advance. Once again, theFürstenspiegeltradition is clear that commentary
such as Dunbar’s–or for that matter Hoccleve’s or Deschamps’s–is of its
nature superfluous, and to be disregarded:
Quha spekis oure oft, and ay is traitland new,
He may never laik of lyere and vntrew.... ( 10336 – 37 )I pointed out in my introduction to this chapter that the process of
modeling grants the model ontological priority; if the monarchisall,is
substance, Dunbar must be–and must be seen to be–nothing: unstable,
dispersed, fragmented. Thefigure that stands at the center of Dunbar’s
petitionary poems–so transparently and repetitiously“not superhumanly
righteous, but fallible, unhappy, and self-interested”^88 – is on display so that
the reader or auditor of the poem, occupying the position of the sovereign,
can experience his distance from thisflawed petitionary self. The petitionary
poems are above all aflaunting, even a celebration, of the absence of power:
a self-abjection through which the subject isfigured at an aggressively visual
court.
There are thus grounds for modifying Burrow’s view that the petition
witnesses a poetic“discovery of the individual.”His argument stops short of
addressing its own most suggestive implication– that an autonomous
subjectivity enters English poetry on the basis of its apparent antitheses,
limit and dependence.^89 His hypothesis that petitionary autobiography is
intended as amusing play also asks to be examined further, since as
Baudrillard observes,“the sphere of play is always the aesthetic sublimation
of labour’s constraints.”^90 What is to be made of a literature in which the
effects of the passing of time on the body–the processes of age and physical
degeneration–are represented in so“playful”a fashion? Most importantly
of all, what is the subject’s own investment in the process, and what
satisfactions are received?
The answer lies in the way in which such representations affirm the
monarch’s status as object of fantasy, and thus source of the subject’s
pleasures. The supplicant’s self-humiliation renders him, as we have seen,
the polar opposite of the king, and the single, suffering body to which he is
consigned throws into relief the king’s title to another body. The petitioner
serves the royal“plaisir,”which, as the words of Deschamps quoted at the
beginning of this chapter reveal, can write itself on the body as pain.
However, it is also the means by which the subject-poet acquires a“plaisir”
of his own, the pleasure of an identification aroused in order to be thwarted.
In bringing to the fore his own profoundly embodied miseries, and offering
them to the sovereign as a source of amusement, the petitioner heightens by
“My panefull purs so priclis me” 85