chapter 3
“My panefull purs so priclis me”: the rhetoric
of the self in Dunbar’s petitionary poems
Je ne plains riens que ma paine et despens:
A vous en est; plus ne les poursuira
Mon las de corps, qui a servi long temps
A vo plaisir^1
[I only lament my pain and my losses: it’s up to you now; my peasant
of a body, which has served your pleasure for so long, will pursue them
no more.]Thefirst documented notice of William Dunbar’s royal pension, dated
August 15 , 1500 , grants him £ 10 “to be pait to him of soverane lordis cofferis,
be the thesaurare, for al the dais of his life or quhil he be promovit be oure
soverane lord to a benefice of xl. lib. or abone.”^2 By 1507 the pension had been
raised to £ 20 ,^3 and in 1510 it reached £ 80.^4 Dunbar appears to have survived
the death of his“soverane lord”James IV at Flodden in 1513 , but his name
disappears from the records shortly afterwards, leading to speculation that he
may at last have received his benefice. Whatever the truth of the matter, there
is a certain aptness both in the story the documents tell, and in their silences.
Perhaps by sheer chance, they imply a reciprocal relationship between poet
and king; in the written record the one does not long outlive the other. More
importantly, they inscribe Dunbar in the position of gratification constantly
deferred which dominates his petitionary poems–as if his unsatisfied desire
for a benefice were itself a service to be rewarded, his self-representation as
supplicant part of an economy. That self-representation, and the discursive
conditions it suggests, will be the subject of the following chapter.
None of the petitionary poems appear in manuscript or print witnesses
dating from Dunbar’s lifetime. Most are collected in the Maitland Folio
(Cambridge, Pepys Library, 2553 , Magdalene College), and the Reidpeth
Manuscript (Cambridge University Library, Ll. 5. 10 ), evidently copied
from the Maitland Folio when the latter was in an earlier and more
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