William Dunbar

Statue of William Dunbar, National Portrait Gallery, Scotland. Photo by Stephen C. Dickson, 2018. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

William Dunbar (?1460 - 1520?) was a Scottish poet.

Life

Overview

Dunbar is believed to have been born in Lothian, and educated at St. Andrews. In his earlier days he was a Franciscan friar. Thereafter he appears to have been employed by James IV in some Court and political matters. His chief poems are The Thrissil and the Rois (The Thistle and the Rose) (1503); The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, a powerful satire; The Golden Targe, an allegory; and The Lament for the Makaris (poets) (circa 1507). In all these there is a vein of true poetry. In his allegorical poems he follows Chaucer in his setting, and is thus more or less imitative and conventional: in his satirical pieces, and in the Lament, he takes a bolder flight and shows his native power. His comic poems are somewhat gross. The date and circumstances of his death are uncertain, some holding that he fell at Flodden, others that he was alive so late as 1530. Other works are "The Merle and The Nightingale," and the "Flyting (scolding) of Dunbar and Kennedy." Edmund Gosse calls Dunbar "the largest figure in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser." He has bright strength, swiftness, humour, and pathos, and his descriptive touch is vivid and full of color.

Youth

Dunbar was probably a native of East Lothian. This is assumed from a satirical reference in the "Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie," where, too, it is hinted that he was a member of the noble house of Dunbar.

His name appears in 1477 in the Register of the Faculty of Arts at St. Andrews, among the Determinants or Bachelors of Arts, and in 1479 among the masters of the university.

Career

Thereafter he joined the order of Observantine Franciscans, at St. Andrews or Edinburgh, and proceeded to France as a wandering friar. He spent a few years in Picardy, and was still abroad when, in 1491, Bothwell’s mission to secure a bride for the young James IV reached the French court.

There is no direct evidence that he accompanied Blackadder, archbishop of Glasgow, on a similar embassy to Spain in 1495. On the other hand, we know that he proceeded with that prelate to England on his more successful mission in 1501. Dunbar had meanwhile (about 1500) returned to Scotland, and had become a priest at court, and a royal pensioner.

His literary life begins with his attachment to James’s household. All that is known of him from this date to his death about 1520 is derived from the poems or from entries in the royal registers of payments of pension and grants of livery. He is spoken of as the Rhymer of Scotland in the accounts of the English privy council dealing with the visit of the mission for the hand of Margaret Tudor, rather because he wrote a poem in praise of London, than because, as has been stated, he held the post of laureate at the Scottish court.

In 1511 he accompanied the queen to Aberdeen and commemorated her visit in verse. Other pieces such as the "Orisoun" (“Quhen the Gouernour past in France”), apropos of the setting out of the regent Albany, are of historical interest, but they tell us little more than that Dunbar was alive.

First printed use of obscenity

Dunbar has the curious distinction of having been responsible for the earliest printed use of the word "fuck": his 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" [Collected Poems, ed. Mackenzie SEE 'In secret place this hyndir nycht'] includes the lines: "Yit be his feirris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane." He thus established a long and noble tradition of which some critics of James Kelman or Irvine Welsh appear to be quite unaware. The powerful word which Dunbar put into print in 1503 was not decriminalised until 1960.

His poem The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie also contains the term "cuntbittin" (meaning afflicted with venereal disease), the earliest known use of the word "cunt" in literature (although Chaucer used "queynte" as a euphemism for the word in the Canterbury Tales). The Flyting also contains the line (addressed by Kennedy to Dunbar) [38] "Wan-fukkit funling, that natour maid ane yrle" (the phrase "wan-fukkit" might perhaps be rendered as 'unfortunately conceived', or 'ineptly conceived', in Modern English - Kennedy is accusing Dunbar of being a foundling and a dwarf).

Death

The date of his death is uncertain. He is named in Lyndsay’s Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo (1530) with poets then dead, and the reference precedes that to Douglas who had died in 1522. He certainly survived his royal patron. We may not be far out in saying that he died about 1520.

Writing

Dunbar’s reputation among his immediate successors was considerable. By later criticism, stimulated in some measure by Scott’s eulogy that he is “unrivalled by any which Scotland has produced,” he has held the highest place among the northern makars. The praise, though it has been at times exaggerated, is on the whole just, certainly in respect of variety of work and mastery of form.

He belongs, with James I, Henryson, and Douglas, to the Scots Chaucerian school. In his allegorical poems reminiscences of the master’s style and literary habit are most frequent. Yet, even there, his discipleship shows certain limitations. His wilder humor and greater heat of blood give him opportunities in which the Chaucerian tradition is not helpful, or even possible.

His restlessness leads us at times to a comparison with Skelton, not in respect of any parallelism of idea or literary craftsmanship, but in his experimental zeal in turning the diction and tuning the rhythms of the chaotic English which only Chaucer’s genius had reduced to order. The comparison must not, however, be pushed too far. Skelton’s work carries with it the interest of attempt and failure. Dunbar’s command of the medium was more certain. So that while we admire the variety of his work, we also admire the competence of his effort.

111 poems have been ascribed to Dunbar. Of these at least 90 are generally accepted as his: of the 11 attributed to him it would be hard to say that they should not be considered authentic. Most doubt has clung to his verse tale "The Freiris of Berwik."

Dunbar’s chief allegorical poems are The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissil and the Rois. The motif of the former is the poet’s futile endeavour, in a dream, to ward off the arrows of Dame Beautee by Reason’s “scheld of gold.” When wounded and made prisoner, he discovers the true beauty of the lady: when she leaves him, he is handed over to Heaviness. The noise of the ship’s guns, as the company sails off, wakes the poet to the real pleasures of a May morning. Dunbar works on the same theme in a shorter poem, known as "Beauty and the Prisoner." The Thrissil and the Rois is a prothalamium in honour of James IV. and Margaret Tudor, in which the heraldic allegory is based on the familiar beast-parliament.

The greater part of Dunbar’s work is occasional — personal and social satire, complaints (in the style familiar in the minor verse of Chaucer’s English successors), orisons and pieces of a humorous character. The last type shows Dunbar at his best, and points the difference between him and Chaucer. The best specimen of this work, of which the outstanding characteristics are sheer whimsicality and topsy-turvy humour, is "The Ballad of Kynd Kittok." This strain runs throughout many of the occasional poems, and is not wanting in odd passages in Dunbar’s contemporaries; and it has the additional interest of showing a direct historical relationship with the work of later Scottish poets, and chiefly with that of Robert Burns.

Dunbar’s satire is never the gentle funning of Chaucer: more often it becomes invective. Examples of this type are "The Satire on Edinburgh," "The General Satire," the "Epitaph on Donald Owre," and the powerful vision of "The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis."

In the "Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie," an outstanding specimen of a favorite northern form, analogous to the continental estrif, or tenzone, he and his rival reach a height of scurrility which is certainly without parallel in English literature. This poem has the additional interest of showing the racial antipathy between the “Inglis”-speaking inhabitants of the Lothians and the “Scots” or Gaelic-speaking folk of the west country.

There is little in Dunbar which may be called lyrical, and little of the dramatic. His "Interlud of the Droichis [Dwarf’s] part of the Play," a piece attributed to him, is supposed to be a fragment of a dramatic composition. It is more interesting as evidence of his turn for whimsicality, already referred to, and may for that reason be safely ascribed to his pen.

If further selection be made from the large body of miscellaneous poems, the comic poem on the physician Andro Kennedy may stand out as one of the best contributions to medieval Goliardic literature; The "Two Mariit Wemen" and the "Wedo," as one of the richest and most effective pastiches in the older alliterative style, then used by the Scottish Chaucerians for burlesque purposes; "Done is a battell on the Dragon Blak," for religious feeling expressed in melodious verse; and the well-known Lament for the Makaris. The main value of the last is historical, but it too shows Dunbar’s mastery of form, even when dealing with lists of poetic predecessors.

The chief authorities for the text of Dunbar’s poems are:— (a) the Asloan MS. (c. 1515); (b) the Chepman and Myllar Prints (1508) preserved in the Advocates’ library, Edinburgh; (c) Bannatyne MS. (1568) in the same; (d) the Maitland Folio MS. (c. 1570-1590) in the Pepysian library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Some of the poems appear in the Makculloch MS. (before 1500) in the library of the University of Edinburgh; in MS. Cotton Vitellius A. xvi., appendix to Royal MSS. No. 58, and Arundel 285, in the British Museum; in the Reidpath MS. in the university library of Cambridge; and in the Aberdeen Register of Sasines. The 1st complete edition was published by David Laing (2 volume, Edinburgh, 1834) with a supplement (Edinburgh, 1865). This has been superseded by the Scottish Text Society’s edition (edited by John Small, Aeneas J.G. Mackay, & Walter Gregor, 3 volumes, Edinburgh, 1893), and by Dr Schipper’s 1 volume edition (Vienna; Kais. Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1894). The editions by James Paterson (Edinburgh, 1860) and H. B. Baildon (Cambridge, 1907) are of minor value. Selections have been frequently reprinted since Ramsay’s Ever-Green (1724) and Hailes’s Ancient Scottish Poems (1817). For critical accounts see Irving’s History of Scottish Poetry, Henderson’s Vernacular Poetry of Scotland, Gregory Smith’s Transition Period, J. H. Millar’s Literary History of Scotland, and the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii. (1908). Professor Schipper’s William Dunbar, sein Leben und seine Gedichte (with German translations of several of the poems), appeared at Berlin in 1884. 

Critical introduction

by John Nichol

M. Taine, in his History of English Literature, leaps from Chaucer to Surrey with the remark, "Must we quote all these good people who speak without having anything to say?... dozens of translators, importing the poverties of French poetry, rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men." Of this period he mentions only and merely names Gower and Lydgate and Skelton. The more genuine successors of Chaucer were the Scotch poets, who, almost alone in our island, lit up the dusk of the 15th century with some flashes of native power. Neither James I nor Henryson was commonplace, and Dunbar, the most conspicuous of the group, displays in his best work a distinct original genius.

William Dunbar was born, probably in East Lothian, between 1450 and 1460. He entered the University of St. Andrews in 1475, and took his full degree in 1479. In early life, according to his own account, he went about from Berwick to Dover, and passed over to Calais and Picardy, preaching and alms-gathering as a Franciscan noviciate; but he became dissatisfied with this life and does not seem to have taken the vows of the order. It has been inferred from allusions in his verse that he was for some years employed in connection with foreign embassies. Toward the close of the century we find him in attendance on the Scotch Court, a poet with an established reputation, and a continual suitor for place. In 1500 he received from the king (James IV) a pension of £10, raised by degrees, during the next ten years to £80—then a respectable annuity: but he never obtained the Church promotion, to which on somewhat irrelevant grounds he constantly laid claim.

Dunbar revisited England in 1501, when the king’s marriage with the Princess Margaret was being negotiated. The Thistle and the Rose in commemoration of that event was composed on the 9th of May, 1503. The Golden Targe and the Lament for the Makars were issued from Chepman’s—the first Scotch—press in 1508. The poet must have accompanied the Queen, in whose favour he stood fast, to the north in 1511; for he celebrates her reception at Aberdeen. There is a record of an instalment of his pension being paid in August, 1513: the rest is a blank, and it has been plausibly conjectured that he may, a month later, have fallen at Flodden with the King. If he lived to write the Orison on the passing of Albany to France (doubtfully attributed to him) the absence of any other reference to the great national disaster is remarkable. We are, however, only certain from an allusion in Lyndesay’s Papyngo that he must have been dead in 1530.

The writings of Dunbar — on the whole the most considerable poet of our island in the interval between Chaucer and Spenser — are mainly Allegorical, Satirical, and Occasional. Allegory, a disease of the middle ages infecting most poets down to the end of the 16th century, was rife in our old Scotch verse, much of which is cast on the model of The Romaunt of the Rose and The Flower and the Leaf. In The Golden Targe the influence of those works is conspicuous, though much of the imitation is indirect, through The King’s Quair. Like the royal minstrel, the poet represents himself as being roused from his slumbers by the morning, and led to the bank of a stream where presently a ship lands a hundred ladies (v. the ‘world of ladies’ in The Flower and the Leaf) in green kirtles: among them are Nature, Dame Venus, the fresh Aurora, Latona, Proserpine, &c. Then Cupid appears, leading a troop of gods to dance with the goddesses. Love detecting the poet orders his arrest. Reason defends him with the Golden Targe, till Presence comes and throws dust into the eyes of Reason and leaves Venus victrix. The plot is no more barren than those of Chaucer’s own contributions to the literature of the Courts of Love: but the Targe is farther beset by an unusual number of the ‘aureate’ terms or affected Latinisms with which the Scotch poets of the century disfigured their language, planting them, as Campbell says, like children’s flowers in a mock garden. The merit of the piece almost wholly consists in its riches of description; but this is enough to preserve it: the ship "like a blossom on the spray," the skies that "rang with shouting of the larks," recall Chaucer’s Orient and anticipate Burns.

The Thistle and the Rose has the same pictorial charm, with the added merit of being inspired by a genuine national enthusiasm. It is perhaps the happiest political allegory in our tongue. Heraldry has never been more skilfully handled, nor compliments more gracefully paid, nor fidelity more persuasively preached to a monarch than in this poem, which has under its southern dress a strong northern body. This remark applies to the author’s work in general, and more especially to those compositions in which he mingles allegory with satire.

His masterpiece, The Dance of the Deadly Sins, may have been suggested by passages in Piers Plowman, as it in turn transmitted its influence through Sackville to The Faery Queen: but the horrid crew of vices, summoned from their dens by lines each vigorous as the crack of a whip, are real, and Scotch, and contemporary, drawn from a knowledge of the world, not from books: these supplied Dunbar with his terminology, that with his thought. His most elaborate composition, and that which ranks next in originality to The Dance, "The Two Married Women and the Widow", has a tincture of Boccaccio and "The Wife of Bath", but the scene is again a northern summer eve, and the gossips are contemporaries of Queen Margaret. The poet’s satire, which is here subtle, is often furious. Half his minor poems are vollies of abuse, unprecedented in English literature, unless by some of the almost contemporaneous outbursts of Skelton, mainly directed against those who had, by fair means or foul, been promoted over him; the other half are religious and moral reveries, those of a good Catholic who lived when the first mutters of the Reformation were in the air, and are the finest devotional fragments of their age.

The special characteristics of Dunbar’s genius are variety and force. His volume is a medley in which tenderness and vindictiveness, blistering satire and exuberant fancy meet. His writings are only in a minor degree bound up with the politics of his age, and though they reflect its fashions, they for the most part appeal to wider human sympathies. He has not wearied us with any very long poem. His inspiration and his personal animus find vent within moderate bounds, but they are constantly springing up at different points and assuming various attitudes. At one time he is a quiet moralist praising the golden mean, at another he is as fierce as Juvenal.

Devoid of the subtlety and the dramatic power of Chaucer, his attacks, often coarse, are always direct and sincere. His drawing, like that of the Ballads, is in the fore-ground: there is no chiaroscuro in his pages, no more than in those of his countrymen from Barbour to Burns. The story of the battle between The Tailor and Souter might have been written by Rabelais: The Devil’s Inquest is the original of The Devil’s Drive: the meditation on A Winter’s Walk is not unworthy of Cowper, nor the best stanzas in The Merle and the Nightingale of Wordsworth.

Like Erasmus, Dunbar railed against the friars and their indulgences "quorum pars fuit:" but there is no reason to suspect that he was more or less than a large-hearted Roman Catholic in his creed. He had none of the protagonist spirit which is required to assail the traditions of a thousand years. Of a generally buoyant temper he appears, like most satirists, to have taken at times a view of the world, in which the Epicurean gloom dominates the Epicurean gaiety. ‘All earthly joy returns in pain’ is the refrain of one of his poems; ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ of another. The shadow of the ‘atra dies’ falls aslant his most luxuriant moods. In the sonnet beginning:—

‘What is this life but ane straucht way to deid,

Whilk has a time to pass and nane to dwell’;

there is something of the satiety of a disappointed worldling; but in others—

‘Be merry, man, and tak not sare in mind

The wavering of this wretched warld of sorrow,’—

we have the manlier temper: on the one side Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas, on the other the Philosophie douce.

Recognition

4 of his poems ("To a Lady", "In Honour of the City of London". "On the Nativity of Christ", and "Lament for the Makers") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

For the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the mid-20th century, Dunbar was a touchstone. Many tried to imitate his style and "high brow" subject matter, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sydney Goodsir Smith. As Hugh MacDiarmid himself said, they had to go "back to Dunbar".

Dunbar is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by The Writers' Museum; The Saltire Society; The Scottish Poetry Library.

Publications

Poetry

• The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy; The Ballade of ane Right Noble Victorius & Myghty Lord Barnard Stewart; Here Begynnys ane Litil Tretie Intitulit the Golden Targe. Edinburgh: printed by Walter Chepman & Androw Myllar, 1508
• Poems (edited by John Small). (3 volumes), Scottish Text Society, 2, 4, 16, 21, 29. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1884-1889.
• Poems (edited by Jakob Schipper). (5 volumes), Vienna: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1891-1894.
• Poems (edited by W. Mackay Mackenzie). London: Faber & Faber, 1932.
  • reprinted, with corrections by Bruce Dickins, 1960.
• Poems (edited by James Kinsley). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of British poets

William Dunbar Lament for the makers.

References

•  Smith, George Gregory (1911). "Dunbar, William". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 668-669. 

External links

Poems

• Dunbar, William (1456?-1513?) (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• William Dunbar (ca. 1460 - 1520) profile & 3 poems at the Scottish Poetry Library
• William Dunbar in the Oxford Book of English Verse (1250-1900) - 4 poems ("To a Lady", "In Honour of the City of London". "On the Nativity of Christ", and "Lament for the Makers").
• Dunbar in The English Poets: An anthology: Extracts from The Thrissil and the Rois, Extracts from The Golden Targe, Extracts from The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis," "Extracts from The Lament for the Makaris Quhen He Was Seik"
• Poems of William Dunbar at PoemHunter (7 poems)
• William Dunbar at Poetry Nook (85 poems)

Audio / video

• William Dunbar poems at YouTube

Books

• Works by William Dunbar at Project Gutenberg
• The Chepman & Myllar Prints digital edition at the National Library of Scotland contain the following works by Dunbar:
  • The Golden Targe
  • The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy
  • The Ballade of Lord Bernard Stewart
  • The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
  • Lament for the Makars (Timor mortis conturbat me)
  • Kynd Kittok
  • The Testament of Mr Andro Kennedy
• William Dunbar at Amazon.com

About

• William Dunbar in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• William Dunbar at NNDB
• Dunbar, William in the Dictionary of National Biography

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at Dunbar, William