ROBERT HENRYSON, WILLIAM DUNBAR, GAVIN DOUGLAS, STEPHEN HAWES
Scotland provided more than ballads in the fifteenth century. Here the major English poetry was composed by writers whose anonymity is almost as complete as that of the ballad makers.
Robert Henryson was probably born around 1425. His death is a guess too: 1508? It is alluded to in William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makaris.” He is the first and greatest of the so-called “Scottish Chaucerians.”
The unknown author of the beautiful love vision The Kingis Quair (possibly James I, king of the Scots, who may have written it around 1424, concerning his time in prison in England twenty years before—his cell near Charles of Orleans’s—and his love for Joan Beaufort), William Dunbar and, less generously, Gavin Douglas acknowledge debts to “worthie Chaucer glorious.” They invite the now-resented title “Scottish Chaucerians” and to an extent deserve it. Chaucer’s spirit moves in Scottish literature well into the sixteenth century. “Chaucer was the ‘rose of rethoris all,’ the ‘horleige and regulier’ for the future movements of poetry,” Edwin Morgan reminds us. But “their references to Chaucer’s ‘sugarit lippis,’ ‘aureate termis,’ and ‘eloquence ornate’ rather than to his pathos, his simplicity, or his narrative gift help to betray the background of their eulogies.” Chaucer is undeniably behind them, but not too close. He is a legitimate authority, an accessible classic.
These poets are truer to Chaucer’s spirit than his immediate English heirs. They are true, too, to a Scottish tradition, alliterative and intensely formal, a tradition that includes narrative of sophistication and passion. If Scottish critics stress the Scottish sources of Henryson and Dunbar, English critics as often disregard them. Though their different languages admit elements of dialect, none of these poets adopts an historical, spoken Scottish idiom. Each employs “an artificial, created, ‘literary’ language, used, for almost a century, by writers of very different locality and degree, with an astonishing measure of uniformity.” Chaucer is crucial, especially to Henryson: his most important poem is a postscript to Troilus and Criseyde. Only Douglas finds it necessary to call the language he uses “Scots,” to distinguish it from the tongue of the “Inglis natioun.” Before his time, “Scots” was used with reference to the Gaelic language of the Highlands, the language Macpherson’s Ossian would have sung in had he sung at all.
Henryson’s fame rests, first, on his Testament of Cresseid. It “completes” Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and is the great moral romance of the fifteenth century. Sir Francis Kinaston in 1640 gave a sour account of Henryson’s purpose: “He learnedly takes upon him in a fine poetical way to express the punishment and end due to a false inconstant whore.” The poem is more humane and moral than this suggests. Henryson was as fond of Criseyde as Chaucer had been, as troubled as he by her inconstancy and fate. Henryson wrote other poems, notably the Morall Fabillis of Esope, which set him among the few great fabulists in our literature.
Little is known of his life, less even than of Langland’s. Kinaston calls him “sometime chief schoolmaster in Dunfermling” (at the Benedictine abbey grammar school) and adds that he was “a learned and witty man.” Already “licentiate in arts and bachelor in decrees,” he may have attended the University of Glasgow in 1462 (it was established in 1451). He may have studied in France. Of all the Scottish poets of his time, only he was not connected with the court—a humble schoolmaster with a divine gift. Kinaston records the only anecdote we have about the poet: “Being very old he died of a diarrhoea or flux,” to which he appends a “merry” if “unsavoury” tale. When the physician despaired of his cure, an old witch came to the bedside and asked Henryson if he would be made better. She indicated a “whikey tree” in his orchard and instructed him to walk about it three times, repeating the words: “Whikey tree whikey tree take away this flux from me.” Henryson, too weak to go so far, pointed to an oak table in his room and asked, “Gude dame I pray ye tell me, if it would not be as well if I repeated thrice theis words oken burd oken burd garre me shit a hard turd.” The hag departed in a rage and in “half a quarter of an hour” Henryson was dead.
H. Harvey Wood prepared the 1933 edition of Henryson’s Poems and Fables. He claims his poet to be the greatest of the Scottish makars, a judgment many non-Scottish readers share. Henryson isn’t so startling a technician as Dunbar, though he is every bit as expert within his range. He lacks Dunbar’s eccentricity. He possesses a humanity well beyond Dunbar’s, and a wealth of particular observation of detail and human conduct equal to Chaucer’s. Dunbar is “A Poet,” always anxious to prove it; Henryson is a moralist who writes poems. Dunbar is literary; he has a following among poets. Henryson is an illustrator of common truths, a storyteller using verse as his medium, and appeals to the common reader. Dunbar is a poet of abrupt changes of tone. Henryson can manage such changes, but is capable of subtler modulations as well.
Modulations take various forms in his work. In the Testament, they are emotional: the progress of Cresseid, of her father Calchas and of Troilus himself correspond to changes in the moral argument that rhythm and diction underpin. A clearer example is to be found in the fable entitled “The Preaching of the Swallow.” The seasonal stanzas move from a spring of lush, latinate and aureate diction to a thoroughly native diction, bristling with consonants, as the year moves into winter. Henryson is closer to the alliterative tradition than is sometimes acknowledged. In descriptions and in passages of action he will employ the rim ram ruf with gusto, normally adopting a vocabulary almost without Latinisms, largely monosyllabic. To his Chaucerian techniques he adds resources from an older alliterative tradition. Chaucer, a crucial resource, was not an invariable model.
The tradition of allegory lived on in fifteenth-century Scotland. Henryson is a better moral allegorist than Gower because, though he appends a moral to his fables and other poems, the poetry substantiates and embodies the lesson drawn. You feel again and again the informing presence of Dante in his verse. Sometimes the tone is so unmistakably Dantesque that you wish he had done for the Commedia what Gavin Douglas does for the Aeneid. Take, as an example, the prologue to the fable of “The Lion and the Mouse.” The poet in sleep is visited by his master Aesop. He is at once inquisitive and respectful:
Nothing could be clearer: voices talking. And like Dante, Henryson selects his metaphors exactly, and his diction can be mimetic, as in “The Harrowis hoppand in the saweris trace.” This is language in the spirit of William Barnes.
We can’t but think of Dante in “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Henryson sends Orpheus to an underworld not pagan but very like hell. Orpheus allows himself (as we sometimes wish Dante would) certain merciful liberties with the damned. He plays his instrument so that the waters are still and Tantalus can drink; briefly Tityrus is relieved of agony. Though it’s a hell where all are dying “and nevirmoir sall de,” Orpheus performs acts of charity, the same charity that Henryson evinces in the Testament both for Cresseid and for Troilus.
The Testament grows out of Chaucer’s poem, an extraordinary fact since Troilus and Criseyde is so complete and so Chaucerian. Henryson’s temper is different, but the gap is no greater than that between Marlowe’s and Chapman’s passages in Hero and Leander. In the midst of winter Henryson, who presents himself as an old man, takes down Chaucer’s poem to while away the night. Both the season and the narrator’s age suit the theme. What happened to Cresseid, he asks. He answers: Diomede cast her off, she went home to her father Calchas, who received her with love as a returning prodigal. She visited Venus’s temple to pray, but in her prayer she railed against Cupid and Venus. She fell asleep and dreamed that those gods summoned their peers to try her. Saturn, the judge, an old, repellent figure, found her guilty and Cynthia, the moon, struck her with a leprosy. Waking, Cresseid finds the dream to be true. She departs, disfigured and lamenting (in nine-line stanzas that contrast with the Chaucerian seven-line stanzas of the rest of the poem), drawing a partial moral:
In the sequel she learns a fuller moral lesson. Urged by a leper lady to “mak vertew of ane neid” (make virtue of necessity), “To leir to clap thy clapper to and fro, / And leir efter the Law of Lipper Leid,” she goes begging by the roadside. Troilus passes that way,
He recalls but does not recognize her, feels a spark of love, and empties his purse into her lap. Cresseid does not recognize him either, but another leper announces the knight’s name. Cresseid swoons, recovers, and comes to a full recognition of her guilt. She writes her testament and dies; the ruby ring Troilus had given her is returned to him. Henryson hints that he may have built for her a marble monument and rounds off the poem with a moral for the women in the audience.
On the strength of this poem alone Henryson would have a place well above the tree line on Parnassus. But there is more: the eclogue “Robene and Makyne,” and “The Garmont of Gud Ladeis,” “The Bludy Serk,” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and especially the Fables, all of which contribute to our sense of his achievement, which includes allegorical satire. The animals in the fables represent classes and types of men, the fable form liberates them from a specific milieu into a general significance.
There are thirteen fables. Henryson pretends they are translations of Aesop, though the best—“The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse”—is from Horace, and others belong to the profusion of fabliaux current at the time. With further modesty, he claims to be ignorant of rhetoric and promises to write “in hamelie language and in termes rude.” Though the low style prevails, the rhetoric is impeccable. Unlike other fable writers, he does not tell and moralize at the same time but keeps the moral for the end of the poem.
The fable of the mice, “The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous, and the Burges Mous,” is the most achieved, vivid in visual detail, corresponding closely to social types, and full of good humor and good sense. His narrative is dramatic as well. The town mouse sets out to seek her sister:
Speech—mouse speech married to common speech—is rendered. When, back in town, the mice are first surprised at their dinner by a servant, the country mouse falls and swoons. Her sister calls, “How faire ye, sister? cry peip, quhair ever ye be.” The arrival of “Gib hunter, our jolie Cat” (Gilbert—a common name for cats well into the sixteenth century), who catches the country mouse, is full of suspense:
As in the Testament, so in the Fables trial and confession motifs add to the Chaucerian tone. Patrick Crutwell, comparing Henryson and Chaucer, comments that Henryson’s “picturesque detail owes its effectiveness to the solidity and seriousness of what it grows from.” Picturesque and transparently allegorical: the frog is frog and more than, or other than, frog:
There emerges from the Fables—by analogy—a more or less complete human world, to be appraised in moral terms.
Gavin Douglas (1475?–1522) acknowledges his debt to Henryson more generously than he does his debt to Chaucer. In reading his Eneados, the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, we sense the nature of that debt in Douglas’s control of his couplets and his skill at writing directly, especially in his original prologues, which preface each book of translation. He knows the huge challenge he’s set himself:
He is harsh on his own language: it lacks variety of tone, inflection and diction.
But his language brings a kind of rough energy to Virgil that the Latin poet would hardly have recognized. Douglas is blisteringly harsh on Caxton’s prose version of the Aeneid—as close to the original, he says, as the devil is to St. Augustine: “I red his wark with harmys at my hart,” he declares, that Caxton’s book should even share a title with the divine Virgil’s. His assault is a brilliant essay on the art of translation and on Caxton’s literary shortcomings.
Douglas was the third son of “Bell-the-Cat,” fifth Earl of Angus, a nobleman without prospects. After a good education he was caught in the political struggles of the day on the “other side” (the victorious side) in the Battle of Flodden and its aftermath. He entered St. Andrews University in 1490, took his master’s degree in 1494, and in 1501 was provost of St. Giles, Edinburgh. He probably studied in Paris as well. He took orders and ultimately, after much controversy, became Bishop of Dunkeld (1515). He died, out of favor, of the plague in London in 1522. Almost a decade earlier his poetic labors had come to an end. When he completed the Eneados he wrote, “Thus up my pen and instrumentis full yor / On Virgillis post I fix for evirmore.” He would wait “solitar, as doith the byrd in cage,” his youth over. It took him some eighteen months to translate Virgil. The Eneados is the first important complete translation into English of a major classical poem. His other works include the “Palice of Honour,” a substantially original dream allegory. Some of his poems and translations, notably his version of Ovid’s Art of Love, have not survived.
Douglas’s working text of Virgil was hardly perfect; appended to it was a full commentary. He translated keeping close to the original but interpolating matter from the commentary. He also included Mapheus Vegius’s apocryphal thirteenth book (1428). His poem is almost twice as long as Virgil’s, yet close to it in spirit. Renaissance humanists in their passion for pure latinity divorced the poem from its wide audience by academicizing it. Douglas was on the common reader’s side.
Ezra Pound declares, “Gavin Douglas re-created us Virgil, or rather, we forget Virgil in reading Gavin’s Aeneid and know only the tempest, Acheron, and the eternal elements that Virgil for most men glazes over.” This tribute to Douglas’s directness reflects Pound’s own sense—many readers share it—that the Virgil we read is filtered through centuries of scholarship and exegesis, so that we can hardly see his face. Douglas could, and in reading him we experience Aeneas’s adventures afresh.
Reflecting on the work of Chaucer, Gower, Henryson and Douglas, we can understand what Dryden meant when he wrote of Chaucer, “The genius of our countrymen in general” is “rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” Translation nourishes a native literature. “Improvement” is too strong a word to apply to Douglas’s Virgil, but his transposition of the poem into courtly idiom with a peculiarly Scottish flavor is characteristic of the writing of the age. Douglas achieved much with few decent models to work from. His modesty remains genuine: “Not as I suld, I wrait, but as I couth.”
He uses roughly one couplet per Latin hexameter: twenty syllables for sixteen, with numerous poetic auxiliaries and doublets to plump out his measure, giving roughness to its rightness. He is naturally most himself in the prologues, where he experiments in alliterative verse (Book Eight) and he states his mind. Warton praised particularly the prologue to Book Twelve: the lines “are effusions of a mind not overlaid by the descriptions of other poets but operating, by its own force and bias, in the delineation of a vernal landscape, on such objects as really occurred.” Douglas loved to write (the excesses of “The Palice of Honour” attest to this), and he was clear in his mind about style and genre. This he reveals in the prologue of Book Nine:
He develops principles of poetic decorum functional and far less restricting than those Renaissance humanists promoted. He is modest again when he says, “Guf ocht be weill, thank Virgil and nocht me.” The faults are his fault, since he is unequal to his original’s “ornat fresch endyte.” If he has “pervert” Virgil, he has also caught the movement and spirit of the Aeneid, and woven into the poem his prologues, which we can read as northern eclogues.
More famous than Henryson and Douglas is William Dunbar. His credit this century has risen thanks to Hugh MacDiarmid’s attempt to “re-create” a distinctively Scottish literature with the cry, “Not Burns—Dunbar!” The masculinity of Dunbar’s verse, its formal skill and verve, its effective malice, its variety, set him apart from his contemporaries, English and Scottish. He wrote allegories such as “The Golden Targe”—the poet puts in an appearance at the sumptuous court of Venus—and occasional poems. The occasional pieces address a variety of subjects in many forms and can’t usefully be described as Chaucerian. They are his major achievement. Bumptious, overbearing, unbridled, he knows no taboos. A friar? Not in his verse, which abounds in everything but charity. “Tidings from the Session” lays into the courts; “Satire on Edinburgh” tells the truth about conditions in a then-disgusting city. “The Dance of the Seven Deidlie Synnis” and the “General Satire” say things not previously said or sayable in English verse, in tones not previously heard. He is a flayer, a Juvenalian satirist. Never gentle, he can be “elfin.” “At first it may seem absurd to try to recover at this time of day,” MacDiarmid says, “the literary potentialities of a language which has long ago disintegrated into dialects. These dialects even at their richest afford only a very restricted literary medium, capable of little more than kailyard usages, but quite incapable of addressing the full range of literary purpose.” MacDiarmid builds his polemic almost exclusively on Dunbar, his chosen ancestor, and only nods en passant at Douglas and Henryson. “Dunbar is in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets.” Dunbar lends himself to MacDiarmid’s nationalist argument. He marries a moribund but still viable alliterative tradition to a French syllabic tradition. There is none of Henryson’s transparency of language or Douglas’s directness. The sound surface of Dunbar’s poem calls attention to itself: we are required to admire the often astounding technique. He is the closest thing we have in English (and MacDiarmid might not like to hear it called English) to the candor, self-exposure and excess of Villon. He may have been in France when Villon’s poems were published posthumously in 1489. He is more like Villon than like Skelton, though he has been called “the Scottish Skelton.” In 1500 he was back in Scotland, no longer a Franciscan friar of the strict Observantine but a court priest with a royal pension. In 1501 he received ten marks from Henry VII of England for his poem with the refrain, “London thou art the floure of Cities all,” and two years later he wrote his celebrated “The Thristill and the Rois” to celebrate the marriage of James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor. Thus he came to be admired on both sides of the border.
Dunbar (1460?–1520?) worked in the courtly tradition, friar and courtier in one, busy about other people’s lives and secrets. He chafed under the restraints of his order and seems to have enjoyed wandering, perhaps as far as Picardy and other parts of France. His poems “are fundamentally and exclusively Scottish.” They are not nationalist, and it’s an irony that the radical nationalist and Communist Hugh MacDiarmid built so much on an apolitical poet enamored of romance, engaged in the ephemeral scheming of courtly life. He may have graduated from the University of St. Andrews as a bachelor of arts in 1477. He survived and lamented the defeat of Flodden in 1513. His verse is part of the decisive, brief flowering of aristocratic culture that finished there. James IV was a responsive patron, though less so than he has been portrayed. He was among the last great princes of chivalry, as his death proved. Learned, a linguist in as many as eight tongues, he cultivated the arts and sciences in his court and in his country. All this Dunbar celebrates. He also shows a dark side.
His love of ceremony and pomp emerges in several poems, even in the organization of imagery, much of it in heraldic colors, especially in “The Thristill and the Rois” and “The Golden Targe.” The aureation he learned from Chaucer contributes to the surface of his verse, but he also deploys the coarse colloquial diction of his day. His style is an amalgam of literary English and the demotic, mingling registers, passing from sublime to grotesque in a single sentence. He is a master of parody, a rogue, at times a scurrilous rogue, especially in the “Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie”—his rival Walter Kennedy, whom he later celebrates in the great “Lament for the Makaris,” where he first laments Chaucer.
Rime royal, short stanzas, couplets, alliterative forms: the technical range dazzles. And he’s at home in many modes: allegory, dream vision, hymn, prayer, elegy, panegyric, lyric, comic narrative, satire and flyting. Edwin Morgan writes, “His first mark is a certain effectual brilliance that may commend him more keenly to the practising poet than to the ordinary reader—an agility, a virtuosity in tempo and momentum, a command of rhythm.” Warton says, “I am of opinion, that the imagination of Dunbar is not less suited to satirical than to sublime allegory: and that he is the first poet who has appeared with any degree of spirit in the way of writing since Piers Plowman.” Sadly, Warton did not have access to the work of Henryson. On Dunbar, he continues: “The natural complexion of his genius is of the moral and didactic cast.” And yet he has not Langland’s social scope or conscience, nor Chaucer’s bemused humanity. Ungenerosity of spirit mars the poems; it vanishes only in the elegies and religious poems. He flays his foes, his greatest pleasure is in the flyting, the bawdy, the grotesque. His longest poem, and one of his best, “The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” combines bawdy satire and moral censure in a single unrhymed alliterative parody of the romantic mode.
His is a poetry without intimacy—in that respect like Langland’s; feelings, when it has them, attach more to the subject and the chosen form than to the poet’s candid emotion. It’s not that the poems are insincere: sincerity is beside the point. He invests emotion only in his elegies. His religious poems, C. S. Lewis writes, are “public and liturgical” rather than devotional. He brings an equal lucidity and professional polish to flytings and elegies. One does not look for psychological depth or perceptual accuracy beneath the polish. It is as though for all his courtliness, his political and diplomatic activity, and the potency of his technical arsenal, he were a poet local to a time and place: James IV’s court. There is no wide world, though the narrow world compels.
In “Dregy of Dunbar” he parodies liturgical form, presenting the king’s stay in Stirling as purgatory, his return to Edinburgh as a return to heaven. “Requiem Edinburgi dona eis, Domine,” he says. The interweaving of Latin among other language registers can be parodic or, in the somber poems, can add ritualistic emphasis. He appears to have been born a technician: there is an even excellence of composition and we cannot detect development or establish chronology. Throughout, comedy tends toward the grotesque, the nightmare. Primary colors, little shading, nothing overheard. Edwin Morgan points to his “startling indifference to theme in poetry.” He is a poet one cannot but admire; yet it is hard for the non-Scot to do more than admire. Sir Walter Scott regards him as “unrivalled by any which Scotland ever produced,” and it is tempting to think that MacDiarmid agreed with him, but MacDiarmid, so similar in spirit but so immensely copious, tends to use Dunbar as a weapon with which to beat poor Robert Burns and Burns’s admirers over the head. Whatever we say in Dunbar’s favor, he is limited to the courtly. He is brilliant and narrow, a medieval poet with more economy of expression than the English Chaucerians, greater formal resources, and wry humor. He has been touched by the new French poetry. In his work the old elements are made serviceable one last time—vivid, real, fully expressive.
And what had England to show for itself at this time, on the cusp of the Tudor century? Stephen Hawes, the archetypal “transitional figure.” His situation was especially hard in terms of the language he had to use. It’s important to recall that throughout the fifteenth century difference in dialects made it hard for people from one shire to understand those from another, and literature of the past became incomprehensible to the ear: the voiced final e was vanishing gradually and unevenly, area by area, word by word. People in Henry VII’s reign couldn’t understand each other, much less the past. Henry VII made his laureate a French poet, the blind Bernard André of Toulouse, preferring the French to the chaotic native Muse. Scottish poets were less diverse in dialect, or the language was evolving less briskly; they had a chance while the English ear was still listening out for itself.
Much of the readable early fifteenth-century verse is to be found in the Chaucer apocrypha. Like a great magnet his oeuvre attracted not only corruptions introduced by scribes, but the verse of any genuinely competent poet. It’s worth hunting down The Floure and the Leaf, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale and others. In fact, it’s rather sad that Chaucer’s act has been so scrupulously cleaned up by later scholar-editors, since, in the end, the work that they excluded has almost vanished.
Printing was finding a place and promised to bring eventual conformity to the language. My predecessors—those who didn’t became jobbing legal copyists, frightened of new technology—“retrained.” Scribes turned into type designers, rubricators. They discussed patterns and rules, letter forms and how a poem might best be accommodated on the page. Medieval English poetry was more or less over. There was in every area an oral tradition of poetry in dialect, and the morality plays were still around. But for literary poetry, a settled prosody was unthinkable, unless one froze poetic language at a certain point and declared: this is it, these are poetic sounds; Stephen Hawes seems to have done something of the kind.
He stands at the door of a new age, but—still a medievalist in his digressive, allegorical approach and in the value structure of his verse—he does not pass through. His chief innovation is inkhorn terms, the invention of new and compound words that smell of the lamp and, with his awkward word order, make him sound peculiar and even comic. He stands between Chaucer and Spenser. The Passetyme of Pleasure is a kind of poor uncle, though not a parent, of The Faerie Queene. W. Murison shows a number of parallels and perhaps analogues or direct debts. But Spenser’s poem lives because for him La Bel Pucel of Hawes is embodied in the Queen of England and everything acquires a specific political as well as a chivalric meaning. Spenser writes from an actual, an attestable occasion, even when his allegory wanders off down elaborate avenues.
Hawes (1475?–1523/30?) regarded himself as the last, lonely “faithful votary of true poetry.” In the 5,800-line rime royal Passetyme (Wynkyn de Worde says it was written in 1505–6) he laments his uniqueness, abandoned by a departed culture, and displays considerable learning. He was educated at Oxford and visited several foreign universities. He entered Henry VII’s household as a groom of the chamber. His life was an example of virtue. He was a great reciter of verse, especially Lydgate’s. He did produce a few remarkable pieces, not least a shaped poem against swearing. Like his fifteenth-century predecessors, he is best in extract, but the good extracts are even fewer than are to be found in Hoccleve and Lydgate. Even so, there’s something fine and firm in his simple, reactionary devotion to his art; he is not content to be a jobbing poet, a translator by the yard. “Accordingly,” comments C. S. Lewis, “his failure excites sympathy rather than contempt.”