Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas

Abstract

The writing lives of the Scottish poets Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas overlapped during a period of fifty years or so, from around 1460 to 1513, coinciding with the reigns of James III and IV of Scotland. The two younger poets – Dunbar was about fifteen years older than Douglas – came to maturity at the end of the fifteenth century in a literary milieu in which Henryson had been the great innovator of the previous generation, as they were to be the great innovators of theirs. They had all stopped writing by the end of 1513, it seems. By then Henryson had been dead for ten or twelve years; Dunbar simply drops from the records; while Douglas completed his translation of the Aeneid in July 1513 and wrote no more poetry. Scottish literature – that is, writings in the variety of English spoken in the lowlands of Scotland – begins later than south of the border, or at least has a different pattern of survival. There is very little earlier than Barbour’s Bruce , written in the 1370s, but a rapid flowering took place in the fifteenth century as knowledge of English writers – including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and the anonymous alliterative poets – spread into Scotland. The Kingis Quair , the first Scots philosophical dream-vision in the Chaucerian manner, was apparently composed in the late 1420s or 1430s by James I, who was held captive in England for eighteen years. Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat , written around 1448, is the earliest long poem of the alliterative ‘revival’ in Scotland; it is a ‘parliament of birds’ fable cast in the form of a chanson d’aventure . Nevertheless, the originality of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas is of a different order. They were all highly educated men who thought hard and came to different conclusions about what poetry is and does. Between them, they created Older Scots as a literary language.