It may seem that the rhetoric which appropriates the petitioner as
metaphorically“sick,” a diminished counterexample to the monarch’s
splendor, is being turned against itself. As Bawcutt notes, however,^68
these lines are paralleled inThe Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the
Wedo, in which one of the wives, a sexually voracious incarnation of
medieval misogyny, prepares to vent her confessional spleen:
Now sall the byle all out brist, that beild has so lang.
For it to beir on my breist wes berdin our hevy. burden over heavy
I sall the venome devoid with a vent large
And me assuage of the swalme that suellit wes gret. swelling
(B 3 , 164 – 67 )T.S. Dorsch has argued that the petitionary poems present an unattractive
figure who sabotages his own case by going on for far too long. Dunbar, he
says, was mistaken to depart from his own warning that“In asking sowld
discretioun be”(B 44 , 5 etc.): that advice“is sensible and manly, and he ought
to have followed it.”^69 Dorsch here unveils the matrix of Dunbar’s representa-
tional performance. For the poet of these petitionary poems is, quite precisely,
“unmanly,”themulier garrula et vagaof clerical antifeminism.^70
Such a subject position might seem discursively unpromising, but it opens
on to some unexpected rapprochements. In“Schir, forʒour grace, bayth
nicht and day”(B 63 ), Dunbar piously prays that some miracle turn the king
into“Iohne Thomsounis man”–a hen-pecked husband. Even though his
sovereign presumably remains obdurate, Dunbar’s tone still has the effect of
wittily feminizing both king and poet, uniting them as a couple of talkative
gossips like the“cummaris [gossips]tua”of B 57. As the poem proceeds, the
king isfigured in a variety of ways, split among various identifications. The
poet’s mock-profound longing“Thatʒe had vowit to the swan, / Aneʒeir to
be Iohne Thomsounis man” ( 19 – 20 ) associates the monarch with those
knights of romance and chivalric cult who replace action with“effeminate”
devotion. Reference to the king’s lack of“reuth”( 9 ) works with the“danger”
(B 9 , 74 ) he elsewhere displays to suggest a pitiless lady whose caprice must be
humored. The desire that moves the petitioner amalgamates amatory motifs
with pleas for preferment in a style that can certainly be situated on the
continuum defined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as“homosocial.”^71
Asfigured in these poems, James IV’s queen is similarly multiple. She is
the“sweit meik rose”(B 63 , 21 ) fromThe Thrissill(cf. B 15 , 6 , 25 – 30 ;B 52 , 142 ,
148 – 82 ), identified with that“aduocat, bayth fair and sweit”(B 63 , 25 ), the
Virgin.^72 She is the lady of romance, setting her lover exorbitant standards
(B 63 , 17 – 20 ). B 63 , however, also sketches a narrative plot of another kind;
“My panefull purs so priclis me” 79