in the clashing tonalities of Dunbar’s poem, the intercessory queen is a
virago–John Thomson’s legendary wife–who should rule her husband
better. Elsewhere, the“sweit meik rose”presides over the court’s punitive
rituals; the second of the Doig poems withdraws the lampoons contained in
thefirst with the words
Thocht I in ballet did with him bourde jest
In malice spack I newir an woord
Bot all, my dame, to doʒou gam... entertain you
(B 73 , 5 – 7 )The petitionary poems yield a variety of gendered identifications. Within the
frame of Dunbar’s poem, petitioner and king are in intimate converse, like a
pair of female gossips.^73 Elsewhere, the king is the object of the poet’sdesire,
the disdainful lady whose“graciows countenaunce”is wealth enough for the
loyal subject. For the petitioner, however, feminization is bound up with
mortification, for the petitioner’s aging body, diseased,fickle and mutable, is
the very source of its“hysterical”outbursts. The queen, too, shifts between
virgin mother–the intercessor for royal favor–and folkloric shrew.
The poet-as-woman thus uses his deviously won rhetorical status to cement
a male relationship between poet and patron. The queen as John Thomson’s
wife,thewomanontop,unitestheminabondnotsofarremovedfromthe
all-male“dirty joke”whose structure, as Freud recognized, turns on the
scandalous exposure of the woman.^74 Both king and queen emerge in these
poems in the context of violently opposed images; and the speaker of the
poems moves abruptly from one to the other, with little mediation. These
poems play out a scene of unstable sexual difference and metaphoric dissolu-
tion, nowhere more apparent than in the fantasized masochism with which the
king is begged to hand Dunbar’s malign plagiarist double, complete with
“babile [bauble],”over to“Cuddy Rug, the Drumfres fuill,”for a Yuletide
celebration in which“ladis may bait him lyk a buill”(B 64 , 23 – 34 , 27 ).^75
One last poem evokes more orthodox generic coordinates. In appealing
to the king’s grace, the poems clearly reflect the literature of advice to
princes. If Dunbar receives his benefice or his pension, then the Scottish
court will indeed be the ideal court of thespeculum principis, ruled by justice
tempered with mercy. This intimate relationship between petitioner and
court, invariably presented in hyperbolic terms, receives its most audacious
formulation in the underrated“This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay”
(B 75 ). At the beginning, the best efforts of several personifications of a more
cheerful cast cannot rouse a gloomy dreamer. Then Discretioun identifies
his illness–melancholy–and announces that Nobilnes can cure him:
80 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland