“vrangis and...gryt iniuris”( 9 – 10 )and“men off wertew and cuning, / Off
wit, and vysdome in gydding”( 11 – 12 ). The prizes in the incessant contest of
court life are carried off not by such deserving cases, but by
fowll, iow-iowrdane-hedit ievellis, foul jew-chamberpot-headed rascals
Cowkin kenseis and culroun kewellis; beggarly/shitty (?) base knaves
Stuffettis, strekouris and stafische
strummellis...
grooms, hounds, stubborn farm animals( 15 – 17 )and so forth. This tirade, which can stand for a number of similar passages in
Dunbar’s petitionary poems, sets in train a process of disfigurement–of
making monstrous–that becomes increasingly embodied and specific. The
poem surveys several types of ecclesiastical ambition beforefixing on one,
“Ane pykthank [sycophant] in a prelottis clais”( 53 ), whose dubious corporeal
characteristicsfit him more for manual labor than for his present occupation.
This unworthyfigure, as he advances, despises“Nobles off bluid”and“helpis
for to hald thame downe / That thay rys neuer to his renowne”( 64 – 66 ). The
speaker casts himself by contrast as a“lerit sone off erle or lord”( 41 ), who is
also“maister natiwe borne / And all his eldaris him beforne”( 45 – 46 ). Bawcutt
acutely observes that thisfigure is“presumably an impoverished younger son”
andthatitis“through his eyes that we see the‘odious ignorance’of this
upstart.”^13 Nature, nurture and craft are conflated, as the virtues of blood,
lineage and nation merge with the acquired attributes of the poet-rhetorician,
“maistrye”and“cuning.”On the other hand, social ambition, inadmissibly
exceeding the bounds laid down by rank and birth, isfigured as a grotesque,
excessive and aberrant body–the proper referent, indeed, of that quintessen-
tially agonistic genre, theflyting.^14 Whilst the aim may be to valorize the
standpoint of the“lerit sone off erll or lord,”the strategy only serves to press
home the extent to which the perspective Dunbar articulates is defined
rivalrously. It is formed around its imagining of the disfigured abomination
of the parvenu, whose shape is a scandal to genealogy and the perfect
aristocratic body. Complaint andflyting are two sides of the same coin.
A similar dissolution of difference is enacted in“Schir,ʒit remember as
befoir”(B 68 ). The poem again begins with formal complaint, and here the
natural hierarchy of the bestiary is affirmed by“gentill”heraldic allegory.
These are the sources of a rhetoric which urges the speaker’s merits against
the upstarts–the birds of ravine–who snatch away the benefices he desires,
and culminates in an appeal to the king, here, as in the heraldicThrissill and
the Rois, the“gentill egill’( 26 ; cf. B 52 , 120 – 26 ). This mode, however, is soon
dropped, as Dunbar inaugurates an alternative representational strategy.
“My panefull purs so priclis me” 65