Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

the ego is not exhausted by the precept:‘You ought to be like this (like your
father).’It also comprises the prohibition:‘You may not be like this (like
your father)–that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his
prerogative.’”^60 The desire to identify must remain secret, disavowed.
It is almost unnecessary at this late stage to indicate how deeply the
distance of lordship described by Ashby participates in certain medieval
doctrines of monarchy. As Louise O. Fradenburg puts it, in her superb
explication of the imaginative purchase of the legalfiction of the monarch’s
dual corporeality,“the king is an effect of paradox. He is the most repre-
sentative of people, but this makes him unique.”^61 In his body politic, the
king represents his subjects because he is different from them: symbolizing
the realm, it is an eternalcorpus mysticum, transcending mortality and death.
In his body natural, the king represents his subjects because he is like them:
his own human body, subject to mortality and death, links him to the least
of his subjects and can be used to engender an affect of community, of
“common cause”shared by subject and sovereign.^62
The king’s symbolically representative function is succinctly summarized
once again by Ashby:“Suche as the kynge is, suche bene al other”(Dicta,
393 ).^63 Texts of advice literature such as Ashby’s inscribe subject and sovereign
in a relationship of identification; thefigure of the prince embodies the
human potentialities of all his subjects–“toutes les possibilités humaines,”^64
in Daniel Poirion’swords–and a fault in the king means a defective
commonwealth. As Aristotle advises Alexander the Great in Sir Gilbert
Hay’sBuik of King Alexander, the people are the mirror of anyflaws in
their ruler; Alexander is told to

gar inquire quhat all men sayis of þe,

Quhidder ill or gud, or quhat-sum-euer it be–

Thare may þow se ane face in ane myrroure,

Baith lak and lois, wourschip and dishonoure;

Than may Þow vesche þi face and put away,

Giff onyfilth apoun þi wissage lay... ( 10536 – 41 )^65

Hay’s, of course, is a narrative rendition of the scene which underlies the
very tradition of theSecretum secretorum, whose structural division incar-
nates the relation between state and self-government.^66 The Secretum,
Aristotle’s purported advice to his pupil Alexander, counterbalances counsel
to the king on how to govern his natural body with advice on the good
government of the state. Hay’s Aristotle furthermore argues that

nocht forthi that of kingis speke we,

All kynd of men to king may liknyt be

Introduction 13