KINGIS QUAIR, THE JAMES I (ca. 1424) The
Kingis Quair by JAMES I, king of Scotland, opens with an
image of the heavens that serves to introduce the nar-
rator’s account of his own experience. One night, he
began to read BOETHIUS’s The CONSOLATION OF PHILOSO-
PHY. Rather than soothing him, however, the narrative
of Boethius’s misfortune and the remedy of philosophy
leads him to consider the unstable nature of FORTUNE’s
wheel, his own youthful experience of adversity, and
how he overcame it. Rising at the sound of the matins
bell, he is overcome by the “fantasye” that it is com-
manding him to describe this fate, and so he begins to
write.
James uses the image of a rudderless ship to represent
and link the subjects of the vulnerability of youth, the
problems of the present task of literary composition,
and the beginning of his past troubles. Voyaging in
youth, he was taken by enemies and imprisoned in a
foreign land, where he suffered until he caught a glimpse
of a beautiful woman walking in the garden beneath his
window. Her departure drove him to despair, and at
length he fell into a trance. In a dream, he was trans-
ported to the celestial home of Venus, where, in a scene
that alludes to the literary genre of the vision of the after-
life, he saw departed lovers whose fates refl ected their
conduct in love. Petitioning the goddess, he was advised
to seek the aid of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, which
evokes an ideal of love that complements reason rather
than undermining it. This theme is reinforced in Miner-
va’s insistence that she might aid the dreamer only if his
love were founded on virtue rather than lust. From
Minerva, the poet learned that Fortune’s power is stron-
gest where forethought and wisdom are lacking.
Descending to the earthly paradise, he witnessed the
nature of Fortune’s wheel for himself and woke as the
goddess set him to climb on it.
The narrator’s doubts as to the meaning of his vision
are resolved by the appearance of a dove bearing a
message, and its promise of good fortune is fulfi lled in
the restoration of his liberty and his success in love.
The poem closes with a litany of thanks and prayers.
The Kingis Quair survives in a single manuscript dat-
ing from the late 15th or early 16th century housed at
Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which gives the work its
title and identifi es the poet as James I of Scotland
(1394–1437). Although this claim has been ques-
tioned, the weight of evidence is on the side of James’s
authorship, and the narrator’s account of his early life
presents signifi cant parallels with the king’s.
James spent his youth as a prisoner in England, and
this captivity gave him ample opportunity to read
authors such as GEOFFREY CHAUCER and JOHN GOWER,
acknowledged as “poetis laureate” in the Quair’s fi nal
STANZA. This contact with VERNACULAR court culture is
refl ected in the poem’s substitution of the RHYME ROYAL
stanza for the metrical form of the octosyllabic COUPLET
favoured in Scots EPIC poetry, and the Quair is a land-
mark in the development of lyrical and allegorical writ-
ing in Scotland. Thematically and linguistically, James
is considered one of the MIDDLE SCOTS poets (SCOTTISH
CHAUCERIANS). In locating its origins in an act of read-
ing, the Quair also alludes to the DREAM VISION form
employed in Chaucer’s The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS and
The PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS. However, rather than pro-
voking a dream, here reading leads the narrator to per-
ceive similarities between his own experience and that
of Boethius, bringing him to a new understanding of a
past vision. The role of memory gives the poem a cir-
cular structure like that of the dream vision. This
underlines its focus on questions such as the role of
fortune in the divine order, since the form of the circle
was perceived as a refl ection of God’s eternal being and
so was often used to indicate a concern with theologi-
cal matters.
Once dismissed as an imitation of Chaucer’s poetry,
The Quair has since been recognized as a sophisticated
engagement with the philosophical ideas and methods
of its source materials. In recent years, the work’s ren-
dering of James’s personal history has attracted atten-
tion as an early form of autobiography.
See also ALLEGORY.
FURTHER READING
McDiarmid, Matthew P., ed. The Kingis Quair of James Stew-
art. London: Heinemann, 1973.
Mapstone, Sally. “Kingship and the Kingis Quair.” In The
Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, edited by
Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, 51–69. Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1997.
Elizabeth Elliott236 KINGIS QUAIR, THE