The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

By Caitlin Flynn

The Narrative Grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in these poems, which fracture narratological boundaries by fusing disparate poetic forms and creating hybrid subjectivities. Consequently, these poems interrogate conventional boundaries in poetic making. The narrative grotesque is applied as a framework to elucidate these chimeric texts and to understand newly late medieval engagement with poetics and narratology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526160805

Book preview

Introduction: the narrative grotesque

If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing? Believe me, dear Pisos, quite like such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams, so that neither head nor foot can be assigned a single shape.

(Horace, De Arte Poetica)¹

Horace’s treatise on poetic composition (10 BCE) derides the rupture and fusion of bodily boundaries as laughable, chaotic, and inarticulate. He argues that poetics written in the spirit of these ‘idle fancies […] shaped like a sick man’s dreams’ would be equally subject to such derision. While Horace’s disdainful perspective is dominant, his description accurately expresses the precepts that define the grotesque. At its most essential the grotesque is the fusion of horror and humour. The intersection of these affective reactions arises from the rupturing of boundaries, whether bodily or abstract. Horace’s simile to fever hallucinations impresses a key feature of the grotesque: it warps and eventually transforms recognisable objects, thoughts, or concepts through a dual process of rupturing boundaries and fusing opposed affective reactions. This subjective aspect of the grotesque is especially provocative in literary settings where abstract concepts such as lexis, prosody, genre, and diegesis might all contribute to this destructive and generative project. The narrative grotesque, therefore, creates a framework through which literary texts may be analysed as they interrogate, distort, and rupture conventions.

This study proposes the narrative grotesque as a new collocation of the critical term ‘grotesque’. This new collocation offers to literary criticism a strategy for reading texts that centres discussion on moments that meld together, however briefly, a collection of discordant or opposed elements. This fusion does not only represent disrupted conventions or boundaries, however. It provokes a sensation of horror, repulsion, and humour to create chimeras of the type reviled by Horace. While these chimeric texts innovate on genre, form, tone, and affect, they do so in a manner which is more concerned with self-consciously probing literary expression and style than pushing forward any one particular genre or form. In this way, the narrative grotesque is a framework that brings into focus textual ruptures and fusions in order to explicate underlying philosophical and aesthetic concerns in literary narratives.

This study considers two Older Scots poems that exemplify the narrative grotesque, namely Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c. 1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1507). Narrowing focus to these two texts allows for a forensic examination of the multivalent forms and outcomes of the narrative grotesque. When it is applied as a framework for reading medieval texts the narrative grotesque will be shown to be an illuminating method for bringing order and insight to unruly texts that disorient and disturb by overspilling boundaries and constructing dizzying literary hybrids. The narrative grotesque pervades these texts at the levels of lexis, narrative voice, genre, and beyond, thus making them ideal exemplars of the framework’s applications. Throughout this study, other texts of Scottish and English origin will be brought to bear as intertexts and analogues in order to show the ways in which Douglas and Dunbar engaged with their literary predecessors and milieux. Through the multitude of ‘grotesqueries’ found in Douglas and Dunbar, this study will also demonstrate the ways in which the narrative grotesque may be applied to other medieval and early modern texts.

The introduction will first give an overview of the literary atmosphere in late medieval Scotland with an orientation towards exploring the contexts and trends that may have given rise to the production of these two grotesque poems within several years of one another. Next, a brief history of the critical term ‘grotesque’ will situate the reader in the multiple evolutions which the grotesque has undergone as it was transferred from a term for architectural decoration to a literary catch-all for exaggerated and obscene figures. The narrative grotesque is distinguished from these various uses of the grotesque because it is not limited to visual effects. Rather, the narrative grotesque elucidates exaggerated forms of transgression and disruption at linguistic, formal, and structural levels of the literary text.

Douglas, Dunbar, and later medieval Scottish literature

Scottish writers were in a unique position at the end of the fifteenth century: the geographically peripheral location of Scotland meant that, despite deep and lasting ties with continental Europe, they integrated new materials into their literary canon unevenly and sporadically. This led to the late persistence of medieval styles of poetic composition. However, that is not to say that Scots were intellectually backward: their engagement with humanism and early European print culture led to a curious mixing of medieval styles with fresh philosophical perspectives.² Scotland’s distinctive political environment also contributed to a peculiarly Scottish literary culture where the ‘advice to princes’ mode was popular for generations, in part a result of the successive minority kingships throughout the fifteenth century, starting with James I of Scotland.

Perhaps the most significant challenge faced by scholars of Scottish literature is the frustratingly narrow and uneven transmission of this literature to the present day. Many surviving texts can be traced to only a handful of authors (mostly of the fifteenth century or later), while the remaining anonymous works often retain barely a trace of their historical context, location of composition, or likely authorship; sometimes dating can be narrowed to only a fifty-year period. As Nicola Royan has observed, what we know of medieval Scottish literature is largely limited to the tastes of three sixteenth-century Edinburgh residents: George Bannatyne (1545–1607/8), Richard Maitland (1496–1586), and John Asloan (fl. 1513–30). The so-called Bannatyne Manuscript alone transmits sixty of William Dunbar’s poems, fifty of which are written in a single hand.³ Regarding patterns of literary production, Royan remarks:

The devolution of literary production outwith an only intermittently regal court provokes additional questions about audience and circulation, as well as about the relationship of the regions of Scotland to the centre. A metropolitan model of production and reception, still evident in discussions of early modern English literature, seems far less probable in a realm where there was not always a political centre, and where power was frequently devolved to regional magnates and burghs.⁴

This observation has implications for two essential aspects of the poetry composed by Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar. The first regards the location and environment of the Scottish court: Douglas and Dunbar are quintessentially of the court and demonstrably wrote for or to James IV of Scotland. William Hepburn, for instance, has convincingly demonstrated that Dunbar’s poem ‘Schir, ye haue mony seruitouris’ contains insights into the personnel active in James IV’s Renaissance court.⁵ Yet, the mobile nature of the court alongside the authors’ other duties, namely Douglas’s ecclesiastical appointments, meant that there were long periods of time in which these authors were not physically in attendance at the royal court. Furthermore, some of the most significant works produced in Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Douglas’s masterful translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Eneados (1513), boasted patrons from the nobility rather than the royal family.

The second relevant aspect of courtliness raised by Royan’s remarks pertains to the distinction between interacting with the court on a personal level and engaging courtly modes of writing. During the period that Dunbar and Douglas were active, c. 1490–1513, court poetry in Scotland and England was undergoing a stylistic evolution. This trend has been most notably identified by Antony Hasler in his study of allegory and authority in Scottish and English court poetry. He observes, ‘this period sees […] the explosion of a fragmenting and abrasive eclecticism, in which signification goes violently awry’, a result which he contends leads to composite literary forms that ‘threaten to collapse into incoherence under the pressure of something unspoken’.⁶ Hasler’s comments come as a conclusion to his study, and in the following analysis his observations are extended, albeit indirectly.⁷

Hasler’s study is limited specifically to court poetry, but hybridisation, multiplication, and transfiguration are themes evident in other genres of Scottish poetry of the period. Perhaps most relevant for the current discussion is the anonymously composed Older Scots fabliau The Freiris of Berwik (c. 1480). The fabliau form is well known for its exaggerated, obscene, and humorous content. As I have argued elsewhere, The Freiris of Berwik innovates on the genre by mobilising ritual magic (necromancy) as the central narrative concern and, in so doing, ‘explore[s] prescient conflicts between modes of knowledge, types of literary expression, and the uncomfortable tensions between popular practices and official intellectual stances’.⁸ In that analysis, I set the Scottish fabliau in conversation with a Middle High German analogue, Hans Rosenplüt’s Der Fahrende Schüler. Reading the texts within a grotesque framework, thus decentring critical strategies more grounded in transmission and explicit cross-textual allusions, exposed a hitherto unremarked correspondence between the fabliaux: each text uses the increasingly archaic medieval comic form to explore the precarious status of ritual magic in intellectual and ‘popular’ spheres. The critical framework applied across this study should similarly open critical discourse to different modes of comparative analysis.

Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar were, nonetheless, closely associated with James IV’s court and are considered to be two of Scotland’s pre-eminent makars. Douglas came from an aristocratic background and was a younger son of Archibald, the fifth earl of Angus. He obtained a degree at University of St Andrews and it is presumed that he subsequently spent time in Paris. As is the case for many writers of the period, Douglas was a member of the clergy and was made provost of St Giles in Edinburgh in 1503 before becoming the bishop of Dunkeld in 1516. The Douglas family was active in political life throughout the fifteenth century and Douglas himself became especially involved in the court and its political machinations after the disastrous Battle of Flodden in 1513. He died from plague in London in 1522 in the midst of various political intrigues.⁹

His impressively wide knowledge of literary and philosophical writing is evident in his two longest works, The Palyce of Honour (hereafter Palyce) and the Eneados. Royan observes that in Palyce Calliope’s train includes many eminent classical writers, but it also shows Douglas to be au courant with the Continental literary scene and European humanism by listing, for instance, Petrarch and Boccaccio among her cavalcade.¹⁰ In terms of Douglas’s humanist impulses Royan notes that, although his association with this movement is problematic, certain aspects of his translation of the Aeneid reflect at least a sympathy with humanist principles. Coinciding with humanist principles regarding education, Douglas presents his translation as a learning tool and he thinks critically about the versification of his translation.¹¹ Douglas’s characterisation of his motivations and philosophy in translating the Aeneid reflect back to his work a decade earlier which explores the purpose of the poetic vocation, the sources of poetic inspiration, and the role that poetry plays in society. As will be explored in the following chapters, Douglas uses the dream vision to interrogate these questions by turning them into the basis of the dreamer-narrator’s psychomachia. Viewing the text through the perspective of the narrative grotesque makes possible a nuanced reading of Douglas’s intertwining of medieval styles with humanist concepts.

The first half of this study takes as its subject Palyce. Douglas’s text is comprised of a complex lattice of hybridisations, which are created through dissonant combinations of perspectives and boundaries, whether spatial, temporal, or corporeal. Consequently, the narrative grotesque is applied to elucidate his innovative take on dream-vision poetry and the process of poetic making. Palyce follows two simultaneous trajectories: the first is a solipsistic agenda in which the dreamer seeks validation and direction as an individual and poet; the second follows a wider epistemological track that attempts to reconcile poetry’s function in society by establishing it as a conduit between the mundane and the divine. The narrator-dreamer’s intellectual and psychological turmoil reflects not only a painful process of self-discovery but also the precarious role of poetics as a divinely inspired mode of enlightenment and as an instrument of personal elevation.

Palyce follows medieval dream-allegory conventions by setting the opening scene in a spring garden. As the narrator proceeds further into the garden, he hears an unknown voice sing in praise of May’s bounty. Rather than feeling inspired, the narrator remonstrates May, Nature, and Venus for what he perceives to be their neglect of his dedicated service. He sets himself into a frenetic state, witnesses a comet-like flash in the sky, and subsequently faints – an act which turns out to be his entrée into the dream. In the dream, temporal and spatial dimensions dilate and constrict unpredictably, while sensory perceptions similarly morph with erratic speed. The dreamer, alone, wanders the terrifyingly poisonous and decrepit dreamscape disconsolately. Eventually he encounters a parade of divine entities and through the intervention of two trailing figures he learns that the party is journeying to the Palace of Honour. He is enraged to see Venus lead a subsequent cavalcade and verbally harangues her, which ends in his indictment and trial for crimes against Venus. Luckily, he is rescued by Calliope, who intervenes as his barrister and then brings him into her retinue of poets and philosophers for the journey. After a brief stop in Venus’s garden, the narrator attempts, with the help of a nymph guide, to see the Palace of Honour up close. Although he reaches the entrance, a glance through the entry door stuns him and he tumbles some way down the mountainside. As he attempts to return to Venus’s garden he slips into a brook and the shock of the fall rouses him from unconsciousness. He once again finds himself in the garden of the frame, albeit a garden that looks much less lustrous than before.

The series of contradictions, reflections, and multiplications that characterise everything from the most peripheral motif to the overarching structure of the text has led to varied interpretations of the journey’s allegorical significance. David Parkinson, for instance, discusses farce in the narrative:

The Palis may be read as an exploration of the broader significance of courtly experience, with its infernal foundation and heavenly goal […] In between those fixed points, however, come the shifting hells and paradises of common individual situations; and here, in the passing of one extreme into another, farce may slip in.¹²

Parkinson’s salient point – that farce marries the ‘shifting hells and paradises’ in the narrative – is extended in the following analysis: many of these transitional scenes, in fact, achieve the narrative grotesque by fusing opposed affective experiences, normally using temporal dissonance to counterpoint the dreamer’s fear with the narrator’s ridicule. The frequent abrupt shifts from hellish to heavenly; the fluctuations in style and register; and the characters inhabiting the text all contribute to the production of the narrative grotesque.

Elsewhere L. O. Aranye Fradenburg situates the text as a fitting product of the courtly culture cultivated during James IV’s reign. She asserts that ‘the dependence of the poetics of honor on exhibitionism, theatricalization, [and] phenomenalization’ reflects the mood of James’s court.¹³ Her argument highlights the dual sense of creation and destruction that pervades the vision by emphasising the looming threat of violence sensed by the dreamer.¹⁴ She concludes that ‘the contradictions between honor as reputation or reward (worldly honor) and honor as virtue (high honor) is thereby narrated as a displacement of one pole of meaning by the other’.¹⁵ The dreamer’s search for H(/h)onour (as framed by Fradenburg) reflects only one facet of the theme of transfiguration, which appears in multiple guises throughout the poem. The discrete episodes referenced in Parkinson and Fradenburg are indicative of a more pervasive sense of distortion at play in Douglas’s poem. The narrative grotesque centres moments of distortion, rupture, and fusion as points of entry into the text. Indeed, the predominating aspects of horror evoked at these key junctures are made grotesque through a patina of humour produced by the disjointed diegesis and the unlikely interactions between Douglas’s dreamer and the various inhabitants of the dream. Moreover, the flashes of awe experienced by the dreamer are always set within and against grotesque episodes. In effect, the problem of elevating the poet from the bestiality of humanity to interpreter and messenger of divine insight is reified by the narrative grotesque.

William Dunbar’s biographical details are murkier. His dates of birth and death are unknown. The only dating evidence locating Dunbar in a certain time and place are found in the Treasurer’s Accounts between 1500 and 1513, where he is listed as a ‘servitour’ of James IV. It seems likely that he attended the University of St Andrews, but documentation is limited to the name William Dunbar occurring in the university’s records as ‘determining’ in 1477 and among the graduates in 1479. He disappears from the records completely until 1500. During this period it is sometimes presumed that Dunbar was on the Continent. After James IV’s death at the Battle of Flodden he once again vanishes from the records (although the Accounts are missing between August 1513 and June 1515) and never reappears. The last historical mention to Dunbar is on 14 May 1513. Dating evidence for his work establishes his period of activity roughly between 1490 and 1513.¹⁶ Sally Mapstone remarks on a comparative oddity in the colophons and title pages associated with his poetry in manuscript renderings and print: Dunbar’s name often appears with the qualifier ‘compilit’ and his name is frequently preceded by the title ‘Maister’, but he is never identified by another rank or ecclesiastical office.¹⁷

Dunbar’s extant corpus of poetry is impressively wide ranging in form, subject, and style. He wrote petitionary poetry, festive, comic, and religious poetry, he dealt with the themes of love, death, piety, court life, friendship, and competition, and he even wrote about migraine headaches. His verse forms are mind-bogglingly diverse: he wrote carols, refrain-poems, and flytings, and he wrote in both rhyme royal and tail rhyme. Priscilla Bawcutt says of him: ‘Dunbar is a poet of enormous variety. He speaks with almost too many voices.’¹⁸ As Bawcutt recognises, any generalisations about his poetry or autobiographical extrapolations are nearly impossible.¹⁹ Of Dunbar’s The Thrissill and the Rois (c. 1503), a dream vision written on the occasion of the marriage between James IV and Margaret Tudor, Hasler observes that it exposes the author’s concerns ‘with the transfiguring power of language, with the visibility of figures, and with the imagining of imperial temporality’.²⁰ Indeed, Hasler’s comments encapsulate some persistent concerns in Dunbar’s poetry that culminate in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. As will be shown in this study, Dunbar once again self-consciously interrogates similar concepts and, through the grotesquing of literary forms and styles, creates a warren of narrative voice and perceptions of authority and veracity. This investigation aims to orient focus to these moments of corruption and rupture. Accordingly, this should create fresh opportunities for critical discourse regarding the relationship between various poems in Dunbar’s corpus, including The Thrissill and the Rois and The Goldyn Targe.

The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (hereafter Tretis) is one of Dunbar’s most iconic poems and it has engendered much debate among critics. The Tretis is exceptional among Dunbar’s other poems for multiple reasons, foremost for its unique formal properties: it is hundreds of lines longer than any other poem in Dunbar’s corpus and the unrhymed alliterative long line in which it is written diverges significantly from the rigorous stanzaic structures favoured by Dunbar. Bawcutt makes the observation that while Dunbar was clearly well read and had a virtuosic knowledge of medieval verse forms, he was not what one would call an ‘intellectual’ poet. That is to say, overt references, quotes, translations, or paraphrases of other authors or texts occur seldomly.²¹ This is certainly the case in the Tretis, where allusions to other works are integrated with subtlety or by implication. This study reassesses the poem by considering the discordant elements that generate critical disagreements in order to explore wider trends in Dunbar’s writing: his poetry consistently confronts the audience with one version of reality only to reveal the artificial or illusory quality of their perceptions. When these conflicting impressions of fantasy and reality are repeatedly layered upon one another the entire construct of poetics is destabilised. The narrative grotesque thus provides a framework for describing this process in Dunbar’s work.

Dunbar employs a mosaic of motifs and genres to construct the complex stylistic and narrative landscape in the Tretis. Owing to this labyrinthine structure, he is able to deconstruct a number of highly recognisable medieval conventions and forms. The poem takes as its subject a demande d’amour discussed by three women as they drink together in a secluded garden at night. One woman, identified by the narrator as a widow, poses a demande which asks whether the women are happy with their marriages or whether they would choose a different husband or lover if given the chance. Each of the three women delivers a response to this question. Their discourses challenge at every level conventions, ideals, and forms of courtly poetic expression. In turn, the narrator, concealed in a hawthorn bush, reports their conversation to the audience. He augments his passive observation with interjected commentaries that frame and editorialise the content of the speeches and the demeanour of the women. These interruptions typically highlight the indecorous or lewd nature of the trio. However, following the widow’s impressive sermon-response, he reacts finally with such horror that it seems comically self-betraying. The narrator closes the narrative by initiating a final subversive distortion when he asks the audience a new demande: which woman would you choose if you had to choose one?

On all levels the text interrogates the concepts of emotional authenticity and narratorial veracity by repeatedly manipulating the audience’s perception of the narrators. The grotesque aesthetic privileges ambivalence and, in so doing, discourages assessments which assign either positive or negative values to particular figures, themes, or expressions. As will become apparent, the text resists classification on every level; it is, rather, a kaleidoscopic composition that is most revealing at points of rupture and fusion. Dunbar’s deeply innovative approach to prosody, narrative technique, and genre pushes forward intellectual and creative boundaries that were becoming increasingly porous as the Middle Ages drew to a close.

A grotesque history

The term ‘grotesque’ was coined in reference to a decorative style made popular after the excavation of the Domus Aurea of Rome around 1480. In its earliest form, grotesque was used to describe foliate figures that defied natural laws to show animate forms flowing together with floral shapes and creating figures that were doubled or reflected into distorted configurations.²² Luca Signorelli’s borders at Orvieto cathedral, painted between 1499 and 1504, demonstrate the translation of the classical ‘grotto’ decoration into Renaissance visual arts. His depiction of Empedocles turned away from the audience and gawking at the figures populating his frame, with an upraised hand, palm extended in a surprised or restraining gesture, compellingly conveys the disoriented and perhaps even repulsed reaction to such imagery. Yet, his posture and expression are relaxed and Empedocles is seemingly engrossed by the cavorting figures. As Empedocles’s portrait insinuates, competing reactions of wonder, horror, playfulness, and laughter encompass the most essential responses to the grotesque whether in the visual arts or as it appears in literary settings.²³

Centuries later, John Ruskin’s multi-volume study, The Stones of Venice (1851–53), argues for two grotesque phenotypes in architectural decoration. He labels these the ‘noble’ and ‘ignoble’ grotesque. Ruskin demonstrates the difference between the types with an illustration of two lions – one appears with upturned face; the other looks forward with outstretched, curled tongue and rolling eyes. He refers to the latter as an example of the ignoble grotesque and calls it the ultimate corruption of beauty; he even goes as far as refusing to publish all but this single pictorial example, fearing that it will pollute his study.²⁴ In Volume II, the chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ asserts that Gothic architecture is comprised of four elements, the fourth being ‘Grotesqueness’, which he attributes to the ‘Disturbed Imagination’ of the builder.²⁵ It is striking to note that, like Horace, he connects the grotesque with a delusion or hallucination resulting from some detrimental physical or mental condition. In Volume III, in the chapter entitled ‘Grotesque Renaissance’, Ruskin critiques the ignoble grotesque as a depraved signal of the moral corruption of the culture. Ruskin asserts that ‘the thoughts of the nation [Venice] were exclusively occupied in the invention of such fantastic and costly pleasures as might best amuse their apathy, lull their remorse, or disguise their ruin’.²⁶ He then describes Venetian architecture c. 1650–1700 as ‘amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men, being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest […] exhausting itself in deformed and monstrous sculpture’.²⁷

Despite his excoriation of the so-called ‘ignoble’ grotesque, Ruskin defines its characteristics in the process of rejecting them, and, furthermore, he identifies the value and power of the ‘noble’ grotesque. Frances Connelly summarises Ruskin’s twofold understanding of the noble grotesque:

The first was that the grotesque confounds language and logical sequence as it fuses together disparate realities. The second element was that the grotesque opens up a liminal space, full of ambiguity and contradiction, that requires us to ‘overleap the gaps’ in order to make meaning of it. Of enormous importance is Ruskin’s insight that the grotesque places the viewer in an in-between, unresolved space, compelling each individual to take these disparate elements and make meaning out of them.²⁸

Later, Connelly distils even further the value Ruskin assigned to the noble grotesque – ‘it is in the noble grotesque that Ruskin found an image with revelatory power, its strange and inchoate fusions creating a highly poetic means of expression and a vehicle for the most exalted of meanings’.²⁹ Ruskin’s dual view of the grotesque pits the ignoble, which he called ‘the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall’,³⁰ against the noble, which he determined was ‘a profound expression of the most passionate symbolism’.³¹ Essentially, he separates images of bestial and ‘low’ themes from the profundity achieved by more graceful unions of contradictory symbols.³² Such explicit value assessments are set to the side in the current study, though Ruskin’s exploration of grotesque phenotypes allows for a broader understanding of the range of forms the grotesque might inhabit.

Connelly’s work on the grotesque, confined to the visual arts, offers extensive insights into its critical utility as well as its value as an artistic aesthetic. Connelly summarises her conception of the grotesque and its place in art-historical criticism:

understanding that the grotesque is a cultural action is fundamental to grasping how it constructs meaning in individual images, as well as how it is manifested through historical time. Historical narratives tend to move from unity to unity, emphasizing the artists and milieus at the center, where a style or movement reaches its purest realization and is most