William Dunbar - Work and Influence

Work and Influence

Dunbar's reputation among his immediate successors was considerable. By later criticism, stimulated in some measure by Scott's eulogy that he is "unrivalled by any which Scotland has produced," he has held the highest place among the makars.

One hundred and one poems have been ascribed to Dunbar. Of these at least ninety are generally accepted as his; of the eleven attributed to him it would be hard to say that they should not be considered authentic. Most doubt has clung to his verse tale The Freiris of Berwik, so much so much so that it seems unlikely that he was the author. The only copy manuscript of this text is in French, and although the style is very close to that of Dunbar's, it is unlikely that he was the author of this anonymous text.

Dunbar's chief allegorical poems are The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissil and the Rois. The motif of the former is the poet's futile endeavour, in a dream, to ward off the arrows of Dame Beautee by Reason's "scheld of gold." When wounded and made prisoner, he discovers the true beauty of the lady: when she leaves him, he is handed over to Heaviness. The noise of the ship's guns, as the company sails off, wakes the poet to the real pleasures of a May morning. Dunbar works on the same theme in a shorter poem, known as Beauty and the Prisoner. The Thrissil and the Rois is a prothalamium in honour of James IV and Margaret Tudor, in which the heraldic allegory is based on the familiar beast-parliament.

The greater part of Dunbar's work is occasional--personal and social satire, complaints, orisons and pieces of a humorous character. His best known orison, usually remembered as Timor mortis conturbat me which is repeated as the fourth line of each verse, is titled Lament for the Makars and takes the form of a prayer in memory of the medieval Scots poets.

The humorous works show Dunbar at his finest. The best specimen of this work, of which the outstanding characteristics are sheer whimsicality and topsy-turvy humour, is The Ballad of Kynd Kittok. This strain runs throughout many of the occasional poems, and is not wanting in odd passages in Dunbar's contemporaries; and it has the additional interest of showing a direct historical relationship with the work of later Scottish poets, and chiefly with that of Robert Burns. Dunbar's satire often becomes invective. Examples of this type are The Satire on Edinburgh, The General Satire, the Epitaph on Donald Owre, and the powerful vision of The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis. Two satirical ballads lampoon a colleague at court, the would-be aviator John Damian. In The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, an outstanding specimen of a favourite northern form, analogous to the continental estrif, or tenzone, he and his rival reach a height of scurrility which is certainly without parallel in English literature. This poem has the additional interest of showing the antipathy between the Scots-speaking inhabitants of the Lothians and the Gaelic-speaking folk of Carrick, in southern Ayrshire, where Walter Kennedy was from.