Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority by Antony J. Hasler (review)

This volume explores a range of English and Scottish works composed between 1485 and 1528. It thus mines a fertile seam doubly overlooked by literary scholars: the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a period to which few Middle English or early modern English scholars extend their range, while Older Scots scholars (who are very active in this period) look to Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay’s contemporaries south of the border almost as rarely as English scholars look north. The only book-length study of comparable scope is Gregory Kratzmann’s 1980 classic, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 1430–1550. Apart from incidental discussions of some poems of Sir David Lyndsay from the 1530s, Hasler’s study breaks off firmly at Skelton’s last poem of 1528: he thus deliberately stops short of the more frequently studied works of Wyatt and Surrey.

Hasler is unapologetically literary rather than historicist in focus: the volume’s subtitle “Allegories of Authority” signals his approach, and he makes it clear that he is not attempting to offer some sort of period survey (there is no Thomas More, for example), nor is he presenting a series of “life and works” studies. His subject is rather “the forms of poetic identity generated in a cluster of works, in response to the multiple sources of authority that surround these authors. Such sources include monarchs and courts, and genres and texts, both vernacular and classical” (2). He tackles this through detailed study of Bernard André’s Vita Henrici Septimi; William Dunbar’s The Thrissill and the Rois, The Goldyn Targe, and a series of shorter petitionary poems; John Skelton’s The Bowge of Courte, Speke Parott, and The Garlande of Laurell (Dunbar and Skelton claim the lion’s share of Hasler’s attention); Alexander Barclay’s Eclogues; Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honour; and Stephen Hawes’s The Pastime of Pleasure and The Comfort of Lovers. Hasler points out that the lives of most of these poets, except perhaps Gavin Douglas, are relatively ill documented, and that their poems “resist decoding for topical and biographical reference, working hard to refuse history a way in . . . they represent a relation between text and history that is less a theatrical one than a secretive one” (3).

The introduction offers a learned discussion of the late medieval English predecessors of, and models for, the works that form the subject of this study. Hasler reviews Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Walton (in his Boethius), Benedict Burgh (in his continuation of Lydgate’s Secrees of Old Filisoffres), Hary’s Wallace, and its response to Barbour’s Bruce. Chapter 5 on Hawes is also particularly enriched by discussion of the medieval background to the texts and themes Hasler pursues. This thoroughness and depth of knowledge goes a long way to establish Hasler’s authority as a critic. His breadth of reference does not merely include the medieval background. Chapter 3’s study of Dunbar’s petitionary poems, which he uses to explore that poet’s “consistently inconsistent persona” (84) takes as its point of departure John Burrow’s observation that the medieval petitionary poem became “the locus of a ‘discovery of the individual’ “ (71). Hasler tests this proposition by comparing Dunbar’s poems to those of an impressively wide range of poets, from his French predecessors or contemporaries—Rutebeuf, Deschamps, Crétin, Molinet—to the Latin poems of the Archpoet or Walter of Châtillon, through English predecessors such as Hoccleve and Lydgate (though avoiding the too-obvious Chaucer) to Dunbar’s own literary heir, Sir David Lyndsay.

Perceptive and imaginative close readings of texts and their physical manifestations are shrewdly deployed in support of Hasler’s broader arguments about poets, patrons, and the creation of authority. For example, he notes that the first segment of verse in André’s Latin prose Vita is a brief Sapphic stanza in which Henry VII, speaking after his victory at...