complete form. The folio appears to have been compiled between 1570 and
1586 , and is associated with the family of Maitland, in particular with Sir
Richard Maitland of Lethington ( 1496 – 1586 ). While knowledge of its
composition and origins is still limited, Priscilla Bawcutt has suggested
that in his youth Sir Richard“could well have known Dunbar,”and that
the folio’s grouping of his poems suggests circulation within a small court
coterie.^5 The possibility that the petitions were a form of intimate address,
written to amuse an audience to whom the poet was familiar, is borne out by
their shifts of tone and alert notation of the pleader’s psychology, which
seem to evoke the very presence of a speaking voice.“Here, if anywhere,”
Bawcutt writes,“is the core of Dunbar’s poetry, and that‘unifying con-
sciousness’that some critics would deny him.”^6 The petitions, indeed, have
been shaped into a hypothetical autobiography, their changing moods read
as a linear move from earlier discontent to satisfaction in 1507 , when
Dunbar’s pension was doubled.^7
The begging-poem as such has courted various interpretations. Bawcutt
argues that while poetic petitioners may have written within a tradition, any
genre the literary petition might constitute“is remarkablyflexible, partak-
ing both of the epigram and the verse epistle, and determined more by
function than by literary form.”^8 For Christine Scollen-Jimack, conversely,
“the pathetico-comic begging-poem constitutes a well-worn literary set-
piece”of a definite kind.^9 I wish to argue, however, that both these positions
overlook the culturally and politically productive function of literary
convention. Throughout I draw parallels between Dunbar’s petitionary
self-projection and those of his contemporaries and predecessors^10 to sub-
stantiate my claim that the begging-poem is not reducible either to con-
vention or to function, but rather represents with remarkable consistency
certain relations of power between subject and sovereign. Since James IV
was much concerned with visibility, the identity Dunbar must perform is
that of his king’s spectacular obverse–fluid,“complex”and multiple, at
times rather a point of disappearance than a self.^11 If Dunbar’s petitionary
poems may atfirst appear difficult to situate in his biography and his
historical environment, they nevertheless richly illuminate the relationship
between poet and sovereign at one late medieval court, and the symbolic
negotiations of which that bond is woven.
autonomy and rivalryIn“ComplaneIwald,wistIquhometill”(B 9 ), the speaker begins in the mode
of generalized complaint,^12 aligning himself both with“nobillis”who endure
64 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland