He lays ironic claim to rights of a more egalitarian kind; he, too, is“cum of
Adame and Eve / And fane wald leif as vtheris dois”( 38 – 39 ). He thus
associates himself both with the famed“poor men”of romance and ballad–
“Raf Colʒearis kynd and Iohnne the Reif”( 33 )–and lowborn clerics, who
are the objects of his subsequent attack. The speaker abandons the preten-
sions to status of his opening plaint in order wishfully to associate himself
with the attention-getting boors he has hitherto deplored, tactically taking a
cargo of defects on board.
The resulting poem is aptly summed up by its refrain,“Exces of thocht dois
me mischeiff.”“Thocht”(Hoccleve’s main affliction at the opening of the
Regement of Princes)^15 is in fact all that holds together the poem’s unsteady
shuttling between traditional topoi, self-canceling pleas for favor, and faintly
blasphemous hyperbole ( 81 – 85 ), and“Exces”is the chief characteristic of its
unpredictable shifts of tone.^16 The poem enacts the gradual dispersal of its
initial hierarchical assurance and injured merit into rivalrous identifications.
Itfinally presents not an approximation to the poet’s“personality,”but a
“comédie duMoi”whose“moi”is a representational excess.^17
Dunbar’s represented court is shaped by mimetic desire;“[t]o imitate the
desires of someone else is to turn this someone else into a rival as well as a
model.”^18 When the victims of Dunbar’s satire are themselves frauds and
tricksters, the maker offictions becomes indistinguishable from his ene-
mies. Dunbar’s most memorable attacks are leveled at John Damian, the
notorious“Fenʒeit Freir of Tungland,”^19 and royal kept alchemist, because
Damian is Dunbar’s mirror image. As one of James IV’s“ingynouris joly, /
That far can multiplie in folie”(B 67 , 55 – 56 ), Damian’s shape-shifting
reflects Dunbar’s own metamorphoses of persona across his poems, just as
his alchemy mirrors Dunbar’s own attempt to transform a rude vernacular
into aureate“gold.”In“Lucina schyning in silence of the nycht”(B 29 ),
Dunbar will only receive his benefice ( 22 ), and spiritual peace ( 21 ),“quhill
ane abbotflew abone the mone”( 50 ). Damian’s absurd plunge from the
walls of Stirling Castle corresponds to each of Dunbar’s petitionary poems
in its trajectory of ambition and failure. Benefice and abbot’sflight belong
in the category ofimpossibilia, both signs of impending apocalypse.^20
If“Lucina schyning”provides a wittily ironic gloss on the rivalrous
structures of courtly desire, as the courtier ends by being indistinguishable
from the rival model, then fantasized vengeance elsewhere presents the same
dialectic in darker tones. Damian’s mobbing by the birds of the air^21 is
merely the most extreme of Dunbar’s punitive visions. The king is begged
to have the mysterious“refing [thieving] sonne off rakyng [roaming] Muris”
(B 64 , 2 ), who has in some way“magellit [mangled]”( 3 ) Dunbar’s writing,
66 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland