any notion of sincerity and even identity. This slipperiness has its ground in
a body enclosed by pain and poverty, and subject to time and decay.^87 His
subjectivity is based in lack; Dunbar’s benefice, like his purse, is a constant
in a consistently inconsistent persona, a running joke. The subject insist-
ently foregrounds his own powerlessness as physical debility, and even as
alignment with the woman of clerical antifeminism.
These features make the petitioner into a dialectical stereotype, for they
have counterparts in thespeculum principistradition. This is confirmed by
Hay’s abbreviated“Regiment off Princis”(iii, 9463 a) inThe Buik of King
Alexander the Conquerour. Against Dunbar’s loquacity, we may set the ideal
ruler’s silence and self-restraint; he must
seild spek, with wourdis all of witt,
As all his wordis sould be put in wrette,
And all of visdome speik in audience,
And efter syne to clois, and kepe silence. ( 10030 – 33 )Dunbar’sfierce invective, too, is unkingly (“off na man mak scornyning, /
For þat efferis nocht till ane nobill king,” 10048 – 49 ). Above all, his
self-professed insincerity and bad faith counter the good faith demanded
of the monarch:
quhat he spak, it suld be rate and stabill,
And all his [w]ordis suld be veritabill.
Ane kingis word suld ay be haldin dere–
The wourd is euer þe hartis messingere... ( 9917 – 20 )
fals of faith is defamit oure all;
For fra gud faith anys defamit be,
Cummys nevir agane til honoure of lawte. ( 10077 – 79 )Hay’s king has a transparency that the opacity of Dunbar’s subject position
studiously avoids. If the supplicant’s body is constricted and tormented by
pain, time and circumstance, the king’s body is at once symbolically
expansive–it governs the kingdom as the soul does the body ( 9813 – 14 )–
and required to“kepe abstinence, / Be m[e]s[u]rabill, and...liff sobirly”
( 10065 – 66 ). And if the petitioner must make entertainment out of his
prodigality, the king must maintain the balance between getting and
spending ( 9479 – 92 ) that is true magnificence.
We saw earlier that in Hay’s text a king’s people are his mirror, reflecting
back to him his own defects. Such a perspective might imply that Dunbar’s
petitionary poems are an authentic critique of a king who harbors moral
derelicts at court while neglecting old servants. However, the supplicant’s
self-construction works to vitiate, and thus neutralize, such criticism in
84 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland