William Dunbar

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter considers Dunbar’s role as court poet to James IV of Scotland, and one of the elite group of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Scottish ‘makars’, but one who overtly linked himself with Chaucer and Lydgate. Most of his poetry, which is set as much in the royal court and the Edinburgh streets as in dream worlds, was composed for the court milieu. Many of the poems are performative in essence, creating voices and circumstances that vividly draw on lived experience; some refer to real people, and some may be linked to actual performances. The chapter examines Dunbar’s courtly, religious and burlesque verse, exploring how his stylistic innovations encompass a full range of registers, and his lexical innovations deploy both the Scots of the Edinburgh streets and highly stylised experiments with aureation. The chapter also considers Dunbar’s position as a poet whose forms and preoccupations demonstrate the difficulties in drawing a hard line between the medieval and Renaissance literary and cultural worlds.