The Two Voices of William Dunbar
- The Two Voices of William Dunbar
Assistant Professor of English, University College, University of Toronto
notes
1. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, by G.[eorge] S.[andys] (Oxford, 1632), 209.
2. It is no coincidence that the grotesque-sublime image of the crucified Christ, hanging at the artistic and religious centre of the mediaeval cathedral above the high altar, should thus epitomize and justify ail the decoration, including the grotesquerie which so often puzzles the observer by its presence there.
3. All quotations are from The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. W. Mackay Mackenzie (London, 1960), marked according to the poem numbers and line references in that edition.
4. J. C. Mendenhall, Aureate Terms: A Study in the Literary Diction of the Fifteenth Century (Lancaster, Pa., 1919), 46. Lydgate’s complaint appears in the Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, E.E.T.S., Extra Series, 97 (London, 1906), Bk. II, 167–8:
5. C.H.E.L., II, 256.
6. The Works of John Metham, ed. Hardin Craig, E.E.T.S. Original Series, 132 (London, 1916), The Romance of Amoryus and Cleopes, 2192–5.
7. C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), 94, has already used this word to describe Dunbar’s poetry.
8. The Writings of James Russell Lowell (Cambridge, Mass., 1892), IV, 271.
9. Scottish Text Society, First Series, 19 (Edinburgh, 1889–90), III, 125–6; “there were some hen feathers in the wings which desired and yearned for the manure pile, not the clouds.”
10. Form and Style in Poetry (London, 1928), 88.
11. Jakob Schipper, in many ways the best of Dunbar’s several editors by reason of his thorough textual apparatus, made substantial rearrangements of the text to avoid what he felt to be inconsistencies, an unsmiling attention to the details of this poem which can be compared to his note on the lines in which Kennedy offered to send, at his own expense, to the destitute Dunbar shipwrecked in Denmark, a “pak of flaskynnis,” whose usual rendering, “pack of fleaskins,” troubled Schipper: “But it is possible to strip off the skins of fleas? Surely, the flayer, who would have to do it, would be more remarkable for his agility, than the fleas, who would suffer it, for their patience.” The Poems of William Dunbar, Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 40 (1892), Part II, 89.
12. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed, E. S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge, 1891), 51.
13. The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie, Scottish Text Society, Third Series, 22 (Edinburgh, 1955), 1, 76.
14. Poetaster, To the Reader, 163–4.
15. Scottish Literature (London, 1919), 35.
