Liberation from this specular struggle, however, is held out by the promise
of royal“grace,”which here means something more than the mere fulfillment
of endless requests for benefice or payment. The subject may be endowed
with difference from his rivals, and thus with his very being, by the sovereign’s
look. From the thirteenth century we may compare Rutebeuf:
Granz rois, c’il avient qu’a vos faille,
A touz ai ge failli sans faille.
Vivres me faut et est failliz;
Nuns ne me tent, nuns ne me baille.
Je touz de froit...^64[Great king, if I should lack you I lack everything. I lack livelihood; no one offers or
gives me anything. I’m coughing from the cold...]
The variant forms of“faillir”press the point home. If the poet–who shares
the Archpoet’s cough–loses the king, he loses more than concrete benefits.
He can only turn back to his ruler with“Et je n’ai plus que vos veeiz,”a line
which means something close to“All I have is the clothes on my back,”but
which in context carries a further implication (“All that I have–that I am–
is conferred on me by your look”).^65 The“simple”Dunbar also refers
himself to the king’s face that gives grace:“Methink his graciows counte-
nance / In ryches is my sufficiance”(B 5 , 25 – 26 ).
This royal“grace”is, of course, quasidivine, given“of mercye and not of
rycht”(B 68 , 52 ).^66 The king becomes intercessor; asroi thaumaturgehe
ministers to the supplicant’s suffering body,^67 and with his“medecyne”( 54 )
“Can best remeid”for the“malice”that afflicts the“panefull purs”(B 61 , 34 ).
The conclusion of“Schir,ʒe have mony seruitouris,”however, violently
revises this common topos. Having conceded that reward would cure his
melancholy, Dunbar begins to demand it with menaces that involve, once
again, writing:
with my pen I man me wreik.
And sen the tane most nedis be– one
In to malancolie to de
Or lat the vennim ische all out–
Be war anone, for it will spout
Gif that the tryackill cum nocht tyt medicine;soon
To swage the swalme of my dispyt. assuage;swelling;anger
(B 67 , 82 – 88 )This ferocious reworking of a common motif transfers power from the royal
patron-physician’s body to that of the petitioner-sufferer; the“I”bursts out
with a new and disruptive violence.
78 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland