It wald me sumthing satisfie
And les of my malancolie,
And gar me mony falt ourse cause; overlook
That now is brayd befoir myn e. broad (evident)
(B 67 , 73 – 78 )Dunbar’s all-seeing, ruthlessly honest“e”can be bought.
We are by now familiar with the rivalrous basis of such arguments. This
speaker, openly unfaithful to his professed word, is as duplicitous as his
opponents–one with the“Fantastik fulis, bayth fals and gredy, / Off toung
vntrew”( 57 – 58 ). And since the poem invests itsfiercest energies infinding
new names for the mobile, evasive beings of its second catalogue, it becomes
a covert celebration of the inauthenticity it purports to describe. The claim
that Dunbar’s“werk”will transcend time is offset by its inventive coinage of
the ephemeral and recondite terms of abuse that have invariably vexed his
editors, and which turn the poet into a dealer in perishable goods. The king
isfinally presented with two alternatives; he can either reward the poet or
have a singularly virulent“flyter”on his hands. Spearing, who associates
Dunbar’s earlier claim for the poet’s nobility with Renaissance ideals, notes
that Dunbar has become“one of the‘Thrimlaris and thristaris’who are at
court only for what they can get.”^30 Spearing’sfine account bears extension
in one crucial respect. The poem’s manifest insincerity is not in some way
unforeseen or accidental, but rather so pervasive in Dunbar’s begging-
poems as to be already implicit in the patronal structure in which the
poem participates–a structure that locates the subject-poet in a predeter-
mined insufficiency. This subject is not so much open as positively exhibi-
tionistic about his duplicity. Dunbar’s writing does not after all authenticate
his honesty, and when he elsewhere attacks a lowborn benefice-seeker
Iok that wes wont to keip the stirkis bullocks
Can now draw him ane cleik of kirkis, number;churches
With ane fals cairt in to his sleif, card;sleeve
Worthe all my ballattis vnder the byrkis... ballads;birches
(B 68 , 66 – 69 )we may suspect more to this commensurability of his“ballattis”and a
concealed“fals cairt”than meets the eye.
Dunbar observes others in a rivalrous struggle; like Skelton inThe Bowge
of Courte, he seems chiefly concerned to bestow a disfiguring visibility on
the competitors his poem so vividly embodies. His own performance is
filled with doublings and disappearances, and yet these are conspicuous
enough to be themselves a spectacle. There is, however, a rhetorical constant
in this shadow-play, to which we now turn.
70 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland