|
Article Excerpt
William Dunbar's "The Goldyn Targe" adheres in most ways to late medieval dream-vision conventions, but idiosyncratically features a ship "Wyth merse of gold brycht as the stern of day, / Quhilk tendit to the land full lustily, / As falcoun swift desyrouse of hir pray" (51-54). (1) Dunbar's speaker dreams that this ship glides "Amang the grene rispis and the redis" (56), and discharges two cohorts of gods and goddesses, the dreamer's opponents in the ensuing allegorical psychomachia. At once beautiful and predatory, this vessel has elicited numerous critical attempts to establish a source, none of them definitive: it may be the poet's invention, a variation on a barge mentioned in Lydgate's Reson and Senuallyte, a nod to King James IV's efforts to create a Scottish navy, or an analog to the pageant cars built like miniature ships for spectacles that Dunbar (c.1460-c.1522?) would have witnessed at court. (2) Whatever its other parallels in life or literature, however, toward the end of the poem the ship becomes part of a religious tableau. Having been seduced and then abandoned by a small army of personified female qualities, the dreamer watches his foes return to their barge at the bugle-call of "God Eolus" (230):
In twynkling of ane eye to schip thai went, And swyth vp saile vnto the top thai stent, And with swift course atout the flude thai frak. Till that the reke raise to the firmament. The rochis all resownyt wyth the rak, For rede it semyt that the raynbow brak. (235-41)
The loud "gunnis" may well be inspired by James IV's fascination with naval artillery, (3) but "flude" and "raynbow" together also bring the poem into intertextual relationship with the Genesis story of the Deluge. What is more, the rainbow's apparent rupture implies that God has retracted his promise in that story never to drown the earth again. Yet the poem's unfocused but disquieting apocalypticism has been largely ignored by critics, who typically have read "The Goldyn Targe" either as an artifact of the secular fin'amor tradition, or as an untroubled expression of Christian piety.
Alongside a serio-comic treatment of erotic desire, however, "The Goldyn Targe" performs a complex negotiation between faith and despair, using allusions to King Solomon and Revelation's New Jerusalem in addition to Noah's flood to reinforce the dreamer's sense of alienation from his poetic forbears and from God. Sensitivity to Dunbar's polyvalent scriptural symbolism yields two benefits. First, it reveals interconnections between the apocalyptic, literary, and sexual anxieties at work in the poem, revealing previously unnoticed complexity in Dunbar's allegory. Second, it can lead us to a more self-reflective critical practice. With medieval and Renaissance literary and cultural studies currently taking a turn towards religion, "The Goldyn Targe" serves as an object lesson for criticism's responsibility to take belief seriously without succumbing to nostalgia for lost spiritual wholeness.
As both a product of James IV's decadent royal court and a highly self-conscious meditation on literary history, "The Goldyn Targe" bas elicited mimetic and meta-poetic interpretations in fairly equal proportions. (4) Yet with an important recent exception, critics have shown comparatively little sustained interest in the poem's religious engagements. Neglect of religion in the poem may derive partly from editorial tradition. Except for Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar's modern editors have tended to organize his poems topically, sequestering the devotional and moralistic pieces from the others. (5) But while segmenting Dunbar's oeuvre by subject matter may help readers make sense of his diverse canon, it necessarily misrepresents the porous thematic boundaries of the poetry. Take for example "In May as that Aurora did vpspring" (also known as "The Merle and the Nychtingall"), a dream-vision like "The Goldyn Targe." James Kinsley groups it with related "Poems of Love," W. Mackay Mackenzie places it alongside similar "Allegories and Addresses," and John Conlee associates it with seven other "Poems in the Courtly Tradition." Yet these editorial labels dismiss the Augustinian sentiment of the poem's refrain, "All lufe is lost bot vpone God alone." And while "In May as that Aurora did vpspring" is a courtly poem with a surprising religious undercurrent, Dunbar's "Ane Ballat of the Passioun" is a homily structured like a courtly allegorical vision. At the poem's outset, the speaker enters a friary to pray "Befoir the michtie king of glorie" but admits that "sudandlie I sleipit" (4 and 8). A vision of Christ's betrayal and execution commences:
Methocht Iudas with mony ane Iow Tuik blissit Iesu our saluatour, And schot him furth with mony ane schow, With schamefull wourdis of dishonour. (9-12)
Dunbar then invokes a number of allegorical personifications, including "Remembrance," "Compassioun," "Contritioun," and "Repentence," to dramatize the Christ's suffering. As Christ dies, the dreamer reports, "The erde did trymmill quhair I lay, / Quhairthrow I waiknit in that steid" (138-9). "Ane Ballat of the Passioun," then, exhibits some salient features of the dream-vision genre: the falling asleep of the speaker, the narration of a dream tinged by a haziness of perception (signaled here by the single word "Methocht"), the procession of allegorical figures, and the sudden disturbance that wakes the dreamer from his sleep. "Ane Ballat" demonstrates the interpenetration of Christian and courtly discourses in Dunbar's poetry, a dynamic equally though less explicitly informing "The Goldyn Targe."
Scholarly disregard of possible religious iconography in "The Goldyn Targe" is also bound up with the vexed relationship between religion and medievalist literary criticism. During the mid-twentieth century, D. W. Robertson and his acolytes argued that even ostensibly secular medieval poetry--including the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer's dream visions, and other important influences on "The Goldyn Targe"--followed patristic exegetical principles, allegorically encoding didactic Christian meanings. While earlier critics such as C. S. Lewis viewed courtly love poetry as parodic of the dominant Christian discourse, expressing the "medieval taste for humorous blasphemy," Robertson denied that any such thing as courtly love even existed, and saw all such literature as dutifully condemning cupiditas and praising caritas. (6) Robertson's question-begging and reductive conception of medieval Christianity and literature invited a backlash which "stifled medievalist literary critical interest in religion," with both New Critics and the historicists who superseded them pursuing decidedly secular lines of inquiry. (7) In this critical milieu, digging for a Christian stratum of meaning in a courtly love poem like "The Goldyn Targe" would have seemed misguided, or even reactionary.
Nevertheless, after several decades of historicist criticism apt to see theology as a screen for political concerns, literary and cultural studies lately have turned to religion with renewed interest. Critics increasingly suspect that "the secularity of what appear to be purely secular phenomena" should be "seen in silent dialogue with its repressed religious counterpart," especially in literature originating from the border between the medieval and early modern periods. (8) In medieval studies, one way the religious turn manifests itself is in...
|
