and they have a long history. Jacqueline Cerquiglini has drawn attention to a
well-attested tradition in which the sight of the poet-clercis defective or deviant
sight; he squints or is blind in one eye, or stands concealed in a corner or behind a
wall. The resulting perspective is oblique and furtive.^24 InLe Champion des dames
by Martin le Franc, theacteurwatches“le hault prince d’Amours”[“the high
prince of love”] and his court from a corner (“ung canton”),“Vergongneux et
remply de honte, / Tout ainsy que l’en fait, quant on / Scet bien que l’en n’est
point du compte”[“ashamed and abashed, just as you do when you know that
you are of no account”].^25 InLi Regret Guillaume Comte de Hainaut,^26 Jean de la
Mote hears cries, wailing and sighs coming from a strange castle–the lamenta-
tions, he is to discover, of ladies mourning for the deceased Count of Hainault
( 179 – 89 , 338 – 44 ). One of the ladies, Débonnaireté, turns him back at the entry
( 236 – 40 ), but permits him to look into the dark chamber (“Une cambre ù mout
fist obscur,” 310 )where“Les vaillans dames”( 314 ) are gathered through a hole in
the wall–made, as it happens, long before (“de pieça,” 312 ), no doubt because
integral to the poetic architecture. Such scenes, Cerquiglini writes, are not seen
“in the eye of God ...an omniscient observer,”but rather aslant from the
perspective“of a humble subject.”Of this“frustrated spectator,”she contends,
“is born a reward: the act of writing as the art of deviation; in short, the mediated
vision objectified.”^27 Writing, the literate cleric’s distinguishing technology,
always offers a“mediated vision,”at one remove from experience and so from
direct access to power. This indirect vision, though, offers perverse compensa-
tions; necessarily sidelong, it purports in its obliquity to guarantee theclerc’struth
and honesty, even as it satisfies his desire to expose and reveal.
Dunbar pushes“the act of writing as the art of deviation”to its limits.“In
secreit place this hyndir nycht”(B 25 ) and of courseThe Tretis of the Tua
Mariit Wemen and the Wedo(B 3 ) owe their existence to such a perspective, in
which salacious pleasures are voyeuristically evoked so that they can be safely
ascribed either to women’s secret gossip or to the ludicrous endearments of
bürgerlichlovers. Such deviation is never far away in the petitionary works.
Standing“fastand in a nwke [nook]”(B 43 , 7 ), like Martin le Franc’s“canton,”
Dunbar deals in the pleasures of“exposure,”by means of the pen, of upstarts
the poem itself has constructed, and at the same time of his own duplicity.
“Wrytting”doubles thefigure of the poet.“Be diuers wyis and opera-
tiounes”(B 5 ) sets the speaker’s“sempillnes”( 21 ) against another catalogue
of rapacious court types, one of whom is afigure who“musand be the waw /
Luikis as he mycht nocht do with aw”( 11 – 12 ).“Luikis as”: Dunbar briefly
exposes the curial satirist’s detachment and contempt for the throng as itself
a pretence.^28 The text incorporates a split between ostensible simplicity and
actual deviousness, the latter weirdly embodied in a skewed narrative
68 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland