necessarily points to the death of fathers,whileassertingthepublicrightsofthe
living to use the sign. Dependent both“on proximity to the ancestors and on
their absence”for its legitimacy, the symbolic law of heraldry thus becomes
identical to the law of the father and its accompanying interdiction“not to
become too much like the father, not to undermine by making real the
symbolicity of the paternal metaphor.”^52 And if this signified monarch com-
bines the roles of parricide and royal regicide, he is transgressive in other
respects too. Critics of Middle Scots writing have been almost romantically
swift to remind us of James’sIV’s attentions to successive royal mistresses in the
years before 1503 ; however relevant this may be,The Thrissillis certainly a work
of counsel to princes advocating the disciplining of sexual appetite.^53 From this
point of view, the ruler’s unpredictable desires make him not only the son who
usurps, but the father (pater patriae) who enjoys. Nature must domesticate him,
posing with the royal lion as if, once again, on afield:
This lady liftit vp his cluvis cleir paws (lit. cloven hooves)
And leit him listly lene vpone hir kne
( 99 – 100 )Violent hierarchies are subsumed (“Do law elyk to aipis and vnicornis,”
109 ). The lion’s wrath is revealed through the power of restraint; the eagle,
with its feathers sharpened“as steill dertis”( 121 ), and the thistle with its
“busche of speiris”( 130 ) become icons of self-control.
The focal point of this advice is the Rose herself, a body that must,
literally, not be adulterated. Distinction pertains; the king is enjoined not
to allow the“nettill vyle”( 137 )or“wyld weid”( 139 ) to mingle or compare
with“the gudlyflour delyce”( 138 ). In this scene’s profusion offigures, the
rose’s perfection excludes comparison; small wonder that, in the poem’s
most notoriously advisory section, the“king”is admonished
Nor hald non vdirflour in sic denty
As the fresche Ros of cullour reid and quhyt,
For gife thow dois, hurt is thy honesty ( 141 – 43 )The erotic body of theRoman de la Rosehas become the kingdom’s body, as
the ensuing ceremonious hymn to the Rose confirms. Dunbar is construc-
ting a myth in the strict Barthesian sense: the“Rois both reid and whyt”
( 171 ) is already a sign of the union of York and Lancaster, but is here caught
up in a discourse where she becomes the signified of another sign, the union
of the Stewart“Fyancells.”^54
These, however, are only the accessible shapes of a desire that lies just out
of the elaborately rendered“light”of heraldry–enigmatic, self-involved,
not fully available.^55 The appeal laid out by the love-garden, with its lover
40 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland