Court Politics, Culture and Literature in Scotland and England, 1500–1540 (review)

The relationship between literature in early sixteenth-century Scotland and England is a subject that has been rewardingly (though not always extensively) treated in the recent past. Various doctoral theses (notably Joanna Martin's "Readings of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland,"' Oxford, 2002) examine the circulation of texts north and south of the border, and while Kratzmann's Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 1430–1550 (1980) monograph remains the dominant book-length study, a variety of critical articles analyze a relationship which was often vexed politically, but culturally rewarding. The prevailing tendency has been to emphasize the porous nature of any literary "border" between the two nations, convincingly demonstrated by Priscilla Bawcutt in a 1998 essay tracing the circulation of Scottish poetry among English readers. Her "Manuscript Miscellanies in Scotland from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century," in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone, records the presence of English verse in a number of Scots manuscript collections, while A. A. MacDonald's "Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Scotland," in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. MacDonald et al. (1998) examines the status of Arundel 285 as witness to some of Dunbar's religious works, and notes its ownership by the English recusant scholar, Lord William Howard.

What these studies coherently demonstrate is the vital importance not only of objectively assessing the literary links between Scotland and England, but also of appreciating the part played in that relationship by compilation circumstances, manuscript context, and circulation. A third common feature is that (excepting Kratzmann) none of the above works appears in the bibliography (though the collection containing Bawcutt's 1998 article is cited) of Robinson's ambitious, but ultimately deeply flawed, scrutiny of the literary work of a group of "active courtiers, literary figures" (p. 1). His thesis is that an examination of the works of Wyatt, Elyot, More, Skelton, Dunbar, Lyndsay, and Buchanan will "offer the clearest insights into the socio-political flux and ideology of the makers and shakers of their respective kingdoms" (pp. 1–2). The selected figures, however, had very different interactions with their kings and courts—David Lyndsay's relationship with James V is unlike that of William Dunbar and James IV, and examination of these differences and the effects on poetic creation could have profitably been expanded.

Robinson's approach focuses upon the "initial performance of a work" (p. 2), specifically the "highly charged and dramatic vocal [first] performance" of a poem, which he (inevitably speculatively) maintains probably took place in front of the king and court. Concentration on performance results in an absence of detailed information relating to manuscript context and circulation. While he attempts to justify this omission by arguing that over-emphasis on manuscript and print contexts may detract from "an understanding of the pragmatic reasons behind the poet's production of the verse" (p. 3), Robinson's subsequent arguments dealing with, for example, the propagandistic qualities of Buchanan's verse seem to depend, at least in part, upon an appreciation of the "circulation within the court" (p. 146) of said poetry. In such cases, a more comprehensive explanation of the physical transmission of the verse would be useful, particularly since the process of identifying the circumstances of, and audience for, the initial performance of any given poem is naturally fraught with difficulty.

Closer attention to manuscript witnesses might also have had the beneficial side effect of avoiding certain fundamental errors, most noticeable in the reading of Dunbar. His poetry is represented here by three different editions: Mackenzie's (1932; repr. 1990); Kinsley's (1958); and Bawcutt's (1998). Robinson's provision of explanatory notes justifying whichever edition is in use at a particular point may mitigate this apparent cherry-picking, but his seeming ambivalence towards Bawcutt—she presents "detailed and scholarly 'Notes and Commentary,'" but "some of her editorial decisions seem somewhat whimsical" (p. 23, n. 80), and her...