Sarah M. Dunnigan

Eros and Poetry at the

Courts of Mary Queen of

Scots and James VI

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EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
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Eros and Poetry at the
Courts of Mary Queen of
Scots and James VI

Sarah M. Dunnigan

Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh

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or my mother, Anna,

my father, Matthew

Amor ch’Ancor mi guidi …

Petrarch, canzone 135

Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on Texts and Abbreviations

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to
Jacobean Eros

Part 1 The Marian Period

Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Scots and the Emergence

of Desire

Demonic and Angelic Women: The Erotics of

Renunciation and Mariology in the Bannatyne Manuscript

Part 2 The Jacobean Period

Fables of Eros: James VI and the Revelation of Desire

Devotional Artefacts: John Stewart and the Eroticisation

105

of the Courtly

Love’s Altar: Alexander Montgomerie and the Erotics of

125

Representation

Heretical Love-Words: The Poetry of William Fowler

149

Conclusion: Love’s End

165

Notes

171

Index

213

vii

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Professor R.D.S. Jack for his inspiration, guidance and
kindness throughout the writing of this book and before. Professor
Evelyn S. Newlyn has been constant in her support and friendship; I
am grateful for all our conversations. Dr Gerard Carruthers generously
read and commented on sections. Deepest thanks are given to Dr Emma
Sutton, who compiled the index.

I wish to record my gratitude to the British Academy for the award of
the Postdoctoral Fellowship which enabled me to undertake much of
the research and writing of this book; and to Professor Cairns Craigh,
Head of the English Literature Department at Edinburgh University.

Note on Texts and Abbreviations

The poetry of nearly all the writers who form the subject of this book
is not available in modern editions. The late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century editions of the Scottish Text Society, with few excep-
tions, such as David Parkinson’s edition of Alexander Montgomerie
published in 2000, remain as the standard, mostly authoritative,
printed texts of this corpus. The texts of the poetry reproduced here,
however, are all based on the original manuscript sources. For ease of
reference and accessibility, all quotations are cited by manuscript
source, then by the most convenient Scottish Text Society (STS) edition
so that a ‘dual’ form of referencing appears.

Punctuation and orthography are almost always derived from the

manuscript source with little modernisation; only the long /s/, ‘thorn’,
and ‘yogh’ symbols have been modernised, as has the ‘z’, which
usually represents the phoneme /y/ ; the abbreviated superscript /t/ (for
example, ‘w

for ‘with’), and other contractions are mostly retained; in

most instances there is no normalisation of /u/, /v/, /w/, and /i/, /j/.
Omissions of words or lines are indicated in square brackets. (An
explanatory note on citational procedure appears in the ﬁrst endnote
to each chapter.)

Abbreviations

DOST

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue

ELH

English Literary History

ELR

English Literary Renaissance

EUL

Edinburgh University Library

NLS

National Library of Scotland

PMLA

Proceedings of the Modern Language Association

SEL

Studies in English Literature

SHR

Scottish Historical Review

SLJ

Scottish Literary Journal

SSL

Studies in Scottish Literature

STS

Scottish Text Society

Introduction:
Amorous Histories – from Marian
to Jacobean Eros

…et poi morrò, s’io non credo al desio

(Petrarch, sonnet 47)

[and then I shall die, unless I obey my desire]

Although the articulation of royal subject positions is explored here,
this is not primarily a book about Renaissance monarchy or power. It
is, rather, about ‘d’amor penseri, atti et parole’; in Petrarch’s phrase,
‘the thoughts, acts, and words of love’

associated with two Stewart

sovereigns in sixteenth-century Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots
(1543–87) and James VI (1567–1625). It asserts the importance of love-
words to the artistic and intellectual court culture of each monarch’s
reign, and proposes that poetic eros in the Marian and Jacobean
periods arises from, and is informed by, political and religious conﬂicts
which endured beyond Mary’s reign into James’s. Marian eros deﬁnes
the terms of Jacobean eros. Since eros is an important factor in sculpt-
ing the symbolic nature of the sovereign, the love poetry produced by
courtier-writers responds to the symbolic ‘passional’ powers of both
Mary and James. In exploring the erotic voicings of the queen and
king, and the erotic dialogues which burgeon between monarchs and
courtiers, the book contradicts the perception that Renaissance or early
modern love poetry is constrained rhetorically or conceptually by
orthodoxy and convention. In proposing that incarnations of eros in
the Marian and Jacobean reigns be taken seriously, it takes issue with
the inﬂuential readings of Elizabethan amatory literature which argue
that love poetry is about politics, and not really about love;

this book

argues that it is about both, and that only by responding to the rhetor-
ical and affective intricacies of erotic utterance can the nature of reli-
gious and political concerns within literary culture of the period be

properly understood. In that sense, this study is distanced from
Renaissance New Historicism because it perceives the erotic power, or
‘genuine’ erotic energies, at the core of this body of love poetry, and
argues that this is the necessary precondition for any politically
embedded reading.

Because the book is underpinned by the premise that, in the wake of
Mary Queen of Scots, the énonciation of poetic eros is invested with
intense political and emotional import, it delineates cultural condi-
tions which are peculiar to incarnations of eros in the Scottish
Renaissance. It is underpinned by the assumption that, in intellectual
and cultural terms, it is appropriate to conceive of an autonomous
‘northern’ court literature (in turn, moulded by its encounters with the
literary identities of continental European culture). While this may
seem self-evident or disputable, the critical fragility of ‘early modern
Scottish literature’ within the present ‘British’ canon necessitates such
justiﬁcation. Scottish early modern literature has been served only by
two single-authored book-length studies: R.D.S. Jack’s The Italian
Inﬂuence on Scottish Literature (1972), a scrupulous examination of the
role of translation and Italianate culture on the writers of James VI’s
reign; and Helena Shire’s pioneering Song, Dance and Poetry (1969), a
musicological and cultural study of Scottish Jacobean and post-1603
Scottish writers.

Such important work was augmented by distin-

guished articles on Jacobean literary culture by Jack, John MacQueen,
Matthew McDiarmid, Richard Clewett and Ian Ross.

The political and

religious culture of Reformation and Renaissance Scotland has been
expertly served in the last three decades by a number of collections,

and outstandingly in the work of John Durkan;

while Michael Lynch

has analysed the royal entries and pageants of Mary and James.

In the

last ﬁve years attention to late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lit-
erature has markedly increased. Essay collections, The Rose and the
Thistle, and The Palace in the Wild, offer valuable revisionist insights.

And yet, though writers such as Montgomerie, Fowler and Stewart have
achieved ‘canonical’ status within the self-enclosed ﬁeld of early
modern Scottish literary studies, they remain non-canonical within
‘English’ or ‘British’ early modern literature. It seems obvious that
understanding of aesthetic and cultural practices at the English
Jacobean court is deepened by an awareness of the early Scottish court.
Despite gestures towards fractured, ﬁssiparous boundaries in poststruc-

2 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

turalist Renaissance studies, the potential for devolving the
Renaissance remains great.

The desire to participate in that process

underpins this book in its quest to counter or restore what R.D.S. Jack
has eloquently mourned as ‘the lost Scottish Renaissance’.

Eros and vulnerability

Stewart erotic literature is written against a background of four decades
of considerable political instability. From the poetry of the Marian
writer Alexander Scott (c1515–c1582) to that of the Jacobean writer
Alexander Montgomerie (c1550–1598), it is an implicit witness to three
sovereign ‘anointments’ (Mary; Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, Mary’s
second husband; and James), a king’s murder, the dethronement of a
queen and the incarceration of both sovereigns (one temporary, the
other prolonged until death). Only two of the courtier writers dis-
cussed here, William Fowler (1560–1612) and possibly John Stewart
(c1545–c1605), witness the absorption of Scottish sovereignty into a
greater monarchical centre, on the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Just
as sovereignty was violently wrested from Mary, so its preservation and
endorsement was James’s desire. It occasioned the assertion of the
Jacobean divine right of monarchy, philosophically seeded in the
1580s and 1590s.

The realm of literature also necessitated James’s

need to authenticate the image of his power. The embodiment of the
Jamesian Renaissance is frequently seen to be his earliest prose work:
Ane Schort Treatise, conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and
eschewit in Scottis Poesie. It appeared in his ﬁrst printed work, The
Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie, published in 1584 by
Thomas Vautroullier.

…[Z]e may maruell parauenture, quhairfore I sould haue writtin in
that mater, sen sa mony learnit men, baith of auld and of late hes
already written thairof in dyuers and sindry languages: I answer, That
nochtwithstanding, I haue lykewayis writtin of it, for twa caussis: The
ane is, As for the[m] that wrait of auld, lyke as the tyme is changeit
sensyne, sa is the ordour of Poesie changeit. […] quhat I speik of Poesie
now, I speik of it, as being come to mannis age and perfectioun,
quhair as then, it was bot in the infancie and chyldheid. The vther
cause is, That as for thame that hes written in it of late, there hes neuer
ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of
it in English, quhilk is lykest to our language, yit we differ from thame
in sindrie reulis of Poesie, as ye will ﬁnd be experience.

Introduction 3

Although in many ways a ﬂawed and immature work, written as an act
of cultural and political consolidation by the eighteen-year old king, it
stands as the aesthetic incarnation of a newly strengthened monarchy:
the sovereign’s blessing towards the creation of a national Renaissance
culture. Ever the paradoxical rhetorician, James admits a degree of
humility in the prefatory material to this thirteen-page treatise (‘… of
Rhetorique and Dialectique, quhilkis airtis I professe nocht’

). The trea-

tise is shaped by existing treatises: not only by those which he openly
acknowledges (Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française of
1549)

but by those he does not such as George Gascoigne’s. It is a

work of technical precision, prescribing metrical rules (Chapters 1 and
2), generic decorum (Chapters 3 and 8) and appropriate ﬁgurative
expansion (Chapter 4). The treatise, for a text intent on renewal,
conveys little sense of a humanistic disinterring of the aesthetic past.
Overt desire is expressed for the values of wit and ingenium, the kind of
syllogistic beauty which his own two sonnets prefacing the treatise
extol and exemplify.

Philosophically underpinning it is the desire for

literary statehood based on the assumption, stated only once, of linguis-
tic, therefore literary difference: ‘For albeit sindrie hes written of it in
English, quhilk is lykest to our language, zit we differ from thame in
sindrie reulis of Poesie’. Language is an identity in itself, and part of a
greater political, cultural, and aesthetic identity.

Yet, though it clearly demonstrates, in Homi Bhaba’s words, ‘the

image of cultural authority caught in the act of composing itself’,

James’s words are not merely an image or enactment of power, newly
secured after the Ruthven Raid débâcle. Instead, the king’s treatise can
be construed as an act of desire: the yearning for the realisation of a
nascent ideal. This is crystallised in its concepts of imitatio and inventio:
‘Bot sen Inuention, is ane of the chief vertewis in a Poete, it is best that
ye inuent your awin subiect, your self, and not to compose of sene
subiectis […]’.

The concept of invention as difference, or dissent from

what ‘hes bene ower oft vsit of before’,

is commonly expressed in

mid-sixteenth-century French treatises. Yet the desire to assert differ-
ence from the aesthetic past is, signiﬁcantly, most acutely felt in James’s
prescriptions for erotic poetry. The sovereign desire for a national
poetics means that love poetry, perceived as inherently derivative (how
can one speak newly about love?), must strive towards innovation:

Ye man also be warre with composing ony thing in the same maner,
as hes bene ower oft vsit of before. As in speciall, gif ye speik of loue,
be warre ye descryue your Loues makdome, or her fairnes […] for thir

4 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

thingis are sa oft and dyuerslie writtin vpon be Poëtis already, that
gif ye do the lyke, it will appeare, ye bot imitate, and that it cummis
not of your awin Inuentioun, quhilk is ane of the chief properteis of
ane Poete’.

Eros must discover a new language under the pressure of the desired

Jamesian source of emulation: contemporary French Protestant litera-
ture. The emergent Jacobean poetic vision shuns eros in favour of the
new philosophical orientations of epic, and the subjects of moral and
religious devotion.

And whyles I thought to sing the ﬁckle boy
Of Cypris soft, and loues to-swete anoy,
To lofty spirits that are therewith made blynd,

To which discours my nature and age inclynd

The work which most profoundly shapes the 1584 Essayes is the king’s
translation of L’Vranie ou Muse Celeste by Guillaume de Salluste Du
Bartas (1544–90). It is Du Bartas’s Protestant epics which inspire the
Jamesian literary vision. A duplicitous, ‘effeminising’ Cupid is sup-
planted by a heavenly muse, a beautiful virgin entitled Urania: ‘A holy
beuty did to mee appeare’ (31); ‘I am said she, that learned VRANIE
[…]/I quint-essence the Poets soule so well’ (53; 57); ‘Take me for
guyde, lyft vp to heauen thy wing/O Salust, Gods immortals honour
sing:/And bending higher Dauids Lute in tone,/With courage seke yon
endles crowne abone’ (65–8). Du Bartas visited James’s court at the
latter’s request in 1587.

Another symbolic commemoration of Du

Bartas’s importance was the translation of La Judit, ‘le triomﬁ de la foi’,
originally published in 1574 at Bordeaux, by Thomas Hudson, an
English musician at the Scottish court.

In 1591, James published a

partial translation of Du Bartas’s La Seconde Sepmaine ou Enfance du
Monde, entitled The Furies. Du Bartas was aesthetically and ideologically
a role-model for James: even his concept of enargeia or ‘the power to
make a vivid image’ is mirrored in the theoretical literary sonnets
included in the Essayes and throughout James’s poetry which assidu-
ously follows the goal of imitation. The Du Bartasian inﬂuence is
emblematic of the direction, spiritually, philosophically and aestheti-
cally, in which James sought to lead his imagined renaissance. This
explains the particular accolade which James awards Fowler for his
translation of Petrarch’s Triumphs – the ‘triumphe’ of ‘chastnes, deathe,
and fame’ over earthly desire – rather than his sonnet sequence, The

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros 5

Tarantula of Love (the subject of Chapter 6), even though it too ends in
spiritual renunciation.

James’s censure of the erotic and the profane might be claimed as

perfectly orthodox, although rooted in French poetics. Yet the vehe-
mence with which he chastises the duplicity and treachery of eros,
‘shameles god’, is persuasively rooted in a personal and political foun-
dation of extraordinary sensitivity: in his mother, Mary, and the culmi-
nating crisis of her brief and troubled reign. Implicated in the murder
of her sovereign husband, Darnley, indicted on a charge of adultery
and guilty of a third marriage procured with apparently indecent haste,
Mary’s erotic powers were further darkened by the public revelation of
the ‘casket sonnets’: a series of twelve love poems associated with the
queen’s name (the subject of Chapter 1). The sonnets replete with
‘d’amor parole’ helped to procure Mary’s fall from grace: they consti-
tuted injurious evidence of excessive, indeed murderous, passion. The
queen’s emotional and political vulnerability was thereby conﬁrmed to
the Scottish (and English) Protestant nobility who, by 1567, the year of
their discovery, desired her deposition from the throne. Erotic power
could no longer shore up the image of monarchy; rather, its vulnerabil-
ity is exposed when love-words are pawned in a political power
struggle.

James’s desire over a decade later to expel mortal eros from his

newly-established poetic empire may therefore be impelled by his wish
never to repeat his mother’s grievous error, so irrevocably and damag-
ingly linked to the sign of eros. If erotic poetry could not shed its
Marian associations, then poetry itself, the realm of public or printed
literature, must never be permitted to speak of the sovereign, or of
similarly ‘graue materis’:

Ye man also be war of wryting any thing of materis of com[m]on
weill, or vther sic graue sene subiectis (except Metaphorically, of
manifest treuth opinly knawin, yit nocht withstanding vsing it very
seindil) because nocht onely ye essay nocht your awin Inuentioun, as
I spak before, bot lykewayis they are to graue materis for a Poet to
mell in.

James’s cautionary proscription against political content (‘commoun
weill’ implies the state of the nation, therefore the notion of kingship,
or queenship, by extension) is most probably a veiled allusion to the
Marian controversies. In his desire to quell printed, polemical debate
about the monarch, James (at least in his reign as king of Scotland) was

6 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

successful, escaping the literary denunciations inﬂicted upon Mary.
Accordingly, Sandra Bell proposes that James’s ‘renaissance’ is a direct
refutation of the Marian one that failed. James desired poetry ‘to legiti-
mate the authority of the monarch’ in the wake of Mary’s grave politi-
cal fallibility; and to that end engendered the creation of a ‘supportive
cultural community’ to procure ‘legitimacy in the face of a tradition of
poetry which questioned the very need of monarchy’.

It was not only the questioning of monarchy’s legitimacy which

James sought to expel from debate within the public, literary realm
but also the capacity for the monarch to be eroticised: to be the agent
and object of desire. James’s ofﬁcial poetics strives to contest what
Marian poetry (the sonnets ascribed to Mary) had failed to suppress:
the possession of what Louise Fradenburg, in her exemplary reading of
symbolic monarchy in the reigns of James III and James IV, deﬁnes as
‘the long-standing construction of powerful emotion as a threat to
rule, whether self-mastery or public governance’.

Since the intense

passional or erotic power of Mary had failed her politically, the con-
trary must hold true of James: denigrate the passional powers of
monarchy to guarantee political good fortune. But monarchical
passion in Mary did not merely symbolise political fallibility: Marian
desire had other associations. Her excess of passion had helped foster
in 1560s Scotland the ﬁerce ideological power of anti-Catholicism and
anti-feminism. This is not a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship.
The cultural and political climate was already ‘predisposed’ towards
condemnation of a Catholic female ruler, only in her twenties, for
whom the central political question of the opening years of her reign
was that of her second marriage: was the queen’s husband and
Scotland’s king to be Protestant or Catholic? The political and reli-
gious fate of Scotland lay sealed in the body of its new queen. The
‘casket-sonnets’ with their extreme adulterous passion ﬁtted the anti-
feminist mould beautifully. The political and religious climate of mid-
sixteenth-century Scotland was only too willing to perceive the very
facts of Mary’s femininity and her devout Catholicism as crimes.
Mary’s sexuality could be used as an additional scapegoat. She could
become an erotic martyr, just as she is arguably a religious and politi-
cal one also. And yet the creation of erotic poetry was not made
impossible in Mary’s reign, though there is a surprising lack of love
poetry about Mary, even in her early reign (explored in Chapter 1).
The Bannatyne manuscript (discussed in Chapter 2), was collated
and transcribed in Mary’s reign and demonstrably responds to
the pressures of reformed culture, drawing together the symbolic

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros 7

interrelationships between erotic desire, the feminine and the
Catholic; in short, the qualities which deﬁne the symbolic power of
the monarch. The manuscript’s love poetry becomes a rhetorical space
in which to debate Woman, the earthly sovereign Mary, and the
Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. The power of the feminine both to
corrupt and to redeem acquires a new polemical urgency which will
haunt Jacobean love poetry.

Symbolically, therefore, erotic literature possessed Marian associa-

tions of which, according to James, it had to be purged as a cause of
political vulnerability and, being bound up in the Catholic ﬁgure of
Mary, in need of religious reformation. Hence James eschews the
poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), the loyalist Catholic poet
attacked by Calvinist pamphleteers in the 1560s, with whom his
mother shared aesthetic and spiritual afﬁnities. Brieﬂy resident at the
Scottish court in the reign of Mary of Guise, Ronsard was allegedly
poetic tutor to Mary in France; she is the dedicatee and subject of
many of his eulogies and ceremonial verse. While Mary might justly be
considered the literal and symbolic embodiment of Scottish
Ronsardian poetics, as Paul Laumonier suggests, her own poetry to and
about the Pléiade architect is slender.

Ronsard is too Marian a writer

for James to emulate. Ironically, the honoriﬁc mythological guise of
the god Apollo is adopted by the king; it is his most frequent incarna-
tion in the poetry of Stewart and Montgomerie.

While the mythogra-

phy of Apollo is inevitable for James, the young poet-king, to adopt, it
also symbolises how the ghosts of both Mary and Ronsard, dead within
two years of each other, stalk the Jacobean period.

Yet the symbolic powers of eros remain intact. While Jamesian pre-

scriptions remain as a unifying body of legislation, implicit and
explicit, the ways in which the courtier-poets of his reign respond to
these are delicate and complex, and the subject of the book’s second
part. The corpus of their love poetry produced under the Jamesian
aegis can be read as a series of both obedient and retaliatory gestures to
the literary will of the sovereign. Obeisance is found in Fowler’s
reimagining of the moral and theological inheritance of Petrarch’s
Rime sparse, explored in Chapter 7, so that the transﬁguration of the
beloved woman and her Marian associations is renounced. Celebration
of ‘the sacred Muse’

rather than the profane by James’s courtier poets

was clearly expedient for any political or artistic advancement; hence,
John Stewart’s anxious adoration of the divine goddess, ‘celestiall
muse’, Urania, in the moral and devotional poem which concludes his
secular collection, as if in a mirror image of the king’s Urania. Yet,

8 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

paradoxically, erotic verse remains popular at the Jacobean centre of
power. Moreover, it is in the poetry of James himself that ‘disobedient’
acts can be witnessed. The king’s love poetry can in part be interpreted
as a concerted effort to veil and manipulate sovereign identity so that
the relationship between eros and the king appears uncertain. The
power of sovereignty and eros is most clearly bound together in
James’s erotic elegy for the death of Esmé Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny,
Duke of Lennox (interpreted in Chapter 3), which James publishes in
his ﬁrst printed collection. In the end, desire is not renounced by
James but embraced: erotic love becomes the means by which the
sovereign’s political will is signiﬁed.

Desire is not annulled by the fate of Marian eros. If anything, it is

the duplicitous powers which desire confers upon poetic language that
James and his courtier-poets appear to perceive as a necessary precon-
dition for its aesthetic realisation. While Mary’s authorship of desire
was maintained (the Marian name could not be removed from the
sonnets for without it their political power disappeared), the love
poetry of the Jacobean period seems to cherish its play on equivocal
identity. In Héle`ne Cixous’s words, it remains intent upon exploiting
the ‘common grammatical feature’ of a lover’s discourse: ‘the existence
of a singular plural pulsional personal pronoun’.

This body of court

poetry centred on the ﬁgure of the king is rarely printed but depends
upon manuscript circulation and courtly performance. Within the
intimate spaces of erotic poetry, the identity of a lover is never assured
but open and contestable. The erotic poem is one of the most intimate,
yet openly vulnerable, acts of rhetorical inscription. Each of these
writers, in particular the ‘lovers’ or desiring voices of Stewart and
Montgomerie, suggest the possibility that desire can be symbolically
unveiled as it is veiled; in short, that it can exist as their own confession
of love for their king. The articulation of desire in court poetry need
not always be a rhetorical ﬁction. Love, as Julia Kristeva deﬁnes it,
must of necessity be ‘a crucible of contradictions and misunder-
standings – at the same time inﬁnity of meaning and occultation of
meaning […]’:

… in the rapture of love, the limits of one’s own identity vanish, at
the same time that the precision of reference and meaning becomes
blurred in love’s discourse […]. Do we speak of the same thing when
we speak of love? And of which thing? The ordeal of love puts the
univocity of language and its referential and communicative power
to the test.

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros 9

The beauty of love’s discourse lies in its capacity both to evade and

endorse the lover’s identity; the ‘genuine’ erotic energy of Jacobean
love poetry is embodied in this constant play of uncertainty. While
Marian eros might seem to deny the ‘openness’ of literary desire
(the silver casket in which the sonnets were discovered symbolises the
enclosure put upon their meaning, as Chapter 1 demonstrates), it acts
as testament to the ways in which the unruly potential of desire can be
unlocked. Neither the identity of the lovers nor the kind of desires
portrayed in the Marian sonnets can be ﬁxed irrevocably. If the annul-
ment of the lover’s identity is a recurring preoccupation of this corpus
of love poetry then, in symbolic terms, it is most assured at the
moment of the lover’s death. These poems return almost obsessively to
the topos of the martyred or dying lover (Mary, Montgomerie, Stewart)
and the beloved (James, Fowler). It is for this reason that the trope of
death, or of mortal love, has been singled out for special consideration
in this study. Death is the moment of love’s apotheosis: an imagined
martyrdom in the Marian poems; in James’s elegy, sanctioning
permission to speak of love, as if death is the pretext to love; and the
apogee of the sacriﬁcial desires rooted so deeply in Montgomerie’s
poetry. In Fowler’s poetry, the beloved’s mortality constitutes the
moment at which desire ceases to exist, and the salviﬁc power of love
and the feminine is exposed as an heretical illusion.

The book is divided into two parts on Marian and Jacobean erotic
culture respectively. The ﬁrst part explores in detail the profane
sonnets ascribed to Mary, exploring the ways in which eros and poli-
tics are contentiously linked both in their political fate and in the
realm of the symbolic. The ‘forbidden’ desires which they represent,
condemned and travestied by the Protestant anti-Marian faction, create
a version of eros which ironically works to redeem the feminine, and
an eroticised martyrology which transforms the fraught historical and
political context of their production. The legacy of these sonnets is to
feminise and politicise eros, and to forge a symbolic association
between profane, corrupt desire and a ‘sinful’ Catholic monarch.
Chapter 2 explores the principal literary monument of Mary’s reign
known as the Bannatyne manuscript, and the association between
Woman, the feminine, and Catholic devotion in its corpus of erotic
lyrics. It argues that the extensive poetic representations of Woman’s
fallen and redemptive status are linked to the debate about Mary

10 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Queen of Scots and draws attention to the section’s mariological
discourse, on which criticism rarely comments. This mariology
presents a surprisingly unreformed iconography which demonstrates
how the Virgin Mary moulds Bannatyne’s love lyrics and female debate
poems in unusual ways: the earthly, but not the heavenly, queen is
silenced. It constitutes an imperfect denunciation of Woman in which
the possibility of man’s redemption is still granted through the
intercessionary Virgin, consolidating the symbolic alliance between
desire, the feminine, and the idea of the Catholic sacred.

The Jacobean section begins with the erotic corpus ascribed to James

himself (Chapter 3), analysing the relationship between eros and sover-
eignty, and the strategies of interpretative evasion which strive to
deﬂect the revelation of desire, their ostensible subject. It contends
that James’s most conservative ‘profane’ poetry occurs when the sym-
bolic guise of monarchical selfhood is most explicit; but that the effort
to conceal sovereign identity, combined with the dissolution and frag-
mentation of the Jamesian political self wrought by the pressure of
eros, enable James to produce the most haunting and powerful erotic
poem of the Jacobean reign: the homoerotic Phoenix tragedy.

Chapter 4 analyses the quintessential courtly display of monarchical

love in the miscellany of John Stewart. Presented to the king, this man-
uscript illustrates how desire can be converted into a rhetorically beau-
tiful artefact, a textual ‘gift’ to be exchanged between monarch and
courtier. This small monument raised to Jamesian power and poetics
also exposes the fragility and precariousness both of the courtly enter-
prise, and illustrates the way in which the ‘braiding’ of gendered voices
in the collection works to enable the articulation of ‘secreit’ desires.

Intensifying the theme of erotic vulnerability, Chapter 5 explores the

representational status of erotic desire in the poetry of Alexander
Montgomerie, Jacobean courtier, exemplary lyricist, and a Catholic
convert whose conversion haunts his poetry. The ‘immanence’ of the
king within his sensuous, parodic and disquisitory expressions of eros
is explored. It is suggested that the narrative of sovereign desire
enclosed within the love poetry of enchantment and disenchantment
exposes the poetics of loss, mourning and melancholia which lies at
the heart of Montgomerie’s writing.

The ﬁnal chapter, devoted to William Fowler’s sonnet sequence, The

Tarantula of Love, and another shorter sequence, argues that Fowler’s
erotic corpus and its preoccupation with the concepts of penitence,
renunciation and atonement, rest on the attempt to recreate the end of
Petrarch’s Rime sparse. It embodies the conﬂict, underpinning almost

Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros 11

all erotic writing of the Marian and Jacobean reigns explored here,
between sacred and profane, and Catholic and reformed forms of devo-
tion. In eschewing the homoerotic impulses of other Jacobean love
poetry, it returns to a Marian identiﬁcation of the feminine with a state
of sinfulness. The philosophically darkest sequence of the Jacobean
period, it signiﬁes a turning away from the ﬁgure of the contemporary
sovereign, James, with an implicit return to the symbolic iconography
of the Marian period. In so doing, it paradoxically works to fulﬁl the
Jamesian Protestant poetic vision.

12 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

The Marian Period

Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of
Scots and the Emergence of Desire

il fault plus que la renomee

pour dire et publier

Above all, she was entering into public discourse, exposing the
beauty of her language, akin to her body, to the masculine
gaze

In 1567, ‘certaine letters and writynges well knawin, and by othe[r]s to
be afﬁrmit, to haue bene written with the quene of Scotes awne hand
to the Erle Bothwell…’ were discovered encased within ‘one small gilt
cofer’.

These texts, which allegedly encompassed a series of sonnets,

were subsequently taken south in 1568 by members of the Scottish
Protestant nobility; they were to form part of the evidence against
Mary in the English commission sanctioned by Elizabeth’s government
into the murder of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. What constituted the
subject of the eleven sonnets and single sestain was female erotic
desire. Their discovery arguably constitutes the most signiﬁcant articu-
lation of eros and poetry in sixteenth-century Scotland for it seemed
that the moment eros was feminised, and rendered explicitly monar-
chical, Scotland entered political turmoil. That authorship of these
lyrics could be claimed of the increasingly unpopular sovereign Mary
became a political imperative. Authorial attribution possessed the
power to stain the queen sexually, morally and, according to the
anxious responses of Ronsard and Pierre de Brantôme (c 1540–1614),
aesthetically.

Freedom from auctoritas would have granted Mary exon-

eration from the charges of adultery, possibly murder and, indeed,
might have ensured the possibility of papal canonisation. The desire to
ascribe authenticity or veritas to the sonnets was clearly part of a

concerted process to discredit Mary politically on the part of the
Protestant nobles, and subsequently by an opportunistic English
government; their injurious power to act as testimony against her was
feared by La Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in England.

Yet,

when extricated from the defamatory interpretation imposed by the
dissenting political and religious factions, these twelve short poems
‘only’ constitute a confession of feminine eros; after all, a decade earlier,
the printing of Louise Labé’s Evvres (Lyons, 1555) had introduced a
reading public to the ‘feminisation’ of Petrarchist desires. Yet, given the
political and religious climate, the ﬁrst substantial printed version of
feminine desire in Scotland, made in the name of Mary, could never be
proclaimed in innocence. For the eager anti-Marian factions, that the
desire alone of these sonnets was ‘feminine’ provided a rich repository
of personal and, according to the inferential logic of orthodox anti-
feminism, political critique of a queen whose longed-for deposition had
ﬁnally found a means of realisation. Erotic sonnets were made to bear
witness to the apparently manifold sins committed by Mary.

These poems have become known as the ‘casket sonnets’, a phrase

alluding to the iconic silver casket in which ostensibly they were ﬁrst
held. Not only does the casket represent the physical concealment and
enclosure subsequently imposed upon Mary, but also the symbolic
‘enclosure’ put upon their meaning. These sonnets have been regarded
as a particularly perplexing relic of the Marian controversy; the possi-
bility of interpretations other than the one in which contemporaries
encased them is rarely explored; nor is their important inaugural status
as a new articulation of eros and politics with cultural and literary reso-
nances which would endure well beyond Mary’s own reign. The
dubious, as yet unresolved, question of authorship proves a substantial
obstacle in developing interpretation of these texts. In short, whether
Mary wrote the sonnets or not remains uncertain. They seemed swiftly
to constitute a ‘ghostly’ text, caught on the threshold of two versions:
one in French, and the other a translation into Anglo-Scots. The docu-
ments from the casket, ‘missive Writtingis, Contractis, Obligations,
Luif-ballettis, and utheris Lettres’,

were conveyed to Elizabeth by the

Earl of Moray, James Stewart, via his secretary John Wood.

9 December 1568, Moray produced the texts before the English com-
missioners, and on 15 December Parliament was convened. Their next
‘appearance’ was in print: the French ‘originals’ with the Anglo-Scots
translations were published in September 1571 in the Detectioun, to
which Mary would refer as ‘Ung livre deffamatoire par ung athée
Buchanan’;

it now contained the sonnets which had not appeared in

16 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

George Buchanan’s Latin prose Detectio. Tutor to both sovereigns and
celebrant of Stewart births and weddings, Buchanan was ﬁrst Marian
panegyrist, then chief polemicist: annotator of her physical and
moral beauty in panegyrics such as the epithalamia (in the collection
Silvae) and the epigrams, and of her transgressions in the Detectio
series. Chief-architect of the texts which brought the controversial
and impugning Marian sonnets to light, in short ‘his role was that of
poet laureate, ﬁrst for Mary Stewart, then, after her overthrow, for the
ruling Protestant faction’.

Certainly, as John Durkan has claimed,

Buchanan’s anti-Marian tracts, beginning with the Admonitioun
(1570), written for the late Regent Moray’s party, and culminating in
the Detectioun, were ‘produced under pressure and their interest was
ephemeral, hence are generally found to be economical with the
truth’.

Durkan records the testimony of a former servant of

Darnley’s father, Thomas Bishop, that as early as 1569 two Latin anti-
Marian manuscripts were being ‘circulated’ by Buchanan while the
vernacular version was available in England; the alacrity of the
English printed editions attests the ‘eagerness’ of Sir William Cecil to
intensify anti-Marian feeling, and further the Elizabethan Protestant
cause.

In the apparent absence of an extant and veriﬁable authorial manu-

script text for the sonnet corpus itself, the printed versions of the
Detectioun remain the primary textual source. There is, however, one
manuscript text associated with a collection of papers belonging to the
Earl of Lennox.

This relatively fair text in sixteenth-century secretary

hand offers predominantly orthographical rather than textual variants
from the printed sources, suggesting that it is most probably a copy of,
rather than an ‘original’ existing prior to, the Detectioun.

This in itself

is indicative of how powerful an indictment of Mary the sonnets were
perceived to be. Its deeper signiﬁcance lies in the nine marginal glosses
which offer (whether spuriously or not) brief biographical and histori-
cal ‘elucidations’; as Peter Davidson has pointed out,

the manuscript

contains a conspicuously wide left-hand margin, clearly designed to
accommodate the ‘pseudo-narrative’ which identiﬁes the apos-
trophised beloved as ‘the erll bothwell’ (f.46r) and identiﬁes ‘his wyfe’
(f. 46r), intent on emphasising the texts’ desire as adulterous in nature
in at least four of the inscriptions. This marginal narrative is at pains to
point out how Bothwell ‘abusit …[Mary’s]…bodie’ (f. 46r), and she is
accused of Darnley’s murder.

The manuscript is therefore a carefully

crafted, consciously designed exercise in incriminatory marginalia; its
narrative is the one accepted and propagated by the anti-Marian party,

Feminine Eros 17

‘the nobyllis’ whom it declares that she antagonises, as well as God
Himself (f. 46v). The Earls of Moray and Lennox were particularly articu-
late voices within the dissident nobility. Lennox was ‘vociferous’ in
demanding retribution for his son’s murder; Mary even permitted him to
convene a parliamentary trial.

There was ample political motivation for

Moray to ensure that Mary was incriminated and retained in England
under duress in order to secure his regency. The documents were pre-
sented by Moray to the Parliament on 10 December 1568 which attested
that the ‘saidis haill missive Writings, Sonnetis, and Obligatiouns or
Contracts, are undoubtedly the said Quenis proper Hand-write […]’;

Mary herself observed that ‘there are divers in Scotland, both men and
women, that write the like manner of writing as well as myself’.

It was

Moray who was particularly singled out for condemnation, ‘to charge
and burden’, by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, in his Defence.

The margins of the CUL MS version, which securely tie each sonnet

to speciﬁc historical moments in the Marian sexual controversy,
present the interpretation of the anti-Marian faction; as if to constitute
a short, concise exposition of how the sonnets were received from an
English perspective. Paradoxically, it presents a narrative of almost
ﬂawless coherence, despite the fact that the apparent sequential unity
of the twelve poems presented there and in the Detectioun itself is
uncertain: whether the arrangement reﬂects an original totality (it is
certainly conceivable that there are sonnets omitted), or a deliberately
purposive sequence, possibly reassembled for publication, is difﬁcult to
verify. The Detectioun’s ‘sequential’ order does not offer the clear teleol-
ogy of conventional erotic sequences (the ﬁnal sublimation, or renuni-
cation, of desire); though the idea of sequential cohesion is not
imperative, of course, as Ronsard’s own sonnet cycles attest.

If the

Detectioun’s arrangement is deliberate, though, the only narrative of
desire which emerges is one which is essentially repetitive or ‘cir-
cuitous’. The following summary may be offered: the lover prays that
she may vindicate her love, having already endured a number of
sacriﬁces, and claims that she is willing to die for him (1); a litany of
the moral and familial sacriﬁces she is prepared to make (including
renunciation of her son and country) demonstrates her ﬁdelity (2); in
the ﬁrst allusion to the beloved’s expedient and immoral wife, the
lover regrets that only she, the virtuous and truly loving one, is con-
demned for her love (3); the beloved’s wife has made no real sacriﬁces
to attain him (4); the sexual frigidity and hypocrisy of the wife are
impugned; she loves him for his material wealth only (5); the wife
embarks on a process of deceitful persuasion; the lover protests that the

18 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

beloved believes these false assertions and demonstrations of love more
than her own which are genuine (6); the lover laments that the beloved
judges her unfairly which both incenses her and yet fuels her desire more
(7); since her love for him is only strengthened, the lover repeats how she
will remain resolute in her obedience and loyalty (8); she recalls two inci-
dents: the ﬁrst when the beloved violated her body; the second when he
was seemingly injured; her suffering has been great (9); the beloved
remains the sole reason for her existence, and she repeats her willingness
to obey him (10); the beloved has failed to fulﬁl his promise of reunion,
and alone she fears his neglect of her (11); his perpetual absence compels
the lover now to write, and she implicitly asserts her superior love (12).
There is closure of a kind but it is partial and imperfect.

Though one might justly question the prosodic elegance of the

French version, it might be reasonable to suppose that Mary, if she is
their author, would write in French, the language in which she was
educated and which she could never, emotionally or intellectually,
relinquish. Authorship, whether individual or collaborative, of the
translated version also remains unknown, despite a wealth of con-
tentious speculation which has included George Buchanan. If the texts
are forgeries, they can be construed as ‘ventriloquised’ texts: utterances
delivered in the persona of Mary as an amatory rhetor, or more
speciﬁcally as a kind of Ovidian female plainant; after all, the voice of
an abandoned lover is heard (even politically, Mary’s fate was to be
ventriloquised: at the conferences in York and London in 1568, for
example, Mary’s commissioners including the Bishop of Ross, John
Leslie, who also acted as her poetic correspondent, pleaded that Mary
be represented in propria persona rather than in absentia). One might
argue that the sonnets superﬁcially imitate the literary and rhetorical
tropes of the mid-Renaissance Ovidian female voice, and that their
assimilation of Petrarchistic and Neo-Platonic discourses is eclectic and
insubstantial; technically, their metrical competence has been chal-
lenged and condemned as Brantôme’s courtly memoir did in declaring
them ‘trop grossiers et mal polis’.

Such implications of aesthetic and

thematic incoherence may be used to substantiate the charge of
forgery. Clearly, the pragmatic question of authorship, as yet
unresolved, creates a number of interpretative problems: how can any
reading of their political, moral or aesthetic content accommodate the
dual possibilities of Mary’s authorial responsibility and their status
as the product of politically intentioned (masculine) forgery? In recog-
nition of this still intractable authorial problem, the sonnets are
referred to as ‘Marian’ utterances: that is, as poetic texts or discursive

Feminine Eros 19

expressions associated with the name of Mary and, possibly, made in
the name of Mary, when she was only twenty-four years old. Given
the fundamental dilemma which underpins the poems (did Mary
write them or not?), which cannot easily be dispelled by poststruc-
turalist theorising of the subject, this reading hinges upon the theoret-
ical position, as formulated by Shoshana Felman, that one can trace in
this apparently most unyielding and recalcitrant of texts, ‘its own resis-
tance to itself, its own speciﬁc literary, inadvertent textual transgression
of its male assumptions and prescriptions […] this self-transgression of
the text […] can be ampliﬁed, made patent, by the desire – and by the
rhetorical interposition – of a woman reader’.

Several qualiﬁcations

might be made to this speciﬁc articulation of Felman’s theory: ‘male’
can be speciﬁcally deﬁned as anti-Marian which evidentially took the
form of misogynistic inquisition. The ‘interposition of a female reader’
might in this context be accused of a naive essentialism; it might be
modiﬁed to accommodate the complexities of a feminist interpreta-
tion, alert to the contradictions of this apparently incriminatory
Marian representation of the feminine. The sonnets fulﬁl a readerly
desire for their redemption: to permit them to escape the enclosure of
their contemporary interpretation and supposed fabrication. The
‘ready-made’ interpretation of the anti-Marian faction still prevails; to
refuse to ‘open up’ or to ‘unravel’ the sonnets is to be complicitous
with the latter’s misogyny and, above all, with its hermeneutic
closure. These sonnets constitute more than a kind of perplexing
political reliquary of the 1567 Marian crisis; they remain signiﬁcant
literary as well as cultural documents, laying bare the sexual para-
doxes of feminised lyric desire; a textual bricolage which, if ﬂawed, is
still coherent.

While their poetic articulation of female eros is inex-

tricably linked to their immediate political and cultural circumstances,
they can also be re-contextualised. Gathered together with the erotic
poetry of Labé and Pernette du Guillet, Veronica Gambara and
Gaspara Stampa, they arguably demonstrate, within their peculiarly
fraught political context, that the énonciation of sexual desire from a
feminine subject-position has the power to re-imagine and reconceive
‘the institutionalised poetic eros’ of the mid to late sixteenth-
century.

Ironically, this is a reimagining of feminine desire which

the pressure of religious and political circumstances, and the appar-
ently sealed interpretation which Mary’s son, James, would inherit,
foreclosed.

20 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

It is evident that desire in the casket-sonnets is not conﬁned to a rela-
tion between lover and beloved but is realised by a trinity of protago-
nists. Such an erotic conﬁguration evokes René Girard’s classical theory
of triangular desire in which desire is always conceived as an effect of
rivalry; the object of desire accordingly gains from being desired by
another.

This threat of another (fundamental to the conﬁguration of

desire in Shakespeare’s sonnets but in other sequences usually only
expressed as the anxiety that the beloved might hypothetically be
desirable to others) is rendered with peculiar intensity in Mary’s
sequence. Her lover desires what is legally and morally ‘possessed’ by
another as ‘mari & seigneur’. What preoccupied Mary’s detractors, and is
repeatedly emphasised in the Cambridge marginal glosses, is that the
desire was also adulterous: if Bothwell is indeed the unnamed beloved
he is, in James Melville’s words, ‘another wyues husband’;

in other

words, Lady Jean Gordon whom he had married on 24 February 1566
and was shortly to divorce. On the anti-Marian reading, this converts
the queen into a court prostitute. The Detectioun’s prefatory title to the
sonnets explicitly announces this illicit desire: ‘[…] writtin by ye
Quene of Scottes to Bothwel befoir hir Mariage with him, and (as it is
sayd) quhile hir Husband lyuit, bot certinly befoir his diuorce from his
Wyfe…befoir quhome she here preferreth her selfe in deseruing to be
beloved of Bothwell’ (my emphasis). That such desire profanes the
sacrament of marriage is starkly emphasised: the queen is accused of
‘mad loue, infamous adulterie, and vile passion’.

While the Detectioun proclaims the sanctity of marriage, the sonnets

portray it as an expedient alliance which profanes the lover’s cherished
amour vrai.

It is one of the ironies of the Marian poems that they

should ‘play’ upon the profanity of words and revelation. The rhetori-
cal proclamation of desire is portrayed as a kind of blasphemous act;
love’s sanctity resides in its unuttered condition. In seeking to know
truly (vrai connaître) the beloved, the lover must displace the paroles
fardèes of other feigning rivals. Though this echoes the critique of
duplicitous discourse that is widely distilled through European love
poetry, in particular, the vogue of so-called ‘anti-Petrarchism’, it has
particular resonance for the casket-texts which, in many ways, inaugu-
rate the period of Mary’s verbal and political ‘censorship’. In Mary’s
lyrics, a scrupulous purity is exacted of both word and self; it is as if the
corrupt nature of love discourse is intensiﬁed for the Catholic writer for
whom the word per se is already fallen.

Any such preoccupation with the ﬁdelity of language is ironic since

the queen functioned as a trope of duplicity in the denunciatory

Feminine Eros 21

writings of Buchanan and other tracts where her language, in expedi-
ent accommodation of anti-Catholic sentiment, is denounced for its
profanity. Mary was acutely aware that her words, whether publicly
proclaimed or privately circulated, were subject to misconstrual, the
‘lying Rhetorike’ of which John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, accused Mary’s
detractors.

She pleads against false distortions in letters to Elizabeth,

even anticipating her displeasure at such ‘freedom of speech’.

Mary’s

letters to Elizabeth are almost discursive trials, played out in a rhetor-
ical court: ‘to accuse them [“my false accusers”] before you’.

These

assertions preﬁgure James’s preoccupation in the Basilikon Doron and
his own literary writings with the needful perspicacity of language. It is
interesting to observe the rhetorical way in which the sonnets antici-
pate their ‘public’ status. The lover is conscious of her desire as specta-
cle, subject to the moral scrutiny of others, a gesture towards the classic
courtly trope of anxiety; as she ‘spectates’ the rival beloved, so she
herself is further ‘spectated’ or judged by the beloved in her own con-
sciousness: the accusation, ‘Vous m’estimez…’ (7: 10), begins a litany
of judgement and incrimination.

Eroticising Mary

The contemporary reception of the casket-sonnets transparently
reﬂected early modern ideologies of female cupiditas (the history of
their later reception might also be said to reﬂect culturally relative
assumptions about female sexuality). The response to the sonnets,
while patently intensiﬁed by the political and religious gains to be
made, seems to imply that the ﬁgure of Mary could not be eroticised,
or was compelled to resist eroticisation. Was it because these sonnets
implied that she was not simply an object of desire, in itself tolerable
perhaps, but that she was seen in these texts to solicit, orchestrate and,
perhaps most injuriously of all, to need desire? Did the apparent erotic
revelation of the queen’s desiring body in these sonnets implicate, on
the analogy of the two sovereign bodies literal and symbolic, not only
her own speciﬁc female body but that of the symbolic Scottish state?
Was supposed disorder and excess to characterise both? The casket
sonnets are an important aspect of the Marian ‘history of
mythiﬁcation’

or mythehistoire which Jayne Elizabeth Lewis has

adroitly analysed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. But
how do they relate to the ‘image of Mary’ which existed prior to the
decade of their probable inception and discovery and, more urgently,
was her ‘eroticisation’, or her ability to be erotically imagined in the

22 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

symbolic realm, impossible in the Scotland of the 1560s? Scotland
inherited, and largely discarded, a Marian iconography from France
which was largely that of a profane Madonna. Widowed in 1559 at the
French court, Mary was apotheosised into la reine blanche, pictorially
and rhetorically conceived as the epitome of marmoreally distant and
virtuous beauty: a femme pudique, a divine Venus.

Her beauty was fre-

quently manifest as sensual blason in Ronsardian eulogy but also as the
externalisation of interior moral and spiritual beauty. Such neo-
Platonic correspondence cannot justly be said to characterise even the
earliest part of Mary’s reception in Scotland. There is, in fact, a startling
absence of Scottish Marian literary eulogy; perhaps this is a question of
textual survival (perhaps a deliberate destruction of ‘evidence’).
Examples do exist, principally and ironically, by Buchanan, for
example, who obliged with celebratory nuptial poetry in 1565. One
year later, he dedicated his Psalms to Mary, while the masques of 1564
and 1565 which he composed depict the virtue, fecundity and beauty
of the queen.

The courtier poet, Alexander Scott, partly succeeds in

exemplifying in his well-known ceremonial piece on the queen’s
return to Scotland in 1561 Ronsard’s assertion in the ‘Elegie à la Royne
d’Escosse’ that ‘Escosse, tu auras une gloire eternelle/D’avoir conceu en
toy une Roy si belle’.

Sovereign beauty is inevitably also politicised;

but in Scott’s poem Mary’s beauty requires to be ideologically attuned
to the needs of a country in which parliament was opposed to the
Roman Catholic Mass and papal jurisdiction. Scott’s poem is a political
speculum with patent Reformist impulses, or Protestant sympathies.
Mary is urged to undertake a symbolic religious cleansing (within state
and self?) which in itself might also initiate a process of political purga-
tion and renewal. After 1567, when the iconography of the queen’s
beauty could only signify an ideologically inﬂected beauty, the celebra-
tion of her sovereign virtue would be conﬁned to the melancholic texts
of pro-Marian, Catholic writers such as Adam Blackwood.

There is a clear association between the Scottish denunciation of

Marian erotic passion and the ideological position of Protestantism;
rooted in Buchanan’s Detectioun but also earlier in the paradigmatic
excoriations of John Knox, the ‘genre’ of anti-Marian propaganda is
inevitably cast in a Protestant mould. Accusations perpetrated against
Mary became standard topoi of this writing. The Detectioun denounced
the casket writings as the expression of inordinate female passion, and
the queen’s conduct towards Bothwell as exemplary of the actions of ‘a
mad woman’.

In orthodox Aristotelian fashion, Mary incarnated

emotion (thus moral and intellectual inﬁrmitas) in implicit opposition

Feminine Eros 23

to reason and a doctrinal faith which was gendered masculine, tropes
used by John Knox for obvious rhetorical and political gain. The con-
frontations recreated by in his Reforming History (inevitably) depict
himself and others as embodiments of rationality, unlike their queen:
‘The said Johne [John Erskin of Dun] stood still, withouit any alter-
atioun of countenance for a long seasson, whill that the Quene gave
place to hir inordinat passioun’ (my emphasis).

Mary feels and speaks

in, and with, excess. In symbolising and perpetuating such feminine
dissipation, she implicitly forms an opposition to Elizabeth who seals
off her body with representations that emphasise its inviolability,
whether gendered masculine, feminine, or neither,

and ‘a value that

her contemporaries increasingly characterised as “sacred”’.

In Marian

rhetorical discourse, Mary’s body, by contrast, could not possess such
miraculous intactness: ‘[Cha

ˆtelard] was…so familiare in the Quenis

cabinett, ayre and laitt, that scarslye could any of the Nobilitie have
access unto hir…’ (my emphasis).

The highly political event into

which the Cha

ˆtelard affair was converted became, as Parkinson notes,

‘an early instance of the repeated breaches of proper distance between
monarch and subject – or between the festive and the politic – that
bedevil Mary’s efforts to be an effective patron’.

Subsequently, the

rape of Mary by Bothwell at Dunbar in 1567 (this treasonable act was
publicly proclaimed but later exonerated by Mary) is the most intense
betrayal of the expected inviolate sanctity of the female body in both
its sovereign and sexual capacities: it was interpreted as a violation
which she allowed, indeed provoked, resulting in the loss of the crown
to Bothwell who, though Protestant, was increasingly unpopular and
disliked. The narrative constructed by the Detectioun is similarly preoc-
cupied by her ‘violability’, and the degree of Mary’s sexual consent: on
the night of Darnley’s murder: ‘Bothwel was through the garden
brought into the Quenis chamber, and there forced hir agaynst hir for-
sothe will. But how much agaynst hir will […] tyme the mother of
truthe hath disclosed’.

In the act of offering her body, Mary actively

contravenes both the ideological patristic precept that woman ‘must
seek not to be the object of desire’,

and the ‘sacredness’ of the sover-

eign body.

While the Detectioun provides the most obvious source of contextual

anti-Marian ‘mythiﬁcation’ for the casket sonnets, so too do Scottish
political and literary tracts of the 1560s with which they implicitly
engage. In his important Marian study, Images of a Queen, J.E. Phillips
analysed some of these polemics in which the conception of Mary’s
sexual and sovereign bodies has a dialectical relationship to the casket

24 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

sonnets.

These constitute a crude but equivalent poetic indictment of

Mary’s sexual and political culpability, attesting the existence of a
politicised public literary sphere in early modern Scotland of which
James would later prove implicitly aware.

Many of these pamphlets

or broadsides deploy a litigious discourse and depict resistance to the
adulterous, murderous queen as a nationalistic act undertaken on
behalf of the suffering Scottish nation. Mary is portrayed as an ally of
an unhappily powerful Venus in a symbolic alliance which, within this
new context of a poetic and public quasi-political culture, patently
articulates the fear of erotic or unlicensed female sexual power; a
mythic fear, one might argue, expediently dressed up in the voice of
contemporary political and religious dissent. As Mary’s power became
increasingly circumscribed during this period, so these poetic diatribes
seek to achieve Mary’s rhetorical containment. The Marian image
which they incarnate is largely parodic. In the broadside entitled the
‘Testament and tragedie of umquhile King Henrie Stewart of gude
memorie’, published by the Protestant Edinburgh printer Robert
Lekprevik in 1567, Mary subjects the spuriously innocent and power-
less Darnley to her desire. She literally impales him and, in an ironic
parallel to the textual violation of the sonnets as well as Bothwell’s
literal violation of Mary, the effect of her ‘licherous lufe’ is the injury
to Darnley’s body.

In imitation of the characteristic rhetorical trope

of anti-feminist debate poems, Mary is offered as an exemplar of
women corrupted and made dangerous by ‘luiﬁs rage’: the mythical
and historical catalogue of men who endured death or suffering
through supposed female iniquity renders insistent the anxiety of
these poems about the ‘powerful’ female sexuality that found its con-
temporary embodiment in the queen. Incarnating the fallen moral-
ity, for example, of Delilah, Medea, Clytemnestra and Jezebel, Mary is
the arch female transgressor: ‘scho wes neuuer lyke Penelopie’

(the

Detectioun sought the analogue of Medea for Mary’s murderous, adul-
terous excess: ‘she maketh hirselfe Medea, that is, a woman that
nouther in love nor hatred can kepe any meane’

). Such poems

become the textual equivalent of the placard paraded through
Edinburgh which depicted Mary as a mermaid, the emblem of the
prostitute.

Mary had therefore entered the public realm of discourse

as an archetype of fallen femininity even prior to the actual publica-
tion of the casket texts. As Parkinson observes, ‘No line between
poetry and politics is to be absolutely maintained thereafter [1561–5],
any more than Mary herself is to remain the unmoved centre of both
spheres of discourse’.

Feminine Eros 25

In short, by the time the casket-sonnets irrevocably establish a pow-

erful and damning association between poetic eros and politics, Mary’s
embodiment as the ﬁgure of fallen Woman was deeply entrenched
within the Scottish symbolic realm. Her eventual marriage to Bothwell
on 15 May 1567 compounded her symbolic trespasses onto yet another
area of sanctiﬁed womanhood: ‘the chastetie and honestie of a
wydowe’:

For what body woulde not abhore hyr, that after the fyrst husbandes
deathe, sheweth hyr selfe to longe after another, and casteth away
hyr spouse Chryste and maryeth the dyuill ﬁrste.

Vives’s denouncement echoes in the Detectioun’s: ‘in a woman, it is
monstrous: in a wife not onely excessively louit, but also maist zeal-
iusly honorit it is incredabill’.

The marriage, which took place almost

three months after Darnley’s murder and only a month after Bothwell
was acquitted of responsibility in it, was generally condemned even by
those sympathetic to the Marian cause as Bothwell’s motivation, ‘wise
and politic’ in the Detectioun’s phrase, was largely construed as
Machiavellian.

Mary’s own defence of the marriage widely censured

as ‘pretendit’,

as recorded in her letter to the Guises, defends

Bothwell’s political loyalty, though she is sensitive to the displeasures
of those ‘that mycht not abyde his advancement’.

Gratitude is

expressed at the same time that both justiﬁcation and apologia are
offered (especially and implicitly to her Catholic support at home and
abroad; John Leslie carefully justiﬁed the marriage in his Defence). But
she candidly notes how Bothwell’s ‘effort’ to ‘purches oure gude will’
by ‘humble sute’ cannot disguise the ruthless ambitions of one who is,
in her own words, her ‘borne subject’:

‘quahirin we cannot dissembill

that he hes usit ws utherwayis than we wald have wyssit, or zit have
deservit at his hand…’.

Provocatively, the marriage was solemnised

by Protestant rites, an act to which she anxiously alludes in her letter:
‘[not] weying quhat wes convenient for ws, that hes bene norissed in
our awin religioun, and never intendis to leif the samyne for him or
ony mon upoun earth.’

In the letter sent to Elizabeth with the inten-

tion of justifying the marriage, Mary presents reasons of political
fragility and the fear of ‘seditioun’; the legalistic veracity of Bothwell’s
problematic divorce is anxiously set forth.

As Michael Lynch

observes, in the spring of 1567, Mary exhibited a ‘dangerous depen-
dence on Bothwell’.

Marriage to Bothwell was an act for which Mary

atoned for the remainder of her life.

26 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Such ‘evidence’ of Mary’s moral and religious culpability fomented

the anti-Marian cause and deepened the interpretative scope of the
casket-sonnets. Ultimately, the form of ‘inverted’ or parodic eroticisa-
tion of the queen which their reception signiﬁed had linguistic or
verbal connotations. Just as her physical beauty was conjured as a
duplicitous artiﬁce, as idolatrous as her Catholicism, by her textual
detractors, so too was her language: accused of being ‘fenzeit fair and
wylie’.

As Lewis observes, the casket material constructed ‘the ascen-

dant Protestant impression that Mary was a craven dissembler of the
most wanton passions’, rooted ‘in the erotically charged act of reading
an emotionally invasive female author’.

In both the Buchananite

anti-Marian tracts and the broadsides, Mary tapped a vein of
Protestantised rhetoric: their condemnations were made to espouse a
contrasting ‘purity’ or veracity. The web of linguistic and ideological
sophistry already spun could only become entangled further on the
publication of the queen’s own supposed verbal embodiment of desire.

Just as the ﬁgure of Mary herself is metaphorical, always symbolic, so

too are the casket sonnets which expediently served as a kind of
metaphorical vehicle for the contemporary political and religious anxi-
eties which surrounded Mary in the ﬁnal months of her reign. Yet the
sonnets also became such a hotly contested politicised publication pre-
cisely because of the power of the erotic word itself: the fact that such a
voicing of desire was taken so seriously surely attests to the erotically
charged energies of the Marian text. The sonnets at once serve as a
political assertion of eros, and an erotic assertion, or rather negation, of
political desires; it is a complex and delicate negotiation between both
which the rest of this chapter pursues in tracing representations, or
allegorisations, not purely conﬁned to the political body but one
which, contrary to their sixteenth-century reception, represents a dif-
ferent erotic or ‘passional’ poetics.

Ironic sovereign desires

As Renaissance treatises on the nature of erotic love frequently illus-
trated, the act of desiring (to desire rather than to be desired oneself) is
necessarily one which entails surrender: a relinquishing of soul or body
to the power of the desiring Other. The concepts of sexual and spiritual
abnegation, at once ecstatically and agonistically rendered, underpin
the Marian sonnets. Since this is sovereign eros, there is political abne-
gation too, voiced with an almost quasi-ingenuous candour; heart, soul
and state are made sacriﬁcial. ‘De vous seruir’: the language of erotic

Feminine Eros 27

duty and obeisance echoes the feudalistic ethos of the rhetoric com-
monly subsumed within the category of amour courtois. The sonnets
boldly subvert the conventionally gendered, hierarchical relation in
the European love lyric between abject male lover and aloof, socially or
politically superior domna. The irony is doubly inﬂected as the political
and social male subject (Bothwell, according to the marginal gloss of
the Cambridge manuscript) is made sovereign; the sovereign places
herself ‘soubz la subiection’ (10: 12), submits to the ‘volonté’ of her
subject (9: 8), and pledges ‘à l’obeyr & seruir loyaument’ (8: 10). The
repeated use of the appellation ‘Seigneur’, or Lord, evokes Gaspara
Stampa’s apostrophe to her beloved as ‘Signor’ or ‘Lord’. A term
imbued with feudal connotations (and, accordingly, with the implica-
tions of either benevolence or tyranny), it may denote simply a spouse
or, as in Mary’s own later religious sonnets, represent ‘God the Father,
Son, or Holy Spirit’.

The political ironies are intensiﬁed further when

such renunciatory acts are contextualised within the model of neo-
Platonic love doctrine, to which the sequence demonstrably gestures;
the tenet which asserts that love is always held by an inferior for a
superior becomes imbued with ironic political currency.

Entre ses mains & en son plein pouuoir
Ie metz mon ﬁlz, mon honneur, & ma vie,
Mon païs, mes subiectz, mon ame assubiectie…

In his handis and in his full power,
I put my sonne, my honour, and my lyif,
My contry, my subiects, my soule al subdewit…

(2: 1–3)

Pour luy tous mes amis i’estime moins que rien,
Et de mes ennemis ie veux esperer bien.

For him I esteme all my fre[n]ds les the[n] nathing,

And I will haue gude hope of my enemeis.

(1: 10–11)

Signiﬁcantly made at the opening of the ‘sequence’, such apparently

bold assertions could easily be construed by the anti-Marian party as
the queen’s resignation of political authority; the contentious litany of
sacriﬁced possessions, ‘pais … subiectz … ﬁls’, is a gift to her adversaries.
Here, the possibility of textual corruption or interference with the

28 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

original sources is at its most persuasive.

Even without the insistent

identiﬁcatory manuscript gloss, the identiﬁcation of a sovereign, or
political self (ineluctably present, it seems, in the use of the term
‘subiectz’), is difﬁcult to resist at certain textual moments; the dynamic
between self-renunication and self-identiﬁcation can certainly be per-
ceived in the erotic writing of other early modern women poets
(Pernette du Guillet’s, for example) but its intellectual and emotional
associations seem to lack the apparently ‘material’ consequences which
Marian eros claims to defy. This particular language of desire threaded
through the sonnets, enacts a ‘sovereign love’, to use Louise
Fradenburg’s phrase,

which is contrary to, indeed contradictory of,

the political eroticism of Elizabeth and, perhaps more signiﬁcantly,
James, the unnamed but presumed ‘ﬁlz’ of the sequence. While James
would later strive to keep the expressions of eros and sovereignty apart
in the Marian sonnets there are no boundaries between erotic and sov-
ereign selves. Unlike Elizabeth’s carefully managed eroticisation (a
desirability which never tolerated any breach), these sonnets seemingly
enact the realisation of desire for the sovereign; the symbolic is trans-
formed into the ‘real’. The sovereign self is made culpable of desire and
error (‘i’ay mesprisé l’honneur’); in the process of disavowing her sym-
bolic, sovereign self, the Marian lover at once admits vulnerability.
Such vulnerability, both erotic and political in nature, would be inad-
missible to James who sought to maintain the symbolic carapace of
monarchy within his poetry.

Bodily possessions: the agony of ‘ce corps’

Pour luy aussi ie iette mainte larme.
Premier quand il se ﬁst de ce corps possesseur,
Duquel alors il n’auoit pas le coeur.
Puis me donna vn autre dur alarme,
Quand il versa de son sang mainte dragme,
Dont de grief il me vint lesser doleur,
Qui m’en pensa oster la vie, & frayeur
De perdre las le seul rampar qui m’arme.
Pour luy depuis iay mesprisé l’honneur
Ce qui nous peult seul pouruoir de bonheur.
Pour luy i’ay hazardè grandeur & conscience.
Pour luy tous mes parentz i’ay quité, & amis,
Et tous autres respectz sont apart mis.
Brief de vous seul ie cerche l’alliance.

(9: 1–14)

Feminine Eros 29

For him also I powred out many tearis,
First quhen he made himselfe possessor of thys body.
Of the quhilk then he had nat the hart.
Efter he did geue me one uther hard charge,
Quhen he bled of his blude great quantitie,
Through the great sorrow of the quhilk came to me that dolour,
That almost caryit away my life, and the feire
To lese the onely strength that armit me.
For him since I haif despisit honour,
The thing onely that bringeth felicitie.
For him I have hazardit greitnes & conscience,
For him I have forsaken all kin and frendes,
And set aside all uther respectes,
Schortly, I seke the aliance of yow onely.

In the particular rhetorical context of this ninth sonnet, and in any
broader interpretative sense, possession of the body sans le coeur
signiﬁes a desire realised without the sanction of emotional or spiritual
consent; here a desire which has yet to be fulﬁlled. This act of bodily
usurpation is enclosed by the rhyme larme/alarme: prefaced by tears
and sealed by its status as the ﬁrst alarme or ‘hard charge’ in the metri-
cally irregular fourth line of the translation. The ﬁrst three lines of the
quatrain possess a simplicity which belies the reticence of the state-
ment being made. The spiritual and the material aspects of her being
are divided: there is her body and there is her heart; the beloved has
laid claim without right to the former, her physical being (‘il se ﬁst de
ce corps possesseur’). Le coeur is implicitly portrayed as the locus of spiri-
tual or emotional autonomy. The coeur and corps of the Marian lover
are inextricably bound since unwarranted possession literally and
ﬁguratively violates the rightful unity of her being (in the end, he shall
discover her ‘tout’ vne’, 8: 14); no longer her body but ‘this bodye/ce
corps’. Such objectiﬁcation evokes the fragmented corporeality of the
female blason.

Historically, this sonnet has repeatedly been interpreted as Mary’s

confession that Bothwell raped her. The Cambridge manuscript glosses
the text as allusion to Bothwell’s known abduction of Mary at Dunbar:
‘it declaris yt he had abusit hyr bodie…’.

The Acts of Sederunt of 12

May 1567 record Bothwell’s imprisonment of Mary, only a week after
he was legally exonerated for any complicity in the king’s murder: ‘hir
Hienes was tane and holdin in Dunbar by James Erle Bothwele, Lord
Hallis and Creychtoun, and certeine vtheris his Complices, contrar hir

30 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Majesties Will and Mynd’.

Bothwell found mitigation for his action:

‘albeit hir Hienes was commovit for the present Tyme of his
taking…sensyn, be his [Bothwell’s] good behaving towart hir Hienes,
and having sur Knalege of his thankful Service in Time bygone, and for
mair thankful Service in Time coming, that hir Hienes stands content
with the said Erle, and hes forgiven, and forgives him […]’.

Mary pro-

vided her own gloss on Bothwell’s alleged physical coercion at Dunbar
(though here the truth may equally be veiled) in a missive written
partly to placate French unease at her subsequent marriage to
Bothwell, but granting him clear absolution:

in oure returning he awayted ws be the way, accumpaneit with a
greit force, and led ws with all diligence to Dunbar … Being thair,
we reprochit him, the honour he had to be estemit of ws, his ingrat-
itude, with all uther remonstrances quhilk mycht serve to red ws
out of his handis. Albeit we fand his doingis rude, yit wer his answer
and wordis bot gentill, that he wald honour and serve ws …

The abduction, then violation, of the queen’s body proved for the

anti-Marian factions evidence of the queen’s vulnerable ‘feminine’
body, physically but also politically capable of being possessed.
Twentieth-century commentary upon the incident ironically repro-
duces the dictum that the sexually violated woman can still desire the
perpetrator of that violation. Marshall, Thomson and Plaidy contrive
naive justiﬁcations for Mary’s complicity in the rape, echoing the ugly
assumptions of Mary’s detractors who implied that Bothwell had full
consent, and of classical misogyny which conceived woman as a
morally frail, sexually unbridled creature.

Antonia Fraser offers the

most sensitive, pragmatic interpretation: ‘he intended to place the
queen in a situation from which she could not possibly escape marry-
ing him.’

Sexual possession was translated into political possession;

‘forcing a woman to submit sexually was viewed as a parallel to domi-
nating one’s subject politically’.

It might be argued that the material–spiritual dualism is too simplis-

tic a dichotomy: that the body in this instance can be conceived in a
more allegorical or symbolic sense. According to the analogy of ‘the
queen’s two bodies’, ce corps might easily refer to her political rather
than to her natural state. The lover (who is queen) is accordingly
desired for the political power which she incarnates, and to which her
natural body gives access. In supplicatory letters to Elizabeth, Mary
makes use of this dual sense of the corporeal: ‘Do with my body at

Feminine Eros 31

your will, the honour or blame shall be yours.’

However persuasive,

there are arguments for retaining the sensus literalis, signifying the
female sexual body, as opposed to the allegoria. First, legal deﬁnitions
of rape (derived from the Latin rapere, to steal, seize or carry away) are
founded on the presence or absence of the other party’s consent; this
point was also crucial in the sixteenth-century juridical understanding
of unlawful intercourse.

The language of Mary’s sonnet strongly

conveys the idea of coercion, ‘quhen he made himselfe possessor’,
which implies verbatim the ‘abuse of a woman by force against her
will’.

The grammatical or textual enactment of the rape portrays the

lover as mere (sexual) property; even if her heart remains inviolate, her
body is not her own. Though she herself is the writing subject, she
objectiﬁes herself; she even weeps ‘pour lui’ (not because of him, but as
if on his behalf). The stanza draws to its close with a catalogue of her
sacriﬁces: ‘grandheur et conscience’ and the hauntingly non-explicit ‘tous
autres respectes’.

The violation of the sonnet’s ﬁrst quatrain preﬁgures another in the

sonnet, perpetrated this time against the body of the beloved, and for
which the lover mourns: ‘Quand il versa de son sang mainte
dragme/Quhen he bled of his blude great quantitie’. The original female
violation is recalled in the second quatrain’s literal language of blood
and sacriﬁce. While the sonnet itself discloses nothing else about this
injury which curiously parallels the lover’s own physical and emo-
tional injuries, the biographical-historical commentary glosses this as
allusion to Bothwell’s wounding in Border skirmishes at Liddisdaill on
7 October 1566.

According to Buchanan’s account, Mary ﬂed ‘in

haste lyke a mad woman’ to attend him;

again, the historical conso-

nances can be mapped.

Yet how does the implied historical framework or ‘paratext’ for this

sonnet impinge upon the erotic power or energy of the sequence itself
which perhaps as a consequence is entirely destabilised. Wormald pro-
poses that the sexually masochistic nature of Mary’s poetry was unusual:

The woman portrayed in the letters and the sonnet [sic] is a woman
utterly dominated by a man, one who would renounce everything
for him, who masochistically dwells on her sacriﬁce – ‘my peace, my
subjects, my subjected soul’ – and on the fact that he had raped her
before she ﬁrst loved him: the archetype, in other words, of the
woman who adores the man who tramples on her […] not enough
emphasis has been given to the fact that it was not a common

32 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

theme in the sixteenth century […] it is curious that they should
think up this kind of image …

Wormald proceeds to cite Lucretia, evidence that the image of the

raped woman was part of literary or mythic consciousness; but what
the sonnet lacks, of course, is Lucretia’s exemplary response.

number of apparent ‘transgressions’ are committed in the Marian
sequence, one of which seems to be the resolute persistence of desire. If
the orthodox expository framework is removed, then the sonnet por-
trays a desire which (on both the lover and beloved’s parts) commits
violence and demands sacriﬁce. Petrarchistic love poetry is wholly
imbued with conceits which play upon the notion of the physically
martyred lover, l’amant martyr. Yet, as a whole, the sequence eschews
the orthodox petrarchisti language which, in itself, is interesting; the
sequence is difﬁcult to anchor in conventional languages of poetic
desire. This may partly lie in its resolute and provocative ‘physicality’,
a travesty or parody perhaps of the metaphorics of desire in Renaissance
love poetry. In the early modern poetic discourse of feminine eros,
Louise Labé’s projection of the lovers’ erotic union embodied in inordi-
nate kisses is comparatively rare.

Yet it can be argued that the sonnet

forges a new language of the desecrated female body which enters into
dialogue with the other implicit neo-Platonic desires of the sequence. If
the sonnets are made to enter a different rhetorical and philosophical
context of erotic discourse from that in which they have been encased,
then a new morality and a new poetics of desire can emerge.

Love’s purgation: reversing the ‘fall’ of the casket sonnets

Within the interpretative context of the Detectioun and the Cambridge
manuscript, the sonnets are castigated for their fallen morality. Yet,
ironically, the Marian lover can also be seen to desire within herself an
individually scrupulous love, one deﬁned by its own moral aspirations
toward the qualities of purity and ‘foy’. She seeks to ‘mak him [the
beloved] perceiue my faythfulness’ (‘Que de ma foy, luy faire apperceuoir’,
2: 8); she will ‘geif of my trueth sic profe,/That he sall know my con-
stancie w

out ﬁction’ (‘Brief ie feray de ma foy telle preuue,/ Qu’il cognostra

sans fainte ma constance’, 2: 11–12). Given that both Mary and her texts
were castigated for duplicity, ‘truth’ becomes a word and concept
almost obsessively pursued throughout the ‘sequence’. The antithesis
between being and seeming, être and paraître, is largely realised
through the division forged between the lover, the embodiment of true

Feminine Eros 33

‘foi’ or faith, and sa femme, corrupt, scheming, materially self-seeking.
The Marian lover casts herself in the role of sexual and moral judge in
the sequence that was itself to be legalistically and morally ‘judged’:

Quant vous l’amiez elle vsoit de froideur.
Sy vous souffriez pour s’amour passion
Qui vient d’aymer de trop d’affection,
Son doig monstroit, la tristesse de coeur
N’ayant plaisir de vostre grand ardeur
En sez habitz monstroit sans ﬁction
Qu’elle n’auoit paour qu’imperfection
Peust l’effacer hors de ce loyal coeur.
De vostre mort ie ne vis la peaur
Que meritoit tel mary & seigneur.
Somme de vous elle à eu tout son bien
Et n’à prisé ny iamais estimé
Vn si grand heur si non puis qu’il n’est rien
Et maintenant dit l’auoir tant aymé.

(5: 1–14)

Quhen you louit hyr sche usit coldnesse,
Gif you suffrith for hir luif passioun,
That cummith of to greit affectioun of luife:
Hyr sadnes schew the tristesse of hyr hart,
Taking na plesure of zour veheme[n]t burning,
In hyr clothing she schew unfaynitly,
That sche had na feir, that imperfection
Could deface hyr out of that true hart.
I did not see in hyr the feir of your death,
That was worthy of sic husband and Lord.
Schortly sche hath of you all hyr wealth.
And hath neuer weyit nor estemit
One so greit hap, but sins it was nat hirs,

And now she saith that she loueth him so well.

Sa femme even manipulates language for her own expedient purpose;
if a fabrication or corruption by Mary’s ‘enemies’ (to which the ﬁrst
sonnet alludes), then such an admission of hermeneutic relativity in
this sixth sonnet is ironic. The sonnet condemns the utterance of
love which is imitated or ‘ventriloquised’ from ‘quelque autheur

34 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

eluissant’; the beloved gives false faith to texts (escripts) which are
duplicitous.

Et voudroit bien mon amy deceuoir
Par les escriptz tout fardez de sçauoir
Qui pourtant n’est on son esprit croissant
Ains emprunté de quelque autheur eluissant.
A faint tresbien un enuoy sans l’auoir
Et toutesfois ses parolles fardez,
Ses pleurs, ses plaincts remplis de ﬁctions,
Et ses hautz cris & lamentations,
Ont tant gaigné qui par vous sont gardez
Ses lettres escripts ausquelz vous donnez foy
Et si l’aymez & croyez plus que moy.

(6: 4–14)

And wald fayne deceiue my loue,
By writinges and paintit learning,
Quhilk nat the lesse did not breid in hir braine,
Bot borrowit from sum feate authour,
To fayne one sturt and haif none.
And for all that hyr paintit wordis,
Hyr teares, hyr plaintes full of dissimulation,
And hyr hye cryes and lamentations
Hath won that poynt, that you keip in store,

Hir letters and writinges, to quhilk you geif trust,

Ye, and louest and beleuist hyr more than me.

Though this echoes the anxieties about verbal hypocrisy intrinsic to
poetic love-discourses, it risks incurring the anti-feminist dictum about
female verbal corruption per se. Without the gendered. implications,
the good lover is one who speaks ‘truth’, offering parolles which are not
idolatrous. While the sonnet discloses itself as a kind of labyrinthine
meditation on the nature of ‘love words’, the division which it sets up
between lover and femme represents one of the poems’ paradoxes. That
they should symbolise the dualism between material and non-material
is a paradox; for the lover (the rival), whose love is sanctioned. by spir-
itual and moral richness, is seen to make the greatest material sacriﬁce
of her physical self. There are further paradoxes. Though the lover may
offer herself as a paradigm of virtue, by her own admission, she is

Feminine Eros 35

condemned by the moral judgements of others: ‘I’ay hazardé pour luy &
nom & conscience’ (1:11, ‘I haue put in hasard for him baith fame and
conscience’; ‘Moy vous obeyssant i’en puis receuoir blasme’ (3: 2, ‘I in
obeying you may receiue dishonour’). Yet perhaps the most difﬁcult of
conceptual paradoxes is that which presents the loved. one as a para-
digm of neo-Platonic virtues: ‘Celuy qui n’a en sens, ny en vaillance,/En
beauté, en bonté, ny en constance/Point de seçonde’ (4: 12–14, ‘Him that
hath none in wit, in manhood/In beauty, in bounty, in truth nor in
constancy/Ony second’. She calls him her ‘seul bien & mon seul esperance’
(7: 3, ‘mine onely wealth, and my onely hope’ of her life), seeking to
preserve herself for him intact: ‘Pour luy ie veux garder santé & vie’ (8: 12,
‘For him I will conserve health and life’). Her greatest ‘grandheur’ is
‘d’avoir part en ce coeur’ (8: 3, ‘to haue onely pairt in that hart’): an act of
union, or consummation, with erotic, spiritual and political resonances.

Yet in his act of rape, the beloved is condemned by those very stan-

dards which render him her object of desire; he seems to perceive her
only as mere matter. Matter, the form of the bodily, is frequently con-
ceived in terms of corruption: Plotinus writes of the ‘ugliness in the
soul’ derived from the ‘infection and pollution’ of matter; Bembo chas-
tises ‘corruptible bodies’.

Further, in identiﬁcation with the impure

and bodily the lover is relegated to an anti-feminist orthodoxy: the
innate association of woman and mere matter. This reduction of the
feminine is entirely inevitable, if seen in the context or interpretative
perspective of the Marian detractors. Internally within the sequence it
is also ironic, given its wish to exonerate its lover’s desire from the
charge of conventional female cupiditas. She is anxious that her love
may be devalued by reason of its ‘femininity’: ‘Vous estimez mes parolles
du vent,/Vous depeignez de cire mon las coeur,/Vous me pensez femme sans
iugement/Et tous cela augmente mon ardeur’ (7: 10–14, ‘You think my
wordes be but wind:/You paint my wery hart, as it were of waxe,/You
imagine me ane woma[n] without iugement./And all that encreaseth
my burning’). Invoking the orthodox, semi-proverbial indictments of
female desire, its ephemerality, the Marian lover still rejects its implicit
identiﬁcation of woman with emotion, man with rationality, by sub-
versively laying claim to both reason and ardeur, a passion which
somehow bears intellectual credence.

An even greater paradox is found in the sequence’s discourses of self-

renunciation and self-assertion. There is a voice which proclaims
willing subjugation, of ‘corps, du coeur qui ne refuse paine’ (voiced in the
ﬁrst sonnet, as if to anticipate the ninth), and one which hotly defends
herself and her integrity: ‘il cognostra sans fainte ma constance’ (2: 12,

36 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

‘That he sall know my constancie w

out ﬁction’. As if in emulation of

the true neo-Platonic lover, she seeks to render herself morally worthy
to receive love. Yet in dutifully assuming a quasi-neo-Platonic humil-
ity, the Marian lover is self-abnegating. This might suggest the intrinsic
powerlessness of the female lover which the rape sonnet only endorses
as proof: ‘Est tout à luy, & n’ay autre voulloir’ (‘To him, and has none
uther will’ 2: 4, though she seeks also to reclaim ‘le but de mon desir’
11:6). Though the sequence presents an ironic travesty of erotic con-
vention, in the neo-Platonic metaphor of the bodily, for example, it is
easy to argue that as a whole it depicts Woman as victim: in her fragile,
abused corporeality and as the betrayed mourner of classical, Ovidian
and neo-Petrarchistic convention?

Given that these texts, as part of the Protestant and pro-Elizabethan

enterprise to discredit Mary, are already ‘co-opted’, as it were, to an anti-
Marian reading, they offer the provocation of a resistant reading practice.
There is little possibility of a seamless feminist ‘recuperation’ against the
historical ironies of their political fate. But I would argue that intellectu-
ally, and in the philosophical framework of eros in which they can be
placed, these sonnets resist a uniform, homogeneous reading. The Marian
sonnets challenge the received terms or languages by which Renaissance
lyric desire is conceived. The sexual contradictions and multiplicities of
Mary’s sonnets – their ardent reclamation of female desire which exposes
male sexual rapacity and yet also to a degree portrays the desiring woman
as compliant and submissive – might easily be conceived as reworkings of
Petrarchism’s quintessential trope: namely that the lover exists in and by
states of contradiction. The texts’ oscillation between self-denial and self-
vindication can also symbolise, on the contra-Marian reading, the queen’s
political vagaries, the charges of inconsistency and incompetence. As the
invention of Marian adversaries, they can be cited as evidence that Mary’s
amour vrai had led her to the most politically dangerous form of self-
renunciation; a prophecy fulﬁlled to an extent in the Bothwell marriage.
Ultimately, perhaps, the most ‘transgressive’ reading is not one which
perceives political vacillation within the sequence but one which
recognises, but refuses morally to judge, its confession of contradictory,
violent and intense erotic desires.

The ﬂesh and the spirit: the neo-Platonic context

Despite the moral censure which the Darnley controversy and the
Detectioun’s publication ensured for these sonnets, they nevertheless
portray a desire which aspires, however contradictorily, towards its

Feminine Eros 37

own moral and spiritual fulﬁlment. Mary’s sequence enters into dia-
logue, implicitly and explicitly, with the bodily eroticisation of neo-
Platonism. Several of the Florentine neo-Platonists are recorded in the
catalogue of Mary’s Holyrood library.

The erotic tropes of the body

and the spirit in treatises by Ficino, Bembo, Bruno or Leone, which
ultimately proclaim the God-centred divinity of eros, in part moulded
the rhetorical and philosophical contours of the sixteenth-century
profane lyric; but they may be used to draw out the ramiﬁcations of
the Marian female body, violated and subjugated. The ninth Marian
sonnet carves out a literal feminine space which, in its literary context
of erotic desire, travesties neo-Platonism’s conventional ideology of the
body: here, one witnesses a new conception of the body which is not
ﬁguratively or allegorically structured, and which seemingly represents
nothing other than itself. In the writings of Ficino and others, the
lover’s body is conceived as an absence, a site of non-being. Ficino’s
indictment of ‘the shadowy attraction of the body’ harks back to the
condemnations of Plotinus, for example, who relegates the beauties
perceived in mortal bodies to the status of mere ‘copies, vestiges,
shadows’ of the true and divine beauty.

Contemplation of the latter

is attained only by the soul purged, or ‘wholly free of body’.

The

sensual temptations of earthly beauty are chimerical, mere illusions.
Pico della Mirandola condemns the sensual appetite which desires cor-
poreal objects, conﬁned to the vulgar love of souls. Ficino explicitly
states that the object of love must be incorporeal. The body may there-
fore only be loved for the sake of its immanence (the divine form
within it); one must love spiritually and not materially.

In apparent contradiction, these sonnets seem insistently to deﬁne

desire by its material realisation and to remain preoccupied with the
literal signiﬁcation of le corps. Predictably, this conforms to the anti-
feminist, anti-Marian reading which, as in the Detectioun, weaves a
symbolic condemnatory web between femininity, the female body and
sexual desire.

Las n’est il pas ia en possession
Du corps, du coeur qui ne refuse paine
Ny deshonneur, en la vie incertaine…

Helas, is he nat alredy in possessioun

Of my bodie, of hart, that refusis na payne,

Nor dishonour in the life uncertaine…

(1: 5–7)

38 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

There are other examples. The lover’s rival is shunned for her sexual

frigidity (sonnet 5) and the failure to revere his sexual grace; at least here,
there is no spiritual sublimation. The second sonnet’s rendering of devo-
tion, ‘Entre ses mains & en son plein pouuoir/le metz mon ﬁlz, mon honneur, &
mavie, /Mon païs, mes subiectz, mon ame assubiectie’ (‘In his handis and in
his full power, /I put my sonne, my honour, and my lyif, /My contry, my
subiects, my soule al subdewit…’, 2: 1–3) conceives the transference of
‘power’ in literal and metaphorical terms: erotic submission enfolds
within it the political. Sexual and political subjugation coalesce in the
anti-Marian interpretation as if to presage Bothwell’s ascendancy.

While some of these allusions to the material fail to evoke the sensu-

ality of Labé’s poetics but seemingly serve to endorse the ‘aberrant’
morality of the Marian lover, the violation sonnet more profoundly
spurns the common neo-Platonic idiom of corporeal insubstantiality
and evanescence. Its literal, rhetorically visceral conception of the
body is far removed from Bembo’s transcendent notion of the body as
a beautiful ‘veil’. In the proclaimed division from le coeur, le corps
insists on its own irreducibility. On this level, the quatrain resists the
orthodox meaning of female corporeality in Renaissance erotics as a
synecdoche in a masculinised system of representation of the desired
but absent female body. If wedded to the literal, the sonnet can be read
as a revocation of the most fundamental of neo-Platonic tenets: the
apotheosis of the erotic into the spiritual. Its depiction of coerced
sexual union, and unwarranted possession of the body, therefore
intensiﬁes into a harrowing feminine rewriting of another orthodox
conceit of amatory discourse: the exchange of souls and hearts, or the
way in which the lover harbours an image, conventionally a mirror, of
the loved one within her or his being. This conceit, at least in part,
seems to derive from the neo-Platonic conception of union. Lorenzo de
Medici writes, ‘Love is simply a transformation of the lover into the
object of love; and when reciprocal, it necessarily gives rise to the same
transformation into him who ﬁrst loves, who then becomes loved, so
that lovers live marvellously in each other, for this exchange of hearts
means nothing else’.

The Ficianian commentary on Plato expounds

this notion of loving assimilation in detail. The lover aspires to become
the loved one; in so doing s/he must yield up a part of her or himself.
This is a loss which still brings joy: the self is destroyed but lives
through this union to become something better, more perfect. Sperone
deﬁnes ‘perfect love’ as a similar union of two lovers ‘so that, losing
their individualities, they are both fused into one new being’.

In con-

trast, Mary’s lover seems to suffer only loss in this sonnet; indeed the
whole sequence elegises loss in a protracted act of mourning. In the

Feminine Eros 39

language of Ficino, Mary’s lover ﬁnds no resurrection. The nature of
this ineffable loss is embodied in the limpid statements of the ninth
sonnet: ‘De perdre las le seul rampar qui m’arme’(8). The noun ‘rampar’
contains both literal and symbolic associations: signifying the beloved
near death, and anticipating the sacriﬁce of ‘honneur … grandeur …
conscience’.

If such readings offered here work to diminish the apparently

authoritative interpretation of the anti-Marian, anti-feminist reading of
these sonnets, one powerful contradiction still endures: how can the
seemingly profane intensity of the sequence be reconciled with the
image of a queen who professed until the end that she was faithful in
her religious devotion? Such adoration of a secular beloved sits awk-
wardly with adoration of her heavenly Lord. The Detectioun clearly
aimed to accuse Mary of the sin of profanity but the sequence itself
seems to abrogate any desire to remain in a state of grace. The willing
assertion of death (1: 10) might be taken as the suicide which leads to
purgatory; the implication of adultery already travesties the sacrament
of marriage. Although to Buchanan and the uniformly Protestant anti-
Marian faction, the devoutly Catholic Mary was already an apostate,
these further suggestions of heresy could only be welcomed. Yet the
idea of the divine cannot be so neatly expurgated from these texts. Nor
is there such an irreparable breach between the sonnets and the later,
authentic sonnets of expiation and penance which Mary wrote. One
ironic reading may ultimately be proposed which escapes the closure of
anti-Marian interpretation: namely, that the sonnets glorify, and
martyr, feminine desire in their abrogation of the corrupt, earthly
beloved.

‘Un corps privé de coeur’: erotic and spiritual martyrdom

‘O Dieux… ayez de moi compassion’ (1: 1, O Goddis haue of me com-
passioun’); ‘…de vous seul ie cerche l’alliance’ (9: 14, ‘…I seke the
aliance of you onely’; ‘Dieu détourne tout malheureux augure’ (11: 14,
‘O God turne abacke all unhappy augure’): there may be a third inter-
locutor in Mary’s sequence, as implied by these three assertions. These
may be an invocation of God whom she invokes to protect and pity
herself and her beloved, and to enter into union with her. In the ﬁrst
sonnet, there may be textual interference or corruption: the plural
‘Dieux’/Goddis’, unless used perhaps in a trinitarian sense, evokes a
more classicised, paganised quality, hence intensifying the negative

40 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

portrait of the heretical Mary.

If one proceeds on the assumption that

it signiﬁes God the Father, the ‘Seigneur Dieu’ or ‘Souverain Pere’ of
Mary’s devotional sonnets, deeper, more contradictory resonances are
sounded.

The lover implores that God instruct her in the attainment

of ‘amour & ferme affection’:

O Dieux ayez de moy compassion,
Et m’enseignez quelle preuue certain
Ie puis donner qui ne luy semble vain…

O Goddis haue of me compassioun,
And schew quhat certaine profe

I may geif, which shall nat seme to him vaine…

(1: 1–3)

As in the closing statement of the violation sonnet, it signiﬁes a
sudden change of pronoun, for the beloved has formerly been
addressed as ‘il/lui’. It may be that the latter deictic confers a distance
and impersonality on the beloved who perpetrated the act; that the
beloved whom she desires avec le coeur can be addressed or conceived
only in a separate grammatical or psychological existence.

Yet the presence of the divinity, whether theocentrically or not,

within this new union remains implicit. At moments throughout the
sequence, her love is literally unworldly: ‘Ie veux pour luy au monde
renoncer:/Ie veux mourir pour luy auancer (1: 12–13, ‘I will for his sake
renounce y

world/I will die to set him forwart’). One might suggest

that the ninth sonnet shelters the possibility of mystic love, redolent of
the erotic martyrdom exempliﬁed by medieval female mystics. In an
act of loving adoration, the body is sacriﬁced to God. The anguished
literal corporeality of the ‘union’ with the secular lover might end with
this access to the spiritual: ‘For love’s work is this: to desire the most
intimate union, the closest adhesion to that state in which the soul
abandons herself to love … in love and afﬂiction she is ready to endure
everything’.

Through this implicit embrace of divinely sanctioned

amour vrai, the sonnets now conform to the conventional denouement
of the Renaissance sonnet sequence. Yet even if one grants Mary’s
sequence a divine protagonist, it still does not emulate the clear spiri-
tual progress or teleology of the archetypal sequence, beginning in the
earthly and ending in sanctiﬁcation. Though the arrangement of the
sonnets cannot be authorially endorsed, it is still pertinent to observe

Feminine Eros 41

that the ﬁrst sonnet after the violation text still pledges faith in this
fallen, secular beloved.

A quoy i’estudiray pour tousiours vous co[m]plaire,
Sans aymer rien que vous, soubz la subiection
De qui je veux sans nulle ﬁction
Viure & mourir & a ce i’obtempere.

(10: 11–14)

The quhilke I shall study to the ﬁne that I may euer please you.

Louying nothyng but you, in the subiectioun
Of quhome I wyll without any ﬁctioun,
Liue and die, and this I consent.

This litany of sacriﬁces strongly suggests that the lover seems to seek
and demand of herself a kind of martyrdom. Martyrdom, for and on
behalf of the Catholic faith, was to represent the ﬁnal stage of Marian
hagiography. In the 1580s, especially on the continent, the pro-Marian
iconography of the martyred queen strengthened.

The implied mar-

tyrology of these sonnets also links with her religious poetry, perhaps
ironically so; she was martyred for these sonnets, the corona of thorns
she had to bear throughout the last two decades of her life.

While these sonnets cannot in any way contribute to this later strain

of ‘canonisation’ (the Bishop of Ross in his ardent defences, for
example, never attempted to ‘reclaim’ these texts; that would have
been political folly), they nevertheless remain potentially ‘redemptive’
in that they can be seen to mirror several variants of feminine martyr-
dom in Renaissance female discourse. In their totality, the sonnets
seem to exalt female love (not the rival’s, which does come perilously
near to misogynistic paradigm, but the ‘true’ feminine mode of loving)
as being far superior in moral terms to the male lover who fails to per-
ceive, or emulate, love’s true foi. Female physical frailty, symbolised by
the rape, is countered by the spiritual triumph of feminine loving.

This notion of quasi-heroic sacriﬁce in pursuit of a spiritual ideal –
whether we constitute that as divine love or as that of the perfected
secular lover – is explored in Mary Wroth’s and Gaspara Stampa’s
amatory sonnet sequences, which also stress the virtuous renunciations
of the female lover. According to Elaine Beilin, Wroth’s ‘Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus’ ‘gloriﬁes a love which afﬁrms and sanctiﬁes the
primacy of woman’s virtue’.

Stampa, in Ann Rosalind Jones’s reading,

42 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

portrays ‘her own heroism in suffering. In this couple, constancy and
strength belong to the woman’.

Gravdal observes Hrotsvitha’s trans-

formation of ‘the hagiographic troping of rape’ by her depiction of
‘male violence against women as a way to represent female virtue,
courage and power’.

This mirrors the female body within female

saints’ lives: however violated and ‘desecrated’, it remains spiritually
intact and symbolically inviolate.

However suggestive these conceptual parallels might be, it could be

argued that in the context of the Marian sonnets sacriﬁce is a reac-
tionary rather than a radical gesture: that this afﬁrmative martyrdom is
merely the gloriﬁed endorsement of conventional female gestures of
humility, suffering and sacriﬁce. It might at the most reductive level be
held as a further accommodation of the ‘conduct-book discourses’
which, as Jones observes, are subsumed into women writers’ lyrics to
pre-empt moral censure;

and, of course, in anti-Marian discourses,

perhaps superlatively in the Detectioun, sacriﬁce is a morally incrimina-
tory gesture. But it is also one which ‘ﬁts’ the context of the female
complaint, the context of the Heroides, in which the female lover, as
Patricia Philippy asserts, ‘insists upon the virtuous performance of their
narratives as a representation of erotic martyrdom in which feminine
constancy and ﬁdelity are sacriﬁced to masculine heroic negotium’.

The idea of the moral superiority of feminine sacriﬁce is already
implicit within the classical model of female erotic martyrdom.

What remains a profound, perhaps disquieting absence within these

sonnets is the lack of a penitential framework. The notion of sin seems
to have been expelled, contrasting with the religious poetry securely
attributed to Mary in which she conceives herself as another
Magdalene.

In the latter, anticipating the concept of atonement in

the next comparison with Peter, the analogue evokes the penitential
typology of the Magdalene as sexual sinner as well as the melancholic
concept of the beautiful penitent. Seeking grace and absolution, Mary’s
penitent depicts ‘passion’, in the sense of suffering in imitation of
Christ’s Passion inscribed within her, through the metaphor of the
body: the body bowed down with grief, the body which she seeks to
remake, create anew, as ‘chaste’. In the casket-sonnets, sin is either
‘irrelevant’, or not a term of moral currency; or sinfulness has already
been expiated in God’s sight, and absolution granted. Perhaps only in
the starkly announced assertion of the fourth sonnet that ‘je vis en cette
foy’ is found a veiled allusion to her mother faith.

Feminine Eros 43

The Marian sequence succeeds in eluding the original and enduring
interpretation of the anti-Marian faction. There are certain facets of the
sequence which suggest such evasion might be impossible. The strange
naivete of terms such as ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ seem to militate against
Mary’s authorial responsibility; the allusion to her ‘ﬁlz’, James, is
strange and haunting. While the Cambridge manuscript annotates it as
the symbolic transference of power from Mary to Bothwell (f. 46r), the
signiﬁcance is not simply political. Mary becomes at once both mother
and the lover/prostitute of the anti-Marian imagination; James is the
child forsaken, but Mary cannot inhabit the role of the mater dolorosa.
And yet the poems resist the categorical condemnation which they
elicited. Desire itself is never sacriﬁced whether one reads the ultimate
form of desire as being for God, or for the lover whom her moral imag-
ination still seeks to redeem. There is an implicit desire to renounce the
bodily though the sequence on one level remains inextricably
anchored in the material and the erotic.

Elusiveness is itself a facet of the desire which the sonnets elliptically

disclose. The overwhelming sense gleaned from these sonnets in
Mary’s name is of a love wholly enclosed in its own intensity but also
insubstantial, imperfect, incomplete. As attested by the ironic adora-
tion of a ﬂawed beloved, the lover’s lucidly expounded ideal of amour
vrai fails to ﬁnd an embodiment, at least human. This paradoxical
desire for a desire in itself unattainable and impossible to realise was
glossed by Leone’s account of a desire rooted only in imagination:

whose object is not the particular thing that we desire, since that
has no actual being, but only the idea [concetto] of this thing derived
from its generic being, and the object of such love is not particular,
and therefore it is not real love if a real object be lacking to it, but
only a thing simulated or imagined, for desire of such a thing is
devoid of real love…

100

Perhaps the Marian portrait of desire is founded on a concetto, or the

imaginative beatiﬁcation, of desire: there are frequent allusions to its
potential, and to the possibility of the eternal: ‘Mon amour croist & plus
en plus croistra/Tant que ie viuray, & tiendray à grandheur,/Tant seulement
d’auoir part en ce coeur…’ (8: 1–3, ‘My loue increaseth, and more and
more wil increase,/So long as I shall lief, and I shall holde for ane greit
felicitie/To haue onely pairt in that hart […]’.

44 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Ultimately, these Marian texts resist assimilation into the conven-
tional canon of Renaissance amatory lyric, resembling Monique
Wittig’s provocative deﬁnition of the literary Trojan horse: ‘Any work
with a new form … is always produced in hostile territory. And the
stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will
take for [it] to be accepted’.

101

The Marian lover insists upon the

uniqueness of her desire: ‘Non par mes pleurs ou fainte
obeyssance,/Co[m]me autres ont fait, mais par diuers espreuue’ (2: 13–14,
‘Not by my weping, or faynit obedience,/As other haue done: bot be
uther experience’), suggesting that female desire has not been
imagined, or confessed, in this way before is declared by the lover
herself who takes ‘la main au papier’ (12: 2). Neither, perhaps, has a
queen been so erotically incarnated ‘au papier’; precisely the novelty
which her detractors sought as they bound the sonnets inextricably to
the historical trinity of Mary–Bothwell–Bothwell’s wife. If their
embodiment of both female and monarchical eros inaugurated some
kind of ‘precedent’ within Scottish, indeed European, literary and
political culture, it was not to be repeated; implicitly and explicitly,
that was the intent of Mary’s son a decade later. For James, who had
newly acceded to the crown and whose political power was at ﬁrst
more fragile than desired, the sorrowful exemplum of his mother
could only imply that there was a dangerously short step from
symbolic to literal disavowal of sovereignty. Mary’s fate, and the
political destiny of these sonnets, made poetic eros dangerous. Yet,
much as James arguably sought both to evade and erase Mary’s dark
history, the decade which witnessed the publication of Marian eros
(the casket-sonnets) was also that in which the most extensive
collection of love lyrics was assembled Within the largely unsigned
corpus of lyrics in the Bannatyne manucript, the terms of feminine
eros are debated. The nature of desire, of the beautiful Woman both
pure and corrupt, and of the Blessed Virgin, seemed to acquire a new
aesthetic and political currency in the light of Mary and her reign.

Feminine Eros 45

Demonic and Angelic Women:
The Erotics of Renunciation and
Mariology in the Bannatyne
Manuscript

Heir followis ballattis of luve
Devydit in four pairtis The ﬁrst
Ar songis of luve The secound ar

Contemptis of luve and evill wemen

The thrid ar contempis of evill
fals vicius men and the fourt
Ar ballattis detesting of luve

And lichery

In terms of eros, the lyrics encompassed by the overarching generic
title, ‘ballattis of luve’, and contained in the 375-leaf folio known as
the Bannatyne manuscript, are its most substantial incarnation in the
reign of Mary Queen of Scots. In a period which produced peculiarly
little erotic poetry dedicated to or concerning Mary, the Bannatyne
manuscript’s obsessive preoccupation with the feminine in its amatory
section partially redresses this absence in its strange quartet division of
erotic poems. Perhaps appositely enough for a decade that witnessed
two sovereign weddings, supposed queenly adultery and the ultimate
deposition of that ‘transgressive’ monarch, desire possesses many
semantic forms: ‘passioun’, ‘lust’, ‘foly’, ‘game’, ‘freindschip’, ‘delyt’,
‘service’, ‘the god of Luve’, ‘sensuall affectione’ and ‘sensualitie’; ‘luve’
is also transacted morally, duplicitously, honestly, religiously, spiritu-
ally and carnally. As if to pre-empt charges of imprecision about the
erotic material assembled in his generically encyclopaedic ballat buik,

George Bannatyne (1545–1606), the Edinburgh burgess conventionally
identiﬁed as the manuscript’s chief compiler and scribe, creates these
four pairtis or ‘subdivisions’. Superﬁcially, a clear teleology of desire is
mapped out. The ﬁrst songis, rhetorically and aesthetically rooted in
conventions of amour courtois, are transformed into ﬁnal renunciations
of the cupiditas that precludes rightful obedience to God. Between
these two ‘movements’ lie the second and third of Bannatyne’s ‘divi-
sions’, the ‘contempis of […] evill wemen’ and of ‘evill […] men’. The
ostensible ‘teleology’ or apotheosis of eros is embodied in the object of
ﬁrst ecstatic, then sinful adoration: Woman, in Bannatyne’s fourth
corpus, is presented manichaeistically as virtuous and vicious, angel
and diablesse.

The alternate degradation and gloriﬁcation of the

female body and spirit must be recognised as the conceptual thread
which binds all four ‘subsections’ of the corpus together in a previously
unrecognised ideological continuity. Since the ﬁgure of Woman is both
angelic and demonic, pure and fallen, these texts gathered under the
fragile rubric of amorous poetry lay bare in stark, oppositional clarity
the theoretical contours of the feminine in early modern secular love
poetry. Yet, while exemplary in this broad conceptual sense, they con-
stitute a symbolic form which is realised in a precise historical, cultural
and religious context of utterance. Mary deﬁnes that context; as
David Parkinson asserts, ‘the querelle des femmes is apt to gain
momentum as an instrument of political purpose’.

The Bannatyne

‘philosophy’ of the feminine must be rooted in this decade of contro-
versial female political and sexual power; its querelle des femmes is
implicitly also a querelle de Marie. Yet the Bannatyne corpus also pre-
sents a complex symbolic articulation of the feminine. Its theologi-
cal, moral and sexual ‘Manichaeism’ is sculpted to meet the
exigencies of a politicised, Protestantised anthology of love lyrics. Yet
what is rendered ‘permissible’ is the doctrinally precise female iconic-
ity of the Virgin Mary.

The Bannatyne decade: Marian and Reformation culture

Bannatyne’s ballat buik once had the reputation, endorsed by
eighteenth-century Scottish cultural anthologists such as Allan Ramsay
and James Watson, of being a precocious oddity; the single prodigious
effort of the youthful George Bannatyne to preserve and create a
national poetic heritage in a period of crisis. Divided into ﬁve sections,
each generically and conceptually deﬁned – devotional, moral, comic,
erotic genres and, ultimately, a series of ‘fabillis’

– the manuscript is a

Demonic and Angelic Women 47

unique witness of many medieval and early modern Scottish texts,
adaptations and translations that justiﬁes classiﬁcation of its compila-
tory strategies as both ‘promulgation’ and ‘preservation’.

Yet recent

historiographical, cultural and ideological readings have deepened
understanding of its scope and motivation.

The Bannatyne family,

from the 1530s onwards, belonged to a rising urban and merchant elite
in Edinburgh bearing professional afﬁliations to the Stuart monarchy.
As Theo van Heijnsbergen has argued, the manuscript can be consid-
ered as a cultural ‘intermediary’ between court and urban elites. Both
van Heijnsbergen and Alasdair MacDonald argue for the manuscript’s
collation as a more communal enterprise, one highly attuned to the
changing fragilities of Marian politics. According to the series of dates
inscribed within the manuscript, the year 1568 would appear to be its
terminus.

The manuscript ‘closes’ one year after Mary’s deposition

with the troubled ascendancy of the Protestant regent nobility. Yet
there is also another inscribed date at the conclusion of the luve ballat-
tis which appears to have been emended: 1565, the year of Mary’s mar-
riage to Darnley. As MacDonald and Michael Lynch argue, the early
years of Mary’s reign, culminating in the marriage, would have been
the most propitious period for Marian secular poetry:

The half dozen months of Mary’s infatuation with Darnley would
have provided a hospitable climate for an anthology of ‘ballattis of
luve’. In 1565 Mary was still maintaining the equilibrium of reli-
gious politics which she had initiated on her return to Scotland
from 1561, and it would still have been possible to envisage the
publication of a volume of courtly love verse, always provided that
the latter was not incompatible with Protestant belief.

The queen may have presided over a cour amoureuse, both literally and
symbolically, during the Darnley courtship. For this brief period, Mary
may even have assumed a symbolic incarnation comparable to that of
her cousin Elizabeth: the sovereign who represents inaccessible desire
but is the subject of writing that fuses erotic and political metaphors.
The dominant trope of desire in these ﬁrst, largely anonymous sangis is
certainly modelled on the orthodox courtly paradigm of sovereign and
subject: ‘I am hir s[e]ruiture // Scho is my souerane’; ‘O venus soverane
haif pety on my pane’.

Yet, if the fourth corpus is hypothetically a quasi-nuptial anthology,

there are surprising omissions. Famously, there is the lyric ‘q king hary
stewart’ but none by Mary herself, a curious absence given her then

48 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

securely established creativity.

Though MacDonald notes the publica-

tion of Thomas Craig’s Latin epithalamium,

there are no recognisable

epithalamia in the manuscript itself, though the anthology as a whole
includes earlier courtly ceremonial verse by William Dunbar, and
includes Alexander Scott’s ‘Welcum’ to the newly arrived queen
inscribed 1562. This is the only conspicuous, and suitably cautious,
Marian text. No obvious covert allusions to Mary through anagram-
matical or allegorical play are easily detected. Those existing sangis may
be only partially representative of the original celebrations that Lynch
and MacDonald postulate. Yet it seems curious that Darnley’s small
poem of love service and devotion should remain, as a provocatively
posthumous reminder of a once auspicious love. The absence of verse
by Mary in this period may reﬂect the problematic nature of women’s
public, poetic utterance at the court. The apparent ‘silencing’ of the
earthly Marian queen, at least, begs a number of questions about the
scope of female aesthetic agency in Scotland at this moment.

The textual ‘invisibility’ of Mary may also reﬂect a Protestant, politi-

cal act of censorship. Bannatyne’s other textual ‘Protestantised’ emen-
dations have been shrewdly observed by MacDonald,

while Evelyn S.

Newlyn has recently disclosed the ideological nature of Bannatyne’s
editing practices as a whole: ‘Each poem, not just its inclusion but its
placement in the manuscript, is the product of Bannatyne’s careful
thought and deliberate design.’

Parkinson observes that the ‘well-

placed, well-connected, mercantile Banntyne family […] could read a
wide range of political positions and afﬁliations into the poems they
found’.

The amatory corpus in particular exempliﬁes the ‘editorial’

rigour which characterises Bannatyne’s text, a carefully designed
anthology rather than a miscellany. As Newlyn points out, authorial
and editorial prologues, studded throughout the manuscript, impose
strategies of readerly interpretation: ‘interpretative direction-moral,
religious, and aesthetic’.

Uncharacteristically, the ﬁrst ‘instruction’ of

the erotic section is relatively indifferent:

To the reidar

Heir haif ye luvaris ballattis at your will

How evir your natur directit Is vntill

Bannatyne, as assumed copyist or transcriber, seemingly resigns
responsibility for these texts (ironically, authorship of two is attributed
to him in this section).

Reception of these lyrics is a question of

Demonic and Angelic Women 49

abnegation, dependent upon the individual’s proclivities and interpreta-
tive will (there is surely a sexual pun intended here). Yet the imagined
reader is an active interpretative participant only brieﬂy. The remaining
part of the address develops into a christianised retraction of love, a
recantatio well in advance of the ofﬁcially designated ‘contempis’.

Bot wald ye luve Eftir my counsalling
Luve ﬁrst your god aboif all vder thing
Nixt As your self Your nichtbour beir gud will

(3–5)

This is dutifully pious, its didactic posture anticipating that of the sub-
sequent and copious preceptor amoris poems. The practice of reading
profane literature is categorised as a form of moral as well as erotic
seduction, endorsing the sheer affective power of love rhetoric to
which early modern treatises abundantly testify. Bannatyne’s moral
and literary authority is thus sealed.

Given the manuscript’s editorial and ‘directional’ rigour, it may have

been intended for publication,

in accordance with the growing culture

of printed manuscript miscellanies in England.

Given the contentious

status of print in the period and the relative conﬁnement of secular liter-
ature in Scotland within a manuscript culture until the end of the six-
teenth century, this is not inevitable.

As van Heijnsbergen has

suggested, a literate reading ‘public’ may have been constituted from
urban and courtly circles though the nature and conditions of any recep-
tion are undocumented.

Further, the clear intertextuality of the erotic

corpus strongly suggests the existence of ‘a system of exchange operating
independently from print circulation’.

The lyrics are consistently por-

trayed as texts in circulation, ‘billis’ passed from lover to beloved (with
‘sum gudlie ansuering’ anticipated in return

) which must act on behalf

of a lover in absentia: ‘Go littill bill and be my aduocat’.

The bill or

letter of love acts as an intercessor:

Beseik that schene w

hu[m]mill reuerence…

Say also to that gudlie fair and fresche
of all my panis scho may me weill relesche

Desire is a purely textual transaction, dependent on the lover’s tran-
scription of desire and the beloved’s adequate interpretation of that
representation. Within the fourth amatory section appear several

50 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

poems by the earlier ﬁfteenth-century writers William Dunbar, Robert
Henryson, Walter Kennedy and Gavin Douglas.

Alexander Scott is the

most proliﬁcally named contemporary lyricist; other writers to whom
more than one lyric is assigned include ‘Mersar’, ‘Fethy’, ‘Stewart’,
‘Moffat’, ‘Clerk’, ‘Weddirburne’.

A substantial proportion of the lyrics

are unsigned and are unique witnesses. While there is a copy of the
‘Canticus Troili’ from Troilus and Criseyde, there are a number of erro-
neous attributions of the anti-feminist poems to Chaucer.

As MacDonald has conjectured, it is possible that the love lyrics orig-

inally formed a separate manuscript, perhaps intended for presentation
to Mary herself, but then abandoned in the light of later political exi-
gencies. Clearly, it could only have been ‘gifted’ well before the
Darnley marriage of 1565. Yet while there is scant explicit textual evi-
dence of Mary, she is symbolically incarnate in the ‘Contempis of luve
and evill wemen’. The importance of these texts in the reconstruction
of the manuscript as a Marian anthology has not been considered. Of
course, they are hardly appropriate for a celebratory nuptial anthology
but the wider ideological implications of this palinode to the luve
songis proper must have had a peculiar intensity post-1568 when
Darnley was dead and Mary discredited.

Observing the frequently

‘politically correct’ nature of the manuscript, MacDonald observes the
anthology’s prioritising of religious and moral verse.

In any neo-

Platonic or broadly Petrarchistic scheme of desire, this ‘denigration’ of
the secular or profane is inevitable; but, given the cultural context, any
expression of eros courted deeper controversy.

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the contemptis and

defences of women, those poems contra and pro mulieribus. These texts
arise out of an interesting ideological axis: orthodox conventions of
the querelle des femmes, religious doctrine lent particular shape by
nascent Protestantism, and the secular, courtly morality of female
conduct. This dualistic portrait of woman as both angelic and
demonic, while rooted in a complex intellectual, philosophical and
religious weave, enshrines two contrasting cultural images of Mary in
the decade of the 1560s: of a femininity ﬁrst pure, then fallen. This
may be a gesture towards the politicised, Protestantised sensibility of
the manuscript’s anthologist and circle. Yet paradoxically, the salva-
tion of fallen femininity in the poems which defend Woman is
attained through the Catholic Regina Maria. The realm of the feminine
in the Bannatyne fourth corpus appears both censored and unexpur-
gated, the site of a residual Mariology as well as its suppression. Since
each text within the anthology always provides a meaningful context

Demonic and Angelic Women 51

for its other texts, the ‘prelude’ to the contempis and defence is
explored ﬁrst: this comprises the songis of luve, probably designed for
(courtly) musical performance, which ﬁrst illustrate the iconography of
the feminine.

Beauty and the feminine ‘ﬁgour’

If the ‘contempis’ and defence of women (the second and third ‘pairtis’ of
the ballattis of luve, ff. 250r–68v; 269r–80v) unequivocally represent the
demonic and angelic feminine, the ‘songis of luve’ (ff. 211r–49v) mirror
an eroticised version of the latter; the ﬁgour of Woman made exemplary
by ﬁxed conceptions of beauty, virtue and desire. These ﬁrst lyrics bear
more than a tangential relation to the fallen and virginal states of the
subsequent texts. Tasso’s comment that ‘[l]ove adds perfection to a
woman; yet we do not deny that per se she is a most perfect thing’,

crys-

tallises the way in which these lyrics present the beloved woman as
untainted, if not positively transﬁgured, by the male erotic gaze:

The grittar desyre I haif vnto your sycht

The less I get your language and presens

The nerrer the sycht the ferrer frome audiens

Desire affects only the desiring subject; the beloved’s desirability is

contingent upon her moral and sexual perfection. With the exception
of one incomplete aubade, these lyrics portray a desire which depends
on its condition of unfulﬁlment.

In depicting the process as opposed

to the consequence of desire, the lyrics are concerned with its poten-
tiality. Such desire is condemned to a perpetual state of imperfection
and incompletion. Although the beloved is chided for her aloofness
(‘Gud ladeis lat no

wilfullnes/exuperat your bewteis than’

), this very

refusal to consent sanctiﬁes the lover’s desire. If she consents, the
beloved destroys the necessary ‘illusion’ of her sexual purity, depriving
her of the precious possession of chastity. The poetry subsequent to
these songis is concerned with the woman who has consented, and
whose sexuality is not simply embodied by a beautiful rhetorical
surface.

The female ‘presence’ in the songis is principally mediated through

the quasi-Petrarchistic idiom of female beauty. Feminine sexuality
becomes aesthetically rareﬁed. The insistent fascination with the
female ‘schap…forme…fygour’

transforms Woman into a beautiful

object, a microcosmic ‘warld of bewtie’: ‘Beauty is the proper value of

52 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

woman’.

Through erotic iconography, she is ﬁgured as a sensual

abstraction: a ‘perle’ or ‘dyama[n]t’; a ‘fragrant olif violat rubicum-
bent’, a sequence of epithets which combines exoticism (the olive),
with an oddly beautiful Latinate variation on the red and white beauty
topos.

The erotic image has frequent symbolic import: the ‘Yung

brekand blosum yit on the stalkis grene/Delytsum lilly lusty for to be
sene’ suggests a virginal purity which might yet be ‘broken’.

Sexuality

is not always contained or suppressed by the metaphor that seeks to
compensate for a metonymic absence.

Female corporeality unites these lyrics, the ‘courtlie corss of portra-

tour p[er]fyt’ aesthetically laid bare:

Thair wes nevir day that dew // nor dyamont sa deir
na stane sa haill of hew // as is ye hyd of hair
hir ene as cristall cleir // w

luﬂie lawchand cheir

hir pawpis till perle ar peir // p[er]fyt and poleist new

The female ﬁgour is transformed into an object of poetic and erotic
contemplation. Ironically, this is an artiﬁce which does not incur the
conventional censure of female artiﬁce copiously exempliﬁed by the
later querelle texts; indeed, it is positively emphasised (‘hir portratour of
most plesance/all pictour did prevene’).

The archetypal sixteenth-

century device for the poetic display of beauty (‘the lady…corporeally
scattered’, in Vickers’s phrase), the blason, is found copiously; if not as
the usual catalogue or litany of bodily beauties, as the concentrated,
précieux description of an object such as ‘hir Lippis’, ‘The fragra[n]t
balme of odour co[m]fortatyve’.

Beauty is therefore conveyed by pro-

cedures of hyperbole and fragmentation.

Hir cristall ene all forgit w

delyt

Surmonting topatioun anamalit celicall

Sa fair was nevir ﬁgour // no fame on ﬂud so quhyt
So pro[per] of portratour // sa p[air]t no sa p[er]fyt
Hir lyre is lilly lyk // plesand forowttin plyt
In bour is no so brycht // beriall no blench ﬂour

Hir hair displayit as the goldin wyre
aboif hir heid wt bemys radient
Is lyk ane buss that birnys in the ﬁre
W

ﬂam[m]ys reid but fumys Elevant

Demonic and Angelic Women 53

54 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

The female body in these lyrics can be conceived as a paradox: sexu-

ally interpretable or ‘readable’ by the male poet or voyeur but res-
olutely chaste. Its beauty is ideologically sound, frequently emblematic
of ‘vertew, meikness, trewth’.

The physical beauty which cannot fail

to symbolise sexuality is tempered by behaviour reﬂecting the conven-
tional trinity of Renaissance female conduct books, chastity, silence
and obedience:

moir meik wes nevir creature on life
W

hair bry

glitterand as the gold

Of pulchritud the fair ﬁgour
The mirro

eik of all meiknes

The verry stapill of steadfastness

The well of vertew and ﬂour of woman[n] heid
And patrone unto patiens
Lady of lawty bay

in word and deid

sobir sweit full meik of eloquens

This alliance of physical and moral beauty reﬂects the common neo-
Platonic conceit of beauty as the outer envelope of the soul, and thus
the corollary between external and internal form.

It is comparable

to the prescriptions of a Renaissance moralist such as Vives, the dis-
course in which ‘meik’ conduct signiﬁes a ‘manageable’ or ‘regulated’
sexuality.

Frequent emphasis upon the beloved’s social status, and the ubiqui-

tous attributes of ‘nobility’ and ‘gentilness’, demarcate a particular social
sphere of female virtue, not simply an obvious citation of amour
courtois’s perennially ‘noble lady’.

These supposedly abstract female

paragons may be designed to engage with their audience or readership:
in an aristocratic, courtly environment to hold up an idealising mirror to
its gentlewomen or female courtiers, or as a model of social, moral and
sexual aspiration for the urban or bourgeois woman.

Desirability is

contingent upon compliance with the prescribed moral ideal, and even
the extreme of immaculate purity. Already, these luve songis venerate the
Virgin Mary as the paradigm of female humility and sexual purity:

To forteﬁe off famenene the fame
Christ wes incarnat and incorporat
And nureist nyn monethis in her wame

And eftir borne and bocht ws fra the blame
of baliall that brint ws bitterly
That onlie act saivis thame all fra schame
And our allquhair th[air] fame dois fortify

The negation of sexuality by the virginal ideal is offered at this early
stage of the manuscript’s feminine ideology as women’s sole redemp-
tion: ‘[t]hat onlie act…’ by which the Christ-child was conceived in the
Virgin womb (the imagery of the Virgin as vessel evoking medieval
Marian hymns).

Debating the querelle: fallen Woman

The second and third sections of the ‘ballattis of luve’ entitled ‘con-
temptis’ were probably conceived as deliberate counterparts to one
another.

While they are named ‘contemptis’ of ‘evill wemen’ and

then of ‘evill/fals vicious men’ (f. 211r), the latter ostensibly constitute
a defence of women, rather than a condemnation of men, to parallel
the preceding anti-feminist section. Even though an interesting gender
balance is nominally set up by this editorial classiﬁcation, these two
sections are shaped by conventions which are persuasively those of the
querelle des femmes: the philosophical, cultural and rhetorical debate
about the nature of Woman in which there was a resurgence of interest
in the mid sixteenth century.

Bannatyne’s compendium is set against

a European book market ﬂooded with publications, new and reissued,
which engage in various ways with the querelle debate. These lyrics are
therefore assembled at an auspicious time in the history of the querelle
polemic; Bannatyne may have thus ensured for his anthology a con-
spicuous fashionableness.

Controversy arises over the kind of culture which fosters the querelle

genre at any time: in particular, whether it inevitably mirrors the
misogynistic, repressively patriarchal society which produced the struc-
tures of power. Evelyn S. Newlyn trenchantly argues that the
Bannatyne contemptis reﬂect and perpetuate female political and sexual
subordination, revealing unequivocally sexual and social hierarchies of
power. ‘These poems treating desire and sex are thus revealed to be in
service to a larger political intention; only secondarily about desire,
these poems illustrate the use of sexuality in delineating, enforcing,
and reinforcing power structures in a patriarchal culture […] they thus
produce and reproduce the culture, they become potent statements of
political power’.

Demonic and Angelic Women 55

Constance Jordan argues of the European querelle tradition in general

that the audience of readership for its therorically complex and diverse
texts ‘are difﬁcult to analyze precisely’.

Other readings suggest that

the ‘necessary postulate’ for such debate was ‘a free-thinking, open-
speaking court dominated paradoxically by accomplished and witty
women’.

Though this rests upon an idealistic interpretation of Book 3

of Il Cortegiano, women may have been complicit participants in such
literary culture (the quintessentially ludic court literature). This specu-
lation has importance for any consideration of the Bannatyne
‘defences’ of women (in particular, for the status of Scottish women at
court).

In imitating earlier, predominantly medieval disquisitions on

the ‘woman question’, the querelle text per se has been conceived as a
demonstration of rhetorical skills ‘on both sides of the question’.

Bannatyne’s texts reﬂect this dialectic, quasi-scholastic aspect (though
Woodbridge, oddly, excludes the manuscript from the formal contro-
versy on the grounds that it does not foster ‘a sense of genuine
debate’).

This rhetorical and ‘intellectual’ aspect, the demand for ‘at

least the trappings of erudition’, has classed it as a non-popular
genre.

More persuasive is the argument that, like the luve songis

which present woman as a textual and metaphorical posession, the
texts reﬂect the homosocial literary environment (Woman as discursive
commodity) that Sedgwick has analysed.

If the impetus for the cre-

ation and circulation of this querelle literature increased as a conse-
quence of the Marian controversies, then the question of their intent,
serious or not, is weighted with political import.

The continuum between the sangis and the querelle texts can be per-

ceived in literary terms. Many of the lyrics have a similar rhetorical
frame to the sangis. ‘In all this warld no man may wit’, for example, is
devised as a letter of disenchantment:

To yow madame this I indyte
That lang yo

trew lufe haif I bene

Commending me Greiting I wryt…

This reﬂects the empiricism of many songis in which both the beloved
and the readership (or audience) witness the act of writing as a pledge
of ‘authenticity’ or ‘sincerity’. None of the lyrics (with the exception of
the quasi-’ﬂyting’

) entails a high degree of verbal virtuosity or inge-

nuity. Their rhetorical character is generally deﬁned by their citational
‘catalogues’ or ‘lists’ (the catalogue of authorities and allusion to
proverbs), characteristic of the querelle mode in general. The proverbs,

56 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

drawn frequently from the biblical loci of Solomon, are portrayed as
shared wisdom, unquestionable ‘truths’:

Oft tymes hes it bene red and told
Be vitty me[n] that vndirstude
All glitterand thing is not of gold
And ilk fair apill Is not gude
Ane seik heid in a skarlet huid
Oft haiss it bene this we heir say
your fenyeit luve Is lyk the ﬂud

Quhat hand may hald that will away

A series of lyrics precedes what might be termed the denunciations

proper (announced by the inscription, ‘Aganis Wemen’, though
generic or periodic ﬂuidity is a characteristic of the section as a whole).
These poems appear to form a ‘prologue’ which makes a seamless tran-
sition between the genre of love complaint and that of the querelle
renunciation. The lover’s burden of discontent is insidiously shifted
from passion per se to the object of that passion, woman, as if in exten-
sion of Alberti’s remark that ‘You can never love her [woman] without
bitterness, fear, misfortune, and worry. Malevolent creature […]’.

The lyricist’s impatience with the composition of ‘triumphand

amowres balleittis’, for example, amounts to a dual renunciation: of
the practice of love which means also that of loving women.

Desire is

denounced as emasculating: disdain for the contemporary practice of
love writing (a familiar topos in itself) is disclosed as a conventional
masculine anxiety.

Other lyrics or complaints (for example, ‘Thir

lenterne dayis’, against an obdurately deceitful mistress who makes the
lover self-abasing

) propose alternatives to the love of women: either

absolute renunciation; ways by which to outwit the deceitful beloved;
or, as in Clerk’s poem, the transference of love to ‘god/thy prince/and
freind all thre’ (33), each of which offers the possibility of ‘luve moist
permanent’. On occasion, these renunciations have more generically
deﬁned contours: for example, ‘My hart is quhyt/and no delyte/I haif
of ladyeis fair’, conventionally bemoans the incompatibility of sexual
desire and ‘aige’ (the complaint of the senex amans).

One anonymous lyric most aptly exempliﬁes the slippage between

the love complaint and querelle diatribe.

Framed as a querulous

missive (‘To yow madame this I indyte’), it rehearses the conven-
tional topoi of female ﬂaws which are later ampliﬁed by the formal
denunciations. The lover’s collated ‘Evidence’ charges the former

Demonic and Angelic Women 57

beloved with conventional Manichaeism: the beauty of her outer form
belies her inward corruption.

your gudly wordis maid me to trest

that all your talking had bene trew

I was dissauit sone in haist
The cleth was of ane uthir hew…

(25–8)

In contrast to the easily decipherable female subject of the songis, this
woman (and the idea of femininity she therefore embodies) can be
misread by the ingenuous male lover. This is the exemplary charge of
these contemptis: that the ﬁgure of the fallen woman severs the neo-
Platonic correspondence between inner and outer. The beauty of the
female ﬁgure (of which the young lover is to ‘haif no concupiscens’,
the sin of concupiscere which the section’s ﬁnal section vehemently
renounces) is a duplicitous ‘sign’ which eludes interpretation: ‘Bewar
hir signys and ay so amiable/Hold it for serme thay bene dissavable/Lo
ane example quhat woma[n] be/In thair signis and countena[n]s
schortly.’

The systematic and reiterative nature of these detractions as a whole

is best illustrated by using one or two texts as exemplars of the con-
tentions which render the genre in Bannatyne so cohesive an entity.
The rhetorical self-consciousness (or bravura) of the mode is attested
by ‘This work quha sa sall sie or reid’ (one of the series of poems
falsely attributed to Chaucer).

This adopts an expository and didac-

tic posture. ‘This work quha sall sie or reid/Of ony Inco[n]gruitie do
me not Impeche’ (1–2): not only does the term, ‘Inco[n]gruitie’,
gesture towards the pseudo-logical ‘deductioun’ (4) of which the
writer immediately boasts, but the opening phrases depict the text as
a ‘public’ work, inviting its own readers and their judgements.

This

authoritative voice is then particularised as that of the worldly and
mature preceptor, dispensing ‘counsale’ to a ‘yung ma[n]
prosprus…/In thy ﬂowris of lust’ (9–10). ‘To thy confusioun a most
allectiue bait’ (14), is a probable allusion to the popular scholastic
dictum mulier hominis confusio.

Authority begets authority: this pre-

ceptor cites almost verbatim the proverbial ‘wisdom’ of Solomon, a
source ironically tapped by both sides of the debate. The historical
‘embeddedness’ of such allusions means that the texts’s anti-feminism
is almost sheltered under the copious weight of scriptural, patristic

58 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Demonic and Angelic Women 59

and philsophical traditions cited with varying degrees of explicit-
ness.

Confessions of textual authority (for example, in ‘The beistly

lust’ to ‘clerkis awld’, 15) are a common anti-feminist device. The list
of exemplars (for example, in Moffat’s ‘My luve wes fals and full of
ﬂattry’, Chaucerian archetypes and the frequently cited folly of
Virgil) render the lover’s predicament entirely exemplary, and almost
exonerating. The alleged iniquity of one beloved woman serves as a
trope for all women.

In these denunciations, the silenced woman of the songis is ironically

endowed with rhetorical proﬁciency:

My luve was fals and full of ﬂattery
W

cullerit lesingis full of dowbilness

Quhen that scho spak hir toung was wonder sle

fals sembla[n]ce and fenyeit humylness

And inco[n]stance pay[n]tit w

steidfastness

hir frane wes cwverit w

ane piteous face…

(1–6)

This suspicion of the beloved’s language here resonates with echoes
of Proverbs 2.16 (‘the adventuress with her smooth words’) and
Proverbs 7: 10–12 (‘With much seductive speech she persuades
him….’).

Moffat’s stanza entwines woman’s verbal duplicity with

other manifestations of her ability to separate signiﬁer from
signiﬁed. Beauty is speciﬁcally indicted as a malevolent veneer: the
beautiful artiﬁce celebrated in the sangis becomes the proverbial
snare (Ecc. 9:8) which Tertullian’s polemic against female ornamen-
tation expounds at length. Adoration of woman who is mere artiﬁce
is tantamount to idolatry. ‘Birning lust’ ensnares man in a self-
destructive ‘game’; amorous ‘play’, as in the closing metaphor of this
poem, guarantees only damnation. The effort to elide the female
ﬁgure – as communicant or recipient of these texts, and as an object
of desire – might be considered an act of symbolic, almost retaliatory
subjugation. If Woman (or the desire for Woman) ensures the self-
destruction of the male lover, then the denunciatory rhetoric of
these lyrics might be conceived as an attempt to regain self-
possession or autonomy.

The beistly lust the furius appetyt
The haisty wo The verry grit defame

60 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

the blind discretioun the hatrent & dispyte

of wemen kynd that dreidis for no schame
That settis at nocht god Nor ma[n]is blame
Thair lustis so hes nvreist thame but dreid
That all thair trest is thair god cupeid

Female sexuality is threatening by being insatiable.

Woman is

identiﬁed with imperfect and impure matter. This dictum is rooted in
the biblical identiﬁcation of femina with sensuality, and the associated
ﬂaw of irrationality which dictates that Woman be subjected to man.
Reason becomes identiﬁed with exclusion of the feminine.

Since Woman is held to lack the intellectual discipline of reason,

female desire in these lyrics is designated as bestial: ‘Thow cokkatrice
That with sicht of thyne yre…’; ‘Als terne as tygir of tung vntollera-
ble’.

Her sexuality, in essence, is devilish: woman is a ‘diuillis

member’, possessed of ‘serpentis crewaltie’.

Eve is the biblical para-

digm of female cupiditas, moral transgression, and the root of man’s
sinfulness:

Grit was the lust that thow had for to fang
the fruct vetite throw thi ill counsaling

Thow gart mankynd consent to do that wrang

Displeiss his god and brak his hie bidding
As haly writ beiris suthfast witnessing

The section’s anti-marriage poetry, cast mainly in the ‘comic’

medieval mould of molestiae nuptiarum, protests against wifely insubor-
dination: the unruly order in which men are subject to women. In
‘Aganis mariage of evill wyﬁs’, the narrator boasts of his moral and
sexual salvation in refusing wedded subordination:

I can not tell the torment and the pyne
of thame that puttis thair nek this yok to draw
ffull oft he feilis the brod and dar not quhryne

With anger smart than gan his hairt ouirthraw

Lyk to ane quhelp to cowche will beir him law
Than Is he baith hir s[e]rvand and hir knaif
Now is it not a wicket seid to saw
of quhilk no grace nor fruct a ma[n] sall haif

(25–32)

Cumulatively, the texts perpetuate a series of (mis)conceptions about
the relationship between desire and the feminine, attained by a
process of reduction: as the songis reduce femininity to a set of pre-
scribed ideals, so these texts invoke a comparable set of ‘inverted’
stereotypes. Alexander Scott’s rhetorical formulation of female
dualism neatly epitomises this habit of conceptual reduction: ‘That
famenene ar of this ﬁgour/quhilk clippit is antiphracis’.

The ﬁgure

of Woman, already conventionalised or reiﬁed by the earlier section,
is transformed into a ﬁgure itself. As in the former songis, the femi-
nine becomes part of a hermeneutic enterprise: how can the sign
‘Woman’ be interpreted?

Such ideological and linguistic argument resembles the anti-femi-

nist rhetoric of both the anti-Marian pamphlets and of the
Detectioun. Though early modern anti-feminism might be said to
have a relatively restricted rhetorical discourse and conceptual scope
(hence its reiterativeness), it seems plausible to argue that
Buchanan’s work, the broadside pamphlets, and the denunciatory
poems of the querelle section can be considered as ‘parallel’ texts.

Yet, just as the songis persuasively belong to the period of the
Darnley courtship and marriage, so might the querelle denunications
correspond to the subsequent period of the royal nuptial crisis, and
the beginning of Mary’s fall from political and moral grace. One can
begin to perceive an implicit Marian narrative to Bannatyne’s erotic
corpus.

The overarching philosophy of Bannatyne’s amatory section is the

inextricability of Woman and cupiditas: possessed of the power to
inculcate ‘birna[n]d lust’.

Yet among these vicious contra querelle

poems is a sign of redemption:

Cleir of corss And clenar of Intent
quhilk buir the barne that coverit ws frome cair
scho beand virgin clenar tha[n] scho war.

At the conclusion of a lyric which has denounced woman’s devilish
‘lust and pryd’, the notion of Our Lady’s redemptive purity is sud-
denly introduced, and Woman – as if in imitatio Maria – is purged of
the association with sexuality. The Manichaeism of which de
Beauvoir writes is tautly illustrated by this lyric, and ampliﬁed in the
manuscript’s next ‘sub-section’, the ‘contempis of evill/fals vicious
men’, which extols both the Virgin and the secular ideal of the
earthly ‘angelic’ woman.

Demonic and Angelic Women 61

The angelic woman and the place of Mariology

Thairfoir I reid that to our lyvis end
ffro this tyme fur

quhill that we haif space

quhair we haif trespassid persew to ame[n]d

Praying chryst Iesu well of all grace
To bring ws unto that blissfull place
Quhair all gude weme[n[ salbe in feir
In hevin aboif amang the angell[is] cleir

The ‘Ballattis of the prayis of wemen and to the reproche of men’ advo-
cate the secular and spiritual adoration of woman. The philosophical,
theological and rhetorical arguments of these texts wholly conform to
those of contemporary and later pro-querelle literature: for example, as
in Robert Vaughan’s A Dialogue defensyve for women agayanst malycius
detractors (1542), there are the claims that misogyny develops through
personal experience of betrayal; that men, not women, are intrinsically
duplicitous; that the detraction of women is an affront to God. These
are all contentions echoed in the famous polemics of Jane Anger and
others, as well as in a number of isolated poems in defence of women
in other English poetic miscellanies. Yet the critical and cultural
neglect of this section means that its relationship to the concepts of
the ideal feminine expounded by the initial songis are obscured. Female
sexuality ironically holds the key which unlocks the idea of the angelic
woman in both secular and religious realms: her sexual purity is the
only state which can save men from the iniquities of sexual desire, and
allow women a shard of moral grace.

The text which can be claimed as the section’s argumentative kernel is

the ‘L[ett]re of cupeid’. It is also the longest, and in the manuscript
appears wrongly attributed to Chaucer.

The text is a copy of Thomas

Hoccleve’s translation of L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (1399) by Christine
de Pisan (1365–1436?) made three years later in 1402.

The Bannatyne

copy exists as one of eleven copies of Hoccleve’s poem; it also appears in
another Scottish courtly miscellany, Oxford Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B.
24, which contains the unique copy of The Kingis Quair, ascribed to
James I.

Hoccleve’s poem has caused critical controversy. A substan-

tially attenuated version of Christine’s poem, the latter framed as a
missive from the god of love to aberrant male lovers who abuse women,
innately gentle and virtuous, Hoccleve’s poem has been termed both a
faithful adaptation and an anti-feminist travesty of the intellectual and
aesthetic qualities of Christine’s original.

While Diane Bornstein’s

62 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

argument for the latter is particularly persuasive, Bannatyne’s placing
of the poem remains interesting, offering a new contextualisation
which, in its status as an ostensible female ‘defence’, seems to gesture
towards the original polemical impulse of L’Epistre. Ironically, an unac-
knowledged female textual authority exists in Bannatyne (as if to
counter the spurious Chaucerian), which creates its own web of cul-
tural and literary associations.

L’Epistre and other works by Christine (1365–c1430) ensured her a

canonical role in the creation and dissemination of the European
querelle des femmes, or more precisely at that time the querelle de rose in
allusion to the French courtly allegory, Le Roman de la Rose.

Her pow-

erful critiques of the courtly, literary ideologies which distortingly
sacralise and desecrate the role of women and femininity engender
claims that hers is the ‘ﬁrst feminist voice’, creating ‘a space for women
to oppose this onslaught of viliﬁcation and contempt, and the example
of her defence was to serve them for centuries…’.

The existence of

Hoccleve’s version of Christine’s poem ironically renders this cogent
female defence through a masculine ‘voice’ so that its act of ‘reclama-
tion’ appears ‘ventriloquised’. Nevertheless, the version as it exists in
Bannatyne is preoccupied with the gendering of desire: the procedures
of a sexual courtship and morality controlled wholly by men, and the
canons of male-authored secular and sacred texts. Bannatyne’s inclu-
sion of Hoccleve’s poem allows, at least rhetorically, a feminine inter-
pellation in the manuscript’s predominantly masculine inventions of
desire. Bannatyne’s ‘recontextualisation’ of the Christine–Hoccleve
poem works simultaneously as both reclamation and containment of
Woman.

In generall we will that ye knaw
That ladyis of honour and of reuerens
And uthir gentill wemen having saw
Sic seid of complaynt in our audiens

of men that done thame outtrage and offens

That it our eiris grevith for to heir
So peteus is the effect of this mateir

(8–14)

Woman’s traditional passivity as reader, audience or lover is subverted
in this second stanza. In contrast to the preceding ‘contemptis’, the
trope of verbal duplicity now changes gender:

Demonic and Angelic Women 63

64 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Sa can tha men dissy[m]mill and fayne
W

standing droppis in thair ene twayne

Quhen that thair hairtis feilis no distress
To blindyn wemen w

thair dowbilness

(18–21)

The toung of ma[n] so swyft is and so wicht

That quhen it is raysid vpon loft
Ressone is schewin so slawly and soft
That it him nevir ourtak may

(143–6)

This inversion of the anti-feminist charge of garrulousness is echoed in
subsequent Bannatyne poems: ‘Lo how reddy thair [men’s] toungis
bene and prest/To speik of harme of wemen causles…’ nor ‘list no

heir the fair wirdis ye wryte…’.

The ‘L[ett]re’ proceeds to accuse the

male lover of ‘blind affectioun’, abandoning the beloved after sexual
possession (51) before boasting of his conquest and treachery (63–70).
His denunciation of women as faithless and promiscuous (99ff) is
exposed as the invention purely of male ‘invy’ and inadequacy.
Another of Bannatyne’s ‘defence’ lyrics echoes this; the lover can never
possess her because she eludes him morally:

Thus may ye se that thay bene faultless
And Innocent to all your werkis sle
And all your craft that twich falsness
Thay knaw thame no

nor may thame no

espy

So sueir ye that ye most neid[is] de…

Thus for to confort and sum quhat do yow cheir

Tha[n] will thais Iangleris deme of hir full ill
And say that ye hir haif fully at yo

will

While Hoccleve’s poem is not as speciﬁc in its indictment of anti-femi-
nist literature as Christine’s (she names Jean de Meun and Ovid), it
condemns ‘scollaris’ and ‘clerkis’ who interiorise the fear of female sex-
uality from books ‘lernid in thair chyldheid’ (211) and produce their
own intellectual form of sexual vengeance:

Tho

awld dottaris addressit thair delyte

To dyt of ladeis the defamatioun

Na wirthy wicht suld sett his appetyte
To reid sic rollis of reprobatioun

in till all bukis yat I cowld fynd or reid

The crymes of me[n] dois weme[n]is vyce exceid

As in L’Epistre, traditional misogynistic narratives proclaiming female

corruption from a conventional biblical, mythical and historical reper-
toire are revised: Helen’s culpability in the destruction of Troy, for
example (‘L[ett]re’, 81ff). The litany of female virtues espoused by the
‘L[ett]re’ deﬁnes their redemptive difference from men:

Wemen hairt vnto no crewaltie
inclynid is bot thay be cheritable
peteouss devout full of humylite
Schamefast debonar and amiable

Dreidfull and of word[is] mesurable…

(344–8)

Woman’s moral sanctiﬁcation is partly derived from her maternal
role: ‘That of a woma[n] he discendit is/Than is it schame of hir to
speik a miss’ (174–5). While Christine’s poem lovingly ampliﬁes the
maternal, it also serves as an ‘exonerating’ trope in other Bannatyne
poems within this section. Woman’s nurturing role exerts moral
restraint:

ffor we aucht to think on quhat maner

Thay bring ws furth and quhat pane thay indure

ﬁrst in our birth and syne fro yeir to yeir
how besaly thay haif done thair bussy cure
To keip ws fro every misauentur
In our yewth quhen we haif no micht…

100

This adoration of motherhood ironically works to desexualise

woman, conferring on her a kind of divinity (cf. 1 Cor 11: ‘for as
woman was made from man, so man is now born from woman. And
all things are from God…’). Men accordingly ought to mould them-
selves in women’s image: ‘Bot thay be as wemen ocht to be…’
(‘L[ett]re’, 300).

The exultation of ‘earthly’ motherhood naturally culminates in

Christine’s L’Epistre in reverence of the Blessed Virgin.

Demonic and Angelic Women 65

And god to quhome thair may no thing hid be

Gife he in weme[n] had knawin suche malice
As me[n] record of thame in generalte
Off our Lady of lyfe reperatryce
Nold haif bene borne bot that scho of vyce
Was woyd / and full of vertew weill he wist
Endewid of hir to be borne him list

Hir he aped vertew haith sic excellence
That all to leif his ma[n]is faculte
To declair it/ and thairfoir in suspence
hir dew preysing put neid[is] most be
Bot thiss I say veraly that sche
Is blissit of god to quhois sone belongith
The key of m[er]cy by his girdill hongith

(‘L[ett]re’, 400–13)

Mary’s conception of Christ the Saviour (‘And eftir borne and bocht us
fro ye blame’

101

) is exalted as the archetypal feminine salvation which

is embodied thereafter in the types of moral and spiritual grace which
earthly women confer on men: ‘Ladeis ar me[n]is parradyiss erdly’.

102

The Virgin’s function is signiﬁcant not only within the

L’Epistre/L[ett]re’ context, but in this Bannatyne section as a whole.
The apparent disparity between the earlier songis and these ‘defences’ is
bridged by the mariology of both modes. In the former, allusion to the
Virgin, ‘mary myld the maid Immaculat’,

103

represents the apotheosis

of the sexual innocence enshrined in the secular beloved. The argu-
ment of the songis has come full circle. Mary, semper virgo, emerges as
the paradigm for the secular lyric beloved who symbolises grace for her
lover; secular and sacred roles of womanhood are fused:

ffor in reuere[n]s of the hevy[n]nis quene
We awcht to wirschip all weme[n] that bene

ffor of all creaturis that evir wer get and born
Thus wot ye weill a woma[n] was the best

By hir sone wes recouerid the bliss that we had lorne

And thruch hir sone sall we come to rest
And bene ysavit gife that our self lest
Quhairfoir methinkis gif ye haif grace
We ochtin weme[n] honor in every place

104

66 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Here, both the Marian argument and the gloriﬁcation of heroic vir-

ginity (itself a signiﬁcant aspect of mariological worship) are rooted in
established theological and philosophical vindications of woman’s
alleged sinfulness. The Virgin was conceived as a Second Eve: ‘just as
the former was led astray by the word of an angel, so that she ﬂed from
God when she had transgressed His word; so did the latter, by an
angelic communication, receive the glad tidings that she should be the
bearer of God, being obedient to His word.’

105

The name ‘Eve’ acquired

a mystical mariological signiﬁcance as Eve could mean vae, misfortune,
but also vita, life; Eva was an anagram for Ave; to evoke Eve was to
invoke Mary. Women’s presence at the Resurrection was recompense
for Eve’s transgression. The rehabilitation of Eve occurred through
arguments e nomine (Eve means life); ex ordine (Eve was the last created
thing, thus most perfect); e materia (Eve was made of living ﬂesh, Adam
of earth); e loco (Eve was created in Paradise, Adam outside); and
e conceptione (the Incarnation of the Son of God within woman).

And gif it hap a man be in diseiss
Scho dois hir bussines and hir full pane
W

all hir micht him to confort and eiss

Gif fro his diseiss scho mycht him restrane

In word nor deid ywiss scho will no

fane

Bot w

all hir micht scho dois hir business

To bring him out of his haviness

106

The Virgin’s role of pity and tenderness is emulated by the mortal
woman who acts selﬂessly as man’s helpmate: ‘to gloir humane thay
mak habilite’.

107

Mary’s declaration in the Gospel of Luke that she is

‘the handmaid of the Lord’ is echoed in this ﬁnal exoneration of fallen
femininity. The Marian virtues of humility, patience and suffering
partly render the Bannatyne ‘defences’ of woman as a gloriﬁcation of
obedience: not only, as the Blessed Virgin, to the Word of God, but to
the will of man and, if the overarching erotic context is recalled, to the
male lover also. The complexity of the arguments outlined above for
Mary as the Second Eve is therefore more restricted than ﬁrst appears.
As Bornstein notes, Hoccleve’s poem omits two further arguments
advanced by Christine about Eve which are those e materia and e loco.
In addition, Bornstein observes how Hoccleve’s poem qualiﬁes
Christine’s celebration of the Virgin’s tender, maternal humanity.

108

lines 400–13 quoted above illustrate, her role as intercessor is empha-
sised, and it is as an intermediary fount of grace, and as a model of

Demonic and Angelic Women 67

virginity, that she appears in the other Bannatyne ‘defences’.
Strikingly, Hoccleve’s poem introduces Saint Margaret as an exemplum
of chastity: ‘Thow precious gemme/martir Margarete/Of thy blood
dreddist noon effusioun/Thy martirdom/ ne may We nat foryete/O
constant womman in thy passioun/Ouercam the feendes tempta-
cioun/And many a wight/ conuerted thy doctryne/Vn to the feith of
god/ holy virgyne’ (421–7).

109

Quinn contends that this new praise of

Margaret’s virginity makes the ‘Letter’ more ‘bourgeois’ and ‘conserva-
tive’ than Christine’s original.

110

A similar process of ‘conversion’ may

be observed throughout the Bannatyne series of ‘defences’. In the
latter’s version of this Hoccleve stanza, however, praise of the holy
Margaret is subtly altered: rather than an exemplary martyr in the third
line, she is extolled as ‘Thow luvar trew thow madin mansueit’.

111

Protestant sensitivities work again to expurgate, transforming hagio-
graphical medieval female sanctity into mild, obedient womanhood.

Despite this, the attempted exaltation in this penultimate ‘subsec-

tion’ of holy virginity and secular morality still recalls the didactic,
exhortatory discourse of the ﬁrst songis, and their quasi-conduct book
precepts of female virtue. The female subject which these texts glorify
is intended to be ediﬁed:

I breif this bill to yow in generall

ladeis and mady[n]is that yarnis fra reprufe

yow to conserf and als for your behufe
That ye defend and keip yow fra dissait
And yow to teich all ﬁlthy lyfe to hait

112

Their sexuality must be restrained (‘wit’ must discipline ‘will’, an
implicitly masculine reason subdue feminine emotion) if their reputa-
tion, and their virginity, is to remain intact.

113

The lyric ascribed to

‘Mersar’ prescribes the correct sexual conduct:

haif mynd how gude is to haif a gude name
And tha[n] na cryme sall your grit wirchep fyle

haif mynd how bernis hes brocht birdis to blame

And latt na grome w

gabing yow begyle

(15–18)

The mariological signiﬁcance of the Bannatyne ‘defence’ of women

is clearly centred on the concept of glorious virginity; this in turn

68 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

preﬁgures the ascetic renunciations of sinful cupiditas in the ﬁnal fourth
section of the luve ballattis. The Virgin’s obedience also becomes ‘secu-
larised’ as a model for all women and their response to desire. Yet it is
important to realise that her perfection consists not only in her ‘passive’
ﬁdelity, but as an instrument of the divine plan, her active role in
the Incarnation and Redemption.

114

The complexity with which the

Virgin’s role is imagined within this overlooked section of the querelle
suggests that it possesses a greater intellectual sophistication than the
preceding contra section. In itself, the admission of the Virgin into this
clearly Protestantised text, or rather her apparent survival within it, is
surprising. While the manuscript is not overtly ‘anti-Marian’, its invoca-
tions of the Virgin are found at a particular historical moment when the
idea of the Catholic feminine was associated with the ﬁgure of Mary,
the devout Catholic queen of a Reformed nation. Several reasons for
this may be conjectured. The mariology of the Bannatyne manucript
may reﬂect aspects of the Reformation acceptance, even ‘rehabilitation’,
of Marian devotion rather than its absolute rejection. ‘Reformation’, of
course, was not a sudden process.

115

The Blessed Virgin remained as the

supreme model of faith in the word of God (sola ﬁde), and as the
guarantor of the reality of the Incarnation and of Christ’s humanity.
The Marian presence in Bannatyne’s ‘erotic’ corpus also forms a
counterpart to the predominantly Christological nature of the
manuscript’s religious section proper, and mirrors in a different way the
latter’s doctrinally ‘sanctioned’ mariology.

116

What Annabel Patterson

terms ‘the hermeneutics of censorship’,

117

evident in the Bannatyne

context as the gradual transformation of Catholic into Reformed
devotion, is peculiarly complex.

The circular feminine

Bannatyne’s luve ballattis are not erotic poems, pure and simple; the
intricate ideological ediﬁce of femininity that they construct precludes
such transparency. These are texts adrift from their original contexts of
production; however ideological or politicised, their intellectual and
cultural status remains equivocal. Were they assembled as a deliberate
imitation of or contribution to the querelle des femmes tradition; or to
reﬂect fashionable courtly preoccupations with the nature of femininity
and sexual courtship? Does their assertion about women’s spiritual
equality, rooted in theological models of redemptive femininity, mirror
a genuine intellectual sea-change, or a fashionable hermeneutic debate?
One might argue that the defenses construct a counter-stereotype of

Demonic and Angelic Women 69

female purity, and advocate chastity as a means of social containment.
As in the anti-Marian texts, female sexuality returns to being the tradi-
tional locus of sin. The subsections or pairtis of the amatory section –
the songis, the two forms of ‘Contemptis’, and the ‘ballattis detesting of
luve […]’ – are not disparate but intimately bound up by the concept of
female sexuality. Its unlicensed, unregulated expression is seen to
threaten man’s moral integrity, an idealised, ‘prelapsarian’ vision of
femininity, and the conservative social order. Though the querelle
debate formally concludes before it begins, the ﬁnal section, ‘ballattis
detesting of luve’, extends these preoccupations. The ﬁgure of Woman
still functions as a kind of symbolic scapegoat. In philosophical terms,
the renunciations in this subsection (eleven lyrics, including three by
William Dunbar) perpetuate the orthodox antithesis between cupiditas
and caritas. The former, and rarely the latter, is emphasised; retribution
for ﬂeshly sins, rather than beatiﬁc apotheosis, recurs:

Woluptuous lyfe quhy thinkis tho so sueit
Knawing the deth that no ma[n] may ewaid
Syne perseveiris in ﬂesly lust and heit…
Repent in tyme devoyd the of this laid
And knaw in hell thair is Eternall pane

118

Alexander Scott’s ‘Ye blyndit luvaris luke’ presents a vision of desire as
‘com[m]oun m[er]chandyce’, the devalued commodity of prosti-
tutes.

119

These extended renunciations perpetuate the notion of

woman as the root of man’s culpability: bestiality, corrupted reason,
excessive ‘affectione’ are all embodied in the querelle’s fallen woman.
Again, female sexual purity is conceived as a precious ‘gift’ in this
address ‘To the madin’:

The noble giftis of chestitie precell
Off vertewis it is Maist principall
Na [per]sone can expryme defyne nor tell
The godly vertew virginiall
ffor the devyne theologgis uniu[er]sall

And awld autto

[is] of maist excelle[n]t gre

Aboif all giftis thay preffer chestetie

120

Gavin Douglas’s fourth prologue to his Eneados is a complex exposition
of ‘the twa luvis’, earthly and divine, an apt summation of the theo-
logical position which Bannatyne’s preface to the erotic section ﬁrst

70 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

promised. Its inclusion in the last subsection (appended to the ‘formal’
conclusion, ff. 291r–297v; the erotic section accordingly ends twice),
may also be signiﬁcant for its inscribed apostrophe ‘To virgynis’.
Possession of true ‘womanheid’ is only merited by the qualiﬁcation of
‘bewtie’ and ‘honestie’:

Rew on your self ladyis and madyins ying
grant na sic rewith for evir ma causs yow rew
ye fresche gallandis in hait desyre birni[n]g
refrene your curage sic paramouris to [per]sew
Ground your amouris on cheretie all new

found yow on ressoun quhat neidis moir to preiche

god grant yow grace in lufe as I yow teiche

121

The ‘ending’ of the luve ballattis can adequately be interpreted

within an intellectual and religious framework of sacred and profane
love, the ‘twa luvis’ in Douglas’s terms. This confers a conceptual
rigour and expositional clarity on the whole section which culminates
in the love of God; except that it is not the gloriﬁed neo-Platonic love,
but one which renders irreparable the breach between each. Woman
cannot serve as the mediator of divine love: she is man’s diversion
rather than pathway to salvation. In the poems of this ﬁnal subsection,
she serves as an emblem of vanitas. ‘by hir mowth dampnit’: the faith-
less female lover is rebuked in a phrase which recalls the vagina dentata
of Kennedy’s poem, ‘Ane aigit man’.

122

She deprives man of moral and

physical potential to which the litany of suffering men in one anony-
mous poem bears witness: Palamedes, Hercules, Pyramus, Jason and
other mythical and historical protagonists.

123

Woman, in this ﬁnal

section, is ultimately transformed into a metaphor for love itself: the
trope of duplicity, ‘variance…vnstabilnes…chenge’, deﬁnes both.

124

While the section lies formally outside the scope of the manuscript’s
querelle des femmes movement, its understanding of pernicious desire is
still predominantly gendered feminine.

Ultimately, then, Bannatyne’s querelle poetry can be seen to perpetuate
the manichaeistic concept of Woman and the feminine. Its inclusion
within an avowedly amatory context (‘ballattis of luve’) intensiﬁes and
makes more explicit the myth of female duality: Woman as fallen and
angelic, an extended exemplum of the common medieval image of the

Demonic and Angelic Women 71

serpent in the Garden of Eden with the face of a beautiful girl.

125

This

extensive collection of lyrics, varied in length and rhetorical compe-
tence, may be said to constitute a larger, single erotic text through
which is woven a number of discrete cultural, religious, and political
threads. All, whether indirectly or directly, return to Mary.

These ballattis of luve may justly be regarded as both the origin and

summation of the ways in which desire is incarnate in early modern
Scottish writing. It represents a manuscript culture of textual compila-
tion and bricolage that displays a fascination with the possibilities and
limits of the rhetorical, and implies a courtly, recreational and intellec-
tual culture in which transactions of erotic poetry take place. The texts
articulate a concept of the feminine that oscillates between ideas of the
fallen and the redemptive. The association of Woman with sin within
a larger discursive context of erotic utterance perpetually recurs in the
profane poetry of the Jacobean reign. But it is the historical conso-
nance between Mary’s reign and the compilation of Bannatyne’s man-
uscript that remains provocative, if irresolvably so. The querelle poetry,
and the ﬁnal excoriation of women and sexuality in the fourth section,
reﬂect the political crisis of female sovereignty in 1560s Scotland, and
an attendant cultural crisis of the feminine; ‘a readership learns to
abhor queenship, idolatry, and fornication’.

126

And yet the model of instruction, and the object of adoration, which

is offered to that readership is ‘heavinis quene’.

127

Within an appar-

ently ideologically resculpted, Protestantised text, Our Lady intercedes
as a model of grace for the fallen women of the querelle (but not, one
might note, for the general sinful lovers of the ﬁnal section). The
admission of Marian veneration may reﬂect Bannatyne’s ‘retrospective
and moderate’ tendencies, aesthetic and doctrinal; but if the manu-
script was collated, as has been persuasively argued, in a climate of
Reformation censorship, why would Bannatyne solicit the accusation
of idolatrousness? Clearly, any substantial process of ideological emen-
dation or excision is complex in a decade as politically and culturally
changeful as the 1560s; one might even suggest that Bannatyne
neither wanted to alienate a potential Catholic or pro-Marian reader-
ship, nor to excise texts that were needed to complete the philosophi-
cal and theological patterning of the feminine in the luve ballattis
corpus. The manuscript’s assemblage is demonstrably artful, at least.
Yet the twin Marian presences, earthly and divine, of the erotic corpus
speak ultimately of the ineradicability of the feminine. While
Bannatyne’s texts are ﬁerce expressions of early modern misogyny,
the redemptive, salviﬁc power of the Virgin seems almost an equally

72 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

powerful act of contestation. The symbolic endurance of Regina Maria
and, through her, the implicit evocation of Mary Stewart, manages to
evoke the power of both queens as the existence of each in different
ways was becoming increasingly fragile. Neither the revocation of eros,
nor Mary, nor of unreformed devotion, could yet be achieved.

Demonic and Angelic Women 73

Part II

The Jacobean Period

Fables of Eros: James VI and the
Revelation of Desire

‘And would God she might see the inward parts of my heart where she
should see a great jewel of honesty toward her locked up in a coffer of
perplexity.’

James’s plea about Elizabeth is made in a letter which

seeks repeal of the English parliament’s recent petition for Mary’s ex-
ecution. The remark is interesting, not least for the way in which it
echoes the conceit of interiority found in the king’s poetry and politi-
cal prose of the 1580s and 1590s. It proclaims an emotional ‘authentic-
ity’ or purity, but one that is recondite or recalcitrant, ‘locked up’ or
sealed from outward representation, as if in evocation of the Marian
casket emblem. This contradiction underpins the king’s amatory
writing where processes of revelation, identity and disclosure gain
erotic, as well as political, investment. Jamesian eros is caught on two
thresholds: between public, or published, and private representations
of sovereign ‘selves’ and sovereignty; and between the notion of the
text as an instrument of revelation and ‘truth’, and as a vulnerable
embodiment of desire requiring a ‘protective’ or evasive shell.
Protection or ‘shelter’ from mendacious and expedient interpretation
was precisely what Marian eros had been denied. While the name of
Mary was so securely fastened to the casket-sonnets, and the concept
of an incontestable sovereign self inextricable from their expression of
desire, ‘self-representation’ in Jamesian love poetry, by contrast, is
unstable or unﬁxed. This is partly a consequence of the new literary
culture of Jacobean Renaissance Scotland which, by the early 1580s,
was emerging as a tightly knit, self-sustaining aesthetic court culture;
poetic practice, to some degree, could become a courtly recreation, an
art which grew out of a collaborative, coterie culture.

Yet, though its culture both cherished and cultivated the arts of

poetic duplicity and ludic playfulness, ‘ofﬁcial’ Jamesian poetics (the

poetry which was printed) extols literature by virtue of its verisimili-
tude, proclaiming it a ‘viue mirror of this last and most decreeped
age.’

Yet James’s ‘unofﬁcial’ poetry, ‘all the kings short poesis/that ar

not printed’,

seems to shun this ideal of mimesis. Despite Francis

Bacon’s comment that James was renowned for ‘Prophane and
Humane’ literature as well as ‘Divine and Sacred’,

the profane poetry

which was erotic in nature never entered the ofﬁcial canon of the
king’s poetry, those texts published within his own lifetime, especially
the collected 1616 edition. It is words of love which are rarely con-
tained within the Jamesian ideal of representational art. Sovereign love
poetry in the Jacobean period weaves its own symbolic veil and
hermeneutic web so that, where the loving self is articulated, it is
always in danger of its own dissolution or transformation. James’s
eroticisation of the word, at the unconscious or subliminal level of the
text, constantly summons up the delicate Marian question of whether
desiring and sovereign selves can ever co-exist. Indeed, within the
‘ofﬁcial’ literary treatise of his early reign, the Reulis and Cautelis
(1584), the king concentrates little upon the theoretical or technical
exposition of love poetry. Rather, he seems contradictorily to assign
erotic poetry a kind of rhetorical disingenuousness: as if, like the love
words ascribed to his mother, Mary, they speak intimately of their
author. Though erotic discourse is conceived as a rhetorical golden
mean, ‘commoun language with some passionate wordis’,

its expres-

sive or emotive capacity stands as its most intense power of
signiﬁcation. Full of ‘passionate wordis’, the textual signiﬁer of love
bears the hallmark or the impresa of transparency; hence, one might
have thought, fulﬁlment of the Jamesian representational ideal. ‘vse
wilfull reasonis, proceeding rather from passioun, nor reasoun…’: the
lover’s discourse is exonerated from the analytic and logical qualities
extolled in the ‘Sonnet decifring the perfyte poete’ and elsewhere.

Reason, naturally, cannot tolerate the exigencies of desire. The corol-
lary of these precepts of profane ‘loue’ is that the ideal Jacobean text of
love should be endowed with a kind of integrity or sincerity; implic-
itly, the erotic poem stands as a ‘glasse and picture viue’.

In practice,

though frequently sensuous and visual, the king’s own incarnations of
eros revoke and render equivocal this desired art of reﬂection and cor-
respondence which is held to lie in the enargeiac power of language.
Rather than instituting the connection between royally and divinely
authored words,

Jamesian love poetry may be seen as the embodiment

of provisionality, fragility, and paradox; the ironic vulnerability of
kingly eros gives rise to playfulness but also implies that the most

78 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

precious desire is one which is enfolded or encased by its own interpre-
tative evasiveness.

Contexts of Jamesian eros

The corpus of twenty love lyrics ascribed to James, known as the
Amatoria, is principally contained in two manuscripts, BL Add. MS
24195 (‘All the kings short poesis’) and Bodley MS 165, both of which
display a degree of editorial revision clearly independent of James
himself.

In Add. MS 24195, both the main title, ‘ […] the kings schort

poesis’, and the majority of the prefatory titles, are considered later
additions chieﬂy by Charles I which, in itself, deepens the problematic
notion of royal ‘authenticity’.

Curtis Perry has recently discovered a

further manuscript, BL Add. MS 22601, which contains copies of the
major Amatoria texts, some of which are structurally reorganised, and
an attribution to Sir Thomas Erskine (‘Sr Thomas Areskine of Gogar’).

This discovery further complicates the existing degree of textual inter-
ference in the previous two manuscripts, already implying that their
extant texts are to a degree imperfect and corrupt. Perry persuasively
proposes that the discovery of Add. MS 22601 points to a collaborative
venture between James and Erskine (lifelong friends, as Perry notes),
rather than wholly negating the king’s authorship of these texts.
Consequently, the title of one sonnet, ‘To the Queene Anonimos’, may
perhaps be construed as a playful acknowledgement of collaboration, a
wilful evasion of kingly identity (though the corroborated title of Add.
MS 24195 still implies some desire to lay sovereign authorial claim to
the corpus). Accordingly, the collaborative nature of the amatory texts
attributed to James can coherently be conceived as the natural product
of a literary environment of exchange and intertextual allusion. A
further argument for the collection’s coherence can be defended on the
basis of its apparent inclusion of recurrent metaphors and symbols of
Jacobean poetry.

It is likely that the Amatoria texts found various circles of reception:

within the immediate Jacobean coterie, and within more extended
royal and courtly circles.

One interesting possibility about the way in

which James’s poetry belonged to coterie formations, acting as part of
its social transactions as it were, is provided by a letter in 1589 from
James to Lady Jean Douglas, widow of Archibald Douglas, Earl of
Angus, concerning her prospective marriage to Alexander Lindsay who
was created Lord Spynie by James in 1590.

In assuming the roles of

‘actor, solicitor, and bestower’,

the king overtly seeks to procure the

Fables of Eros 79

marriage: ‘Madame, as my sonnet says, I am and must continue best
friend to you both “sen sa is”’.

This self-referential literary gesture is

suggestive: either it implies that James has sent a copy of his sonnet to
her, thus rendering it almost as a textual transaction in the courtship;
or the intertextual gesture simply implies the well-known existence of
the sonnet in manuscript circulation. At any rate, the sonnet has to
some degree become part of a social or erotic contract.

It might be

conceived as a kind of miniaturised counterpart to the ‘Epithalamion’
orchestrated by James for the wedding in 1588 of George Gordon, 6

Earl of Huntly and Henrietta Stewart, daughter of Esmé Stewart, Duke
of Lennox, with whom James had been politically and erotically
intimate.

Though the inner Jacobean coterie in the 1580s and early 1590s

appears to be composed of male courtier-writers, this sovereign-
orchestrated homosocial culture, and its attendant homoeroticism,
embraces women in its literary rituals of exchange and dedication. The
subject of the Jamesian lyric, ‘A dreame on his Mistris Lady Glammis’,
can be identiﬁed as Anne, daughter of Sir John Murray, who became
the ﬁrst Earl of Tullibardine, ‘a companion of the King’s childhood and
later master of his household’, who married Patrick Lyon, Lord Glamis,
in 1595.

Another lyric, inscribed ‘A complaint on his Mistres absence

from court’, mourns an absent female courtier:

The Court as garland lacks the cheefest ﬂoure

The Court a chatton toome that lackes her stone
The Court is like a volier at this houre
Wherout of is her sweetest Sirene gone.
Then shall we lacke our cheefest onlie one?
No, pull not from ws cruell cloude I praye

Our light, our rose, our gemme, our bird awaye.

Whether written independently or even collaboratively by James, the
sense of collective courtly privation seems to possess a sovereign locus;
this deepens the lyric’s delicate, ironic reﬂection upon the subject of
courtliness itself. The court is crystallised as a ‘statelie ﬂeeting castle
faire/On smoothe and glassie salt dois softlie slide/With snowie sheets
all ﬂafﬁng here and thaire/So deck’d and trim’d as she were Neptunes
bride’ (1–4),

and therefore as a beautiful but ultimately fragile artefact

in a kind of metonymic displacement of the subject herself (immi-
nently to be a bride?). No longer governed by Venus but by Pluto
(‘Since by thy absence heauen in hell is changed/And we as Diuells in

80 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Plutoes court are ranged’, 41–2), evocation of the once feminine, or
feminised, court is subsumed into a more philosophic reﬂection on
worldly vicissitude, as though the standard trope of anticurial literature
were being voiced by the sovereign himself.

Within the immediate context, this need not constitute a critique of

the poem’s female subject. It is easy to indict James of anti-feminism;
granted the well-known misogyny espoused by the king in his tract of
the Daemonologie (1597) and the systematic expounding of female sub-
ordination in the Basilikon Doron (1599), critical interest has fastened
upon the poem inscribed a ‘Satire against Woemen’ in the Amatoria
collection.

Incarnations of the diabolic woman enter the Jamesian

amatory canon on several other, far less substantial occasions.
Goldberg claims that ‘James’s attacks on women explore the strategies
of discursive power, the negations and disclaimers and the annihilative
erasures that ensure the monarch’s freedom and truth’.

In the present

context, the ‘discursive power’ of the constellation of sonnets in the
Amatoria nominally addressed to Anna is explored. But rather than per-
ceive these lyrics to shore up monarchical power, or to place them
solely within Jamesian anti-feminist discourse, the present reading
contextualises them within the erotic strategies of the collection as a
whole which, it is argued, rest upon a poetics of fragmentation and dis-
solution. The formation of a political sovereign identity is constantly
annulled or rendered fragile by the poetry’s own erotic pressures, and
the giving of oneself up to the Other in the act of love. The apogee of
this poetics is found in Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called
Phoenix, a poem of death, eros and mourning, and the only love poem
by the king which was ever printed.

Structures of desire: the ‘Anna sonnets’

On 5 September 1589, at the age of fourteen, the sovereign bride Anna
of Denmark began a sea-voyage to Scotland that failed and postponed
the nuptial union between herself and James until 23 November in
Oslo.

This historical moment seemingly underpins the eleven

sonnets which begin the Amatoria, and the story of desire which these
sonnets narrate, whether prophetically or retrospectively, mirror the
larger stories of desire which have been told about the marriage of
Anna and James.

The colophon titles above the ﬁrst four sonnets in

Add. MS 24195, ‘A complaint against the contrary Wyndes that hin-
dered the Queene to com to Scotland from Denmarke’, ‘To the
Queene’, ‘To the Queene, Anonimos’,

imply that these opening

Fables of Eros 81

sonnets do indeed constitute a miniature sequence to Anna. Whether
as a consequence of later editorial revisions or structural reconstitution,
a narrative of the marriage and courtship has been deftly imposed
upon the sonnets; the result is a number of persuasive assumptions
which, however, bear unwarranted certainty: ‘The opening lines of this
sonnet [the third] make it certain that it was composed after James had
arrived in Norway towards the end of October 1589, its closing ones
suggest that it was actually written after he had met Anne of Denmark
for the ﬁrst time about the middle of the next month.’

These sonnets

promise the illusion of the emotional and historical veritas which
James formulates in his theory of representational poetics; and they
institute Anna as the subject of erotic desire when she is markedly
absent as such in Scottish Jacobean poetry as a whole. Yet, given the
collaborative, coterie context from which these Anna sonnets stem, it
might be useful to regard these texts as the counterpart to the theatri-
cal, staged representations of union which took place in Edinburgh.

On the evidence of letters and documents relating to the marriage
negotiations, it appears almost as though the voyage and the infa-
mously ‘contrary windes’ (ironically, they indirectly began the Scottish
witchcraft hunts of the 1590s) have become a standard topos in the
marriage account which can be endlessly invoked. Numerous contem-
porary accounts exist of the ‘contrary’ voyage exists, such as James
Melville’s: ‘His Maieste […] culd not be persuadit to retourn in
Scotland that winter, be raisoun of the raging sees and storme that he
had susteanit a litle of before’

. These sonnets may therefore be symp-

tomatic of the prevalence of a conceit rather than a veriﬁable account
of their composition

; even James’s own voyage in October 1589 to

meet Anna in Norway appears to be inscribed in one sonnet:

Frome natiue soil to follow on your name
And Eagle like on Theatis back to ﬂee

Wher she commaunded Neptune for to be

My Princely guard and Triton to attend
On artiﬁcial ﬂying tours of tree
Wherein I resting ranne to journeys end

A canon of poems to Anna can therefore wilfully be constructed were it
not that such large scale ‘canonisation’ ignores the difﬁcult rhetorical
complexities of each poem. There is a sense in which Anna’s presence
may be inscribed within every Jamesian expression of desire. Another
lyric, not part of the opening sonnet ‘sequence’, can be converted into

82 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

an allegory of the Anna–James relationship, a dramatisation of their
separation (‘the seas ar nou the barr […]’

); except that this lover seeks

reunion rather than any pristine encounter with the beloved. The body
of texts to which this poem belongs invokes absence and separation, in
particular the trope of the sea or water. These lyrics dramatise a larger
preoccupation with absence, dissolution, even of non-existence. ‘O
absence cruell foe/Why workes thou ws such woe/And gars true lovers
so/Far shedd remaine’.

The only ‘textual’ narrative of their desire is

one which dramatises its end so that it becomes a rhetorical perfor-
mance of insubstantiality. Such a narrative can also be perceived in the
eleven sonnets. The ﬁrst three sonnets resemble courtship lyrics: the
Jamesian lover seeks reciprocity in love, protesting his erotic ‘wounde’
(2: 4). Anticipation of union, the erotic anxieties of that eventual
union, remorse for the apparent failure or loss of desire (a shared ‘like
sorrowe’: 10: 13): these ‘passions’ precede the ﬁnal sonnet which
accuses the beloved/Anna of inﬁdelity, and marks the dissolution of
the lover’s/James’s desire. If these ostensibly nuptial sonnets allegorise
or ‘fabularise’ the sovereign voyage and memorialise desire’s decline (as
if to present the marriage’s end before its later documented decline as
the Catholic convert Anna formed an independent court in Jacobean
England), one might question why they are preserved in the ostensibly
sovereign-authored manuscript? This might be answered by Goldberg’s
interpretation which invests the Amatoria’s lover with absolutist, unas-
sailable authority,

where lover and beloved, sovereign and sovereign,

are not theoretically equal, and united in the democracy of eros. The
Amatoria sonnets can always be overtly ‘politicised’, or incorporated
into a larger Jamesian statement of misogyny. But the superﬁcial struc-
tures of desire and power which the sonnets assemble are perhaps less
orthodox and more interesting when conceived as a pathway into
Jamesian erotics which presents only the illusion of an uncorrupted
sovereign absolutism.

A fable of authority is promised by the opening sonnet that devises a

metaphorical chain linking the relationships between ‘power’ and
poetry. The Platonic furor possessed by ‘Poets’ compels ‘all things infe-
riour in degrie/As vassalls unto them doe hommage showe’ (1: 3–4).

As Jonathan Goldberg points out, the political and social language of
hierarchy is here transparent.

The authoritative divinity of poetry is

distilled into the emblem of the ‘sacred throne’ (1: 1) as the images of
poetry and sovereignty blend seamlessly. If poetry is divinely inspired,
the poet-lover is a divine incarnation, as if an erotic echo of the later
Jacobean theory of monarchical divine right. In this sonnet, poetic rule

Fables of Eros 83

of the ‘heauen Empyrick’ (1: 1) has the power to subvert or endorse the
order of nature.

There songs enchants Apollos selfe ye knowe
And chaste Dianas coache can haste or staye

Can change the course of planets high or lowe

And make the earth obeye them euerie waye

(1: 5–8)

Yet the sonnet also registers the fallibility or restrictions of such power;

it querulously implies the failure of ‘hommage’ or dissent in the natural
world: ‘mutins the midde region of the aire […]’. Allusion is made to
Aeolus’s compliance with Juno’s request that the wind-god Zephyr be
aroused: ‘What hatefull Juno, Aeolus entiseth/Wherby contrarious
Zephyre thus ariseth’ (1: 13–14). Goldberg wishes to interpret this ‘hate-
full’ Juno, probably an allusion to Virgil’s ‘saevae […] Iunonis’ (Aeneid
I.4), as Anna herself: ‘He invokes the ideal of political suppression for his
conquest in the realm of love. The transformation of opposition into
suppression and subjection has occurred here […].’

Presumably, Anna’s

identity here is inferred from the fourth sonnet, ‘To the Queene
Anonimos’, in which the queen is explicitly made to represent the ‘earth-
lie Juno’. Yet this ﬁrst sonnet might be absolved from the charge of irony
against Anna. This was, after all, the sonnet to which Henry Constable
publicly responded. Further, in the Virgilian text, Juno’s fury at the
Trojan attempt to subdue Carthage compels her to seek Aeolus, who
obeys her command to raise a storm. If Juno symbolises Anna, then Anna
herself becomes the obstruction to the lovers’ union, somewhat improba-
bly convicted of the ‘fury’, jealousy and resentment which Virgil imputes
to Juno. Juno’s rage arises from the fear that, as ‘regina deum’, her author-
ity no longer prevails: ‘‘et quisquam numen Iunonis adorat/praeterea aut
supplex aris imponet honorem?’ (I.48–9).

Aeolus, ‘King of the Winds’,

obeys Juno by a debt of obligation: ‘tuus, o regina, quid optes,/explorare
labor; mihi iussa capessere fas est.’ (I.76–7).

In obedience to Juno, he

extends his authority beyond the bounds by which the sea-god Neptune
constrains him. If the king’s sovereign-bride is here allegorically veiled,
the sonnet gestures towards her power, but it is a power which, according
to the facetiae of the sonnet, is fallible and impolitically procured.

The wholly politicised reading which seeks out the evidence of sov-

ereign-authored absolutism and ‘suppression’ is more securely attested
by the mythological incarnations of the king, almost certainly present.

84 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

If, in the ﬁrst sonnet, James is represented by the virtuous Aeneas, con-
demned by Juno to travail and suffering, in the fourth, entitled ‘To the
Queene, Anonimos’, he becomes the ‘happie Monarch, sprung of
Ferguse race’, earning the authority or self-autonomy which a tyranni-
cal Cupid has brieﬂy usurped:

It was agreed by sacred Phoebus skill
To ioyne there powers to blesse that blessed wight
Then happie Monarch sprung of Ferguse race

That talkes with wise Minerue when pleaseth the…

(4: 7–10)

The Scottish royal genealogy had, of course, been the subject of debate
in historiographical texts from Boece to Buchanan, and occurs in
James’s non-amatory poetry;

his poetic authority within the Jacobean

coterie is partly embodied in a claimed mythological ancestry.

In this

sonnet, the mythological ‘origin’ bestowed on Anna is more elabo-
rately contrived than James’s. As Minerva, Diana and Venus incarnate,
she embodies wisdom, chastity and love (the closing erotic embrace
suggests the sensual rather than heavenly Venus). Queen Elizabeth
herself was frequently eulogised by reference to the three Graces, often
iconographically; and Buchanan had earlier employed this ‘trinity’ in
an epigram on Elizabeth.

If the sonnet conceivably belongs to a

nuptial celebratory series, then the neo-Platonist gloss on the Graces as
‘‘unfolding the hidden enigma of Venus’ is clearly apt.

In assuming

these roles, Anna, ‘our gratious queene’, serves or obliges her
‘Monarch’ in different aspects:

That talkes with wise Minerue when pleaseth the
And when thou list sume Princelie sporte to see
Thy chaste Diana ride with the in chase

Then when to bed thou gladlie does repaire
Clasps in thine armes thy Cytherea faire.

(310–14)

Each of Anna’s virtues is displayed as if in obedience to a desire held a
priori by James (‘when pleaseth the/when thou list/when thou gladlie
[…]’). The typically insidious insertion of misogyny, ‘and as of female
sexe like stiffe in will’ (5), with regard to the goddesses’ indecision,
indicts not just the three deities but all women; even ‘Our earthlie Juno

Fables of Eros 85

[…] our gratious Queene’ (4: 2) is scarcely exempt. Minerva, Diana and
Venus cannot agree ‘who protect her shoulde by right’ (4: 4) by reason
of their equal claims to authority; a far greater authority is invoked to
quell the dispute: ‘It was agreed by sacred Phoebus skill/To ioyne there
powers to blesse that blessed wight’ (7–8). The identity of ‘sacred
Phoebus’ is Apollo, the favoured mythological guise of James himself;
kingly dispensation appears as a kind of deus ex machina to redeem the
constellation of ﬂawed feminine power. This successive chain of identi-
ties implies a utopian realm of rule: god rules goddess as the king his
queen for the reason that desire is anarchic. The sonnet, as the
sequence as a whole, is on the threshold of orthodox Renaissance pan-
egyric (the courtly, mythological sovereign conceit which almost con-
verts the sequence into a performance of nuptial king and queenship)
and the more darkly coercive sequence of Goldberg’s interpretation.
Neither negates the other; and both are sustained by the idea that they
arise out of a collaborative coterie culture which would have been
entertained (perhaps disquieted) by the poetic staging of sovereign
desires. But a more interesting impulse within the twelve-sonnet
sequence is embodied in the strategies used to control the implied,
imagined anarchy of a universe, political and erotic, distinct from that
portrayed in the opening text.

As if in deliberate, quasi-logical contradiction of potential anarchy, the

other sonnets are structured by the concepts of analogy and correspon-
dence. Implying the wilful creation of a divinely ordered, Ptolemaic uni-
verse, relationships obtain between divine and earthly, inner and external
states, macro and microcosm. The neo-Platonic extension of love through
the natural, sublunary world is suggested in the seventh sonnet, modelled
on one by Mellin de Saint-Gelais (c.1490–1558):

For as there toppes in cloudes are mounted hie
So all my thoughts in skies be higher gone
There foote is fast my faithe a stedfast stone
From them discends the christall fontains cleare
And from mine yes butt fained force and mone
Hoppes trickling teares with sadd and murnefull cheare
From them great windes doe hurle with hiddeous beir

from me deepe sighs, greate ﬂockes of sheepe they feede

I ﬂockes of loue, no fruicts on them appeare
My houpe to me no grace can bring or breede

(7: 3–12)

86 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

The lover’s body and physical gestures are anatomised in Petrarchistic
mode by the degree to which they reﬂect the natural topography: tears
reﬂect streams, sighs winds. The architecture of the universe in the
Amatoria is coupled with an architecture of the body. This neither
reﬂects sovereign infallibility, nor is structured in a politically allegori-
cal way, but is a reﬂection of mutability, a self in dissolution. In the
eighth sonnet, analogy is blended with metamorphosis as the lover is
conceived as a microcosm of the four elements. The opening assertion,
‘As man a man am I composed alone’, resigns sovereign identity to
humoral theory.

My ﬂames of love to ﬁrie heauen be past

My aire in sighs euanish’d is and gone
My moysture into teares distilling fast
Now onlie earthe remaines with me at last
That am denuded of the other three

(8: 6–10)

Love of her ‘onlie beautie’ transforms his corporeal self, effecting a
partial physical dissolution. But the conceit does not result in com-
plete metamorphosis. He retains his ‘earthly’ part which is, according
to Elyot, ‘of substance gross and ponderous […] set of all elements
most lowest’.

Desire is portrayed as an incorruptible element of his

being, rooted in the body but removed from any neo-Platonic concep-
tion of bodily matter as sensually degrading or corrupt. The primacy
of ‘earth’ also suggests the lover’s mortality especially when allied to
the ultimate metamorphosis. On death, the body’s earth is united
with the earth of its grave: ‘Send als my earth, with earth for to
remaine’ (13). The ﬁnal plea, ‘restore me to my selfe againe’, is a
familiar request for the beloved’s grace (consent or compliance) which
will restore the lover from imminent death. Yet the phrase, ‘my selfe’,
aptly corresponds to the sonnet’s intense physicality of self. The
king’s literal body, in this particular Jamesian poetic corpus, is rarely
mystiﬁed. Its corporeality is itself fragile, echoing the other recurrent
trope of metamorphosis and its invocation of a selfhood neither
unitary nor stable.

How may a man, a ﬂoure, a corps in smart

See, blossome, breathe; but eyes, but Sunne, but hart.

(9: 13–14)

Fables of Eros 87

As the conceit is fragmented into its analogical parts, desire assumes
the equivalence of death. This might be conceived as a quasi-
Petrarchan gesture; though the sonnets resolutely refuse either
Petrarchistic rhetoric or philosophy. Such impulses towards coherence
are ultimately deﬁed: the sequence is neither nuptial nor celebratory
nor ends in the apotheosis suggested by that last sonnet. Perhaps this
ultimately attests the uneven quality of a sequence that was collabora-
tively devised by James and his courtiers, or even for the king. This,
then, is the valedictory sonnet:

O womans witt that wauers with the winde

When none so well may warie now as I
As weathercocke thy stablenes I ﬁnde
And as the sea that still can neuer lie

Bot since that tyme the treuth hath made me trie

That in inconstance thou art constant still
My courage sayes on Cupide ceasse to crie
That are rewarded thus for thy goodwill
For thogh Madame I failde not to fullﬁll
All sort of seruice to a Mistres dewe
Yett absence thogh bot for a space did spill
The thankes deserued of all my seruice trewe

What shall I saye, I neuer thought to see
That out of sight, shoulde out of languor be.

(12: 1–14)

Such a text signals the death of desire, and the reign of misogyny.
Erotic absolutism seems to triumph. But the sonnet is fruitfully com-
pared with another Jamesian poem, the extraordinary retraction seem-
ingly made at the expense of Anna in the lyric, placed outside the
‘Anna’ sonnet sequence, ‘if mourning micht amende my harde unhap-
pie cace’, and later titled ‘A dier at her M:ties desyr’.

True to its

generic title, the poem is a complaint against a beloved who fails to
‘couple’ the virtues of ‘beutie’ with ‘bontie’. Condemned to death
(‘syne like a suanne to sing’), the lover regrets his futile martyrdom:

yett if the endles smairte & sorrou I sustaine
uaire sufferid for some uorthie uicht I happie uolde remaine
I uolde me happie thinke if thus I martired uaire

for sum sueit sainte in sacriﬁce that both uaire goode & faire

88 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

but ô alace my paine & restles griefe it grouis
for her quho neuer once on me a louing thocht bestouis

Clare McManus observes that ‘James’s performance as the romantic
lover is that of the ideal Renaissance prince, the private manifestation
of the public role of the monarch sacriﬁced to marriage’ in a narrative
of romance quest.

But as if to pre-empt judgement that Anna herself

may be thus incriminated, the text of the lyric found in BL Add. 24195
offers a further interpretative sonnet:

My Muse hath made a willful lye I grante,

I sung of sorrows never felt by me
I haue as great occasion for to wante,
My loue begunne my blessing for to be
How can I then excuse so lowd a lye?
O yes, I did it euen at her desire,
Who made me such successe in loue to see
How soone her ﬂames hade sett my heart on ﬁre.
Since for her sake I presse for to aspire,
To preache of passions which I neuer prou’d
What should yee doe who haue for haplesse hire
The lucklesse lott, to loue and not be lou’d

Your plaints I thinke should pierce the starrie skies
And deaue the Gods with shrill and cairfull cries.

(1–14)

In one sense, this is a playfully equivocal sonnet which riddlingly answers
the dilemma of whether to interpret the erotic lyrics as implicit apostro-
phes to Anna. It suggests that even the most wilfully contradictory love
poem, such as the last sonnet in the notional Anna ‘sequence’, may be a
provocatively ‘wilfull lye’. The defence of feigning occurs also in the anti-
feminist ‘Satire’ which is rendered characteristically Jamesian by the
intrusive ﬁctionalising: the self-referential disavowal of sovereign ‘authen-
ticity’ in the ﬁnal rhetorical manoeuvre performed by the envoi. What the
copy in BL Add. 24195 terms an ‘Exposition’, addressed to ‘ye Dames of
worthie fame’ (note the insinuating and implicating ‘ye’), is an excusatio
(which the Bodleian Scots text blatantly calls an ‘excuise’

expone me richt ye damis of uorthie fame
since for youre honouris I employed my caire

Fables of Eros 89

for uemen bad heirby are lesse to blame
for that they follou nature eueryquhayre
& ye most uorthie prayse quhose reason dantis
that nature quhilk into youre sexe so hantis.

(55–60)

The true meaning or ‘exposition’ of the text is dependent on the
poem’s interpreter or recipient, a characteristic ‘disowning’ gesture of
courtly literature, and of misogynistic literature as well. The ‘worthie
[…] Dames’ to whom the orator suddenly defers may be an audience or
readership of female courtiers. In reality, the satire may well have
found an exclusively male or homosocial circle of reception for whom
the obsequious eulogy of female ‘honouris’ acts ironically, a jest gained
at the expense of female absence. Signiﬁcantly, the text’s ‘qualiﬁcation’
is highly reminiscent of the interpretative sonnet attached to the
‘Dier’. Both are linked in their castigation of women and in the subse-
quent posture or pretense of feigning. Misogyny becomes a game; and
sexual, rather than erotic, politics an interpretative conceit.

The pietistic attitudes to the Anna-James marriage desired by earlier

pseudo-biographical critics made these sonnets anomalous; the new
historicist interpretation which centred on the unequivocal circulation
of political energies produces an orthodox reading insensitive to the
erotic power at their core. Yet what these sonnets do portray is the
moment of desire’s ‘desecration’, when the apparent sanctity of
the beloved is revealed as an illusion. As the ‘reality’ of the beloved
image is unveiled, the focus is displaced onto the representational
power of language, using the paradigm of Joel Fineman’s analysis.

One sonnet in the putative ‘sequence’ invests desire with the capacity
to delude the lover into believing it ‘sensles deade’ (11: 3):

So am I forced for to confesse indeede
My sponke of loue smor’d vnder coales of shame
By beauties force the fosterer of that seede
Now budds and bursts in an appearing ﬂame …

(11: 9–12)

Illusion, duplicity and guile: not only desire but the sign of desire

can deceive. As Kevin Sharpe points out, the capacity for rhetoric to act
as a mode of deception informs James’s poetic ‘legislation’ for repre-
sentational order and concordance.

Sharpe incisively construes royal

90 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

authority in James’s partial translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s La
Seconde Sepmaine ou Enfance du Monde (1584), christened The Furies and
published in the Poeticall Exercises of 1591, as the reﬂection of the
text’s divine order; the powers of the poet-king are even sufﬁcient to
reverse the Fall. Further, Sharpe argues that in the ideal Christian com-
monwealth of James’s epic Lepanto (1591), poetry is associated with
government and is the mediator of divine order and reason. The king
feared the ‘idolatry’ of the word, though his erotic poetry, as if anx-
iously to deﬂect the incriminatory certainties ﬁxed upon Mary’s,
depends upon it.

‘A dreame’ of desire and the emblematic veil

James’s preoccupation with the representational power of language,
the word’s impossible ﬁdelity to desire, ﬁnds its most intellectually
developed expression in an important lyric of the Amatoria collection,
‘A dreame on his Mistris my Ladie Glammis’.

In many ways, it repre-

sents a utopia of desire in comparison with its relatively dystopian
manifestations in the Amatoria collection as a whole. As the most nar-
ratologically structured of the erotic poems, it delivers an account of a
dream in which a donna angelicata presents the desiring dreamer with
two tokens deﬁned as ‘A tablet and an Amethyst’. Her disappearance
signiﬁes the dream’s end, and the narrative is then devoted to
reﬂection and elucidation of the dream. Generically, ‘A dreame’ is
derived from the Petrarchan dream vision and its petrarchisti variants,
and to the contemporary vogue for narrative allegory exempliﬁed by
Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae (1597). The precepts of the sov-
ereign treatise and its espousal of a rigorously analytical and logical
poetic practice appear to ﬁnd fulﬁlment in this text. In its carefully
orchestrated symbolism and intimation of a quasi-mystical love, ‘A
dreame’ presents a redemptive love only paralleled within the Jamesian
canon by Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Phoenix, the veiled erotic
memorial to Esmé Stewart, Duke of Lennox. In ‘A dreame’, the progress
of desire and intellectual comprehension compel the ‘forward’ narra-
tive logic of the poem; symbolic meaning is perpetually dispersed and
deferred. The lover’s desire to expound the dream’s arcana presents an
intellectual logic in fragile tension with the alternate logic of desire
and yearning. The different images and emblems of ‘A dreame’ depict a
fragmentation, redolent of the earlier Anna sonnets, which the poem
seeks to reconstitute into a cerebral whole. As a text which leads out of

Fables of Eros 91

the Amatoria sonnets and into the allegorical labyrinth of the Phoenix
tragedy, it is considered in detail here.

The poem’s opening visionary prologue in its evocation of night and

a deathly earth made ‘colde and wacke’ (4), dispelled only by the
bright entrance of Morpheus, exempliﬁes James’s poetic criterion of
art-like ﬁdelity, ut pictura poesis: ‘like a painter shadowing with umbers
a portrait els drawn in grosse, for giuing it greter viuenes, so I eike or
paire to the circumstaunces of the action […]’.

If James’s epic Lepanto

articulates the poem’s aesthetic category, it also echoes its depiction of
Morpheus: ‘The God with golden wings,/Who entring at the ports of
horne/So manie monstres brings,/And changing into sundrie shapes’
(10–13) as in the epic’s ‘Chorus Ventus’: ‘The God with golden wings
through ports,/Of horne doth to me creepe,/Who changes ofter shapes
tranformd/Then Protevs in the deepe’.

Whether or not the printed

Lepanto or the unprinted erotic text is the original model, the
enchanted delusiveness of dreams in the latter is the source of miracu-
lous metamorphoses: ‘By strange and subtle slight,/Does make ws
heare without our eares/And see but eyes or light’ (14–16). Perception,
the faculty of interpretation, from the outset is ‘afﬂicted’ by provision-
ality. A rare moment of Ronsardian sensuality precedes the angelic
visionary’s departing ‘gifts’. The lover is compelled to fragment the
vision intellectually into analogical categories; if a ‘naturall dreame’,
humoral theory could explicate the vision.

If bloode domin’d with bloodie iarres

In spring tyme, and againe,

If cholere raign’d with rauening ﬁres

In Sommers pearching heate,

If phlegme did with drowning ﬂoods

When Hyades holds there seate,

If melancholie earth and night

With heauie things and blacke,

When frozen Saturne rules with snowe

The place wolde suirlie take…

(67–76)

The inﬂuence of Du Bartas is again witnessed in the nexus drawn
between the four elements, humours and seasons, a correspondence
which forms an allusive, intertextual weave throughout the Jamesian
canon.

Alternatively, the dreamer reasons, the dream may have

92 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

been occasioned by ‘the things I last hade thought/Hade done or
wish’d to be…’ (77–8). The beloved has already been imagined or
envisioned, an ‘Idee’ or neo-Platonic form already existing a priori in
the dreamer’s erotic imagination. ‘Ravish[ment]’, a kind of sensual,
intellectual violation, has already occurred. Only the ‘tokens’ or
signiﬁers of that process remain, the ‘heauenlie gift’ which requires
an intellectual gloss.

In order to disclose its ‘secret vertues’, the dreamer solicits Apollo:

O thou that mysteries can reueale

And future things foreseis

Assist my seeking out of this

And open cleare mine eyes

(105–8)

Allusions to the god are threaded throughout the poem. Here, Apollo’s
role as prophetic god is invoked; elsewhere, his role as inspiration,
furor. The knowledge that both James himself and the court invoked
the Apollonian mythology to make incarnate the sovereign self in liter-
ary terms offers the temptation of reading the king into every manifes-
tation, as here in ‘A dreame’. Both as an articulation made by James, or
on his behalf, the notions of self-legitimisation or self-authentication
are richly embedded within any allusion. If lover and god are mirror-
images of the one, absolute sovereign self, then erotic power is
intensiﬁed through this dispersal. Such magniﬁcation of sensual
authority is playfully enacted as though the sign of ‘sovereignty’ were
being offered to the court in order that its ludic, elusive meaning
might be ﬁxed just as that of the gift itself. For example, in the case of
the amethyst stone, James alludes to its proverbial power as a remedy
against drunkenness: ‘And can preserue ws from the harme/Of the
envenomed sting/Of poysoned cuppes’ (125–7). Such ‘souereign[lie]
remeade’ (122) or ‘soueraigne antidote’ (133) is mapped onto the
province of his desire: ‘So shall my harte be still preserued/By vertue
from aboue/From staggering like a drunken man/Or wauering into
loue’ (129–32). The ‘poisonous’ allure of drink is likened to the
‘poysoned lookes/Of Dames I shall not swerue’ (135–6). The dreamer
conceives other women as antagonists, as if threatening his love’s
integrity, whom he can subjugate with the aid of the amethyst: ‘That
with my conquering hand I may/Enforce my foes to ﬂie…’ (139–40).
‘Sovereign’ desire is legislated as the pledge of eros is enforced:

Fables of Eros 93

For suire he cannot worthie be

To be accompted deare

By anie Dame that in his brest

A womans heart dois beare.

(141–4)

The mark of ﬁdelity is double-edged: being loyal he will not literally
harbour another ‘womans hart’ within his own but neither will he
display the qualities of ‘a womans heart’ in its ostensible weakness and
vulnerability. Masculinity is shored up as ‘authentic’ desire, amour vrai
to use the Marian term, and deﬁned against feminine multiplicity.
Martial imperialism is once more asserted: ‘I shall not from the
enemies sight/To anie part remoue,/Vnkithing once in honour of/My
mistres and my loue’ (149–52). Yet the god(s) of war cannot resist
Cupid, if not Venus: this section of interwoven ‘sovereign’ self-refer-
ence unravels when ﬁnally drawn back to the underlying agency or
locus of an irresistible desire. In the third, ﬁnal interpretation of the
stone’s threefold signiﬁcance, its ‘force/A hunter for to aide,/In ende to
catche his pray, the fruict/Of all his trauell made’ (157–60), desire
receives its most subtle expression of subjectivity: ‘I trust by vertue of
this stone/To winne and hold the pray/That prayes on me, and is of
all/My passion’d thoughts the stay’ (165–8).

Neither beloved nor

lover possesses ultimate controlling agency as the lover’s will to possess
redoubles on itself in a conceit of ‘self-entrapment’. Victimhood is
shared, as if the implicit mythological protagonists of Diana and
Actaeon, hunter and ‘prey’, are conﬂated:

But loe I long to turne me to

The tablet made of golde,

And all without and in the same

At length for to beholde.

(169–72)

The poem’s ﬁnal ‘movement’ is the attempt to provide where there is
none a subscriptio or gloss for the emblem image. While the tablet as a
whole signiﬁes ‘Her chastnes’ (175), in its quality of pure distilled gold,
its deeper visual and symbolic import is more abstruse:

The crawling scores of ameling blacke

That on the golde are wrought,

94 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

The diuers passions represents

That walters in her thought.

(177–80)

Her ‘Siren voyce diuine’ (194) is contained in the reverse image of ‘A
nacked man […] /Whome Phoebus rosts with hote reﬂexe/And stinging
ﬂees doe teare,/Yett sitting in the forrest greene […]’ (182–5). The ﬁgure
can most probably be identiﬁed with Orpheus

yet the

beloved/Orpheus identiﬁcation is strange. Is she, like Orpheus, unaware
of the pain which she inﬂicts and to which (by analogy with the
Orpheus allusion) she is herself subject? Is she made oblivious to this
unidentiﬁed pain by ‘Esteeming so’ the ‘ioye’ of those whom she
enchants (an unselﬁsh beloved)? A ‘dittie’, redolent of the emblematic
motto, is inscribed on the reverse leaf of the tablet: ‘To please/The rest
he suffers paine’ (197–8). At this point, the beloved’s previously muted
social-historical identiﬁcation is strengthened, and the context of the
court and ‘courtliness’ emerges. ‘And she her Princesse serues of
loue/Without respect of gaine’ (199–200): is this Lady Glammis’s service
to Anna allegorised; or is this written on behalf of Lady Glammis? Is the
latter’s virtue being commended? Service to her ‘Princesse’ is performed
not through expediency or expectation of beneﬁt, but by honest devo-
tion and affection. Courtly and social patronage relationships may be
woven into the lyric’s abstract, symbolic language. The beloved is not
purely a transparently rendered donna angelicata whose presence cannot
be more tangibly deﬁned or circumscribed.

The second image or emblem ‘on the vtter side’ exempliﬁes the

beloved’s supreme beauty. The visual tableau of the ‘Sunne […] shining
bright/Into the midst, with stars about/Bot darckned by his light’
(202–4) is Petrarchistic; the dreamer apostrophises the literal sun in
whom he seeks her ‘shaddowe’. The image is glossed by the ‘dittie’: ‘As
Sunne/Amongst the stars does shine/So she her sexe surpasseth far/In
vertues most diuine’ (205–8). The dreamer perceives ‘the inward part’,
allusion to a literal facet of the tablet and to desire’s ‘secret’ nature. The
emblem depicts the beloved’s heart held by ‘ane hand […]/Whill
Cupide with his bended bowe/And golden arrowe aime,/To shoote his
subtle ﬁrie shaft/For pearcing of the same’ (219, 221–4). The dreamer
refuses to interpret this as the beloved’s unwilling submission to the
Cupidian golden arrow. Rather, he ‘writes’ or annotates the inscription
of her desire as that she ‘willinglie’ offers her heart to receive desire:
‘[…] she letts her hart/Be shotte into for me […]’ (227–8).

Fables of Eros 95

This imagined or fabricated narrative of desire has its iconographical

counterpart in the other ‘emptie leafe’. An image of potentiality and
immanence, the dreamer announces that it is ‘ordain’d to containe’
(232) the image of the beloved herself; a portrait, created by ‘sume
Apelles ﬁne’, lending the artistry of all the other images ‘a grace’.
Implicit within this representation of the beloved is the Jamesian ideal
of ut pictura poesis; but it is also the supreme ‘legislative’ act of the
lover-dreamer-sovereign as the image of ﬁdelity is ordained into cre-
ation. The Jamesian lover not only prophesises as Apollo but invents as
Apelles. Imperfection remains in this incomplete representation: ‘So
shoulde her selfe, though vivelie, no,/Yett best it can be there’
(239–40). The most ‘vivid’ incarnation of the beloved (James’s own aes-
thetic criterion in the twelve sonnets of the Essayes) would be, by
implication, her actual living presence; she exists only in the
metonymic image or imagination.

The ‘tokens’ prophetically declare that ‘our loue’ is predestined. In

the poem’s ﬁnal exegesis, the union of tablet and amethyst ‘both knitt
together be/Euen by a string’ (244–5) signiﬁes the ‘threed’ which binds
beloved and lover to one another, and the ‘threed’ which only fate or
death in the guise of Atropos can sever. Yet though Apollo has prophe-
sised, there remains the possibility that ‘verrie truth’ has not been
revealed. In allusion to the opening discourse on the reliability of
dreams, the dreamer concedes that any consolation is a ﬁction. Even
the duplicity of a false vision is embraced as a ‘gladd deceate’ (257):
‘…so my guesse,/In gladnes doth me keepe’ (259–60). The spacious
realm of imaginative desire is gladly inhabited.

‘A dreame’ is therefore a disquisition on illusion and insubstantiality,

as much as it attempts to summon up the Jamesian criteria of ‘reasons
ﬁtt’ and interpretative sanction for meaning. Desire is twinned, mir-
rored, doubled, as the desiring subjectivities of beloved and lover
blend, and each image or representation contains the potential for
other imprints or inscriptions. Even the rhetoric itself seems to
‘double-back’, or be enfolded within its own dream-like structures.
Uniquely within the Amatoria, desire offers the capacity of redemption.
‘A dreame’ secularises the Petrarchan visionary allegory and the female
beloved who comes to the dreamer as an annunciation of divine
caritas. That ‘secularisation’ of the beloved is problematic. To what
extent is the courtly world enfolded beyond or within the text’s frame?
To what degree is the sovereign self invested with desire? One of
James’s earliest editors, Westcott, construed ‘A dreame’ as a kind of
erotic sanctuary for James (‘the royal couple were at this time troubled

96 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

by petty mutual jealousies […]’).

And yet the lover’s sovereignty is

both evaded and endorsed; identiﬁcation both resisted and offered in
sexual and political contradiction: ‘No wonder is, what Monarch
may/resist a womans might’ (267–8). This (in)famous concluding line
might stand as evidence that the entire text is a collaborative or ‘ven-
triloquised’ effort on behalf of James. There are also frequent gestures
or self-references) ‘But loe my minde […] But looke’) which seem to
signify the very transparency of the sovereign assertion.

Yet it is a thoroughly Jamesian, or Jacobean, poem. Its emblematic

and allegorical structures convert the text into a hermeneutic device
which fulﬁls the analytical precept of the treatise though travesties its
other desiderata. In many ways, the poem is as Platonic as its
metaphors: as the form of the beloved copies the sun, and emblems
function as representational icons of a greater image, so the poem itself
may be a reﬂection of a larger sovereign and courtly ‘reality’ which
exists beyond the contours of its dream world. For these reasons, it is
the least orthodox and most haunting expression of desire in the
Amatoria; the hermetic veiling of desire preﬁgures or, since the tempo-
ral sequence of the Amatoria texts is more or less unknown, echoes its
deepest Jamesian expression in the Tragedie called Phoenix. It is the
king’s only printed erotic utterance and was never explicitly included
in the collection given the sign of eros.

Mythologising desire: ‘a Tragedie called Phoenix’

If love-words are necessarily duplicitous within the Jacobean context,
and even its political discourses can rarely achieve the representational
clarity which Jamesian theory seeks, the text devoted to ‘my Phoenix
rare’ is a paradoxical announcement of both a private will to tender-
ness and a public assertion of political loyalty. With the 1584 publica-
tion of Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix, which
appeared in the Essayes of a Prentise,

eros crosses the threshold of pol-

itics in ways which travesty the king’s own literary prescriptions for a
poetics immured from political intrusion or ‘contamination’. The
Phoenix, a strange and beautiful transgression of Jacobean poetic policy
and polity, fails to fulﬁl any Marian-inspired renunciation of literary
polemics. It is likely that the poem was published because the young
king perceived it as an important political assertion, an allegorical dec-
laration of his unhappiness with the persecution of Esmé Stewart
(c1542–83) whom he saw as a political ally and conﬁdante. Stewart was
James’s French cousin, the only son of John Stewart, who had lived in

Fables of Eros 97

France as the adopted heir of the Maréchal d’Aubigny. Subsequent to
Esmé’s arrival in Scotland in 1579, James rapidly conferred on the
courtier, who was twenty-four years his senior, a succession of titles (in
1580, he was made Earl of Lennox; a year later, Duke of Lennox). Their
alliance was swiftly noted: ‘My Lord of Obeny, being maid Lord of
Dalkeith and efterwart Duc of Lenox, was chieffest about his Maieste’.

On the king’s ﬁrst visit to Edinburgh in 1579, he was accompanied by
Esmé.

According to anxious contemporary accounts, the young sov-

ereign of thirteen entered into ‘great familiareties and quyet purpoissis’
with the older French courtier, ‘in such love with him as in the open
sight of the people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with
his arms and kiss him.’

The court witnessed a burgeoning relation-

ship of emotional and political intimacy where even the bonds of spir-
itual inheritance were weakened as Esmé signed the ‘Negative
Confession’ against Catholicism. The sovereign and his subject
became, in the words of the Basilikon Doron, a ‘spectacle’ for the court
and the nobility who accused Esmé of a dangerous and covert politick-
ing, of being complicit in Counter-Reformation plots, and of fostering
pro-Marian sympathies: ‘alleging him to be a papist, altogither at the
Duc of Guise deuotion, and therfor a dangerous man to be about his
Maieste. Bot his chieffest falt was, that he being trew to the King, he
was thocht vnwonnable to ther behoue, as he wes indede.’

Esmé

fulﬁlled the role of the feared Other: a French Catholic who had the
devotion of the king.

The Ruthven Raid of 1582 ended Esmé’s politi-

cal ascendancy; he returned in exile to France where he died a
Protestant, after conversion three years earlier, on 26 May 1583.

The pioneering work of David Bergeron, in two recent, book-length

studies, has decoded James’s self-professed ‘Metaphoricall Invention’ as
the poetic embodiment of the king’s love for his cousin in the context
of epistolary desire: the poem is ‘a ‘familiar letter,’ written in response
not only to Esmé’s death but also to his ﬁnal letters’ (33). In the
poem’s elaborate allegorical frames, Bergeron discloses the traces of
desire and sexuality. The homoeroticism of the second Jacobean court
(which was expediently used by Weldon and others as defamatory pro-
paganda) cannot now be circumscribed as part of the king’s ‘English’
history of sexuality.

James’s poem The Phoenix serves as a ‘familiar letter’, written in
response not only to Esmé’s death but also to his ﬁnal letters. The
poem takes us into the king’s private space through allegory and
gives voice to James’s desire […] The exclusionary, intimate, and

98 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

affectionate nature of the relationship points in the direction of
homoerotic desire, whatever the speciﬁc (and unknowable) quality
of their sexual behaviour. […] James’s poem The Phoenix offers addi-
tional and compelling evidence of such desire.

Bergeron’s rich, sensitive reading of the Phoenix, one text among other
intimate ‘epistolary’ texts, laid a foundation which has not been built
upon in the context of the Scottish period of Jacobean erotics. The
representational anxieties which are a marked feature of Jamesian
poetry provide a leitmotif by which the Phoenix may be read. Where
Bergeron perceives an absolute assertion of the king’s desire, the poem
may be construed as a signiﬁcant printed exercise in the consciously
duplicitous or veiling strategies which characterise erotic courtly poetry
of the Jacobean period in general. Above all, it stands as a bold evasion
of the Jamesian pledge against overt political topics. It is a love poem
and a political text at the same time, which contravenes James’s
‘ofﬁcial’ derogation of the philosophical and ideological importance of
literary erotics.

The poem’s allegorical centrepiece narrates the destiny of the rare

Arabian phoenix who takes shelter in Scotland (‘this land, ane stranger
heir unkend’ (70)) before its persecution and ﬁnal self-immolation in
the ﬁre which is simultaneously its rebirth. Despite the declarative
naming of one line, ‘In her alone, whome I the Phoenix call’ (33), the
poem partly veils itself by devices of emblematic, as well as allegorical,
coding. These processes of secrecy and ‘encryption’ produce a text
which, at the rhetorical level, is locked up in its own hermeticism.
Both in conceptual and iconographical terms, it represents a
hermeneutic puzzle; in this aspect, it has afﬁnities with ‘A dreame’. The
two anagrammatic and emblematic poems which preface the text
suggest, in their invocation of Echo, that the words of the Tragedie
which follows are to be magniﬁed and recapitulated. While the trope
of Echo is conventional in Renaissance amatory discourse, its occur-
rence in James’s preface suggests that the Phoenix is a text which
refuses concealment or silence; these words are not to be guarded cau-
tiously as James advises in the Basilikon Doron. James’s preface also
enjoins ‘all that it reid’ to share in his grief so that a display of
empathy might diminish its acuity. Sovereign desire is here not dis-
tanced but rather dissipated. Further, since the poem explicitly mani-
fests hostility to the Protestant nobility who opposed Esmé, such an
imperative also functions as a rhetorically imagined, collective opposi-
tion to their action.

Published under the quasi-ingenuous auspices of

Fables of Eros 99

the Essayes of a Prentise, this is a polemical poem, designed to create
dissent and ‘disorder’ as the opening invocation to the ‘furies’ suggests.
While Esmé is transparently incarnated as the phoenix, the other
‘fowles’ appear to signify the opposition nobility and clergy. The
rebuke to Esmé’s enemies is clear at the end: ‘deuills of darknes […]’.

Though printed in an auspicious poetic collection, clearly intended to
signify poetic and political renewal, the poem as a contemporary polit-
ical ‘fable’ is desolate in implication. There is a clear opposition, topo-
graphically and symbolically, between Scotland and those regions in
which the bird has her origin and in which she dwells. Scotia is a place
of persecution and antagonism, of Machiavellian deceit (it is literally
and metaphorically ‘cold’ so that the beauty of the bright bird renders
her an object of desire and ‘Inuy’, 80–4, 120–35).

Yet the Phoenix is a poem which contains strategies of evasion and

displacement. Paradoxically, it even disclaims that it is about death
(indeed Esmé’s, as stanza 3 asserts in consolation that: ‘friends can return
[…]’); and this, in one sense, is conﬁrmed in the self-fulﬁlling prophecy of
the bird which renews itself, ‘new gendered’, from the ashes. The symbol
of the phoenix as Esmé incarnate has obvious allegorical purpose but is
richly equivocal. The image of the phoenix was also deployed in James’s
triumphal progression into London.

Harmonising with the poem’s

emblematic framework, the phoenix was itself a popular emblem
device.

Interestingly, the phoenix was the impresa of Marie de Guise.

was also an image by which James himself was incarnated by George
Buchanan, then later by Du Bartas.

The classical mythological history in

Pliny’s Natural History is transmuted in the medieval Physiologus and in
Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics into the resurrection of Christ and eternal life.
The Christological consolation of death is clearly ﬁgured in the poem’s
envoi where the ‘X’ of the word Lennox (‘whose name doeth end in X’,
262) is the sign of the cruciﬁxion and of the resurrection.

If the phoenix symbol fuses Christian and mythological typologies,

it also possesses erotic signiﬁcation. By the sixteenth century, the
phoenix-like death and resurrection of the lover had become an erotic
commonplace, bound up with neo-Platonic conceptualisations of love
as a simultaneous form of death and rebirth in the body and spirit of
the beloved.

The gendered identity of the ‘Phoenix rare’, symbolising

Esmé, intrigues Bergeron, who proposes that its ‘femininity’ reﬂects
James’s ‘sexual confusion’ and ‘allows the poet James to hide the
sexual desire embedded in the poem; that is, all desire fastens to the
female gender, which immediately seems socially appropriate’.

The phoenix, as already suggested, possesses Christological

100 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

signiﬁcance, and arguably Esmé’s allegorisation as the bird also suggests
a Christ-like comparison in the text’s narratives of martyrdom and res-
urrection. Yet this phoenix incarnation, and its potential or imminence
for a double-gendered identity (a feminine or feminised icon now signi-
fying the masculine), is consistent with the poem’s hermeneutic strate-
gies. The masculine subject represented by a feminine symbol most
obviously evokes within the poem’s intertextual, allusive weave the
context of profane lyric desire. In Petrarch’s Rime sparse, the mythical
bird is portrayed as an analogue of the lover’s desire in a perpetual state
of dissolution and recreation. It also signiﬁes the beloved Laura. Sonnet
185 strongly suggests itself as a rhetorical and imaginative model for
James’s poem: ‘Fama ne l’odorato et ricco grembo/d’arabi monti lei
ripone et cela,/che per lo nostra ciel sì altera vola.’

In the poem, an erotic ‘topography’ or anatomising of the bird’s

‘body whole’ resembles the blasonneur’s topoi of beauty:

Whose body whole, with purpour was owercledd,

Whose taill of coulour was celestiall blew,
With skarlat pennis that through it mixed grew:
Her craig was like the yallowe burnisht gold,
And she herself thre hundreth yeare was old.

(38–42)

Further, the arcane and exotic beauty of the phoenix signiﬁes escape
and retreat (as an erotic symbol, she represents the melancholic desire
which cannot exist); its deathly fragility suggests a preciousness which
is almost illusionistic. Her immolation is conceived as a kind of beauti-
ful desecration: she adorns her nest with ‘Titans garland’ (213). The
phoenix-iconography represents the ‘tragicall’ subject of Esmé in a way
which is sacred or sanctiﬁed; despite this process of ‘canonisation’, it
cannot wholly elide the sense of the prescription, noli me tangere.

James and Esmé, allegorist and textual ‘mater’, lover and beloved,

sovereign and subject: these subtle dialogical relationships woven
through the poem are most richly embodied in the overarching
mythological relationship between the phoenix and the sun-god.
Bergeron observes that the bird’s ‘identiﬁcation with the god Apollo
enhances desire’ but does not, in tracing the ‘rich mythic history’ (61)
of Apollo, include an immediate Scottish contemporary resonance. In
the poem’s frequent allusions to ‘Phoebus bricht’, or Apollo, the sun-
god, James may borrow, and accordingly subvert, the eulogistic kingly

Fables of Eros 101

symbol of Jacobean poetry: ‘She toke delyte (as she was wount
before)/What tyme that Titan [Apollo] with his beames vpsprent,/To
take her ﬂight, amongs the skyes to soire’ (93–5). Bergeron perceives a
‘triangular’ relationship in the poem, founded on the intersecting real
and mythological personae.

The phoenix chooses to immolate herself

upon ‘Apollo’s altar’. At one level, this conforms to the bird’s mythol-
ogy: in the Physiologus, the phoenix burns itself on the altar of the sun
at Heliopolis. But the other weave of connotation, which stems from
the king’s own symbolic incarantion as the sun-god, complicates such
orthodox symbolism, and suggests the notion of part, almost unwit-
ting complicity and responsibility for the immolation of the phoenix
which is also the dead, exiled Esmé: ‘Apollo then who brunt with thy
reﬂex/Thine onely fowle, through loue that thou hir bure’ (260–1).
James’s poem as a whole communicates a sense of guilt at the bird’s
‘oppression’ and that the shelter which she seeks ‘between his leggs’ is
insufﬁcient. Simultaneously, the poem projects the notion of sexual
consummation as a form of resurrection: the phoenix’s rebirth is an act
of regeneration as another offspring is ‘new gendred’ (259) from the
ashes: allegorically, his eldest son, Ludovic.

The sovereign identity immanent within the poem’s Apollo/sun

symbolic tracery also has other political implications. The phoenix
commands the other birds through its beauty and ascendance; an
avian hierarchical allegory seems to mirror a courtly and political one.
The ‘sovereign’ himself implicitly marvels at this visual display of supe-
riority; the bird outshines ‘Titans self’ (112), another reference to the
sun-god which inhabits the same symbolic space as the received
mythology of the phoenix and James’s own (‘he abashit beholding
such a light’, 63). Giordano Bruno’s exposition of the phoenix emblem
is instructive in this regard: ‘by its smoke the phoenix almost obscures
the splendour of the sun whose ﬁre inﬂames it; and there is a motto
which says “Neque simile nec par”: neither similar nor equal to it.’ Far
removed from the perceived discursive inscriptions of authority in
other Jamesian poems, the Phoenix constitutes the ultimate act of sov-
ereign self-effacement.

The poem stands in a strangely subversive relationship to the king’s

poetic and political theory. It makes even more ingenuous the call to
political, literary quiescence in the Essayes; the Phoenix is a remarkably
audacious, perhaps deliberate, assertion of intransigent sovereignty in
the wake of the Ruthven Raid. It is a polemical poem, as much
designed to create dissent and ‘disorder’ as the invocation of the
‘furies’ suggests, a contrast to the rhetorically anxious desire to quell

102 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

the raging seas in the notional ‘Anna sonnets’ or the frequent depic-
tions of cosmological and political concord in other pieces. And yet
any notion of monarchical intransigence or unassailibility is undercut
by the poem’s erotic impulses, tender, submissive and elegiac.
Importantly, the most intense expression of Jamesian eros seems to be
occasioned by death. Eros can ‘shelter’ beneath the poetic gesture of
mourning elegy; desire can be symbolically resurrected in and after
death.

The realms of ‘public’ and ‘private’, the ‘inward’ as opposed to the

openly manifest, seem no longer tenable as oppositions in the context
of James’s poem. It is a public call to mourn, an act of political excoria-
tion, and a private, eroticised commemoration or elegy which seems to
‘fabularise’ the language and spaces of royal intimacy: ‘Syne she her
self, perkt in my chalmer still’ (119). Its publication in 1584 is an
important moment in the history of eros and politics: it marks the suc-
cessful eroticisation of politics which in 1567 had grievously incrimi-
nated Mary. Uncannily, there is a Marian ‘haunting’ or resemblance to
the literal textual remnants of the James–Esmé relationship. Bergeron
observes that Esmé on his ﬁnal return to France left behind a collection
of papers, locked in a ‘coffer’ which were delivered to the Advocate;
‘but by the commandement of Lennox he hath burnt all the
writings’.

None of the Amatoria pieces appeared in the collected Works of 1616.
Inevitably perhaps, since they were the product of a ‘playful’ manu-
script coterie culture, most probably collaborative in nature, which
licensed remarkable erotic incarnations of the sovereign self, and
because profane poetry was denounced by James as a sign of immatu-
rity; those who blaspheme or ‘abuse’ poetry’s true didactic function are
charged with the Platonic accusation of duplicity and feigning.

But as

Bergeron comments, ‘[James] might have withheld the poem [the
Phoenix] from […] circulation, but he did not’.

The poem creates and

perpetuates its own mythology of the text: the phoenix is new ‘engen-
dered’ just as Esmé is. The affective function of the poem also con-
forms to James’s literary precepts, except that the representation is not
based on ‘vivelines’ but rather contained beneath the protective alle-
gorical, hermeneutic shell. The device of fabularising eros and death
was, it seems, politically expedient. The poem is testament to James’s
power as rhetor and sovereign, and it makes the Essayes of a Prentise an

Fables of Eros 103

assertion of political as much as literary will two years after Morton’s
regency ended, and the Ruthven Raid of 1582. The Phoenix seemed to
escape kingly self-censure, or censorship, in part due to its quasi-didac-
tic or moralistic framework, and in part because it was an important
political statement: Esmé should not have been condemned and exiled
the way he was by the disaffected nobles because it contravened the
king’s political will and desires. But what remains interesting is that
James chose to articulate such a political ‘position’ or grievance
through the medium of the erotic: for it is an erotic, as much as a polit-
ical, allegory. It attests how seriously James took articulation of the
erotic; how could he not, when there was the precedent of Mary.
Eroticisation gives the lie to the apparent illusion of Jamesian invulner-
ability but, as the Phoenix poem suggests, the combination of erotic
and political power can only strengthen the symbolic monarchical
presence.

104 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Devotional Artefacts: John Stewart
and the Eroticisation of the Courtly

to reverence the prince he serveth above all other things,

and in his wil, maners and facions to be altogether pliable to please him…

Castiglione

The single surviving manuscript which contains the work of John
Stewart of Baldynneis (c1545–c1605), was a ‘gift’ to James VI, a literal
and symbolic act of devotion. This act of piety was textually threefold:
the manuscript folio consists of a translation, a body of lyrics and a
moral-religious allegory gathered under the scribal rubric, ‘Ane
abbregement of roland/furiovs translait ovt of/Ariost. togither vith/svm
rapsodies of the authors/yovthfull braine, And/last ane schersing ovt/of
trew felicitie,/composit in scotis/meitir be/J. Stewart of Baldy[n]neis.’ It
therefore constitutes a triptych, a symbolic altar raised to James some
time in the mid-1580s.

Stewart’s heterogeneous miscellany of

66 poems is, in one sense, a collection of fragments, the inscription
of fragmented ‘voices’. An intensely dialogic series of poems, the
Rapsodies is a composite of verbal gestures to the courtly, sovereign
world yet is also centred upon the courtly self (the courtliness ‘within’,
as it were), and its fragile space of interiority. Stewart’s poetry can
justly be said to crystallise the material culture of Jacobean poetic devo-
tion in that the presentation manuscript appears as a ‘lovingly’ assem-
bled textual artefact. This chapter examines the centrepiece of that
devotion, the lyric interlude of the Rapsodies, and explores within that
lyric corpus the eroticisation of the courtly: the desires which consti-
tute, or are converted into, a rhetorically beautiful artefact, ‘gifted’
between courtiers and, ultimately, to the king himself. Just as Stewart’s
collection may be considered an ‘icon’ or exemplar of Jacobean courtli-
ness, so it converts the ﬁgure of the king into quasi-sacred, and quasi-

105

erotic, icon more than any contemporary poetic work. Within Scottish
Jacobean poetry, the Rapsodies is one of the most striking exemplars of
‘courtliness’ performed, the lyric dramatisation of a putative network
of correspondents and recipients. Yet ultimately it is the king who is
conceived as its ideal reader and, implicitly, its ideal beloved.

Stewart has remained on the edge of histories of Renaissance Scottish

culture except in his role as a translator. This is perhaps because the
fragmentary erotic texts of the Rapsodies do not offer a sustained
sequence composed by one solipsistic lover as does Fowler’s Tarantula;
nor do they display the thematic range of Montgomerie’s lyric oeuvre,
albeit echoing its fusion of amatory, social, and political registers. Yet
Stewart’s lyric practice is distinct. Within the Rapsodies’ discursive
network of conversant lovers, women are not only conceived as the
object of desire but are transformed into textual subjects, frequently as
epistolary correspondents. Female lovers become the imagined projec-
tion or site of authorial erotic anxiety. Several important lyric frag-
ments dramatise the relationship between female desire and moral
agency, creating a portrait of feminine eros complicated by its presence
within a text which bears a masculine signature, and a male subject or
addressee, the king. These female-voiced poems, a form of rhetorical
ventriloquism or ‘cross-dressing’, delineate and yet also resist the moral
contours of a prescriptive society in ways that seem to mirror the
anxious desires of Stewart’s own courtly voice(s). Stewart’s invocations
of eros come full circle when the palinodic or recantatory writing of
the ﬁnal Rapsodies’ sonnets, and his religious allegory, Ane Schersing,
transpose the place of desire in Stewart’s writing to its Jacobean locus.

This displacement of erotic desire can be understood only in terms of
Stewart’s unique position and role within the Jacobean literary enter-
prise. The ﬁnal congruence of desires signiﬁes a particular kind of
profane and devotional interplay which carefully pays obeisance to the
king.

Gifts of the courtly devotee

The Rapsodies is a gift offered by a subject to his sovereign, a type of
courtly presentational text which, as Woudhuysen comments, consti-
tuted ‘a powerful weapon in the quest for patronage’: ‘All vorldlie velth
that onie hart may wis/Helth and Renoune vith euirlasting Gloir/
Vnto your Grace I Represent vith this’.

Its poems construct an aptly

meretricious rhetoric for the sovereign patron and mentor while also

106 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

conveying the fragile and emotional bonds of that patronage, though
its exact terms have not been wholly clariﬁed. Genealogically, John
Stewart had intimate connections with the monarchy as the second
son of John Stewart, the fourth Lord Innermeith (a branch of the
Perthshire aristocracy) and Elizabeth Betoun, who was the mistress of
James V. Despite his clear literary prominence at James’s court,
Stewart’s presence there remains largely uncharted except through
poetic documents and the occasional appearance of his name in the
Privy Council Register, the Acts of Parliament, and the Register of the
Great Seal of Scotland.

Stewart’s public career emerges with clarity

only in the late 1570s and early 1580s through his part in the litigious
and remarkably violent process of the dissolution of his mother’s
second marriage.

The early part of the decade saw Stewart’s ﬁnancial

and material situation improve after the resolution of this domestic
legal conﬂict. Stewart’s subsequent circumstances until his death,
probably in 1605, are unknown and, unlike other Scottish Jacobean
courtiers such as William Alexander and Alexander Craig, he does not
appear to have relocated with the court after 1603. The main body of
his writing was probably produced throughout the considerable
period of domestic and political trouble caused by the legal controver-
sies of his mother’s divorce; perhaps it is partly responsible for the
markedly anxious, placatory relationship with James which his
writing portrays. Based on the evidence of allusions to James’s 1584
Essayes, McDiarmid dates the manuscript, which shows virtually no
revisions or emendments, to 1585–6.

Such a dating may refer to the

transcription rather than to the poems’ actual composition: the New
Year poetic gifts to James are inscribed 1582 and 1583; and the acros-
tic lyric, ‘In Name of ane Loyale Ladie’, is addressed to Margaret
Wemyss whose marriage suggests another dating (see below). A note
on the ﬂyleaf in what appears to be an eighteenth-century hand
asserts that ‘King James ye ﬁrst Brought this Booke with him out of
Scotland’;

Stewart may have had at least this metonymically textual

presence at the English Jacobean court.

The diverse nature of the Rapsodies’ lyrics (encompassing the topics

of erotic desire, sexual satire, ruminations on poetic ‘science’, Jamesian
panegyric, moral reﬂection), combined with the uncertainty whether
Stewart was himself responsible for the folio’s transcription, means
that it is difﬁcult to perceive an overarching order to the collection,
whether authorial or editorial. There are ‘local’ textual arrangements,
however, which are thematically meaningful. The collection opens and
closes on a sonnet to James; appositely the king forms its beginning

Devotional Artefacts 107

and end. Two religious complaints succeed the opening sonnet: both
solicit God’s mercy for a frail and ‘vnvordie’ penitent, and ask that the
king receive divine grace.

The moral and pious consolation immedi-

ately offered to ‘Ane Honorabill And distressit ladie’ is a natural exten-
sion of this religious discourse, and of the second lyric’s closing
certainty: ‘My God, gif thow for me prouyd,/I feirles am And suir sall
bie’.

Loyal friendship is next extolled in the lyric, ‘To his rycht inteir-

lie belowit freind’,

the ﬁrst expression of the topos of amicitia that

also informs the collection; the speaker’s assurance that ‘miserie’ can
be endured in the knowledge of God’s salvation preﬁgures the two
short lyrics of ‘derection’ to the ‘amorus ladie’. Consolation and
instruction are then offered to another, or perhaps the same,
‘Honorabill Ladie’, and on worldly vicissitude to ‘His familiar friend in
Cowrt’.

This coherent set of poems is concluded by the exhortation,

‘To his Maiestie in fascherie’; even the king is subject to frailty.

What

can be identiﬁed as a moral prelude does not recur again as a sustained
unity but is instead echoed in individual sonnets such as ‘Of Fidelitie’
and ‘Of Trewth’.

Given the miscellany’s disparate nature, it is likely that many were

circulated individually within the courtly milieu before being assem-
bled and presented as a ‘cohesive’ entity to the king. Written ‘in com-
mendatione of’ or ‘at the desire of’ other, frequently not explicitly
named or identiﬁed, courtly ﬁgures, its range of petitionary, dedicatory
and ‘exchange’ can be harnessed to speciﬁc social occasions, or at least
premised as such. There are obvious acts of social and cultural com-
memoration: the king’s poetic ‘Coronation Vith laurell’ is commemo-
rated, and other lyrics offered to James as a ‘new yeirs gift’.

Even

those lyrics which cannot so unequivocally be tied to historical events
often imply or posit another sense of occasion: for example, the titles
‘For Conﬁrming of ane Faithfull Promeis’ or ‘In Going to his Luif’
create an occasion, albeit hypothetical, on which the poem rests. The
miscellany is full of implied but anonymous presences: the
unidentiﬁed mistresses and ‘honorabill ladies[s]’ to, about, and on
behalf of whom Stewart writes.

These lyrics addressed to a body of

‘honarabill’ women (which may in fact be a single, historically
identiﬁable subject; her identity is not even anagramatically or crypto-
logically hinted at) demarcate the Rapsodies as in part a ‘feminine’ or
‘feminised’ discursive space, which has important ramiﬁcations for its
exploration of desires both licit and illicit. The lyric inscribed ‘In Praise
of luif at the desyre of ane Nobile ladie’

is one exemplar of these fem-

inine ‘commissions’:

108 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

from Secreit Seit And ceinter of my hart
Pen inexpert depaint sum speitche expres
In mychtie praise of that celestiall art
Quhilk vordie vychts behuifs for till profes:

Great Gods abowe And men below dois dres

All Reuerence dew vnto thy gouldin bow
O lord of luif lowing thy luiﬂie low:

(1–7)

Cupid’s effeminising power is celebrated rather than condemned (Troilus
wears Venus’s myrtle rather than the laurel wreath of victory), a prelude
to the reconciliation of Mars and Venus. Sexual rather than heroic
‘courage’ is lauded (14), and Cupid’s wounding, as a benevolent ‘lord of
luif’, is peculiarly gentle. Eros and poetry are imagistically entwined in
‘chains of Rosis reed’ (16), evoking the sense of purely rhetorical ‘ﬂowers’,
and a poetics of desire aptly garnered from the rose, most probably an
Anacreontic allusion.

This evocation of beauty, allied to celebration of

Cupid’s gentle absolutism, is concluded by a sudden sacral intrusion:
‘And to be schort scripture dois condiscend/All things in erthe Bot onlie
luif hes end’ (20–1). Such piety may be to reassure the ‘nobile ladie’ that
earthly love has moral sanction; or that love is inﬁnite and therefore tran-
scends the limitations of the earthly. It might be a wittily reverential
posture rather than reﬂection of the moral gravitas of Stewart’s darker
anticurial poetry. The ‘L’enwoy’, a veiled compliment to the courtier
herself, typiﬁes the ‘ornamentally’ faceted courtly gift of eros:

L’enwoy to the foirsaid ladie
Quha possessit Cupid inclosit
In ane tablat of christall.

fair luiﬂie dame In quham all bontie beine
Thy proper persone dois approwe thy mycht
Quhilk keips incloist in rock of christall cleine
This lord of luf quho dantons euerie vycht,
Thocht he be vechtie yit thow bears him lycht:
Laith venus is hir bonie boy to vant
Yit gifs him liwe thy vordie brest to hant. (22–33)

This text also exempliﬁes the fascination with the ‘material surface’
characteristic of Scottish Jacobean court poetry: the microcosmic

Devotional Artefacts 109

world of artefacts and objects frequently embodied in such poetry (in
the Stewartian context, the laurel tree given to James, the Cupid set in
‘cristall’, the painting of ‘Luif young’ expounded in a sonnet) which is
itself an aesthetic artefact.

The sense of display, or of conspicuous

rhetorical consumption, as it were, is mirrored in the graceful orna-
mentations of Stewart’s manuscript itself with its insertions and
embellishments in red ink and gold leaf such as the epilogue to this
lyric.

Stewart’s fascination for ‘literal’ elaboration, in the Jamesian

sense, is attested not only by the Rapsodies, but in his Ariostian transla-
tion that ampliﬁes, qualiﬁes, and digresses, and is often perceived as a
limited exercise in virtuosity.

The rhetorical preciosité of many

Rapsodies’ sonnets is fragile, as if their manneristic excesses were on the
brink of implosion,

but the Rapsodies represent the quintessence of

Jacobean courtly artiﬁce. If Stewart’s word congeries exuberantly ﬂout
linguistic decorum, they do so with what might be termed a trangres-
sive jouissance. In lyrics such as ‘Of the Qualities of Lufe’, ‘Of the
signiﬁcation of colors’, ‘Of the Assaultis of Luif’, ‘Ane Literall Sonnet’,
and in occasional passages of alliteration or verbal ornamentation
within other texts the verbal, no less than the erotic, pleasure of the
text is courted.

The Cupid lyric and other such texts in the Rapsodies can be said to

function as an erotic emblem, a Castiglionian signiﬁer: ‘the way which
the Courtier ought to take, to make his love knowen to the woman me
thinke should be to declare them in signes and tokens more then in
woordes […]’.

But the signiﬁcatory power of the collection resides

also in its pervasive, indeed mandatory, ability to ‘sign’ James.

Spreits of pernass than pouss my pen ane space
To praise Quhair praise derseruit dois abound:
O brycht Apollo vith thy schyning face,
Thy harp deuyn this subject sueit sould sound

(9–13)

This characteristic poetic rescension implies that James, in his mytho-
graphic guise of Apollo and bearing the harp of David (another, less
common Jamesian icon but one markedly favoured by Stewart), should
himself ‘sound […]/Sutche mychtie mater’. Offered to James as a token
of ‘guid vill’ (‘To his Maiestie vith Presentatioun’, 9), the Rapsodies
anxiously court the sovereign presence throughout. So insistently and
anxiously does the Stewartian lyric ego solicit the attentions of the

110 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

king that the manuscript can be considered as a sustained attempt at
aesthetic and erotic ravîssement. Stewart’s courtly apostrophising can
appear duly and conventionally reverential: ‘Long lyf and welth vith
veilfair and great gloir/Be to thy Peirles Person euirmoir/Perfyt
precelling puissant prudent Prence’.

This is perhaps one reason why

these reverential poems have been overlooked; but they also portray
with an intensity lacking in the Jacobean coterie at large (not even in
Montgomerie’s poetry) the desire to manifest ﬁdelity to Jamesian
literary precept. In Stewart’s poetry, the literary word and will of the
king is sacred.

The spectre of Du Bartas’s Uranie, James’s exemplar of

the moral, religious and philosophical epic, implicitly haunts the
Rapsodies, and is the guiding spirit behind Ane Schersing out of Trew
Felicitie. In closing the manuscript, this moral allegory atones for the
latter: ‘Beliwis thow his godlie blissit braine/Vill tak delyt of thy
fantastick vaine/Quhilk hes sic fectles friuolteis don fram…’.

In part

an excusatio, this renunciation and pledged allegiance to ‘mair prudent
verse’ reﬂects the frequent two part division of a poetic collection into
secular and divine halves, with the latter presented as its moral and
spiritual telos. Yet this substantial apologia is most probably a
concession to Jamesian poetics: the composition of secular poetry is
charged with ‘fantastick facill sayings vaine/from Sonets als, And euerie
friuoll verse…’.

The Rapsodies’ ‘merrie ryms’ are not only formally

retracted in the Schersing but implicitly qualiﬁed by the former’s
sonnets proclaimed in praise of James’s ‘dyt celest’:

The Mychtie Muse is no Subiectit Slawe
To mundan mater Bot with dyt celest
The Gloir of God Immortall thow dois crawe
Quho dois deteine thy Peirles spreit possest
Vith heawenlie gifts of grace abowe the rest

The poem’s prologue rehearses Stewart’s rhetoric of praise, supplication
and abnegation to James while the manifestation of the goddess
Urania alludes to the moral iconography of the muse in the king’s
translation of Du Bartas’s Uranie. Stewart’s allegorical protagonist will-
ingly submits to her spiritual and literary enlightenent in a way which
seemingly reﬂects the symbolic submission of Stewart himself to James:
‘I lang reuoluit in my secret thocht/Quhow my desyre mycht till effect
be brocht/Quhilk sen my pouer mycht navayis furthschaw,/I tuik
conceit at leist sum lyns to draw/As I best could, that his maist sacred
skill/Yit mycht consawe ane part of my guidwill.’

The poem

Devotional Artefacts 111

concludes by blending both monarchical and divine praise as adora-
tion of God fuses with that of Stewart’s ‘godlie king’.

The Rapsodies are rarely so obviously palinodic but they enshrine and

adore ‘his kinglie courtas hart’,

as well as betray the fear of possible

excommunication. The collection preempts censure by confessing itself
a miscellany of literary beginnings (‘my ﬁrst dyt’), as yet untutored and
unreﬁned, a lack to be completed by James:

[…] Ay hoiping surely still

Your hienes vill My minchit meiter mend.
So condiscend And do the same defend,
Than sall be kend Quhat vertew in yow lyis.

Despite the apparent paucity of his ‘ﬁrst dyt’, poetry appears the sole
instrument by which royal favour may be procured: ‘sempill versis […]
…to my end Sall ay awance your pryis’.

The presentation of this

‘sempill gift’ is simultaneously the offering of ‘ane treuthfull luiﬁng
hart alone’;

elsewhere the offertory heart is an icon of

‘guiltles[ness]’.

‘Sempill’ becomes a key term in the repertory of

Stewart’s monarchical devotion, paradoxically implying a verbal and
emotional purity ‘encased’ within elaborately mannerist poems.
Rhetoric, and accordingly desire, is ﬂaunted by Stewart’s poetry; an
abundance of words must serve as the sign of ‘authenticity’.

To a degree, the Rapsodies succeed in glorifying the sovereign; in

Montrose’s terms ‘enhanc[ing] not only the splendour but the strength
of the monarchy’.

Stewart’s conviction of his personal unworthiness

sanctiﬁes the king but suggests that any acts of adoration or submis-
sion are almost heretical. The ineffable greatness of the king makes his
eulogist a blasphemer: ‘My sclendir skill thy gloir may not defyn’;

‘Sum holie Angill from abowe most bring/Vith heawenlie voce to spred
his praisis vyd.’

Stewart’s adoration of James is arresting in its sheer

ingenuousness: his texts lay bare their loving and fearful abnegation
which can also be gentle: ‘Daylie to see your grace is my disyre’;

‘Remember me And do me Not foiryeit’.

Yet the poems are con-

sciously artful, engaging in an allusive sovereign iconography. The
sonnet ‘Of Chastitie’ compares this precious commodity to the
‘vermell Rois’ (perhaps in Marian terms) and to the ‘Phenix’ which
shares its rarity.

Not that every occurrence of the phoenix emblem in

Jacobean poetry is of necessity a coded reference to James’s tragedy;
but it is suggestive in a text which exalts spiritual love and in a corpus
of work which signals its intimate acquaintance with ‘celestial’ sover-

112 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

eign poetry.

The Phoenix would have been an obvious Jamesian text,

in its veiled and elegiac homoeroticism, for Stewart to incorporate in
his allusive network.

Part of the Rapsodies’ process of revering James also entails the offer-

ing of pleas and prayers for his protection, and occasional cautious
advice. ‘To his Maiestie In fascherie’, which may possibly allude to the
alarming Ruthven Raid of 1582, depicts the fragile and vulnerable
young sovereign body, as though Stewart were brieﬂy forfeiting his
abject status and daring to counsel the king in protective fashion. The
miscellany as a whole betrays deep anxiety about the duplicitous
nature of the context in which homage and display occurs; it is an
anticourtly as well as a courtly text: ‘Tyds hich dois ﬂow, Bot ebs als
fast,/Than Richtlie row, for courts vill cast’.

The quatrain, ‘Of ane

Certane Courteour’, evokes Puttenham’s assimilation of the courtier to
the ﬁgure of Allegoria:

Vit but veals vith vertew but vyce
He doith posses now all may persawe.
Sit sall he still suir nocht semyng nyce

Sie may ye him trew nocht leing knawe.

‘Courtliness’ acts as the synonym for guile. Stewart solicits James to
‘ﬂie Sir’ from such dissemblers, vexed that his own reputation might be
tarnished by ‘vthers of dispyt/[who] Vill me Bakbyt’.

Within this

milieu, characterised by an ever-illusory sense of order and the threat
of duplicity and dissent, Stewart’s literary erotics are enacted and
transacted. ‘Yea godis vorks decay sall euerie one,/Befoir that I the
sacred oth repent’: the faithful lover or courtly subject vows never to
betray an ‘Inwart treuth’.

While the locus of the court lies behind

these texts by Stewart and other members of the Jacobean coterie, their
erotic transactions neither simplistically nor reductively veil those of
courtly or political power. Rather it is the act of withholding from the
external courtly world, and of withdrawal to a sanctiﬁed symbolic
realm, inhabited only by the sovereign and his most loyal subject,
which characterises the poetics of erotic courtliness in the Rapsodies.

The allegorical secrecy of desire

‘[I]f oure Courtier would folowe my counsell, I would exhort him to
kepe his loves secrete’:

Stewart’s sonnet, ‘In Going to his Luif’,

mod-

elled on Desportes’ ‘Contre Une Nuict Trop Claire’, is an erotic confes-

Devotional Artefacts 113

sion invested with greater transgressive power by being ‘voiced’ within
the discursive and rhetorical context that cherishes and exploits the
expedient sins of dissembling.

O siluer hornit Diane nychtis queine,
Quha for to kis Endimeon did discend,
Gif ﬂam[m]e of luif thow haid don than susteine
As I do now that instant dois pretend
T’embrasse my luif, Not villing to be kend,
Vith mistie vaill thow vold obscuir thy face
for reuth of me that dois sic trauell spend,
And ﬁnding now this vissit grant of grace,
Bot lett it be thy borrowit lycht alace
I staying stand in feir for to be seine
Sen yndling eine Inwirons all this place
Quhois cursit mouths ay to defame dois meine.

Bot nether thay Nor yit thy schyning cleir
May cause appeir my secret luif synceir.

(1–14)

Transmuting the rituals and codes of courtly society into allegorical
conceit, this sonnet is concerned with the impossible existence of an
inviolable sanctuary in which to love. The lover, in seeking to evade
being seen, must act duplicitously; desire only exists, or possesses
integrity, in so far as it remains unknown. The text recreates the
moment at which the lover prepares ‘T’embrasse … [her/his] love’, and
the brief consummation which fulﬁls the longed for ‘grant of grace’.
The framing analogy of Diana and Endymion carries the conceit of
secrecy; Diana, in her power as moon goddess, can envelop the lover in
darkness; he solicits her aid since she too has loved illicitly. She may
withdraw or soften her light through the ‘reuth’ [pity] of mutual
understanding. So far the lover’s secrecy is a virtue in the sense that
Bacon portrays ‘this hiding and veiling of […] self’: ‘an habit of secrecy
is both politic and moral’.

Yet Diana’s love for Endymion was con-

demned to secrecy, or ‘obscuir[ed]’ in Stewart’s sense, for Endymion, in
perpetual sleep, did not know of her embraces.

This other implied

aspect of secret love imbues the sonnet’s love with pathos: this
‘pretend[ed]’ embrace may be as unfulﬁlled or imperfect as Diana’s.
The fear of revelation imposes temporal limits: ‘Bot let it be thy bor-
rowit light allace […]’; the verbs ‘pretend’ and ‘borrow’ emphasise the

114 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

illusoriness or impermanence of this desire. Even if the condition of
its secrecy ensures its virtue (‘secret luif synceir’), this love is fragile
in other ways. Diana’s protection is not assured but hypothetical:
‘Vith mistie vaill thow vold obscuir thy face…’ (my emphasis).
Grammatically, the sonnet is bound to the present: the title communi-
cates the present immediacy which is emphasised by other temporal
reminders (‘As I do now[…]/I staying stand’). The colophon implies a
sense of stasis as well as movement; the present participle suggests
eternal deferral with his desire immured in a state of imperfect
fulﬁlment. The literal opacity by which this love is consummated sug-
gests opacity of other kinds: must it be covert in ﬁdelity to a notion of
amour courtois, or is it adulterous and of necessity ‘secret’? The lover is
protective not only of ‘luif synceir’ but of the beloved too whose pres-
ence is almost wholly effaced. This is a hauntingly elusive love which,
as the couplet asserts, evades even the moon’s ‘schyning cleir’. The act
of erotic devotion is therefore implicitly conceived as a fragile courtly
transaction, vulnerable to the perils of revelation and condemned, as it
were, to the sanctity of its irremediably ‘secreit’ state. The sonnet
accordingly can be conceived as a miniature meditation, or metacom-
mentary, on the compulsion to veil desire, or to render it invisible.
Within the Rapsodies’ elaborate metaphorical entrelacements and
complex framework of dedications, desire is strongly compelled to ﬁnd
a new means of signiﬁcation in the ﬁgure of Woman. The perilous
erotics of consummation are expressed through the desiring subject-
position of the Other.

Impossible erotics and desiring women

The feminine is an important rhetorical space within Stewart’s lyric
collection, not merely in terms of conjectured social exchanges, but
conceptually and ideologically. In addition to the poems addressed
ostensibly to women, either historically identiﬁable or textually incar-
nated, are several poems about women that are articulated in the name
of woman. The most important of these are entitled ‘In Name of ane
Amorus ladie’, and ‘In Name of ane Loyale ladie’ which hauntingly
explore the question of the permissible voicing of desire. Such poems
are concerned with the enunciation of desire from a feminine subject-
position by a male writer. The impersonated female voice need not
produce a reading which perceives the ﬁgure of woman to be silenced
or marginalised within a masculine discourse. Stewart’s ‘transvestite
ventriloquism’, to use Elizabeth Harvey’s phrase,

can be wholly

Devotional Artefacts 115

orthodox as in the twinned sonnets which form a dialogue between
the ‘hostes’ and ‘host’ (prostitute and client).

Unlike the cultivated

and socially acceptable courtesan of sixteenth-century Venetian
society, the prostitute in Protestant Britain possessed less cultural sanc-
tion; yet as the archetypal courtly, presentational text, gifted to the
sovereign, Stewart’s inclusion of facetiae on the prostitute’s art may
have consciously mirrored the anti-courtesan jests of Italian courtly
‘dialogues’ such as Aretino’s.

But the pre-eminence of the feminine erotic subject-position in

Stewart’s collection, more markedly present here than in other texts by
Scottish Jacobean writers (only Alexander Montgomerie’s corpus is
comparable) renders impossible the ﬁxed location of sexual identity,
and is analogous to the Cixousian notion of bisexual writing. The
concept of literary bisexuality, ‘the location within oneself of the pres-
ence of both sexes’,

emancipates readings of such ventriloquised texts

as Stewart’s from a critique of the subjugated feminine. The presence of
Cixous’s ‘decipherable libidinal femininity’

articulates a position of

the abject and the exiled, and the concept of desires which are ren-
dered more precious by their transgressive nature. (The notion of
‘authenticity’, or the supposition that they speak of ‘genuine’ erotic
impulses rooted in an attested psychosexual interiority which the
concept of the ‘libidinal’ may imply, is not intended here.) The erotic
energies disclosed by the ‘undoing’ of desire’s conventional gendered
spaces may ultimately be contextualised within the Jamesian arc, the
kingly homage of beginning and ending, by which the Rapsodies is
framed.

Sen I am frie to scherse my peir
I knaw my friends vill so desyn,
Bot than sall I vith cairfull cheir
Drywe out my duilfull dayis in pyn
Sen that this luiﬁng hart of myn
Hes chosin ane Inferior
To quhom my nature dois Inclyn
To luif as my superior:

(9–16)

Stewart’s ‘amorous ladie’ is caught between ‘contrarieteis’, debating
whether to choose, presumably in marriage, ‘the man quhom I luif
best’ (28), or to comply with the dictates of ‘freindis […] counsell’ (46).

116 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Desire conﬂicts with the institution of marriage, according to doc-
trines which entail the suppression of female and/or erotic agency.
Although Stewart’s ladie would fulﬁl ‘Gods law’ in taking her true
beloved (27), faithful not only to her own desire but to the Christian
precept of love, she fears that this would be construed as mere pursuit
of her ‘vanton vill’, injurious to her ‘former famus fame’ (43–4).
Stewart’s phrase, ‘playing the fuill’, implies that to act licentiously
would be to assume a mere role or to act contrary to the virtuous love
she inwardly bears. ‘Me to guwernne It better war’ (45): female desire
must be circumscribed and disciplined by authority. ‘Ane venerian
Interpryse’ (48) or profane love may reveal an unguarded and unli-
censed aspect of the female self. The anxieties of social status com-
monly expressed by the politic courtier-lover are feminised. Mindful
of her ‘nobill race’, she can act only as a familial, or more appropri-
ately patriarchal, symbol. Yet Stewart’s female subject contradicts
social hegemony by investing the terms ‘Inferior/superior’ with a
moral or spiritual currency in contrast to the social or materialist
values espoused by her coercive ‘friendis’. Her discourse ends on the
threshold of imminent choice:

Quhan sall my vofull veird compleit?

Quhan I efter my constant kynd
May rander vp ane faythfull spreit

(70–2)

The lyric becomes her own elegy: at once a revelation of, and frustra-
tion with, the impossibility of female desire ﬁnding realisation and
fulﬁlment outwith the public, social realm. Her early assertion of indi-
vidual agency, ‘Sen I am frie’, is denied; in loving according to a pre-
scriptive ideal ‘it becommeth not a mayde to talke […]’.

In Stewart’s other lyric, ‘In name of ane Loyale Ladie’, female sexual-

ity and the constraints of morality appear reconciled; loving under the
auspices of ‘prudent Pallas queine’ (20), her

[…] trustie hart is setlit ﬁrme and suir

As diamant dour Or lyk the stabile steill,

Rather to die than ons my fayth abIuir

(1–3)

Devotional Artefacts 117

Her love achieves the paradox of being both divinely sanctioned (‘God
hes contentit my desyr so weill’, 4), and yet fulﬁlling spiritually and
sexually.

Ewen as lord Phebus lyks the lawrell greine
Contentit so for euir I Remaine,
He for his daintie dame yit suffers teine
Trewth of my luif Reconforts me againe

(21–4)

Unlike Apollo’s desire for chaste Daphne, the ladie is assured of reci-
procity, her beloved no less than an embodiment of ‘Trewth’. This is
an interesting mythic analogue: she identiﬁes herself with the desiring
Apollo rather than the pursued and passive Daphne, frequently alle-
gorised as female virtue; this implies a consenting rather than reluctant
or fearful beloved. The ladie is permitted – she permits herself – to con-
template in erotically suggestive terms his ‘face formois’: ‘My senses all
in solas sueit dois suell […]’ (11). This act of ‘beholding’ most obvi-
ously and strikingly inverts the common gender of the sexual gaze; the
beauty which is adored is also male. ‘Vith suggurit sop as Recent Rois
dois smell/Ewen so resemblith my maist comelie chois’ (9–10): the
male beloved is imaged by the highly sensual and conventionally fem-
inine conceit of the moist or dewy rose. Female eroticism is metaphori-
cally replete throughout: he is a sun to her marigold; she opens as the
ﬂower. She desires sexually but like a ‘trew Penelope’ or Pallas: female
wisdom and female love are mutual. The strength of this alliance
between purity and erotic desire presents a new, almost redeemed,
embodiment of feminine sexuality.

It is probable that this lyric was a ‘gift’, as indicated by the anagram

formed by the initial letter of each line, to Margaret Wemyss, ‘Ladie
Crevcht’ (d.1636). She may be identiﬁed as the daughter of Lady
Cecilia (d. 1589) and Sir David Wemyss of Weymss (c1535–91), the
latter a prominent member of the Jacobean court. She married James
Beaton of Creich as his second wife; thus the poem’s address to
‘Margaret Vemis Ladie Crecht’ implies that it was intended either to
commemorate or announce her marriage (though its date has been
claimed as both 1578 and 1598).

Unlike Montgomerie’s commemora-

tive or ‘gifted’ nuptial poems,

Stewart’s does not espouse a single,

crystalline ideology of the virgin bride; impulses of the pure and
‘impure’ are fused in a version of the eroticised, and eroticising, virgin.

118 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Yet this ‘missexual’ text offers a further complication of gendered

voice through the two short poems immediately subsequent to it. In
‘The Author vith derection heirof to the foirsaid ladie’ and ‘The
Authors adwyce to the foirsaid ladie’,

the verbal travesty or illusion-

ism is broken as Stewart ‘impersonates’ a male voice offered as his own.
In the ﬁrst lyric, the ‘happie man’ of whom the female lover speaks is
addressed. He is fortunate to be loved or ‘elect[ed]’ by her. Though ‘the
author’ grants the ladie free choice or ‘election’, he advises that she
should love ‘ane vther maik’ (8); in desiring him she degrades herself
(‘ourfar she dois abuiss/Hir freindlie fauor for thy saik’ (5–6)). In the
eight line envoi, he excuses himself (his audacity?), and courteously
defers to her: ‘Your hand I kis/And so I end’ (15–16). The second lyric
(termed ‘adwyce’ rather than the more direct ‘derection’) is a brief
exemplum on the folly of aspiring to the impossible or unattainable.

Althocht the fruite dois fairest spring
That hichest on the trie dois grow
In greatest dainger dois it hing
Quhan Boreas begins to blow;
The hicher set, The sooner low
As be experience ve sie:
The faster knet, the harder throw,
Heirfoir vith the myd meine aggrie.

Through proverbial sententia, the poem articulates the moral that
desire should be restrained. There are conscious echoes of the amorous
ladie’s own cautionary maxims: the example of Icarus, the ‘prowerbe
plain’ of lines (37–40). Her desire to love unreasonably (in her own
phrase not to be ‘content’), symbolised as the ‘fruite […]/That hichest
on the trie dois grow’, resonates with that archetypal paradigm of illicit
and covetous feminine desire, Eve and the tree of knowledge.

As these male-voiced poems seal her utterance (vis-à-vis their actual

textual position in the manuscript), so they may represent the caution-
ary instructions of the companions to which she alludes. As if in a
further act of ventriloquism, her unﬁnished and questioning poem is
‘answered’ by words of social propriety and censure; her desire, that
she may desire as she wishes, is symbolically ‘ﬁnished’. The female
subject, in the end, is silenced: the ﬁrst of these ‘answer’ lyrics is a
communication between men (one prospective, jealous lover to
another?), contesting the emotional agency of the absent female
subject (depicted in the ‘third person’ in the ﬁrst eight lines though the

Devotional Artefacts 119

poem is ostensibly addressed ‘to the foirsaid ladie’). Female eroticism is
invested with a trangressive beauty which, albeit differently in each
lyric instance, is ultimately forbidden. The veiled allusion to Margaret
Wemyss, Lady Creich, invests the lyric series with the ‘ghost’ of a his-
torical narrative: did this erotic chastisement, the imperative to love
prudently, have roots in a courtly succès de scandale? Did Wemyss
herself author the lyric(s); or did she ‘authorise’ by proxy this exchange
of desire and admonishment?

These lyrics are also haunted by another erotic narrative: desire for

the king. While none of the female-voiced texts allude explicitly or
implicitly to James, their incarnations of eros, and the processes of
authority and chastisement which they invoke, unravel threads of con-
tinuity with Stewart’s own professed desires for the sovereign. There
are several reasons, already explored, why sexual desire should here be
‘feminised’. It is not embodied in any position which perceives the
female desiring subject as being de facto powerless. But this erotic act of
projection and identiﬁcation on Stewart’s part is resonant with impli-
cations for Jacobean and Stewartian erotics as a whole: in the ambigu-
ously ‘unsigned’ or unauthorised signature of desires, and in the
‘bisexuality’ which serves to signify the possibility of male–male
erotics. This is sublimated in the collection’s ﬁnal transposition of the
profane into the realm of the sacred and the pure.

Love, faith and chastity: Jamesian prescriptions

In praising love ‘at the desyre of ane Nobile ladie’, Stewart celebrates its
eternity and its sole exemption among ‘[a]ll things in erthe’ (21) from
religious censure. This can hardly be said to preﬁgure the closing vision
of eros in the Rapsodies, and Stewart’s manuscript as a whole. In the
context of the manuscript’s triptych-structure, the lyric section is
philosophically and theologically subordinate to the overarching
moral sublimation of Ane Schersing. An elaborately tissued allegory, it
culminates in a vision of the New Jerusalem after the apocalyptic
expulsion of all temporal sins, the expurgation of mortal and political
temptations, and the establishment of the ‘ﬁrm trew Religion’ (102).
These symbolic acts of moral and civic purgation are carried out by a
panoply of allegorical protagonists that, in their image and rhetoric of
exemplarity, owe much to David Lyndsay’s 1540s drama, Ane Satyre of
the Thrie Estatis. The latter’s part-status as an allegorical performance in
the ‘advice to princes’ tradition also informs Stewart’s poem. This
offers moral and spiritual ‘derection’ to a later Stewart sovereign

120 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

beneath the veil of personiﬁcation. As such, it may belong to the mid-
1580s with its relative political stability; at the same time, it echoes the
rhetoric of auspiciousness and premonition, and the iconography of
kingship, which belongs to the sovereign poetry of 1579. Subsumed
within this monarchical, political and religious vision is the pilgrim
journey of an individual soul. The Stewartian poet renounces his
former iniquitous devotion to Venus (the sins of luxuria and vanitas),
and redirects his love to God, ‘the onlie fontane fair/Of euerie grace’
(75–6). While Stewart’s self-protagonist is guided by Charity and
others, his deliverance out of a Venusian purgatory is implicitly orches-
trated by James himself. To the goddess Urania, spiritual muse of Du
Bartas’s Uranie and its Jamesian translation, Stewart laments the folly of
presenting his former profane ‘buik’ to the king. She replies that James
will ‘correct’ its ﬂaws (‘correctioun’, 91, being both textual and moral),
and that ‘be inspectioun of his luiﬁng luik/In euerie blob sall beautifeit
appeir’. In the ‘Mateir’ of Ane Schersing, Charity appears as a ‘chast
virgin’, a ‘heawenlie dam’ (the image of the Petrarchan donna angeli-
cata rather than the Virgin herself). He offers his devotions to caritas:
‘Your luif is courtas godlie and synceir/Your luf from all Inwy is purgit
cleir/Your luif is not prouockit to desdaine/Your luif in suffering long
dois perseweir […]’.

Submission to Urania and Caritas implicitly

becomes submission to James through the ideals, literary and moral,
which both female personiﬁcations incarnate. Ironically, the female
muse replaces Apollo, and the conventional Jacobean poetic genealogy,
the source of all auctoritas, is feminised.

The word of God, and the words of James, constitute the true texts of

Ane Schersing; the ‘blissit buik’ ﬁnally revealed to its poet contains the
‘gouldin letters’ ‘IACOBUS SEXTVS HIC SCOTORUM REX’ (261). Yet
the Rapsodies is not wholly its moral opposition: it contains anticipa-
tory moments of its recantation of the profane. The sonnet on
‘Chastetie’ is placed before the prostitute’s ‘Salutation’ and ‘Ansuir’; the
latter are suggestively succeeded by ‘Of the Assaultis of Luif’ and ‘Of
Deth’ in which the body is shown to suffer agonistically.

‘Chastetie’

neither offers an exposition of caritas nor of the renunciation necessary
in order to attain this divine ‘vertew great’. The sonnet was earlier dis-
cussed as a veiled allusion to James’s spiritually unique love for the
phoenix which is Lennox. In this sense, it offers a masculine version of
the normally feminised phoenix emblem which contrasts with the
feminine associations of the ‘vermell Rois’. The phoenix, as a symbol
of Christian resurrection, may inform Stewart’s concept of chastity as
an implicit kind of ‘resurrection’ of the spiritual over the bodily. The

Devotional Artefacts 121

rose (perhaps in deliberate contrast to the Anacreontic associations of
the rose in the earlier sonnet ‘In Prais of Luif at the Desyre of ane
Nobile Ladie’) evokes the ‘paine’ by which the ‘blis’ of chastity is
attained:

for as the Rois of ﬂouris all the chois
Maist semlie sproutith from the scharpest thorne
So thow (I dout not) dois vith paine Inclois
All sort of thois be quhom thy blis is borne

Purity is also a crown of thorns. There are other invocations of
‘redeemed’ eroticism. The sonnet, ‘For Conﬁrming Of Ane Faithfull
Promeis’, illuminates a concept of love which refutes the courtly
machinations of ‘In Going to his Luif’.

A ‘sacred oth’, never deﬁned

or ‘explaine[d], (13), is made to ‘yow my luif alone/Vith ﬁxit faith’
(7–8). The secrecies of ‘In Going to his Luif’ are not wholly renounced;
this is a confession or vow whose sanctity must be taken on trust: ‘Och
vold to god I mycht be pruif explaine/My Inwart treuth quhilk con-
stant sall remaine’ (13–17). Faith in the beloved is so assured that sus-
picion of the ‘sacred oth’ is sacrilege:

The suelling sie sall ﬁrst rewert in ﬁre;
And mollifeit salbie ilk dourest stone;
The erth abowe the heawenis sall Impyre:
Of sone And mone the lycht sall als be gone,
Yea godis vorks decay sall euerie one (1–5)

The sanctiﬁed virtue of ‘ﬁrm faith’ is extolled in a number of other
Rapsodies poems which resolutely celebrate amicitia, and not amor.

Quhat solas is so sound sinceir and sueit?
As freindschip ﬂowing from effection frie?
Quhat mundan myrth may man obtein so meit
As sutche guid hap to ﬁnd for his supplie?
for freindis tuo, quhois nature dois aggrie
Ar lyk vyn branchis linkit growand greine
About the stoupis of that kyndlie trie
Quhilk luiﬁnglie againe dois tham susteine

The ‘faithfull band’ (‘Amitie’) which binds true friends is, as attested

by its classical exposition in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s

122 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

De Amicitia, and their neo-Platonic transmissions, based on virtue, the
recognition of equality, and inexpedient motives.

Their mutual devo-

tion contrasts with the Rapsodies’ other denunciations of earthly vicis-
situdes, particularly the anti-curial poems. Their larger socio-cultural
status suggests interesting, if ultimately irresolvable, issues. Do they
simply reﬂect the ‘conversational’, dialogic qualities of the collection,
poems given as gifts to ‘friends’ as to mistresses; Castiglione’s manual
of good courtiership advises how one should enter into friendship.

R.D.S. Jack perceptively proposes that the moral ethos of the Rapsodies’
love poetry is inﬂuenced by the popularity of Petrarch’s Trionﬁ at the
Scottish Jacobean court:

In the four chapters of the ﬁrst triumph of Love, Stewart would ﬁnd
love in all its varities from lust to the highest aspirations. Love is
then conquered by Chastity and we ﬁnd the Castalian composing a
sonnet called ‘Of Chastetie’, using the conventional Petrarchan par-
allels with ‘phoenix’ and ‘vermell rois’, while stressing its superiority
to earthly pleasures […]

The Rapsodies’ friendship poems, none of which makes explicit the
speaker’s gender, may seek to exploit that same afﬁnity between amor
and amicitia so that, ultimately, the ideal love founded on faith is
same-sex love. As such, the labyrinthine traces of desire may lead back
to the king, who espouses the aesthetic and philosophical ideals of
moral purity.

Stewart, ever fearful ‘to displeis’ the king, may have created the

Rapsodies in deference to James’s ‘Sacred Sang’, as an avowedly consci-
entious reader of his ‘maist prudent/Precepts in the deuyn art of
poesie’.

Given the way in which Stewart presents himself as such an

assiduous sovereign interpreter, it is surprising that his work exists only
within this single manuscript; there are no extant copies of his poems,
a fact which places Stewart oddly in the margins of the Jacobean
coterie. It is interesting to conjecture whether this lack of textual sur-
vival is mere chance or perhaps deliberate? Stewart’s allegorical protag-
onist in Ane Schersing willingly submits to the divine muse’s spiritual
and literary enlightenment in a way that parallels the symbolic submis-
sion of Stewart himself to James. The conversion of the erotic into the
spiritual within Stewart’s manuscript is, of course, shaped by wider
palinodic conventions of amatory writing. Yet the earliest poems of the
Rapsodies raise the spectres of mortality and sinfulness, concepts
refracted in the female-voiced poems which introduce the secular

Devotional Artefacts 123

morality of ideal feminine conduct and, by virtue of its ‘missexual’
context of articulation, ideas of the transgressive and the forbidden.
The erotic world of Stewart’s presentation ‘buik’ is circumscribed by
secular and religious moralities, by the duplicities of courtiership and
ultimately by the sovereign himself. Stewart’s writing bears the closest
afﬁnities to Montgomerie’s above all other Scottish Jacobean poetic
courtiers. Yet Stewart remains the most extreme Jamesian devotee; the
sense of both erotic and literary piety and ﬁdelity runs deep within his
writing. The individually beautiful textual artefacts of the collection
constitute an elaborate verbal homage to James. Yet while Stewart’s
poetry depends upon the duplicitous courtly context (how else is desire
for the sovereign mediated?), it is deeply critical of it, partly because it
discloses the vulnerabilities, political and emotional in nature, of both
himself, the courtly subject and the sovereign. In Stewart’s poetry, the
sheer need for sovereign attention, approbation and, ultimately, desire
is felt acutely; the subject is incomplete and imperfect without the
plenitude, as it were, which only the king can offer. The erotic renunci-
ation of Ane Schersing is Stewart’s philosophical homage to his ‘prince’
where the representation of James is a remarkable synthesis of mythog-
raphy (‘phebus brycht’), christology, and divine kingship. At least on
earth, James is Stewart’s redeemer. The Rapsodies, perhaps an isolated
remnant of Stewart’s literary production, remain as an erotic and wor-
shipful ‘gift’.

124 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Love’s Altar: Alexander
Montgomerie and the Erotics of
Representation

Alexander Montgomerie (c1550–1598) is both the Jacobean paragon
and the Jacobean excommunicate. As a convert suspected of covert
Catholic counter-plotting, Montgomerie’s political, courtly and liter-
ary communion with James had dissolved by the end of the 1580s.
Erotic love seems to have entered into that communion, according to
the testimony of the poetic dialogue of desire between Montgomerie
and his king. Just as Stewart’s poetry invests the constellation of
Jamesian sovereign mythologies with affective, and seductive, power,
so does Montgomerie’s, but with a greater and more sustained inten-
sity. This chapter explores the erotics of representation in those lyrics
whose portrait of desire delineates the king. Sensitivity to the ‘imma-
nence’ of James within certain profane poems provides a further point
of symbolic departure into the ‘passional’ narrative of other lyrics,
those which do not apostrophise or imagine the king, but stage their
own dramas of erotic desecration and redemption. Desire is frequently
ensnared by mortality in Montgomerie’s love poetry; love, fortune
and death unite to form a trinity of adversaries. While mortal love is
not the explicit subject of Montgomerie’s sovereign erotic verse, its
manifestation in other lyrics extends and ampliﬁes the dark provision-
ality of sovereign desire. Erotic and political subjectivities ultimately
blend in their shared fragility. Love, above all for the king, entails
sacriﬁce, and Montgomerie is the most willing and poignant of love’s
martyrs.

125

Catholic desires

Montgomerie’s copious and diverse writing belongs to a number of
histories: those of political and religious literature in late sixteenth-
century Scotland; of early modern rhetoric and the poetics of transla-
tion; of a Counter-Reformation pietistic sensibility; and of the
cultural fusion of music and literature in its creation of a performa-
tive and popular art in courtly and elite Scotland.

Montgomerie was

the most proliﬁc amatory lyricist of the Jacobean coterie, awarded the
sobriquet ‘Pindarus Scoticus’ by Thomas Dempster, and allegedly the
author of ‘cantiones amatorie’.

While his poetry remains inextrica-

ble from the contexts of the inner Jacobean coterie, it also embodies
the social and familial ‘transactions’ of the Montgomerie circles.

The

lyric texts of the Ker manuscript have many identiﬁable recipients,
dedicatees and interlocutors, which embed them within contempo-
rary cultural and social dialogues or ‘transitions’; frequently, the
transfer through marriage and between families of the aristocratic
daughter.

Montgomerie himself belonged to the powerful Eglinton

branch of the family in southwest Scotland, and he had familial links
with the king himself. Uniquely, his literary production crosses polit-
ical and cultural thresholds in spanning both the Marian and
Jacobean decades. He contributed prominently to the cultural inau-
guration of James’s reign through allegorical, masque-like narrative
which celebrates the iconicity of James’s new kingship.

The Marian

‘inheritance’ had pragmatic manifestation in his probable pro-
Catholic agitation in Reformed Scotland,

and, by extension, in the

fact of his conversion which conjecturally occurred during a probable
visit to Spain in the 1580s.

R.J. Lyall points out the intriguing dispar-

ities between the ofﬁcial Jacobean records of Montgomerie’s contin-
ual imprisonment in ‘the pairtis of Flanderis, Spane and utheris
beyond sey’,

and the lack of Dutch archival evidence to corroborate

this imprisonment. Lyall suggests that a signiﬁcant simultaneity of
events – James’s conﬁrmation of the pension of his ‘Catholic
courtier-poet’ and his public statement of Montgomerie’s ‘inexplica-
ble’ presence in Spain when pro-Catholic sympathies among the
Scottish nobility were being treated leniently by James – may imply
that the allegations of imprisonment are a ‘cover-story to disguise the
true nature of Montgomerie’s activities’.

Montgomerie’s political, no less than aesthetic, career at the

Jacobean court had a dramatic and changeful trajectory. His most inju-
rious act was his support for the Catholic Hugh Barclay of Ladyland’s

126 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

plot to capture the island of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde in support
of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland. He was summoned to
answer the treasonable charges but, having failed to appear at court, he
was ofﬁcially outlawed on 14 July 1597.

This grievously compounded

Montgomerie’s earlier litigious and political offence. Montgomerie had
drawn an annual income or pension since 1583 from the revenues of
Glasgow Cathedral which entailed the endorsement of the Catholic
James Beaton as Archbishop of Glasgow; the Protestant claimant,
William Erskine, subsequently asserted his right to the archbishopric
revenues which affected Montgomerie’s own dispensation. Erskine’s
incumbency was endorsed in 1593 by the Crown.

Politically and

ﬁnancially, Montgomerie was affected; an apparently irrevocable
breach had occurred between sovereign and subject. According to the
testimony of Father Thomas Duff, a Benedictine monk of the Scottish
abbey of St James in Würzburg, Montgomerie sought sanctuary there.
He seems to have returned to Ayrshire, though, where his political
commitment to the Catholic cause was renewed. As John Durkan
recently attested, although declared by the Edinburgh presbytery a
‘poet papist’ and ofﬁcially an outlaw, Montgomerie was given burial on
Protestant ground.

In a series of Latin poems discovered by Mark

Dilworth, Father Duff vehemently endorses Montgomerie’s spiritual
and literary ﬁdelity to the faith in 1616:

Dum moritur ﬁdei vates Montgomrius ardens
Romanae et sanctae Relligionis Amor…

Hostis eram gravis haereseon semperque perodi

Falsa, Picarditas carmine Marte premens.

Such impassioned religious polemic cannot be entirely substantiated

from Montgomerie’s poetic relics.

His longest work, a complex vision-

ary allegory entitled The Cherrie and the Slae, ﬁrst published in 1597 by
Robert Waldegrave and reprinted throughout the next century in
Scotland, has been interpreted by Helena Shire as the poetic inscription
of ‘Catholic militancy’.

The spiritual succour of the cherry is sweet

temptation compared to the bitter gall of the Reformed slae. The alle-
gory evinces Montgomerie’s propensity for iconographic and emblem-
atic symbolism. In other ways, Montgomerie’s conversion ‘haunts’ his
extant poetry: in the sonnet, ‘Myne ee the glasse’, derived from Henry
Constable, also a convert;

in the sonnet to James Lauder, Catholic

court musician, which may allude in ‘ghostly’ acrostic form to Mary

Love’s Altar 127

Queen of Scots;

in rhetorical and imagistic echoes of Counter-

Reformation baroque piety and sensuality; and in the series, ‘A Ladyis
Lamentatione’. This tripartite sonnet sequence can be used as a sum-
mation of Montgomerie’s political and spiritual faiths, and as a sugges-
tive prologue to his writing of eros:

ORD

, for my missis micht I mak a mends,

By putting me to Penance as thou pleasd?
Good God forgive offenders that offends
And heall the hurt of sik as are diseasde.

A female plainant seeks remission for her sin, implicitly a sexual trans-
gression on the evidence of the separate but related typologies of the
Magdalene and Cresseid upon which she draws. Her ‘fall’ is also trans-
lated into social terms: ‘I wes accountit Countes but compair/Quhill
ﬁckle fortun vhirld me from her vheell./Rank and Renoun in lytill
Roum sho rang’d’ (1: 11–13). This is a haunting, melancholic text
which elegises the spiritual end and exile of a ‘worldly woman’ (1: 10)
turned ‘Bysin’ (2: 14; ‘harlot’). A number of speculations can be
brought to this text. The ﬁrst, in pursuit of historical veracity, might
suggest that it dramatises a speciﬁc incident in the life of a female
subject at the Jacobean court or within the Montgomerie circle.

Second, it may represent Montgomerie’s excursion into the popular
Renaissance genre of female complaint. Alternatively, that the poem’s
plainant may not be ‘ventriloquised’ but authored, anonymously of
course, by a woman; whether she herself is the historical representative
of the spiritual crisis or its fabulator. Finally, given Montgomerie’s reli-
gious and, by implication, political sympathies, and the text’s persona
of the beautiful, penitent ‘whore’, this might be Montgomerie’s act of
writing in propria persona Mary Stewart.

The queen’s situation can be

mapped seamlessly onto the sequence; the term ‘Countess’ may mask
the more transparent term of sovereign. Its vocabulary of penitence
and atonement is Catholic (‘So with Peccavi Pater I conclude’, 3: 14),
liturgically the source from which Montgomerie, the exiled convert,
creates his own devotional poetry.

‘A Ladyis Lamentatione’ may

therefore be a politically suggestive act of Marian sympathy. The reli-
gious and political ‘faultlines’ of this sequence, its powers of ellipsis
and evocation, suggest the cultural complexities of Montgomerie’s
position: a devoted and disaffected writer to James with the spiritual
faith of the king’s mother.

128 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

In ‘Cupid’s court’: writing eros, reading James

While Stewart’s relationship with the king is overwhelmingly manifest
in the Rapsodies’ postures of adoration, humility and abjection, sover-
eign desire in the context of Montgomerie’s poetry is not singly pos-
sessed by the courtly subject but ‘shared’ between sovereign and
subject. James’s Essayes may announce the forms of ideal sovereign-leg-
islated poetics but it is mostly Montgomerie’s lyrics which exemplify
its desired principles such as the song-lyric, ‘Before the Greeks durst
enterpryse’, offered as the exemplary love poem of the new Jamesian
renaissance, though explicit authorial identiﬁcation is not made.

Further, there are possible correspondences between the erotic texts of
both James and Montgomerie. The Jamesian mythological web of sym-
bolism – light, sun, ascendance, Apollo – is promulgated by
Montgomerie in erotic poems such as ‘The Solsequium’ and ‘Before the
Greeks’, printed in extract in the Essayes.

Either as deliberate emula-

tion, uncanny resemblance, or as inspiration for kingly poetics,
Montgomerie’s profane poems reﬂect Jamesian desiderata: scepticism,
wit and philosophical impulses. What R.J. Lyall has classiﬁed as the
ideological mannerism of Montgomerie, founded on ‘shifting uncer-
tainties’,

is echoed in the rhetorical manierismo of many lyrics, replete

with meretricious alliteration, embellishment and a deep absorption
with their own qualities of beautiful difﬁcultà. These endeavours to
manifest the ‘fullness’, the absolute presence, of love conform to the
Jamesian desire for ‘literall’ verse.

The courtly maniera aesthetic of

which Montgomerie is the supreme, Jamesian-endorsed exemplar, con-
trasts with the earlier mid-sixteenth-century, Protestant-inﬂuenced
‘plain-style’ rhetoric in which anti-sacramental theology is translated
into the ‘doctrine’ of the unmediated purity of the word.
Montgomerie’s mannerism is not only a reﬂected practice of ‘secu-
larised’, courtly preciosity but the counterpart, conscious or otherwise,
of Protestant poetics. Montgomerie’s erotic mannerism is the outward
and visible sign of love’s ‘secreit’ mysteries, known by its excess and
the proliferation and extravagance of its textual signs.

Montgomerie is not such an obvious Jamesian devotee as Stewart; his

devotion to James is more irresolute and more concessive to irony. As
if in obeisance to the king’s precept that politics should be expelled
from poetry, Montgomerie offers several disavowals in one lyric:

With mightie maters mynd I not to mell
As copping Courts or Comonwelthis or Kings.

Love’s Altar 129

Quhais Craig yoiks fastest let them sey thame sell.

My thoght culd nevir think upon sik things.

I wantonly wryt vnder Venus wings.

In Cupids Court ye knau I haif bene kend…

Here, eros is portrayed as a cloistered and innocent realm, an alterna-
tive ‘commonwealth’, in which Montgomerie can shelter with due dis-
pensation to write in excess (‘wantonly’). ‘Kings’ are signiﬁcantly
dissociated from Venus’s empire. Elsewhere Montgomerie comments
on the duplicitous, and morally incriminating, art of princepleasing:

First thou mon preis thy Prince to pleis
(Thoght contrare Conscience he commands)
With Mercuris mouth and Argo’s eis
And with Briarius hundreth hands

And seme vhatsoevir he sayis to seill

So Court and Conscience wallis not weill.

This might be taken as a conventional piece of ‘anti-courtliness’ or
anti-curial satire, except that it indicts the ﬁgure of the king rather
than the courtier with the charge of verbal corruption, and with the
power to make his courtier commit perjury. Ironically, perjury is the
sin of which Montgomerie’s famous series of sonnets on the revocation
of his pension accuses James.

In another valedictory sonnet series to

the court musician, Robert Hudson, Montgomerie assumes a position
of abjectness in relation to the king which is invested with quasi-erotic
power, mirroring the rhetorical and psychological state of a lover. As
they condemn the wilful, unjust arbitrariness of James, so they reiter-
ate the terms of an original and enduring adoration:

I feid Affectione when I sie his grace
To look on that vhairin I most delyte.
I am a lizard fainest of his face

And not a snaik with poyson him to byte […]

So stands with me vho loues w

all my [hairt]

My Maister best, some taks it in ill pairt

Its language demarcates a former space of devotion upon which

others, from the larger, all-enveloping political world, have trespassed.
Montgomerie has no guilt to expiate; nor does he accuse the king of

130 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

any other sin but that of betrayal. It is a passionate sequence, con-
structing the illusion of confession, but one where the passions are so
dispersed that they emerge as fragments of a sundered devotion which
is difﬁcult to reconstitute into a meaningful whole. It is not known
whether James directly received these extraordinary poems. Obliquely
dramatising the political and erotic power of the sovereign, they invest
it with a menacing capacity for retribution.

The poetic and erotic exchanges of desire within the Jacobean coterie

play upon the arbitrariness of the royal will. Jamesian approval of, and
pleasure at, obeisance can be withdrawn; Montgomerie illustrates that
vagary in several ways. James’s poem, ‘Ane admonition to the maister
poete to leaue of greit crakking quhi[lk]/deid shau leist he not onely
sklander him self but alsua the haill/professours of the airt’ can be con-
strued as the jesting literary prologue to Montgomerie’s later, ‘real’
excommunication in which the sovereign withholds or revokes the
seal of desire or approval:

geif patient eire to sumthing i man say
Belouit sandirs maister of oure airt
the mous did help the lyon one a day
sa i protest ye tak it in guid pairt
my admonition cumming from a hairt
that uishes ueill to you & all youre craft
quha uald be sory for to see you smairt

thocht uther poetes trouis ye be gain daft.

There is an implicit joke here: the king audaciously offers the ‘maister
poete’ advice (‘the mous […] help the lyon one day’ becomes a fable of
their poetic inversion). It is witty and rebarbative in its depiction of
Montgomerie’s apparent ‘exile’ or exclusion from the coterie. James
attempts to explain the reasons for Montgomerie’s seeming ‘failure’
and subjection to ‘bakbit[ing]’ (22), offering himself as both ‘freind’
and ‘chirurgian’ (9, 17). Both gently and abrasively, he rebukes
Montgomerie for the sins of hubris and presumption ‘all youre crakkis
& bargane […]’ (66), likening him to Dares who pleaded in Aeneas’
court for the ‘reuairde’ owed to the victor: ‘ […] sen thair is nane that
dou or can/be matche to me quhat langer sall i stand’ (39–40).

For Helena Shire, this poem exempliﬁes the competitive poetic culture

of the Jacobean court and its propensity for ‘role-playing’ though the
pseudonymous guises of the king and his courtiers.

Yet its language of

reward, aspiration and desire is nuanced in other ways too. James’s

Love’s Altar 131

‘Admonitoun’ dramatises in its end the failure of Montgomerie’s own
contrived rivalry: ‘ye sta auay and durst na maire be sene […].’ (96).
The poem certainly enacts kingly authority, but it is ﬁctionalised, even
in the prophetic arrival of ‘apollo […] in his glistering throne’ (83) at
the poem’s beautiful pastoral epilogue. The ‘Admonitioun’ is enclosed
by another text, the ‘Sonnett’ which ‘protests’ that the warning and
rebuke stemmed purely from ‘loue’ (98). Humility is assumed: ‘fullis
counsall quhiles uill help uise men i trou […]’ (99). The sonnet is reca-
pitulatory in part, suddenly confessing the futility of its Dares analogy:
‘Cracke not againe no forer then the creede’. These ‘remissions’ or
retractions may demonstrate the habitual ﬁctionalising of the sover-
eign self at this time, and the socially inventive and imaginative mise-
en-scène of literary and cultural collaboration; but they also convey the
strange, emotive parity which can be sensed between the king and
Montgomerie in the writing of both. In the text of Bodley 165, the
third line is deleted: ‘heir patiently quhat loue moues me to say’ (f.
47r). While clearly this poem is a jeu d’esprit of sorts, it suggests the
ways in which a language of desire could ‘contour’ the language of
political and literary devotion.

This in itself does not make Montgomerie’s poetry unique; eros and

politics are nearly always entwined in the literary discourses of
Renaissance courts. But in the context of British Renaissance political
Petrarchism, in which the circulation of political and social anxieties is
contained within the vessel of love poetry, the creation of what Javitch
termed an ‘impure’ poetry has remained inextricable from the ﬁgure of
Elizabeth, and the subtle conﬁgurations of gender which surrounded
her. While the homoeroticism of James’s English political and courtly
practices have been recognised, the delicate eroticisation of James
within the Scottish Jacobean context has not. Within certain contexts,
the potential for erotic language to fold in on itself in an ever-
regressive structure towards a centre or origin which is always political
may be inevitable. Yet it is difﬁcult to ignore the fascination within
Montgomerie’s profane love poetry for the topoi of sovereignty. His
political and amatory poems have been conventionally kept apart
when there is a borderland of verbal equivalence between them. The
sovereign self is enclosed in their structures of allusion and metaphor.
Such ‘impure’ poems of love are haunted by the spectrally erotic pres-
ence of James.

Cupid stalks Montgomerie’s love poetry to a greater degree than that

of his Jacobean contemporaries. The power of Amor or Eros, when
embodied in the little love-god, offspring of Venus, usually signiﬁes an

132 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

unruly authority; Petrarch’s Rime sparse declares Cupid the lover’s
nemico. In his illuminating survey of Cupidian allegory, Thomas A.
Hyde comments on the irony or satire arising ‘when a poem lends its
readers to understand Cupid differently than do its speaker or charac-
ters’.

Helena Shire attributed precisely such irony to Montgomerie’s

Cupidian poetry in interpreting Cupid as the perennial representation
of James himself. Cupid, according to Shire, is an early mythological
representation of royal authority succeeded by that of Apollo,

though

R.D.S. Jack is unconvinced by Shire’s hypothesis.

While Shire’s

hypothesis rules out more equivocal manifestations of Cupid, the evo-
cation of erotic and political power through the love-god remains
suggestive.

In The Cherrie and the Slae (1597), Montgomerie’s complex allegory of

the spiritual, possibly apostolic life, Cupid appears to the poem’s
dreamer as a deceptively ‘coy’ emblem of sensuality.

The lover’s expe-

riential awakening occurs after s/he usurps the ‘wingis’ and ‘bow’ of
the little ‘Sant’ (112): ‘Quhairwith I hurt my wanton heart/In hope to
hurt ane vther:/It hurt me it burt me/The ofter I it handill./Cum se
now, in me now,/The butter-ﬂie and candill’ (163–8). This Narcissus-
like self-martyrdom makes for a miniature fable of idolatrous desire to
precede the lover’s ‘ascension’ to a spiritual and selﬂess caritas. In
general, the ‘little God of love’ (107), appearing in the guises of a mis-
chievous Anacreontic Cupid and as a fully-ﬂedged adversary, may offer
Montgomerie a point of characteristic pictorial elaboration. Similar to
Stewart’s descriptive, explicitly painterly incarnation of Cupid,
Montgomerie’s Cupid mirrors the later artistic depictions of eros. The
familiar iconography of the ‘winged boy’ is allegorised by
Montgomerie in conventional ways, reﬂecting, if not consciously
derived from, the exegeses of some Italian neo-Platonic treatises.

Cupid’s iconography, the traditional armoury of devices bestowed on
the ‘winged god’, invests desire with literal force: ‘for lurking
Love…/took a shaft and suddently me shot/Quhais fyrie heid brint in
my harte so hot’.

In ‘The sacriﬁce of Cupid’,

Montgomerie pursues the concept of

erotic martyrdom to mannerist extremes. Its chief conceit is the
sacriﬁcial relation between lover and love-god, transacted through the
lover’s veneration at the altar of ‘Cupido’ where the liturgical text is
French: ‘vive vive l’amour’.

Cupid, the god of love, is depicted as

omnipresent and omniscient: ‘Hou oft haif I (thou knauis hou, vhen,
and vhair)/Caus’d my complante ascend into thy eirs?’ (7–8). Though
the lover resigns himself to Cupid’s kingly power, he achieves a surrogate

Love’s Altar 133

conquest over his beloved by commanding Cupid to ‘Anis burne hir
breist’ (47). He desires her to suffer likewise: ‘That sho may sey vhat
sicknes me possest’ (48). Though expressed in conventional metaphor-
ical terms (the ﬂame of desire), his imperative is at root violent.
Impotence compels the lover to inﬂict suffering upon the intransigent
woman. Cupid becomes a ﬁgure onto which frustrated desire is dis-
placed, a process mirrored in other Cupidian texts of Montgomerie’s.

Many of these lyrics querulously depict the paradoxical nature of

Cupid’s power. As a mere ‘Boy’ (‘suckling’ or ‘bearne’ in Montgomerie’s
terms), he is attacked for the unwarranted, unmerited usurpation of
authority and for lacking wisdom in neo-Platonic and other philosoph-
ical treatises on love. One sonnet, ‘Against the God of Love’
(signiﬁcantly the last sonnet in the series in the Ker manuscript which
begins with one on the Holy Trinity) vehemently denounces this false
‘god’:

Blind brutal Boy that w

thy bou abuses

Leill leisome Love by Lechery and Lust,
Judge Jakanapis and Jougler maist vnj[ust],
If in thy rageing R

ESONE

thou refusis

To be thy Chiftanes changers ay thou chuisis

To beir thy baner, so they be robust

Cupid’s travesty of justice and the secular law of ‘leill, leisome
love’implicates his loyal subjects (ﬁgured as standard bearers, evoking
Petrarch’s Trionfo d’amore) in similar corruption. The sestet parodies the
conventional iconographic features of Cupid; his ‘staitly styl[e]’ (13) is
systematically reduced to the trappings of mere disguise. This reductive
metamorphosis divests Cupid of his supposed divinity:

Art thou a God, no, bot a Gok disguysit

A bluiter buskit lyk a belly blind

With wings and quaver waving with the Wi[nd]

A plane Playmear for Vanitie devysit.

Thou art a stirk for all thy staitly stylis
And these good Geese vhom sik a god begylis

(9–14)

Though this sonnet has been interpreted as an assertion of ‘spiritual
truth in the low style’,

it arguably remains a conventional denunci-

134 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

ation of Cupid’s profanity, echoing earlier conservative moralisa-
tions of the love-god. The charge of duplicity, for example, is
derived from emphasis upon Cupid’s blindness, an iconographical
feature that associated him with Fortune and Death.

Rather than

being a playful little amorous divinity Cupid is a vicissitudinal, thus
dangerous ruler, and therefore scarcely the ideal mythological incar-
nation of James; especially as Shire assumes that these Cupid poems
belong to an early phase of Montgomerie’s writing when relations
between subject and monarch were supposedly harmonious. The
relationship between sovereign and subject is always already written
into Cupidian mythologies. No real ‘metamorphosis’ of James into
Cupid can occur since the conceit of ruler exists a priori. There is
always a potential ‘sovereign’ reading of such Renaissance love texts
premissed on the lover’s submission and rebellion to ruling author-
ity: ‘Go, sonet, soon, unto my Soveran say,/Redeme your man, or
dam him but delay’.

Montgomerie’s vein of Cupid poetry is still a

suggestive ‘translation’ of James, and the power of eros and politics
when combined.

In Montgomerie’s Ronsardian translation, ‘Vha wald behold him

vhom a God so grievis?’,

the lover offers himself as the supreme

victim or exemplar of Cupid’s grievous power: ‘Behold bot me persaiv
my painfull pairt […]’. This rebellious lover promises that (his) reason
will overcome (Cupid’s) passion: ‘Thair sall he sie vhat Resone then
c[an do]/Against his bou if once he mint bot, to/Compell our hairts in
bondage basse to be[ir]’ (9–11). Montgomerie’s ﬁnal three lines richly
draw out the eroticism of the Ronsardian resolution:

Yit sall he se me happiest appeir

That in my hairt the Amorous heid dois [lie]

Vith poyson’d poynt, vhairof I glore t[o die]

(12–14)

Proposed rebellion becomes joyful submission. Cupid’s ubiquitous
arrow is here not an instrument of suffering (the metaphor of
‘poysond’ now bears different implications) but inculcates a seemingly
ecstatic sexual surrender. Another lyric, ‘The well of Love’, imparts a
similarly sexual gloss to desire engendered by Cupid’s dart:

Fra tym that winged God did sie

That I did Love disdane

Love’s Altar 135

He took a shaft and shot at me

And peirsit evirie vane.

The head so deeply in me sank

That al my body brist.

Then of the well of Love I drank

To quench my birning thrist.

The resonance of ‘brist’ seems provocatively erotic (as opposed to the
more conventional ‘wound[ing]’, 51). This surrender to desire forms an
introductory prologue to the vision of a palace which harbours
‘Nymphs mony one’ (34). This allegorical, visionary lyric thus opens
with a mythologised or deiﬁed depiction of love. The device performs
the characteristic psychological twist of absolving the lover of responsi-
bility for his desire. ‘The well of Love’ from which the lover is com-
pelled to drink in the second stanza is not a conventional aspect of the
Cupid mythology but here seems to symbolise either consummation or
at least some kind of fulﬁlment of desire. The poem’s ﬁnal two lines,
‘God give hir grace to reu on me/And meit me at the well’, seem to
intimate the resolution of the lover’s desire, and the beloved’s pity or
‘reu’ is often synonymous in the love lyric per se with sexual consent.
In the companion or twin piece immediately subsequent to this lyric,
‘To the o Cupid king of love’, the well is explicitly identiﬁed as a
province of Cupid’s rule: ‘We pray vhair thou dois duell/That but
respect thou wold remove/All rebells from thy well’.

To drink from

Cupid’s well is to taste of ‘desyre’ (12).

Let not thy Lau be lichtleit at the leist
Bot tak revenge vhen Rebels thee reboots.
If thou be he of vhom so many moots
Quha maks the hardiest ﬂintie harts to melt
And beirs thame ay about the lyk a belt,

Or if thou be that Archer so renound
That vhair thou mints thou missis not the mark
Bot lyk a king is for thy Conqueis cround
To vhom all stoupis thoght they war neuer so s[tark]…

If this is Montgomerie’s brief lyric exercise in the advice to princes tra-
dition, then the counsel offered to James seems to concur with his use
of power but to imply that it is not exercised either enough or
sufﬁciently: ‘If thou be […]’.

The obdurate female beloved, one of

136 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Cupid’s ‘rebels’, may represent an insubordinate political subject. ‘To
the o Cupid king of Love’ may be construed as a pledge of loyalty on
behalf of the love deity’s faithful ‘subjects’ (13) and a warning to ‘All
rebells’ (4) intent on insurrection. If Cupid is James (Apollo is alluded
to in line 9, James’s favoured mythographic guise), and Montgomerie
writes as a loyal political subject, then the last stanza transparently
expresses the latter’s desire for princely beneﬁcence:

As we do serve thy Celsitude

In hope to haif reuaird,

Let thame vhom we haif so long lude

Our service once regaird.

(17–20)

‘Service’ is especially resonant, evoking several alliances: between
lovers; poet and patron; sovereign and subject. In ‘The sacriﬁce of
Cupid’, a contract is established between lover and Cupid: ‘Releiv my
breist that sik a burthen beirs/And thou sall be my Maister evermair’
(11–12). This mutually enabling contract also rests on the lover’s poetic
gloriﬁcation of his ruler: ‘My pen thy princely pussance sall report’
(15). As well as this writing contract, the lover implies that he will act
as the exemplary subject: ‘Quhat wald a Maister wish mair of his
man/Then till obey his thoght in evry thing?’ (35–6). Shire’s hypothe-
sis gains credence by a conceit such as this which transparently renders
the erotic sublimation of political appeal.

Yet veneration of the authority which is the Jacobean Cupid entails

risk and sacriﬁce even if obedience is given which the lyric, ‘The
sacriﬁce of Cupid’, best illustrates. Though the offerings made at
Cupid’s altar are resolutely profane, the ‘oblatione’, not of bread and
wine, but of ‘Tua Turtle Douis’ (17) and the blood ‘of sparouis’ (20;
conventionally birds of Venus) parodies the devotion of the Eucharist.
The lover himself becomes part of this sacramental offering: the ‘harte
of wax’ is the lover’s own, necessarily in danger of dissolution. The
lover’s heart becomes a kind of relic, hung ‘In signe’ upon Cupid’s
‘Trophee’ (25), conceived as a precious and rare offering (‘buitings’) of
‘A rubie rich within a Royal ring’ (31). The intensely literal quality of
Montgomerie’s visual conceit is further brought out by the lover’s
inscription: ‘Behold the spoills of him/Quha for his Conqueis may be
calde a King’ (32) as the emblematic image ﬁnds its motto.

This, the most resonant of Montgomerie’s Cupidian lyrics, can be

conceived as the allegorical counterpart of Montgomerie’s literal

Love’s Altar 137

‘sacriﬁce’ in the 1590s at the altar of James’s political ruling on the
archbishopric pension. Montgomerie’s lover, in seeking the sacrament
of penance, makes James assume his ultimate incarnation as confessor,
no longer simply sovereign or lover, but endowed with the gift of
absolution:

So do I nou, mair painfully opprest,

Hope help at him vhais help culd nevir heall

Bot be the contrair martyr and molest.
Forgive me Cupid, I confess I faill,
To crave the thing that may me not availl,
Yit to the end I may my grief digest […]

(41–6)

The persuasive crux of Shire’s hypothesis, that Cupid is always and

inevitably James, rests on an uncertainty: the compositional and per-
formative circumstances of these lyrics. It seems unlikely that those
that mock and provoke the love god would be performed in James’s
presence, if the latter’s identity as a Cupidian ﬁction was a publicly
recognised trope of Montgomerie’s. Improbably, they seem to risk
censure or repudiation, although Shire explicitly claims that the sonnet
‘Against the God of Love’ communicates ‘rage and bitterness of affec-
tion’ towards the king.

Lacking irrefutable evidence that would iden-

tify a performative context, the rhetorical language of these poems
inevitably courts a political reading. The paradoxes of authority are
already rooted in traditions of Cupid lyric; the ﬁgures of the lover and
the political subject are already bound by a shared abjectness. And
though the idea of eroticism is implicit within the Cupid mythology,
the sensuality remains muted compared to the other pervasive mytho-
logical incarnation of James as Apollo on which Montgomerie’s poetry
also draws.

Bruce Smith posited that poetic discourse is condemned to an ‘inde-

terminacy that keeps homosexuality hidden and elusive but at the
same time makes it provocative to the literary imagination’.

In one

sense, this is paradoxical: who formulates this injunction to elusiveness
or silence? Is there conscious transgression, an implied jouissance, to
the desire that is resigned to ‘provocation’ and suggestion only? In the
richly symbolic context of the mannerist Jacobean court where lan-
guage is deﬁned by its excess, its verbal and semantic copia, are we our-
selves ‘seduced’ into reading excessively? On a psychoanalytic model

138 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

of reading, one cannot evade the symbolic ‘unconscious’ of certain
Montgomerie texts which project onto the king, such as the song-lyric,
‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’,

offered by James in his treatise as

a paradigm of love poetry. Despite this royal endorsement, subsequent
critics perceived its metaphor as a virtual negation of this generic
status.

Before the Greeks durst enterpryse
In Armes to Troy toun to go
Thay set a Counsell sage and wyse
Apollo’s Ansueir for to kno

How thay suld speid and haif succes
In that so grit a busines.

Then did thay send the wysest Grekis
To Delphos vhare Apollo stode
Quha with the tearis vpon thair Cheeks
And with the fyrie ﬂammis of wod

And all such rites as wes the guyse
Thay made that grit God sacrifyce.

Quhen thay had endit thair Requests
And solmnely thair service done
And drunke the vyne and kild the beists
Apollo made them Ansueir soon

Hou Troy and Trojans haiv they suld
To use them hailly as they wold,

Quhilk Ansueir maid thame not so glad
That thus the Victors they suld be
As evin the Ansuer that I had
Did gritly joy and comfort me

Quhen lo thus spak Apollo myne,
All that thou seeks it shall be thyne.

Erotic disclosure is gradual. The mythological analogue of desire, the
resolution of the Trojan war, is not as recondite as it might seem; the
Greeks pray to Apollo that he might prophesy the war’s end

the lover implores the beloved to deliver an answer of refusal or com-
pliance. The utterance of Apollo, ‘All that, seeks it sall be thyne’, is
enigmatic and provocative if interpreted as the response of the lover.

Love’s Altar 139

The female beloved is often conceived as a goddess at whose altar the
lover sacriﬁces himself. The lyric conveys pursuit of the beloved as a
long period of endurance (the Trojan war lasted ten years), and renders
it in ritualistic, ceremonial terms. ‘Hailly’ implies complete possession
or surrender. The simile is postponed until the authorial revelation of
line 20, ‘As evin the Ansuer that I had […]’, just as desire itself is
deferred. Yet Shire proposed that the poem can be divested of its
amatory content and replaced by political or courtly terms of aspira-
tion, suggesting that the lyric records Montgomerie’s gratitude for
receiving his pension.

Appositely, then, the king as Apollo (‘Apollo

myne’) is portrayed as a prophet or instrument of oracular truth. The
assurance delivered by the god suggests that the lover- courtier may
proﬁt or gain from sovereign beneﬁcence. Yet a degree of uncertainty
and risk is implicit within the mythographical trope (the prophetic
‘sacrifyce’ of erotic martyrdom). In commemorating the king’s reward
of political favour, material beneﬁt, or reciprocal desire, Montgomerie
ensures that the myth of sovereign inviolability remains intact.

The Jamesian presence haunts another Apollonian hymn, the cele-

brated song-lyric, ‘Lyk as the dum Solsequium’:

Lyk as the dum
Solsequium
With cair ou’rcum

And sorou vhen the sun goes out of sight

Hings doun his head
And droups as dead
And will not spread

Bot louks his leavis throu langour of the nicht

Till folish Phaeton ryse
With whip in hand […]

(1–10)

In comparing the lover to the ﬂower in constant need of the beloved’s
sun and her power of replenishment, the lyric deploys a common
emblem image. Scève’s emblematic sonnet sequence Délie (1544)
pursues the same imagistic conceit, apparently beginning a vogue for
this popular emblem device.

Montgomerie’s lyric may primarily draw

on the Ovidian source of the Metamorphoses, Book IV, and its poignant
narrative of Clytia’s faithful, unrequited love of the sun. Given the
Jacobean vogue for emblematics, it is interesting to note the image’s

140 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

currency as an impresa amorosa in contemporary French and Italian
works. In Ruscelli’s 1566 Imprese Illustri (its motto mens eadem), the
Ovidian source is related to the neo-Platonic concept of the sun as the
source of virtue and light.

Though the analogue between lover and

ﬂower is explicitly announced by the opening line of the second
stanza, much remains for the listener/reader to ‘decipher’ (in the mode
of accretive allegory) beneath the surface rhetorical form: for example,
the beloved is Aurora, evoking neo-Platonic resonances, but also pos-
sessed of the power to ‘awaken’ the lover/sunﬂower sexually (48–54).
The intimation of natural, cyclical and thus eternal rejuvenation
wholly dispels the pathos of the Ovidian text, and is more resonant of
the emblem’s motto of ﬁdelity; certainly it evokes the prerequisite of
‘sondrie interpretations’.

Yet there are curious oscillations and shifts in the poem’s metaphori-

cal structure which confuse the identity or function of the kingly pres-
ence. An analogy is drawn clearly enough between the sun, ‘My lamp
of licht’, and the female beloved; and in the ﬁnal stanza, Apollo
returns in his incarnation as the sun who has the power to prolong the
lovers’ joy.

Thy presence me restores
To lyfe from death
Thy Absence also shores
To cut my brea[th].

I wish in vane
Thee to remane

Sen Primum mobile sayis aluayis nay.

At leist thy wane
Turn soon agane.

(63–71)

This implicates both the beloved and the sun in its metaphorical scope.
‘to behold vhom I love best’: the object of the lover’s contemplative
‘plesur’ is uncertain.

It is an apposite metaphor for the sovereign rela-

tionship: eternally, inevitably, and securely changeful. The aptness of
Apollo as a Jamesian incarnation is self-evident. In these poems which
forge a web of connections between this god, eros and the sovereign,
Apollo’s ‘threshold’ status as the emblem of both heterosexual (Apollo
and Daphne) and homoerotic desire (Apollo and Ganymede) are
evoked.

Love’s Altar 141

Such texts are testament to the ambiguously representational power

of erotic language within the intimate courtly context of Jacobean
poetry, as well as corroborating the impulses of epistemological ques-
tioning in Montgomerie’s other poems.

Hence the declaration, ‘for

me I love the king’, is not erotically innocent.

Such intimacy is also

intertextual where a symbolic or mythographic core of sovereignty
extends tendrils of meaning into other poems of Montgomerie’s. In
mourning a lover’s martyred heart, one text alludes to the mythology
of the phoenix:

Then freshest Phoenix, freind and fo
Both fremmd and friendly nou fair weill
Quhen I sall be full far the fro,
My Verse before thy feet sall kneill

To caus thee tak this hairt to thee

Quhilk wald no more remane w

me.

Given the publication in 1584 of James’s Phoenix tragedy (which, prior
to this, may have been in circulation at the court), might the phoenix
here not merely symbolise a female beloved but also allude to either
James himself or Esmé Stewart whom the king’s own poem allegori-
cally incarnated (an allusion which John Stewart may have used)?
Montgomerie’s known associations with the Lennox family may
endorse this ‘double’ meaning.

Certainly the poem’s valedictory

posture of absence, the metaphor of obedience and worship, and the
closing evocation of exile or expulsion are all ‘pinpoints’ within
James’s tragedy, within the historical narrative of the Duke’s fate, and
prophetically, of Montgomerie’s own. The delicate metaphorical tex-
tures of these poems give only the illusion of transparency to their
symbolic meaning.

In literary terms, Montgomerie already ‘transgresses’ against James in

writing overtly political complaint. The king’s role as ‘poetic legislator’
cannot be reduced to a simple act of literary absolutism, as the poetry
ascribed to himself exempliﬁes. The effort of the treatise to prescribe
meaning is subverted by Montgomerie’s poems and by the ways in
which meaning ‘spills across’ the symbolic frames of these texts. These
are, and are not, love poems from Montgomerie to the king. To read in
this way might be an instance of ‘purloining’ the metaphor(s) in
Lacan’s terms: illustrating the continual appropriation and reinvest-
ment of the symbols of Cupid, Apollo and the phoenix.
Homoeroticism is evoked by the metaphorical traces of desire rather

142 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

than causally inferred from any known or established Jacobean
homosocial network. Still there is a certain uniqueness to the relation-
ship between ‘I/thou’ in Montgomerie’s notionally and directly ‘sover-
eign’ poems. In a different context, Anthony Low asserts that the
intimacy fostered with the beloved ‘becomes in a determinate way an
analogue for another brand of intimacy altogether, one that [the
courtier] paradoxically court[s] with the public who will grant or deny
their long-term fame’.

For Montgomerie, that latter memorialising

relationship is founded on the increasingly estranged ‘intimacy’
between himself and the king: ‘Quhy did Apollo Poet me proclame?/To
cleith my heid with his grene laurell Cap/Since that the Hevins are
hinderers of my hap’.

This estrangement from James, the attested historical narrative of

Montgomerie as the exiled and dishonoured subject, becomes a ‘fable’
within the canon of Montgomerie’s poetry, enacted endlessly in its
mythographical mise-en-scènes. ‘Compelling me to play Actaons pairt /
And be transfformd into a bloody hairt’:

such mythographical ‘pairts’

are illustrated in the dismemberment of Diana’s antagonist; in the
ﬁgure of Icarus who mirrors the lover, endowed with ‘wings of hope
and high desyre’ (1) who strayed too near ‘the sun, that sacred thing of
things’;

and in the tale of Psyche and Cupid. Two of these fables

depict an illicit love which ends in punishment, the other hubristic
aspiration. ‘That sho foryet to close the lamp till he/In wrath auok and
ﬂeu she wist not vhair/And left his deing lover in dispair’ (12–14):
Montgomerie invokes the moment at which Psyche takes a light to
‘him vho sho lovd’, disobeying Cupid’s imperative that they love each
other in darkness. The darkly beautiful and melancholic renderings of
these tales of love may constitute a larger tale about Jamesian desire,
and love for the king which ends in punishment. To enfold
Montgomerie’s erotic canon within this narrative is not meant as a fan-
ciful circumscription of the contextual abundance of these poems.
Rather it is a response to the enactment of loss which is peculiarly
intense in Montgomerie’s profane poetry. Of course, early modern
philosophical theories of desire, no less than more recent psychoana-
lytic ones, proclaim that the act of desiring is in part a renunciation.
The lover’s identity is constantly imperilled for s/he is in danger of
her/his own dissolution or of annulment in the beloved as souls and
bodies are exchanged.

In Lacanian terms, lack or absence is the quin-

tessence of desire, ‘an element necessarily lacking, unsatisﬁed, impossi-
ble, misconstrued’.

Further, the beloved is eternally caught in a

double bind: through the state of being desired, refashioned or recon-

Love’s Altar 143

ceived in the lover’s imagination, s/he ultimately frustrates the ideal of
sublimation. If, according to Lacan, desire can attain its one fulﬁlled
state only in the ‘unbroken metaphorical parallel between inner and
outer’,

then Montgomerie’s erotic poetry frequently records the

moment of its separation in the representation of the beloved. The
‘Medusa’ sonnet which records the perceptual desecration of a malevo-
lent female beauty

dramatises the symbolic ‘fall’ of the female

beloved: a ‘demythologising’ of the feminine paragon which other
women represent in the Montgomerie canon. Even if desire is overtly
associated with the realm of the feminine, this concept of an ‘unfallen’
or ‘prelapsarian’, then desecrated, object of desire is mirrored in the
lyrics explored here which constitute a provisional Jamesian erotic
canon. Just as Montgomerie was expelled from the realm of sovereign
blessedness, so his poetry works to memorialise in shards and frag-
ments the king’s own ‘fall’ from the location of desire.

Love’s mourning and martyrdom

In medieval paintings of the love-god, Cupid is frequently depicted as
an angelic messenger of death; eros becomes one with thanatos.

Just

as the concept of the fall underpins many of Montgomerie’s ‘transfor-
mations’ of eros – the demythologising of female beauty, sorrowful
devotions to the king – so too is love often expelled from the realm of
eternity. In many of Montgomerie’s lyrics, death imposes its ﬁnitude;
and the spirit relinquishes itself from the corporeal. It is a signiﬁcant
feature of Montgomerie’s erotic practice toward which the other lyrics
gesture or in which they culminate: the ultimate act of mourning or
memorialising.

Ressave this harte vhois Constancie wes sik
Quhill it wes quick, I wot ye never kneu
A harte more treu within a stomok stik
Till tym the prik of Jelousie it sleu,
Lyk as my heu (by deidly signis) furthsheu,
Suppose that feu persav’d my secreit smart.
Lo heir the hairt that ye your self ou’rthreu.

Fairweill, adeu, sen death mon us depart.

(1–8)

144 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

In this lyric, words seek less to console the beloved, imminently to be
bereaved by the testamentary lover, than to prolong and dispel death.
The act of offering and sacriﬁce recurs again, as does the emblem of the
martyred heart, mirrored in the conceit of ﬂagellatory piercing. The
supposedly agonised or agonistic heart is to serve as a kind of icono-
graphical trophy for the beloved, memorialising his ‘constancie’:

I leiv to thee the hairt wes nevir fals

About thy hals to hing vhare thou may sie.

Let thyn to me then be so constant als.

(14–16)

Desire is vindicated. by its materiality, as here in the relic of the heart;
death’s ‘darte’ is ironically the transﬁguration of love. This testament
makes other offerings, not merely to the apostrophised beloved, but to
the king himself:

To God I give my Spirit in heuin so hie.

My Poesie I leave my Prince to preiv
(No richt can reiv him of my Rhetorie).
My bains to be bot bureit vhair I die.

(10–13)

First the spirit, then words, then the body, are surrendered: the poems
become a reliquary as bone, heart, and text constitute martyrdom. This
is a typically ‘passional’ poem of Montgomerie’s, baroque in its evoca-
tion of erotic death. In the ﬁnal stanza, Montgomerie renders the
image of bodily putrefaction into one of sensual embrace. Decay and
beauty are disconcertingly, even macabrely, blended in imagistic and
tactile terms: ‘ […] I am bot a carioun of clay/Quha quhylome lay
about thy snauie throt,/Nou I must rot vha some tym stoud so stay’
(34–6). Bodily frailty is here also depicted in sexual terms: the lover can
no longer remain ‘stay’ or erect in his caress. Bodily dissolution con-
trasts with the endurance of love’s spirit. The lyric is full of different
temporal references: human life is ﬁnite, conceived in the penultimate
stanza’s quasi-proverbial tone as ‘the race that every man must rin’; the
lover even prophesises his untimely death (‘I sie ouer soon my
Prophesie compleit’, 20). Its strange fatalism – ‘Adeu for ay, this is a
lang guid nicht’ (40) – suggests that the poem might occupy an inter-

Love’s Altar 145

esting place in the history of Montgomerie, the exiled sovereign
subject.

If this poem conceives death as desire’s simultaneous end and vindi-

cation, other lyrics render mutual the states of death and love; desire is
intensely physical, often bizarrely literal, in tropes which interweave
Montgomerie’s conception of love as martyrdom, and erotic bliss as le
petit mort.

My vexit ghost, quhilk rageing Love dois roste
Is brint almost, thrugh heit of my desyr
Then quench this fyre quhilk runneth ay the poste
Out thou my cost, consuming bain and lyre.

‘Rageing love’ exacts a kind of physical desecration: desire takes com-
plete possession of the body while ‘almost’ obliterating the spirit (the
‘vexit ghost’ which punningly secularises the Holy Spirit).

The ﬁnal

stanza posits the ‘humor’ of love within the ‘levir’. Evoking conceits of
love as both illness and poison, the lover commands the beloved to
‘gar the bealing brek/For fra it lek I hald the danger done’. This particu-
larly tactile, semi-grotesque image substantiates R.J. Lyall’s observation
on Montgomerie’s insistent literalism and physicality.

Montgomerie

here intensiﬁes in mannerist vein existing Renaissance concepts of cor-
poreality: physiological treatises proposed. that the infection of love
enters via the eyes and ‘through the veines vnto the liuer [to] imprint a
burning desire’. Elsewhere, the lover’s martyrdom is portrayed. as a
sensual violence: ‘Come gentill Death and that with suddentie/And
mak dispatch of this puir hairt of myne./Thy sterving straik, with force
thou let outﬂie/ […] Come gentle Death and let me die thairfor’.

Persuasively, then, Montgomerie is a poetic materialist of desire. Yet

the recurring oscillation between the corporeal and spiritual in his
erotic poetry is also bound up with its desire to invest the lover’s fre-
quently martyred or deathless body with a kind of real presence. The
possibility of ‘a purifying mystic love’

can indeed be admitted,

perhaps a facet of his Catholic poetics. Even if Montgomerie’s baroque
testament lyric concedes that even the most faithful love ends with,
rather than transcends, bodily dissolution, his Ronsardian sonnet, ‘So
suete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft’, invests the materiality of desire with
an erotic neo-Platonism.

So suete a Kis yistrene fra thee I reft
In bouing doun thy body on the bed

146 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left.
Sensyne from thee my spirits wald never shed.

To folou thee it from my body ﬂed.

And left my Corps als cold as ony Kie
Bot vhen the Danger of my Death I dred.
To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee

Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee

With thee it myndit lykuyse to remane.
So thou hes keepit Captive all the thrie
More glaid to byde then to returne agane

Except thy breath thare places had suppleit
Even in thyn Armes thair doutles had I deit.

(1–14)

Just as Ronsard’s ‘Hyer au soir que je pris maugre toy’, Montgomerie’s
sonnet portrays love as a union embracing more than the purely physi-
cal; the ‘spirits’ and ‘hart’ which seek to join the beloved evoke the neo-
Platonic union of souls. The poem is a disavowal of the worth of the
body: the ‘Corps’ remains ‘als cold as ony Kie’. There is a curiously erotic
yet threatening deathliness about this neo-Platonic apotheosis. It
describes the lifeless moment after consummation (le petit mort), a help-
less surrender of the body so ‘inamored’ with the beauty of the other
body in which it seeks sublimation. Yet this apparent sexual and spiri-
tual death is precluded by the revivifying power of the beloved’s ‘breath’.
The tender intimacy of the exchange recalls and metaphorically rein-
vests the kiss of the ﬁrst three lines with Bemboist signiﬁcance.

Wherupon a kisse may be said to be rather a cooplinge together of
the soule, then of the bodye, bicause it hathe such force in her, that
it draweth her unto it, and (as it were) seperateth her from the
bodye. For this do all chast lovers covett a kisse, as a cooplinge of
soules together.

The resonant spiritual implications of ‘lyfe’ are bound to the delicate
erotic beauty of ‘lippis’. The sonnet draws on the Ficinian conceit of
the lovers’ exchange of souls which joins together their bodies in one
unity, unveiling the spiritual and sexual potential of the orthodox
paradox that desire is life-in-death, death-in-life.

It represents an

eroticisation of the soul, and not the body, making manifest the
inward bliss of love in the sign of the kiss.

Love’s Altar 147

In many ways, Montgomerie’s poetry represents the apogee of
Jacobean erotic writing. The impulses of Petrarchism and
Neoplatonism always appear more jaggedly manneristic, ebulliently
subversive; the baroque copia of many is at once a kind of idolatrous-
ness, contravening any Jamesian ideal of perspicacious representation.
Combined with a frequently dense symbolic or mythographical lan-
guage, it means that the king’s presence as an object of desire can be
both strongly identiﬁed and yet elusively deferred. The suggestion of
Jamesian ‘immanence’ is not an argument for the demystiﬁcation of
Montgomerie’s poetry as always and inevitably political, nor for a
quasi-Foucauldian position that somehow power relationships in this
milieu are always eroticised. This monolithic position is betrayed by
the delicate, shifting metaphorical textures of Montgomerie’s lyrics.
James is not the beginning and end of all desiring exchanges since
many of the Ker manuscript ‘coterie’ poems clearly act as an erotic seal
to transactions between female and male subjects, and between the
subject and his sovereign. In spite or because of the potential for uncer-
tainty and equivocation which haunts erotic representation in
Montgomerie’s lyrics, the ‘sovereign’ poetry serves to construct narra-
tives or fables of desire which illuminate his other erotic texts, preoccu-
pied with disenchantment, loss and sacriﬁce; and the quest for elusive
forms of erotic and spiritual transﬁguration. It is unsurprising, then,
that another sacred poem of Montgomerie’s should depict the ‘dream’
of a bride of Christ: ‘God give me grace for to begin/My spousing
garment for to spin/And to be one till enter in/With the brydgrome in
blisse’.

The typically baroque excesses of Montgomerie’s poetry bring

erotic pleasure and the sacramental together, a fusion witnessed in the
haunting presences and representations of the erotic poems.

148 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Heretical Love-Words:
The Poetry of William Fowler

The love poetry of William Fowler (1560–1612) closes this book’s
exploration of Jacobean erotic poetics for several reasons. His amatory
corpus contains the only example

of a substantial sonnet sequence

written within the Scottish Jacobean period. This is a more ‘monumen-
tal’ lyric exploration of desire than has been considered so far. In dif-
fering ways, the erotic writing of Stewart and Montgomerie engaged
with the Jamesian project of eros, but Fowler’s poetry, in its dark inves-
tigation of sacred and profane desires, is in precise negotiation with the
king’s vision of an ideal Protestant poetics. There, a duplicitous and
corrupt eros is shunned, ‘that insolent archer quyte’,

and the moral

and philosophical vision of the Du Bartesian epic emulated instead.
Fowler’s unpublished sequence, The Tarantula of Love, and a shorter
sequence, ‘Of De[a]th’, can be conceived to re-imagine desire in accor-
dance with the sanctioned vision of Jacobean eros.

Fowler’s writing

does not portray an intimately dialogic relationship with James, as do
Stewart’s and Montgomerie’s in varying degrees of anxiety and dissent.
Fowler is associated in his later career with Anna’s, rather than James’s,
court. In 1589, he was appointed Master of Requests and ‘Secret-
depute’ to Anna, a position retained until 1608 when Fowler’s position
as the Queen’s Secretary (a post in which John Donne showed interest)
could no longer be sustained.

Fowler, who embarked on a translation

of Machiavelli’s Il principe, courted controversy; he was employed as a
spy in the service of Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to
Elizabeth. By 1584, he was still in contact with Walsingham and
English agents, but that year also marked his formal and literary entry
into the inner Jacobean circle. Francis, Earl of Bothwell, and nephew of
James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell who married Mary Queen of Scots
in 1567, acted as Fowler’s literary patron; this patronage continued

149

throughout Fowler’s writing life with the exception of the dedication
of the Trionﬁ translation in 1587 to Lady Jean Fleming, wife of Sir John
Maitland, Chancellor and Secretary to James and allegedly an enemy of
Bothwell.

After 1603, Fowler was an established member of the

Jacobean English court.

Consequently, the relationship between king and subject is not

dramatised with the affective intensity which has marked Jacobean
courtier-writing thus far. Fowler’s poetry is still obsessed with the
object of its desire, but now the moral and spiritual status of
the beloved woman. Fowler’s lovers are haunted by the fear of her
power to corrupt and desecrate. It is interesting to speculate whether
Fowler’s love poetry had an identiﬁable recipient. The beloved’s
name in the Tarantula sequence, Bellisa, is an obvious verbal play
upon beauty (bella/belle), but may also invoke the name ‘Arbella’.
Surviving documents and letters attest his acquaintance with Arbella
Stuart (1575–1615), a relationship which acquired some notoriety on
the basis of a number of playful, anagrammatic love poems which
Fowler devised, some of which were sent to Arbella.

One ‘dedica-

tion’ seemingly alludes to Arbella’s rejection of the political power
which James, as her cousin, was always conscious she potentially
possessed: ‘whose chastfull hands disdayned for to sweye/both
sceptars crovnes wt all imperial rod’.

The Tarantula sequence

persuasively belongs to the 1580s and 1590s, coinciding with
Arbella’s presence at court but there is no record of it having been
presented to her, and it does not contain any explicitly allusive
biographical or coded dedication.

The degree to which Fowler’s writing is enmeshed in courtly and

erotic politicking with Arbella remains speculative, but it is perhaps
improbable that such a dark sequence as the Tarantula would have
been offered as a sweetly erotic ‘gift’. In it the feminine is identiﬁed as
the Iocus of sin and an idolatrous object of abject adoration. This
speciﬁcally evokes the idea of the Catholic feminine which had earlier
been articulated within the Marian period so that Fowler’s erotic
poetry is laced with the religious and cultural associations which desire
has accrued throughout this period. Fowler’s attempts to advocate reli-
gious reform attest a brief pragmatic ‘intervention’ in religious politics.
While continuing his education in Europe, possibly studying civil law
at the College of Navarre in Paris, he became embroiled in a theologi-
cal controversy which endorses his religious allegiances and formed an
early venture into print. An Answer to the Calumnious Letter and
Erroneous propositiouns of an apostat named M. Io. Hammiltoun, a prose

150 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

work published by John Leprevik in 1581, records a violent dispute
between the staunchly Protestant Fowler and the Scottish Jesuit John
Hamilton. Fowler’s Defence, partly a personal account of what Fowler
terms religious persecution and partly theological polemic, is an inter-
esting rhetorical and public contribution to the early decades of post-
Reformation Scotland when Marian political sensitivities and the
threat of Catholic insurgency were intensiﬁed. As a counterblast to the
charge of being a ‘Huguenot, Heretique, contemnar of ye Saints’,
Fowler proclaims that he ‘sal be the last Protestant, that euer sal lycht a
candil in Paris’.

There is, of course, no simple inference to be drawn between Fowler’s

reformist sympathy and the theological anxieties of his love poetry.
Yet an implicit impulse of the sequence is its effort to ‘protestantise’
desire. It is precisely the fear of idolatry which haunts the Tarantula
through the identiﬁcation of the beloved woman with the state of
mortal sin, until she becomes as idolatrous as the erotic language and
image in which she is enshrined. Further, it is only through the drama
of death that the nature of the idolatrous feminine is made apparent.
Fowler’s entire erotic corpus can be conceived as a sustained medita-
tion upon death; this chapter explores the evocation of mortal love in
Fowler’s poetry, proposing that this is mediated through Fowler’s
version of what is recognisably a petrarchan eros. Just as Fowler trans-
lated Petrarch’s Trionﬁ as part of the Jacobean enterprise of vernacular
imitation, his own erotic corpus may be seen as a re-enactment and
rewriting of the Rime sparse’s errore.

Fowler’s reimagining of Petrarch’s

sin and redemption, ultimately through the intercession of the Blessed
Virgin, is here ﬁrst traced through the alternative ‘closures’ of the
Tarantula of Love.

Impossible grace: atoning for desire

The Rime sparse ends with an invocation to the Virgin Mary. In the
adoration of ‘del Ciel regina’, Petrarch transmutes the sequence’s
mortal ‘Vergine bella’ into the ‘Vergine benedetta’, the mother of
Christ who, by contrast, dispenses grace and mercy (‘che ben sempre
rispose/chi la chiamò con fede’).

A confessional liturgy, this last

canzone is both renunciation and afﬁrmation: the effort to annul both
the past (‘i miei passati tempi’, sonnet 365), and Laura, and to antici-
pate the salvation regained by the ‘sante lagrime’ of the penitent heart.
The canzone is dedicated to the consecration and articulation of a new
name: ‘Vergine unica et sola’ (133). It offers closure of a kind. Death is

Heretical Love-Words 151

imminent: the lover writes ‘a l’ultimo anno’ (88), and nears the heav-
enly ‘port’, guided by the Virgin as mare stella.

The Tarantula’s ending, in contrast, remains unwritten. Closure is

evaded because it survives in two different manuscripts, Hawthornden
and Drummond, which make available two different narratives. The
Drummond manuscript offers the most authoritative ending: it con-
tains the greatest number of poems, and appears to be a presentation
copy. In its closure, it rejects the adoration of Bellisa as a form of false
idolatry. But rather than imitate the Marian adoration or sublimation
of Petrarch’s ﬁnal text, Fowler’s closure ends emphatically on peniten-
tial and abject submission to God. In the Hawthornden manuscript,
the ﬁnal Tarantula sonnet (the last text inserted within the same man-
uscript binding) is entitled ‘Contrair’.

It works as a paradoxical cele-

bration of Bellisa’s beauties, conventional cruelty and occasional grace
indiscriminately fused. With incantatory repetition, Bellisa’s paradoxi-
cal nature and the lover’s state merge in a series of ‘contrairs’:

this humeur her that humeur me dois move
this is her state and that is myne agayne
now louting lowe now monting high above

so none of vs can tell quho feils more pane

(9–12)

Such an ending, as if to amplify the sequence’s rhetorical imitation of
Petrarchism, does not signify closure but rather the ‘suspension’ of the
lover in a predictably paradoxical state. The ending of the Drummond
manuscript offers a deeper attempt at closure. In its ﬁnal two sonnets
(found below), the ‘contrair’ dilemma of the last Hawthornden sonnet
assumes theological import.

Lord quha redemes the deid and doth reviue
and stumbling things preservs fra farder fall
quha mercyeis maks the sinfull saul to liue
and dothe to mynde na mair there guylt re[call]
aboliss lord my faults baith great and smal
and my contempt and my offence efface
by thy sweit meiknes and thy mercye thral
my stubborne thoughts proud rebells to thy grace
In thy sones bloode my sinns great god displace
and giue me words to cal vpon thy name

152 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Lord in thy wonted kyndnes me embrace
that to this age I my these word p[ro]cla[m]e

IN ONE

OD EUER AY HAITH TRUST

SO AR HIS PROMEIS STEADFAST TREWE AND

UST

(1–14)

More suddenly than the Petrarchan ‘substitution’ of the divine for the
mortal vergine this, the very last, sonnet exiles Bellisa; she fails to offer
the consolatory and redemptive role of Petrarch’s earthly beloved. This
is a devotional supplication, structured by a series of three apostrophes
in each of the three quatrains before the ﬁnal couplet assertion. The
ﬁrst quatrain is an expiation: ‘na mair’ emphasises the prayerful
longing for self-forgetfulness and annulment; ‘my faults’ are a plural
version of Petrarch’s singular and overarching errore. God here is
gentle, deﬁned by a ‘wonted kyndnes’ and made manifest in the
promise of an ‘embrace’. Subjugation to Bellisa is transformed into the
willing subjugation of the penitent which partly consists of atonement
through language: instructed by God, he will enunciate ‘thy name’ and
proclaim the true spiritual text in opposition to the text celebrating
Bellisa which profaned true, or rightful love. His desire to become an
instrument of oracular truth, ‘that to this age I must these words
p[ro]clai[m]e […]’, ironically recollects the sequence’s earlier sonnet,
‘Muse yow fair dame […]’ in which he sought to ‘proclame’ love for
Bellisa ‘to this age’.

The couplet of this ultimate sonnet represents the

true, divine ‘text of love’. The process of ‘rewriting’ which this sonnet
exempliﬁes (the lover appeals, ‘giue me words’) is also one of imagistic
reclariﬁcation: Christ’s sacriﬁce (‘In thy sones bloode […]’), for
example, recalls the earlier portraits of the martyred lover.

Spiritually,

it must be a process of effacement and wilful forgetfulness.

The sonnet preceding this last text in the Drummond manuscript (in

other words, the penultimate) meditates upon the lover’s sinful self:

Eternal lord God of immortal glore
though I in love my self and sense have lost
by vainlie vowing quhome now I do abhor,
with sighs and teares causd baithe by ﬂams and frost
though soverene prence I have in playning most
bewaild my panis bot not bewaild my sinn
and so maid sad in me thy holie ghost
yet drawe my saule from hell that thense doth rin

Heretical Love-Words 153

this O Sueit lord to grant I will begin,
that I have blaikned beutyes lovd and servd
and hethe adord bot outward bark and skin
and earthlie things to heu[n]lye hes preferd

yet let thy mercie the to mercie move,
and off my mortal mak immortal love

(1–14)

In Petrarch’s sense, the lover desires ‘a più beata spene/mirando ‘l
ciel’.

Reﬂection is passed upon the text of love, and the profanity (or

vanity) of the lover’s preceding secular hymn of love. The lover’s for-
getfulness of God is imbued with the implication of original sin.
Inattentive to words, concentrating upon the externals of language
rather than their meaning, the object of his prayer, and the sacramen-
tal meaning of language, has been lost. While the other sonnet brieﬂy
permitted the alliance of secular and sacred language, love words are
here exposed for their hollowness and near absurdity. Such a concept
of vanitas, as Giuzeppe Mazzotta argues, is intrinsic to the Rime, itself a
‘narcissistic, idolatrous construct’.

As the rhetoric of desire is condemned for its duplicity, so is its

object, Bellisa, similarly indicted. Fowler’s lover has sacriligously
adored beauty which is merely external. ‘I haif blaikned beutyes love
[…]’ (10): gloriﬁcation of an idolatrous image is denounced; true
beauty is ‘blaikned’, tainted by corruption, and stripped bare to ‘bark
and skin’. Fowler’s opposition between external and internal has been
compared to the neo-Platonic theory of divine beauty: ‘He turns within
himself, as Bembo advised the courtier, and suffers a period of doubt
[…] The outcome, however, is that transference of love from lady to
God promised in The Courtier […]’.

Yet in this renunciation of exter-

nal beauty, of the body’s outer vestment, Fowler precludes the neo-
Platonic resolution which assigns divinity to the material beauty of the
female beloved. Sensual love is condemned per se by the failure ‘to see
beauty imaginatively in the light of its ascendant possibilities’.

Desire for divine reconciliation is not, as partly conveyed in

Petrarch’s text, impelled by the desire either to purge that desire and so
render it apposite for a morally sanctiﬁed beloved, or to be spiritually
united with Bellisa (for in the Tarantula the beloved does not die) and
God, as in the Rime: ‘vol.ando tanto su nel bel sereno/ch’ i’ veggia il
mio Signore et la mia donna!

’21

Rather than anticipating salvation, in

the penultimate Drummond sonnet, Fowler’s lover fears imminent

154 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

damnation: ‘drawe my soul from hell that thense doth rin’ (8). Earthly
love is not granted transﬁguring power. Fowler’s penitent confesses to
God that his ‘sinn’ has ‘maid sad in me thy holie ghost’ (6–7). God is
now internalised (echoing the familiar conceit of the beloved inscribed
on the heart within), addressed as if He were a lover betrayed.
Salvation only remains imminent in the ﬁnal sonnet of the
Drummond manuscript, contingent upon the lover’s articulation, and
anticipated revelation, of the ‘correct’ words of love.

Idolatrous desire is, however, the sin of which Petrarch accuses

himself: ‘Questi m’à fatto men amare Dio / ch’ i’ non deveva, et men
curar me stesso;/per una donna ò messo /egualmente in non cale ogni
pensero’.

Like Petrarch, Fowler’s lover seeks the spiritual absolution

that will enable him to receive God’s grace: ‘soccorri a l’alma disviata et
frale/e ‘l suo defetto di tua grazia adempi’.

Both Fowler and Petrarch’s

lovers have sinned in loving ‘the created more than the Creator’.

Yet

the Tarantula, and not the Rime though still imbued with the doctrinal
and moral rigour of Augustine’s counsel in the Secretum, forbids Bellisa
any mitigating or intercessionary role.

The text’s ﬁnal refusal to grant Bellisa a spiritual and moral apotheosis

has, however, been anticipated by its earlier stages, and its accretive
ironies and recapitulations. Fowler’s lover, as Montgomerie’s, frequently
assumes the role of l’ amant martyr, cruciﬁed by a god of love who ‘saws
his breirs and thornes within my hart’, and in whom is inscribed in
blood ‘her fatal name’.

The lover possesses life as long as Bellisa has

‘fairnes’, the ‘heuenlye coleur’ of her ‘angel face’ (2); but her beauty
endures while he is subject to ‘chainge […] of haire and hew’ (5),

as in

Petrarch, a visible sign of his mortality. Throughout eros is charged with
a quasi-religious resonance that culminates in the ending of the
Drummond manuscript. Desire is treated as a lapse of ‘faithe’; the lover’s
confession of a fallen ‘empyre’ of faith and reason implies the desire to
make reparation. Yet it is Bellisa, and not God, who is sought:

…all is fallen that I buildt by faithe
quho then sall drye my tearis quhairin I bathe
quho shal my harte deburden of his greif
and tak from senses the empyre they hathe
quho to my schaking feares sal giue releife
quho quho but shee to whome the gods hes geven
to be the pryde of earthe as pompe of heaven

(8–14)

Heretical Love-Words 155

In this appeal, sacred and profane senses are held in conﬂict: ‘faithe’
may signify the lover’s belief in Bellisa’s underlying mitigant grace as
much as religious devotion.

Her apparent divinity in the ﬁnal line is

undercut by the terms ‘pryde’ and ‘pompe’ which suggest ‘gaudiness’
or insubstantiality.

She is proclaimed as the ‘heaven’ in which he

may anchor,

even apostrophised as ‘Deare Sant on earthe and yet of

heavenly race’. Yet, in the ﬁnal two renunciatory sonnets, Bellisa is
wholly acquitted of any redemptive grace. As the ﬁnal sonnets
denounce the hollowness of love words, so such eulogies of Bellisa are
offered in ironic retrospect as mere words. Her spurious divinity is epit-
omised in a sonnet, not incorporated in the sequence itself, but possi-
bly intended as a later addition, in which her ‘godlines’ appears as an
eroticised posture; she is as idolatrous as profane language itself.

Bellisa pansiue satt and in her hands
more whyte then snaw, did hald the holye booke,
and reiding that which shee weill vnderstands
devoltlye wt her eyes did thairin looke
and quhils her heide was boued her brest shee strooke
and with a godlye and a gudlye zeale
pourd furth her sighs of vapours ful and smoke

(1–7)

At the heart of Fowler’s sequence lies the illusory ﬁction of the femi-
nine. The Tarantula, for all its supposed evocations of classical
Petrarchistic motif and neo-Platonic transmutation, is a dark sequence.
Fowler’s title condemns desire from the outset; not only does the
Tarantula serve as the source of metaphorical and imagistic entrelace-
ment, but implies that desire is yoked to the idea of a maniacal and
fearful deathliness.

Eros and death are inseparable, bound together in

the ‘ﬂight’ of the heart and soul:

I equal absence loss[e]s with deaths agayne
for quhen by her we mortallye lye slayne
to the immortall thrones our soule dois ﬂie
euen so my harte in this impatient payne
abandons this my corss and ﬂeyes to thee
deathe maks vs leave the derest things we see
this pest depryvs me of your heunlye face

(4–10)

156 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Love is already overshadowed by mortality in the Tarantula before the
renunciation per se begins. Death pervades all of Fowler’s erotic writing.
Conventionally, of course, eros is an afﬂiction which brings the lover to
the brink of death; in the archetypal association of death and the fem-
inine, the female beloved may herself be conceived as a quasi-
personiﬁed death-ﬁgure. In the sonnet alluded to above, the identity of
death and Bellisa are fused by the personifying pronoun, ‘she’. The soul
seeks refuge in ‘the immortall throne’ (God the Father symbolised in
regal eternity) as the lover’s heart deserts ‘this my corss’. The beloved’s
encounter with mortality in the Tarantula works to negate the redemp-
tive power of the feminine which both the Petrarchan Rime and Trionﬁ
subsume into part of the divine consolation. Bellisa does not die but
rather serves as a kind of memento mori incarnate: she represents the
spiritual death which awaits the lover if he cannot renounce her. Only
in another of Fowler’s sonnet sequences, far briefer, can transformation
of the relationship between death, eros and the feminine occur. Not
only does this endorse the perception of Fowler’s entire erotic corpus as
a hermeneutic engagement with Petrarchan endings but the perception
of love words as the ultimate form of idolatry: the heretical act against
which authoritative Jamesian poetics cautioned.

Mortal desires: ‘bellezza … chiuso in poca fossa’

The series of sonnets which share the drama of the beloved’s mortal
frailty, entitled ‘of Death’ according to the ‘the tabill’ of contents in
the Hawthornden manuscript,

reimagine the Petrarchan consolation

for the beloved’s death (as crystallised in the Rime 359, and the third
Trionfo). Fowler’s ‘sequence’

recreates Petrarch’s narrative at the

moment of Laura’s death, sustained until her visionary return and
their colloquy. The baroquely macabre ‘Elagie’ (the ﬁrst text in this
provisional sequence) and the succeeding sonnet rehearse a familiar
trope: the lover endures a living death but the actual, or literal, death
of the beloved irreparably diminishes such ﬁgurative assertions. This
works to expose the ironically prophetic quality of love words:

for love by cairs my youtheid hes defaitt
and maed me oft for death to call and crye
preserving it before that rage and hate

by w[hi]ch my hairt in burning fyre did frye…’

(5–8) (my emphasis)

Heretical Love-Words 157

In an echo of Rime 338, ‘Pianger l’aer et la terra e ‘l mar
devrebbe/l’uman legnaggio, che senz’ ella è quasi/senza ﬁor prato
[…]’

and its notion of desuetude, the beloved’s death bereaves ‘this

lothsome earth [of] hir grace and glore heirbye’ (11). By the sonnet’s
close, the beloved’s death has conferred a kind of infamy on him:
‘more than love death hes me wrought disgrace’. Might ‘disgrace’ allude
to the lover’s once resolute, now fallible, ‘faith’ in pure love? The third
sonnet, ‘a dreame’, embodying the Petrarchan consolation en minia-
ture, may answer this. Bellisa, as Laura in the Rime, speaks directly:
‘Can these availl …[the lover’s ‘sobbs’]/ […] to rander me my lyfe?’
(5–6). The beloved urges that he should celebrate her release from an
earthly condition marked only by ‘stryfe’:

I ioy my ioyes wt the celestiall troupe
w

in my grave then troubill me na more

raise vpp thy spreits, and longer do not droupe
thy faithfull hairt dois weill my death decore

(9–12)

‘Che val,’ dice, ‘a saver chi si sconforta?
Non pianger più, non m’ ài tu pianto assai?
ch’ or fostu vivo com’ io non son morta!’

The sequence’s ultimate poem refuses to accommodate the Petrarchan
desire to be ‘troubill[d] […] na more’. Her death is ‘decored’ by poetry
which gifts to her what she here judges impossible: ‘to rander my lyfe’.
The ultimate consolation, or reparation, offered by this sequence is
contained within writing which, in contrast to the Tarantula, is not
convicted of profanity. Poetry becomes an act of eternal repetition: to
inscribe the beloved perpetually in writing is to summon her presence.

Textual transcendence, the redemptive power of love words,

becomes the means to endure ‘love and death’.

The subsequent two

poems constitute a ‘dialogue with death’, just as the preceding sonnet
was a colloquy with eros incarnated in Bellisa.

Thow Cruall death thow noysome plage and pest
quhilk wt thy dairt my derest hairt hes slaine
quhy spairs thow me quhase bodye is adrest
to tak thy straiks to frie me of my paine

(1–4)

158 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

Heart/body, sense/spirit; mutuality is expressed as the lovers’ insepara-
ble unity. Yet this intimation of quasi-Neo-Platonic oneness is con-
fronted by death’s own ‘Ansuer’: ‘thought hairts were one yet bodyis
war disjoyn [de…]’ (8, my emphasis). In the companion sonnet, the act
of mourning, the cleansing of tears, effaces the ‘cruelty’ of her loss:
‘quhair I have plast a ﬂood out from myne [ene]/to drowne the death
that hes so cruell bene’.

The power of elegy is rendered tangibly. Such

writerly transcendence is diminished by the next sonnet depicting the
grieving lover in danger of his own dissolution: ‘my daisled eyes by
sorrow ar o[u]rsyld […]’.

Faith is lost in the beloved’s consolatory

immortality: ‘quhen as I thought the graces of my dame/and heuinly
port might served for releif […]’ (10–11). The knowledge of mutability
forms part of the lover’s spiritual ‘education’: ‘bot now I see the errour
of my mynde / sen farest things to wrak ar maist inclynde’ (13–14),
echoing the Petrarchan sorrow that ‘cosa bella mortal passa et non
dura’.

The conventional Petrarchan text has been learnt.

O blissed luk my spreit no mair in trance
nor into dumps contenew sal thairfore

OD HES HER TAINE IN MERCYE NOT IN YRE

THAT VNTO HIM MY THOUGHTS MAY ALL ASPYRE

(11–14)

Yet the sequence refuses to end on this transformative moment of
Christian Neoplatonism as attested by the ﬁnal two poems, the
‘Complaint’ and ‘Fantasie’, which fasten upon the sign or ‘ruit’ (55) of
eros.

althocht hir corpss interred be in clay
and I w

sobbs the echo off her name

sal still resond till death my lyfe assay

(‘Complaint’, 70–2)

It is the power of eternal signiﬁcation which is afﬁrmed by the ultimate
sonnet, envisaging the beloved’s angelic return.

Thus as I wrett w

full Intent to end

these doolfull songs which dois hir death deplore

me thought I saw down from the heavens discend

that peirles perle quhome I in hairt adore

Heretical Love-Words 159

In courtlye grace in semlye schaw and glore
In heuinlye [fr]ame, and beauty w

out blame

with all these g[i]fts which she posest before
most lovingly[e] to call me be my name

(‘A Fantaisie’, 1–8)

Bellisa is essentially untransformed, her beauty neither beatiﬁed or
altered but simply as ‘she posest before’. Fowler’s donna angelicata
therefore retains vestiges of her earthliness, unlike Laura who returns
in canzone 359 of the Rime as a spirito ignudo who assures Petrarch that
she will appear immeasurably beautiful through offering him the possi-
bility of their mutual ‘salute’.

Fowler’s manifestation of the beloved

certainly fulﬁls Petrarch’s yearning to contemplate the dead Laura’s
beauty: her ‘forma miglior che vive ancora/et vivrà sempre su ne l’alto
cielo,/di sue bellezze ogni or piu m’innamora […]’.

Fowler’s beloved

offers another consolation: not that he must patiently wait for the
death which will return him to herself and God (as in canzone 366, by
the Virgin’s grace), but that she can ‘name’ (8) the lover as poet:

FOULER

o immortall be thy fame

Lat never dame thy honest suit disdaine
thy machth[l]es faith of trewth deservs the same
though thow my loue by death did not obtea[ne]

thow death hes kild thy verse dois mak me liue

and wt thy name my fame sal ay reviue

(‘A Fantaisie’, 9–14)

Poetry promises the memoria eterna of which Petrarch assures Laura;

there is no sense of the profanity of love words which ends the
Tarantula. These lovers are reunited by, and enshrined in, language, a
poetic communion desired but unattained by Petrarch.

Since Fowler’s

‘death’ sequence is another rewriting of the Petrarchan end, one might
argue that this loving, textual reunion after the beloved’s death invokes
the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as in canzone 332 of the Rime. There,
as in Fowler’s sonnet, the affective power of language reclaims the
beloved from death: ‘Or avess’ io un sì pietoso stile/che Laura mia
potesse torre a Morte/come Euridice Orfeo…’.

Fowler’s beloved grants

her lover the recognition which Petrarch seeks from Laura: ‘Se sì alto pon
gir mie stanche rime/ch’ agiungan lei ch’ è fuor dira et di pianto/et fa ‘l
Ciel or di sue bellezze lieto,/ben riconoscerà ‘l mutato stile’.

160 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

If these ‘death’ sonnets redeem love-words from the heretical profan-

ity with which they are charged in the Tarantula, not least Jamesian
poetics, the female beloved remains exiled from the realm of the spiri-
tual, and the idea of the feminine is not expiated from its association
with sin. Unlike Laura, Fowler’s beloved does not look back to see if
her lover follows her ascent ‘al Ciel’.

That eros and poetry might

work to ameliorate death remains ‘a fantesie’. Though dreams may
possess prophetic truth, these love-words embody only an imagined
power. The beloved returns but her beauty is reimagined; beauty, as in
Petrarch, becomes ‘the measure of the transience of all mortal life’.

a ‘fantesie’, it may conceal how irrevocably the dead beloved remains
(in the sense of Rime 335 and 336) ‘out of sight’, within the lover’s
memory alone.

Fowler’s most typical ‘rewriting’ or transformation of the Petrarchan

consolation (that feminine eros possesses salviﬁc power) denies that
both lover and beloved can attain a state of grace; in Fowler, eros is
irredeemably fallen. Another, more disparate sonnet sequence within
the Hawthornden papers

mirrors the Tarantula’s ‘dialogue’ with

Petrarchan penitential love:

In by way roadds I ran a restles race

as best besemd my vaine vnlauful lust,
quhair I haue found long pains with cares unIust
and feading ioyes my pleasours to displace

But nou the glass of sin before my face

presents my eyes the schaps of uorldly trust
that trusting to the same confes I must
that verteu vyce and errour reuth doth chase

As if apocalyptically, the lover’s demise is envisaged (‘my yeres sall
showe the horrour of my sin/and dayes that rests the errour of my
hart’, implicitly alluding to Petrarchan errore); he will make atonement,
or ‘washe his wounds’, in teares that inscribe his ‘Smartt’. Fowler’s self-
reﬂections in the ‘glass of sin’ occur in texts ostensibly devoted to
erotic desire which refuse absolutely the sublimation or apotheosis of
profane into sacred love.

My winding scheits my steidfast love sal end
my heid sal tend vnto his buriall toume
to tak that rowme, this bodye sal be bend
or I make end of love, al this sal cume.

Heretical Love-Words 161

then sen my dome and death I wiss, respect
my faith, suspect no chainge for to insew
na vncouth hew sall hinder thy aspect
Let prove detect and furyis all persew
and yeild thair dew to my deserved hyre
gif I desyre in vthers to mak chose
or in thame Ioyse quha would my lovlye fyre
Quensche through impyre of faucos wanto[n] toyes

fame schame may noyse and foull be my report
and all my deids to seve fro skorne and sport

This is Fowler’s most beautiful, and seemingly unequivocal, assertion
of absolute faith in the beloved Yet death, so sepulchrally embodied in
the ﬁrst quatrain, cannot be effaced by the subsequent intimations of
eternity. Against this opening retraction or rescension, the assertion
of love’s perpetuity is measured. Despite the promise, ‘or I make end of
love’, the ﬁnitude of death is implied, if only by its denial. As in
William Drummond’s love poetry, which Fowler’s so strongly antici-
pates, a division, inevitably and insurmountably, exists between
beloved and lover; here, and in Drummond’s Poems (1616), it is death.
Despite allusion to neo-Platonic doctrine, the Ficinian assimilation of
lover into beloved is never achieved. Fowler’s is an uncertain spiritual
love that wholly renounces rather than assimilates the earthly and,
most deeply of all, the feminine.

Collectively, Fowler’s erotic poems constitute a work of melancholia
and mourning. Fowler is a loyally Petrarchist poet who nevertheless
fails to endow love with Petrarch’s theological and spiritual transcen-
dence. Grace is absent. Yet Fowler’s work should not be termed simply
‘anti-Petrarchist’ since his is not a categorical rejection of Petrarchan
philosophy but rather a ‘transﬁguration’ of its secular and sacral con-
trasts. Fowler’s Tarantula and the series of sonnets which are its exten-
sion belong to the history of the early modern reception of Petrarch. As
William J. Kennedy has shown, each new translation, commentary or
Petrarchist sequence invents an ideologically different Petrarch, a new
paradigm of the Rime or Trionﬁ.

Within these hermeneutic traditions,

Fowler may be located within that of Protestant or Protestantised revi-
sionism.

The intercession of the Virgin Mary in Petrarch’s canzone

366 is doctrinally fallacious for the Reformed poet since God alone dis-

162 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

penses grace. In this theological vein, Fowler’s writing has obvious par-
allels with the English Protestant love poetics of Sidney and Spenser.
Yet the Tarantula and the Amoretti are different: the devotional ethics
of the latter still allow the beloved to act as a mediator of divine beauty
and wisdom; she is not an idolatrous image as is Fowler’s Bellisa.
Fowler ‘inherits’ from Petrarch the theological concept of human love
as sinful, an aberration or diversion from devotion to God, the creator
rather than the created as expounded in the dialogue of Petrarch’s
Secretum. Yet the full religious transﬁguration of Petrarch’s Rime, con-
tained in adoration of the Virgin, is rejected by Fowler’s text that ends
in the lover’s penitent abjection before God. Even in the miniature
sequence, ‘Of death’, the beloved’s death is not apotheosised as in the
Rime where Laura arrives among the angels (sonnet 346), or as in the
Trionfo della morte.

Fowler’s erotic poetry can be conceived as a mirror image of his 1581

polemical Epistle where he answers the charge of being ‘a blasphemer
of ye virgin marie’

by excoriating the idolatrous practices of the

church and the perniciousness of false ‘Images’.

Eros is ultimately

heretical: love-words cannot be redeemed, nor can the beloved be spir-
itually transﬁgured. He is the Scottish Jacobean writer who fulﬁls the
Jamesian dictate against perpetuating the delusional capacity of love-
words, and the desire for a philosophical vision shaped by
Protestantism. If eros requires reformation, then Fowler’s writing com-
plies. While his love sequences are faithful to the notional vision of
Jacobean eros (also representing its most esoteric engagement with
Petrarchan and neo-Platonic thought), they are also haunted by the
religious and cultural burden of eros in the earlier Marian decade, and
the evocation of its sovereign, Mary, as a troubling embodiment of
rhetoric and the feminine. The corrupt beauty of her form, faith and
language fuelled Protestant suspicion of the idolatrous image and the
idolatrous feminine. Whether impelled by quasi-Reforming revisionism
or not, Fowler’s sequence cannot admit the feminine to redemption
when Woman is irredeemably sinful, and the the lover’s own soul
imperilled by both her and death. Fowler is Petrarch’s celebrant and
apostate. His erotic writing is deﬁned by the effort to articulate God’s
words, and not Petrarch’s. This is, perhaps, what his king ultimately
desired.

Heretical Love-Words 163

Conclusion

Love’s End

On 8 February 1587, Mary was executed. The writers of the inner
Jacobean circle, the subject of this book, met the queen’s death with
silence. That there are no extant funeral elegies or allusive poetic com-
memorations is perhaps unsurprising, for Mary’s name could not have
been invoked without incurring the anger or unease of the sovereign to
whom alone loyalty was owed. Just as Fowler’s poetry refuses the
Marian transﬁguration of the beloved, so Mary is refused any redemp-
tive incarnation by the Jacobean coterie. By the year of her death,
almost all the erotic poetry considered here (with the probable excep-
tion of James’s ‘nuptial’ sonnets which persuasively belong to 1589
and after) had been produced. There is no obvious causal connection
between the end of the major corpus of Jacobean love poetry and the
queen’s own end. But 1587, rather than 1603, more persuasively marks
the dissolution of the courtly love poetry resting upon the intimate
links between the monarch, the courtly environment and literary
culture, which this book has explored.

Erotic literature was still created by Scottish writers in subsequent

decades. The sonnet sequence Aurora. Containing the ﬁrst fancies of the
Authors youth, by William Alexander (1567–1640), belongs to the later
years of the Scottish Jacobean coterie. Composed in the 1590s, it was
published in London in 1604. The entry of Aurora into the public book
market may reﬂect the exigencies of being a Scottish writer following
the court’s transposition to London in 1603.

Post-Union, there is the

substantial erotic writing of Alexander Craig (c1567–1627) and William
Drummond (1585–1649): the former’s complex, labyrinthine sequence
to no less than eight female ‘beloveds’ pursues the consequences of
desire which ends after sexual possession; the latter, composed of two
parts in imitation of Petrarch’s Rime, is an intellectual and imaginative

167

meditation on the beloved’s death, and the fragile consolation of her
existence in divine eternity.

Yet these erotic texts lack an explicit

monarchical focus, or the mediation of the political, religious and sym-
bolic concerns of sovereign, courtly culture. Marian and above all
Jacobean erotic poetry is fostered by what Seth Lerer, in writing of
Henrician court poetry, called ‘the theatricalization of the intimate’.

The idea of passion as literary spectacle, or of the court as a literal and
symbolic chamber of the inward and interior, is entwined throughout
this Scottish Stewart corpus. It is as much an incarnation of courtly
ritual and practice as is its better known theatrical counterparts of
masque, pageant and royal entry. The poetry of Stewart, Montgomerie
and Fowler is an emblem of courtly expression; in part, also of royal
devotion but, as witnessed in Montgomerie, of the fragility of such
devotion. The extravagantly adulatory poetry of Stewart and, to a lesser
degree, of his Jacobean contemporaries, may represent a collective
shrine to James but one where chastisement as well as veneration is
enacted. In Mary’s case, the ‘passional’ display of the monarch con-
tributed to her own political tragedy; the casket that contained the
fragments of ‘letters and writynges’ was a Pandora’s box which, once
opened, led to the standard litany of anti-Marian imprecations. Yet
James’s erotic elegy, although ‘protected’ by a carefully worked allegor-
ical shell, raised a memorial to desire, which was not erased even from
the 1616 edition of the king’s collected works. Erotic literature, though
putatively ‘censored’ by Jamesian apologiae for its ‘immaturity’, frivo-
lity and blasphemy, the ‘shameles rymes’ of ‘Scrybes prophane’ and
the Cupid ‘Who in Idolatrous breasts his darts hath pight’,

articulates

the courtly ‘unconscious’. Desire inhabits the realms of the symbolic
and the imaginary, unveiled and unbound on the threshold of the
poetic.

The metaphors of veiling, secrecy and encasement which the Marian

texts and the erotic poetry of Stewart, Montgomerie and James
espouse, draw us to the symbolic desires at their heart where the sup-
posedly ‘unspeakable’ is spoken. The erotic poetry remains, no matter
how much subsequent pro-Stewart historiography sought to absolve
the Marian and Jacobean reigns from any controversial ‘excess’ (Mary’s
sexual trangressions, or the decadence of the English Jacobean court
alleged by Jamesian detractors). In relation to this ideological ‘war’ of
possession for the Stewart monarchy David Allan cites the example of
Drummond’s seventeenth-century History which sought to assign the
king ‘a good command over his Passions, his desires never being above
his reason’.

168 Eros and Poetry in the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI

The machinations of poetic eros are an emblem of the issues of politi-

cal and religious signiﬁcance which link the reigns of Mary and James.
These texts are united by the tension between the Catholic and
reformed faiths. By elision, expurgation and substitution, the new devo-
tion gradually usurps the old as these erotic texts, variously preoccupied
from Mary to Fowler with the ‘profane’ and the ‘idolatrous’, disclose.
What underlies the relationships between the sacred and profane in
these poems (Bannatyne and Fowler in particular) is the presence of ‘the
feminine’: embodied in the ﬁgures of the beloved woman and of two
queens, earthly and heavenly, Mary Stewart and the Virgin Mary. This
trinity, productive of such moral and theological anxiety, and, in the
case of the twin Marian representations, of attempted repression and
silencing, points to the enduring symbolic power of the feminine
throughout the Marian and Jacobean periods.

The connection, secured in ﬂesh only between Mary and her son,

baptised by Catholic rites but compelled to abjure the maternal faith, is
embodied with pathos in the book which Mary wrote for James:
‘Tetrasticha ou Quatrains a Son ﬁls’. It is recorded, undated, in William
Drummond of Hawthornden’s library but no copy survives.

It is

ghostly as is the portrait of the adult king James and Mary, side by side,
together in imagined unity.

‘Of one thing only I am astonished; that

he has never asked anything about the Queen […] and yet, notwith-
standing this, I know that he loves and honours her much in his
heart.’

If this represents another kind of unspoken love, then there

can be consolation in the fact that in their association with the erotic
word Mary and James are bound together.

Love’s End 169

Notes

Introduction

1 Petrarch, Rime sparse, sonnet 9: 12; trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric

Poems. The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1976), 44–5.

2 The exemplary article in this respect is Arthur F. Marotti’s ‘“Love is not

Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, ELH, 49 (1982), 396–428. See also
Louis Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the
Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama, 8 (1977), 3–35,
‘“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes”’, and the Pastoral of Power’, ELR, 10
(1980), 153–82, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the Politics of
Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH, 50 (1983), 415–59, ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’, in
Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers eds,
Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986),
65–87, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Patricia
Parker and David Quint eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40. See also Ann Rosalind
Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s inﬂuential ‘The Politics of Astrophil and
Stella’, SEL 24 (1984), 53–68. Other analyses of coded political poetry
include Rosemary Kegl, ‘“Those Terrible Aproches”: Sexuality, Social
Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English
Poesie’, ELR, 20 (1990), 179–205; Stephen W. May, Elizabethan Courtier
Poets. The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1991); Achsah Guibbory, ‘“Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So”: the Politics
of Love in Donne’s Elegies’, ELH, 57 (1990), 811–33; Daniel Javitch,
Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1978); ‘The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry’,
Genre, 15 (1982), 225–38; Phillippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power.
Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989).
For a critique of this critical mode in its earliest stages, see Jonathan
Crewe, Hidden Designs. The critical profession and Renaissance literature
(London: Methuen, 1986).

171

3 R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Inﬂuence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1972); Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the
Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969).

4 See, for example, R.D.S. Jack, ‘Scottish Literature: the English and European

Dimensions’, in Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup eds, Renaissance
Culture in Contact. Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 9–17;
Richard M. Clewett, ‘James VI of Scotland and his Literary Circle’, Aevum,
47 (1988–9), 445–6; Ian Ross, ‘Verse Translation at the Court of King James
VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67
and ‘Sonneteering in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Texas Studies in Language
and Literature, 6 (1964), 255–68; Matthew McDiarmid, ‘Some Aspects of the
Early Renaissance in Scotland’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 3 (1967),
201–35.

5 Edited collections which stem from the triennial international conferences

on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language; see most
recently Graham Caie et al. eds, The European Sun (East Linton: Tuckwell
Press, 2001).

6 See David MacRoberts ed., Essays on the Scottish Reformation (Glasgow:

J.S. Burns, 1962); Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh:
Donald, 1981). On sixteenth-century Scottish political culture, see Roger A.
Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and
Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998); John Dwyer, Roger A.
Mason and Alexander Murdoch eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture
of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Donald, 1982). On early modern Scottish
culture in general, see John MacQueen ed., Humanism in Renaissance Scotland
(1990), and A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan eds, The
Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1994). Two outstanding essays by Durkan are ‘The Beginnings of
Humanism in Scotland’, Innes Review, 4 (1953), 5–24, and ‘The Cultural
Background in Sixteenth-century Scotland’, in MacRoberts ed., 274–331.

7 Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at

Stirling in December 1566’, SHR, 69 (1990), 1–21, and ‘Court Ceremony and
Ritual during the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Lynch and Julian Goodare
eds, The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 71–92; also
Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Sally
Mapstone and Juliette Woods eds, The Rose and the Thistle. Essays on the
Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell
Press, 1998);10–37.

8 L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, The Palace in the

Wild. Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and
Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000).

9 See, for example, Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan

Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Claire
McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andrew Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and
National Identity. Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994). See also Thomas Healy, New Latitudes. Theory and
English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992); David

172 Notes

Norbrook, The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (London: Penguin Books,
1992), ‘Preface’, xxxi.

10 R.D.S. Jack, ‘“Translating” the Lost Scottish Renaissance’, Translation and

Literature, 6 (1997), 66–80.

11 Since the bibliography on Marian and Jacobean rule is extensive, only

book-length publications of the last two decades are listed here: Gordon
Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men. Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland
(London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd, 1983); Michael Lynch
ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988);
Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: George
Philip, 1988). On James, see Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI
and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990) and
Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1980); Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland
1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Bryan Bevan,
King James VI and I of England (London: Rubicon, 1996); W.B. Patterson,
King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Irene Carrier, James VI and I: King of Great Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lynch and Goodare eds,
The Reign of James VI and the newly published collection edited by Daniel
Fischlin and Mark Fortier eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James
VI and I (Wayne State University Press, 2002).

12 Essayes of a Prentise, sig. Kijr–Kijv; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James

VI of Scotland, 2 vols STS (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1955),
vol. 1, 67.

13 Sig. Kiv. STS vol. 1, 68 See also James’s sonnet to Chancellor Maitland: ‘For

what in barbarous leide I block and frames/Thou learnedlie in Mineru’s
tongue proclames’ (STS, vol. 2, 107, 13–14).

14 See R.D.S. Jack, ‘James VI and Renaissance Poetic Theory’, English,

16 (1967), 208–11, and Clewett, 445–6.

15 ‘Sonnet Decifring the Perfyte Poete’, sig. Kiiijr (1–6); STS, vol. 1, 69. The

treatise might be appropriately conceived as a kind of Renaissance conduct
book, prescribing desirable rules and techniques to fashion the most
covetable aesthetic image.

16 Homi Bhaba ed., Narrating the Nation (London: Routledge, 1990), 250.
17 Essayes, sig. Mijv, STS 79.
18 Essayes, sig. Mijv, STS 78.
19 Essayes, sig. Mijr; STS, 78. The beloved’s beauty (descriptio pulchritudinis) is

singled out as a topic which requires invention, sig. Mijv, 78. Ironically,
this is slightly derivative in itself; other poetic treatises comment on the
relationship between female beauty and rhetoric in similar terms:
Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction (avoiding what is trita et obuia…’)
and Sidney’s Apology.

20 ‘I lofty Virgill shall to life restoir/My subiects all shalbe of heauenly thing’:

‘Sonnet 12’ (10–11), Essayes, sig. Cr, STS vol. 1,14.

21 ‘The Vranie translated’ (25–29), in Essayes, sig. Dijr, STS, vol. 1, 19.
22 The visit is recorded by James Melville in his Memoirs; Du Bartas recipro-

cated the artistic compliment in kind by translating James’s own epic
Lepanto into French.

Notes 173

23 See James Craigie, ed., Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith (Edinburgh and

London: Blackwood, 1941); Ross, ‘Verse Translation’, 257–8.

24 Reulis, sig. Mijv–r, STS vol. 1, 79.
25 Sandra M. Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub.

PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 9, 13.

26 Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late

Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

27 Paul Laumonier, ‘Ronsard et L’Écosse’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 4

(1924), 408–28 (425). Only two quatrains in alexandrine metre survive,
clearly intended for Ronsard; instead she sent ‘un buffet de 2,000 ecus, sur-
monte d’un vase “elaboure en forme de rocher, representant le Parnasse”
et portant cette inscription: “A Ronsard, L’Apollon de la Source des Muses”’
(Bodleian MS Add.C.92, f. 22v).

28 Shire overemphasises the playfully ﬁctional quality of literary practice at

the Jacobean court though it may still be considered, in Manfred
Windfuhr’s phrase, a ‘tropical court-society’, and as glossed by Heinrich F.
Plett: ‘all courtly manifestations are to be taken sub specie allegorica’:
‘Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England’,
New Literary History, 14 (1983), 597–621 (607).

29 Ironically, Ronsard was eulogised by the sobriquet of ‘Apollo’, hailed as

‘mon Apollo’ by the poet Olivier de Magny (1529–61) in Les Soupirs (XLI).

30 ‘The Translators Invocation’ (7) to ‘The Furies’ in Poeticall Exercises, sig. 7v,

STS, vol. 1, 112.

31 Susan Sellers, Héle`ne Cixous, Authorship, Autobiography and Love (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1996), 71.

32 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1987), 2.

Chapter 1

Fragment inscribed. in Mary’s Book of Hours: facsimile NLS Adv. 81.5.8,
f. 81v; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros (Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 28, on the voyeuristic exposure of the
Renaissance woman writer per se.

Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scotts, touchand the murder of her
Husband, and hir Conspiracie, Adulterie, and pretensit Mariage with the Erle
Bothwell. Translatit out of the latine, quhilk was written be M.G.B. (n.p, n.d.
but believed to be in London by the printer John Day in 1571), sig. Oijr.
The sonnets are found in sigs, Qiiijr-Sir. This text was based on George
Buchanan’s earlier anti-Marian Latin tract denouncing Mary for her part
in Darnley’s murder, De Maria Scotorum Regina, which appeared in 1571
together with the Actio contra Mariam by Thomas Wilson, and two poems
by ‘G.M.’ and ‘P.R. Scotus’; see John Durkan, Bibliography of George
Buchanan (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1994). Another vernacular
Detectioun was printed at St Andrews by Robert Lekprevik in 1572. A
French edition entitled Histoire de Marie, Royne d’Escosse also appeared in
1572, allegedly printed in Edinburgh by ‘Th.Vwaltem’, but actually in La
Rochelle, as an expression of French Protestant sympathy for the anti-
Marian movement. The moment of the casket’s discovery became a topos

174 Notes

of anti-Marian writing; the incriminatory casket was in fact produced by
the Earl of Moray on 7 December 1568 at the ﬁrst of the trials instigated
by the Elizabethan government at Westminster; see Antonia Fraser, Mary
Queen of Scots (1969; London: Mandarin, 1993), 460–1.

Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, ‘Discours Troisième sur la
Reyne D’Escosse’, Receuil des Dames ed. Roger Gaucheron (Paris, 1926),
44–5; Brantôme’s work was originally published posthumously in 1665
at Leyden. The testimony of Ronsard was particularly injurious.

Cited in Andrew Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stewart (New York: AMS Press,
1901), 344. For a representative range of literature on the authenticity
debate, see Samuel Cowan, Mary Queen of Scots and Who Wrote the Casket
Letters?

(London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co, 1901);

T.F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh:
Adam and Charles Black, 1889); John Hosack, Mary Queen of Scots and her
Accusers (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1869); Walter
Goodall, An Examination of the Letters said to be by Mary Queen of Scots to
James Earl of Bothwell, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1824); John Kerr, The Casket
Letters and the Keys (Robert Maclehose and Co, n.d.); John Skelton,
Maitland of Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stuart: a History, 2 vols
(Edinburgh, 1894); Fraser, 379ff; Jenny Wormald Mary Queen of Scots. A
Study in Failure (London: George Philip, 1988), 178.

Records of the Privy Council, Edinburgh, 16 September 1568, in James
Anderson ed., Collections Relating to the history of Mary Queen of Scots, 4
vols (London: 1727–8), vol. 2, 258.

Anderson ed., 257.

7 R.H.

Mahon,

The Indictment of Mary Queen of Scots (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1923), 25; the letter to La Mothe Fénelon is printed in
Alexander Labanoff ed., Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Marie Stuart Reine
d’Escosse, 8 vols (London: Dolman, 1844), vol. 4, dated 22 November 1571,
desiring that the tracts in her defence be published as freely as the denunci-
ations against her (the Medicis were particularly anxious to ensure the
destruction of the Detectioun and other anti-Marian treatises).

Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan. Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press, 1982), 108.

9 John

Durkan,

Bibliography, xiv.

Ibid., xiv.

CUL MS Oo. 7.47: ‘An Elegy on the Murder of Lord Darnley’ (ff. 32–7);
‘certane French sonnettis…’ (ff. 46-8). This manuscript copy is infrequently
commented upon: Lang reproduces in facsimile the folio containing the
ﬁrst two sonnets (stating that ‘the copyist is unknown’, 345); Mahon,
Indictment, commented on what he termed ‘the Lennox manuscripts’ (1):
CUL Oo.7.47/8: a rough draft by Lennox of the Bill of Supplication; CUL
Dd.3.66: ‘A brief discourse of the usage of um

qle

[formerly] the King of

Scottis, sone to me the Earle of Lennox, be the Quene his wyff’; CUL Oo. 7.
47/11: ‘A Remembrance after what sorte the late Kynge of Scottis Sonne to
me the Earle of Lennoxe, was used by the Quene his wieffe’. In Mary Queen
of Scots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), Mahon transcribes
from CUL MS Oo.7.47/8 what he terms ‘the Lennox narrative’, a contem-
porary prose account of the Darnley controversy believed to be written by
the Earl of Lennox himself (78). The Indictment is closely based on

Notes 175

Buchanan’s Latin De Maria Scotorum, found among the same collection of
papers in CUL MS Dd.3.66, entitled ‘Ane informatioun of probable and
infallable conjecteuris and presumptiounis quhairbe it appeiris evidentlie yt
ye Quene, moder to our soverane Lord, not onlie wes previe of ye horrible
and unworthie morthour, perpetrat in ye persoun of ye King of guid
memorie, his hienes fader, but als wes ye verray instrument, chieff organe
and causer of ye Vnnaturall crueltie’.

Another anti-Marian document by Buchanan, known as The Book of

Articles, was written as ‘an accusatory brief at the time of her trial in
England’ (Fraser, 324), commissioned by Moray, and ﬁrst produced at the
Westminster trial of 15 December 1568. Often blatantly fallacious, it has
direct verbal echoes in the document ‘Ane informatioun’, and in the
printed version of the vernacular Detectioun.

The CUL manuscript also provides two missing lines from the third and
eighth French sonnets in the 1571 Detectioun. Between lines 12 and 13 of
the Detectioun’s third sonnet is inserted the line ‘et toutesfois mon coeur
vous doutez ma constance’; between lines 5 and 6 of the Detectioun, eighth
sonnet is the line ‘pour luy ie veux faire teste au malheure’.

At a seminar given to the Department of English Studies, University of
Strathclyde, November 2000.

There are altogether fourteen annotations, numbered alphabetically.

15 Fraser,

373.

16 Anderson,

259.

Labanoff, vol. 2, 202. For conjectures on the identity of the forgerers see
(for example) Lang, 345; Goodall, 127. Mary refers here to the letters,
and not the sonnets; neither she, nor her apologists such as John Leslie,
Bishop of Ross, referred directly to the evidence of the sonnets.

18 John

Leslie,

A Defence of the Honour of Marie Quene of Scotlande (Menston:

Scolar Press, 1970), 300; the text was originally published in 1569.

The sonnets also bear an interesting, tangential relationship to the letters
which makes the priority of each text uncertain. The mise-en-scène of the
letters, of course, remains close (the adulterous relationship), but there
are also several striking verbal echoes.

20 Brantôme,

44.

21 Shoshana Felman, ‘What Does A Woman Want? The Question of

Autobiography and the Bond of Reading (Postface)’, in What Does a
Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 6.

Readings of the sonnets vary in length and detail, often inhibited by the
crisis of authorship. See Betty S. Travitsky ed., The Paradise of Women.
Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1981); Helen Hackett, ‘Courtly Writing by Women’, in
Helen Wilcox ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–89 (173–4); Sarah
M. Dunnigan, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance language of love and desire:
the “bodily burdein” in the poetry of Mary, Queen of Scots’, Gramma, 4
(1996), 181–95; ‘Scottish Women Writers c1560–c1650’, in Douglas
Gifford and Dorothy McMillan eds, A History of Scottish Women’s Writing
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 15–43 (17–26); ‘The cre-

176 Notes

ation and self-creation of Mary Queen of Scots: rhetoric, sovereignty, and
female controversies in sixteenth century Scottish poetry’, Scotlands, 5.2
(1998), 65–88; Peter C. Herman, ‘Mary Queen of Scots’, in Reading Royal
Subjects (forthcoming; I am most grateful to Professor Herman for allow-
ing me to read the essay in advance of publication); Mary E. Burke,
‘Queen, Lover, Poet: a question of balance in the sonnets of Mary, Queen
of Scots’, in Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda E. Dove, and Karen Nelson
eds, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart
Britain (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101-18. There is
an interesting early account in David Dalrymple, ‘Of the Sonnets attrib-
uted to Mary Queen of Scots’, Remarks on the History of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1773); Dr Sally Mapstone drew my attention to this piece.

Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 168, 189.

24 Rene

Girard,

Deceit, Desire and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure,

trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976); see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s reading of triangulation in
Shakespeare’s sonnets in Between Men. English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), which
begins with Girard.

James Melville, Memoirs of his own life (Edinburgh, 1827), 176.

Detectioun, f. 195r. Her later marriage to Bothwell was construed as ‘a
mokking of God’: Mahon ed., Indictment, 47.

The phrase is drawn from Mary’s elegy upon François II’s death: the idea
of an almost sacramentally perfect love recurs throughout Mary’s secular
and religious poetry.

28 Leslie,

Treatise, 263.

Agnes Strickland ed., Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, and documents con-
nected with her personal history, 3 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1842–3), vol.
1, 305, undated, but probably 1568; see also the letter to Elizabeth, vol.
1, 72. In the context of Mary’s self-defence in the later Babington contro-
versy, Lewis notes that ‘Mary […] cast the written word as itself a traitor
of sorts because it deprived her of her rightful sovereignty’ (47).

Strickland ed., vol. 1, 51 (undated, probably May or June, 1568).

The phrase is borrowed from Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The
Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Zone
Books, 1999).

See the portrait of Mary attributed to François Clouet, ‘The Bath of Diana’,
and the anonymous portrait of the semi-nude yet chastely beautiful ‘Lady
at her toilet’, believed to be Mary: Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomas eds,
The Queen’s Image (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 13–14.

Two Shrovetide masques were devised by George Buchanan for perform-
ance at Holyrood Palace in 1564, ‘In Castitatem’ and ‘Mutuus Amor’. For
Mary’s marriage to Darnley a year later, three masques were devised by
Buchanan: ‘Pompa Deorum in nuptiis Mariae’; ‘Pompae equestres’; and
an address by the four ‘Maries’ to the goddesss of Health. The baptism of
James VI was also commemorated by a Buchanan masque.

See R.D.S. Jack, ‘Mary and the Poetic Vision’, Scotia, 3 (1979), 35–40.

Notes 177

Detectioun (1571), sig. Biijv, with regard to Bothwell’s injury at
Liddesdale; but see Donaldson, First Trial, 156, for this as an instance of
polemical fabrication.

Knox, History of the Reformation, Book IV, in David Laing ed., Works,
6 vols (Edinburgh, 1848), vol.2, 388.

Susan Frye, Elizabeth I. The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 12–13. For revisionist readings of the Elizabethan
image or icon, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen. Elizabeth I
and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995)
and Julia M. Walker ed., Dissing Elizabeth. Negative Representations of
Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Frye, 105. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body
Enclosed’, Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in
Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42,
and Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human
Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 197–8, for analy-
sis of Elizabeth’s corporeal presence.

Knox, 368.

40 David

Parkinson,

The Poems of Alexander Montgomery, STS, 2 vols

(Edinburgh, 2000), vol. 1, 147.

Detectioun, sig. Bijr–v; it continues with the assertion that Mary desired to
‘rauish hym agayne’ (sig. Bijv).

Tertullian, cited in Alcuin Blamires et al. eds, Woman Defamed and Woman
Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 51.

J.E. Phillips, Images of a Queen. Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature
(Ithaca: University of California Press, 1964).

See Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print. Pamphlets and the Public
Sphere in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); on the Scottish pamphlets, see Phillips, 41–2. Sandra M. Bell,
‘“The Throne of Trial”: Reformation Satire and the Scottish Monarchy’,
unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), 36–43, contends
that the anti-Marian satires were a profound questioning of monarchy to
which James’s later legitimisation of political and cultural autonomy was
a deliberate response.

Satirical Poems, vol. 1, 39–45 (15, 30).

In ‘Ane Ballat declaring the Nobill and Gude inclination of our King’,
published by Robert Lekprevik in Edinburgh in 1567, the narrator causti-
cally asserts that the exemplum of Mary would subvert the Boccacian
catalogue of mulieribus nobilis, and challenge the power of Ovidian (pre-
sumably Heroidian) representation. On Lekprevik, Protestant printer, see
Satirical Poems, vol. 1, liv–ix. In Mary Queen of Scots, Donaldson cites a
play presented at the English court ‘late in 1567’, Horestes, by the anti-
Marian English parliamentarian John Pikeryng which constructs Mary as
Clytemnestra (161); see further Lewis, 44–5.

Detectioun, sig. Giir.

Visual emblems also served to remind the populace of Mary’s corrupt
sexuality: for example, her representation on a 1567 placard as a
mermaid (icon of the prostitute): see Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen of Scots
(Edinburgh, 1986), 140.

178 Notes

49 Parkinson,

142.

Joannes L. Vives, De institutio foeminae christianae (1524), trans. Richard
Hyrde, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Booke called the Instruction of a christen
woman, made ﬁrste in latyne, by the right famous clerke maystr Lewis Vives,
and tourned out of latyne into Englishe (London, 1557), Book III.i, sig.
Kkiiir. (ﬁrst translated 1529).

Detectioun, f. 194r.

Detectioun, sig. Giir. Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London, 1937),
proposes that Anna Throndssön, with whom Bothwell had an affair
before his marriage to Lady Jean Gordon, wrote the sonnets attributed to
Mary, and tailors the sonnets to ﬁt a new biographical narrative (106–9,
412–415).

Acts of Parliament December 1567, extracted in Anderson ed., vol. 3,
206.

Labanoff, vol. 2, 34, 36.

In a defence of Bothwell’s ‘faythfull and uprycht service’ in letter to
Melvil, May 1567, Labanoff, vol. 2, 15.

56 Labanoff,

41.

Labanoff, 41. See Fraser, 388, on Mary’s justiﬁcations of the Bothwell
marriage.

58 Labanoff,

45.

59 Lynch,

217.

‘Testament and tragedie of umquhile King Henrie Stewart of gude
memorie’ (63): Satirical Poems, vol. 1, 39–45.

61 Lewis,

31.

William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1994), 138.

‘mon ﬁlz’ in the CUL MS is glossed as ‘the king his sone, for it apperit

she menit th’erll bothwell …’ (f. 46r).

Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament. Arts of Rule in Late
Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): ‘sover-
eignty promises a fantastic, a perfect but imaginary closure to the very
yearning it brings into being’ (71).

One could also cite in parallel the aestheticistion of sexual assault in pas-
tourelle; see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘The Political Dimensions of Desire and
Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne Manuscript’, in Stephen R.
McKenna ed., Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature. A
Festschrift in Honour of Allan H. MacLaine (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press,
1992), 75–96. On the dark erotic corporeality of the female blason, see
Sawday, 197–212.

CUL MS, f. 34r. Dalrymple offers a substantially different ‘and very harm-
less’ interpretation of the sonnet: ‘the Queen felt displeasure at his
[Bothwell’s] alliance with the family of Huntly [ce corps refers to Lady
Jean Gordon, his ﬁrst wife]’, and that the phrase ‘ie iette mainte larme’
refers to his marriage with Gordon ‘whose affections he did not possess’
(213–15).

Records of Session, Edinburgh 12 May 1567, extracted in Anderson ed.,
vol. 1, 88.

Ibid.

Notes 179

Edinburgh, May 1567, in Labanoff, vol. 2, 37–8.

See Luce Irigaray, citing Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look’,
Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), trans. C. Porter, This Sex which is not
One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 66.

Fraser, 379; Bothwell persuasively demonstrated by the Ainslie bond that
he had the support of the majority of the nobility.

Margaret Caroll, The Erotics of Absolution’, The Expanding Discourse.
Feminism and Art History ed. Mary Garrard (1992), 138–58, cited in Diane
Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.

73 Strickland,

Letters, 60.

Roy Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli eds, Rape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), 10. Rape as an historical, social and cultural phenomenon
pre-1600 is addressed in Angelike E. Laiou ed., Consent and Coercion to
Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, D.C:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993); Nazife Bashar,
‘Rape in England between 1500 and 1700’, in The Sexual Dynamics of
History. Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983),
28–42, offers a cogent account of legalistic conceptions of rape in the
period.

Phrase taken from ‘The Trial and Condemnation of Merwin Lord Audley
Earl of Castle-Haven at Westminster, April the 5th 1631’, extracted in
Charlotte F. Otten ed., English Women’s Voices 1540–1700 (Florida:
Florida International University Press, 1992), 33–40 (34).

‘My Lord Bothwell was hurt in Lyddisdaill, and the Quene raid to
Bothwick’ (October 7, 1566): A paper containing a short recital of some
material Passages concerning Mary Queen of Scots by way of Diary from
the Birth of her Son to his going into England’, in Anderson ed., vol. 2,
269; it was also caustically observed in the Detectioun that: ‘she ﬂyith
away in haste lyke a mad woman…’ (f. 161v).

Donaldson, 96, explains why this is ‘the best known of Buchanan’s fabri-
cations’; but that the CUL MS should replicate what might justly be
termed a topos illustrates the close interrelationship between it and the
Buchanan anti-Marian tracts.

Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots, 178.

See Wolfthal, 183–4, for analysis of the Lucretia myth. Machiavelli in the
Discorsi cites it ‘among many examples to be found in the ancient histo-
ries of rape leading to legal and political change’: Stephanie H. Jed,
Chaste Thinking. The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3.

‘Baise m’encore, rebaise moy et baise: / Donne m’en un de tes plus
savoureus’ (sonnet 18: 1–2) in Françoise Charpentier ed., Oeuvres
poétiques avec Pernette du Guillet Rymes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Labé’s
lover conceives herself as the spiritually inferior but sensual ‘corps’,
lacking the completion of ‘âme bien aymee’ (7: 3–4). As in the Marian
sequence, desire can also be self-annihilating in its intensity (cf. 13:
9–11). See Deborah Lesko Baker, The Subject of Desire. Petrarchan poetics
and the female voice in Louise Labé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University
Press, 1997).

180 Notes

As in Gli Asolani: ‘this earthly burden…will turn to dust…’: trans. Rudolf
B. Gottfried (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1934), 71.

For a comprehensive survey of the Renaissance identiﬁcation of woman
with sensuality, inﬁrmitas, and weakened rationality from a variety of
sources, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16–17.

What Jensen terms ‘the insistent trope of female suffering’: Katharine A.
Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a
Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Goldsmith ed., Writing The
Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature (London: Pinter, 1989), 25–45
(33).

The Platonic works in Mary’s library as recorded in the standard inventory
are the Symposium translated by Louis de Roy (Paris, 1559); the works of
Plato (‘Platonis opera omnia’); ‘Leon the Hebrew of Luif’; the neo-Platonic
poetry of du Bellay’s Olive, of Heröet, Scéve, and de Tyard. It is interesting to
note that Heröet (and also Dolet) translated the Symposium, Ion and Crito
c1530–40; and that Pontus de Tyard translated Leone’s Dialoghi d’Amore. See
Durkan, ‘Library’, for further detailed exposition.

Ficino, The Philosophy of Love trans. F. Freidelberg Seeley, 198; in the orig-
inal text see the Second Oration, cap. iii, ‘Quo Pacto Divina pulchritudo
amorem parit’, and the Fifth, cap. iv, ‘Pulchritudo est aliquid incor-
poreum’, Commentarium Marsilij Ficini Florentine in conviuium Platonis de
amore, Divini Platonis Opera Omnia quae extant Marsilio Ficino interprete
(Lugdini, 1590), 775 and 780–1; Plotinus, The Enneads trans. Stephen
MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 63.

Plotinus, 61.

Cited in Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1934), 51.

Donald L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist. Italianate conceits and love theory
in the Songs and Sonets (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 160.

Though Huguet, vol. 3, 173, notes that ‘On trouve Dieu pour les dieux, et
les dieux pour Dieu’.

‘O Signeur Dieu resceuez ma priere’: Bodleian Library MS Add C.92, f.
22r; ‘Donnes Siegneur don[n]es moy pasciance’: Bodleian Library MS Add
C.92, ff. 22r-v; ‘Que suis ie helas et de quoy sert ma vie’: Bodleian Library
MS Add C.92, f. 24r; ‘Méditation sur l’inconstance et vanité du monde’
and ‘L’ire de Dieu par le sang ne s’apaise’ in Bishop John Leslie, Piae
Afﬂicti Animi Consolationes Divinaeque Remedia (Paris, 1574).

Beatrice of Nazareth, The Seven Manners of Love, in Amy Oden ed., In Her
Words. Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought (London:
Abingdon Press, 1994), 125.

Mary’s serene preparation for martyrdom is recounted in the standard
hagiographies such as Adam Blackwood’s (see Phillips, 165).

There is Petrarchan resonance here too given the spiritual ‘assumption’,
as it were, of Laura into the Virgin Mary in canzone 366.

Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 242; endorsed by
Jones, 141–7.

Jones, 135–6.

Notes 181

Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: writing rape in medieval French litera-
ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 41: in her
Praefatio she proclaims ‘cum femina fragilitas vinceret et virilis robur
confusionis subiaceret’ (27).

Jones, 34.

Patricia Berrahou Philippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance
Lyric Poetry (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press London: Associated
University Presses, 1995), 128–9.

99 ‘Méditation’ (57–60).

100

Robb, 209.

101

Monique Wittig, ‘The Trojan Horse’, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 69.

Chapter 2

NLS Adv. 1.1.6, f. 211r. The text of the poems in this chapter is based on
the manuscript; there is an excellent facsimile edited by Denton Fox and
William Ringler, The Bannatyne Manuscript. National Library of Scotland
Advocates’ MS 1.1.6 (London: Scolar Press, 1980). For convenience, refer-
ence will also be made to the Scottish Text Society edition, The Bannatyne
Manuscript writtin in tyme of pest 1568 edited by W. Tod Ritchie, 4 vols
(Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1928–34) which provides generally
judicious transcriptions. For the prefatory inscription see STS vol. 3, 240.
Unless otherwise stated, vol. 3 is the principal source until discussion of
the querelle des femmes poems. In citations, reference is identiﬁed by MS
folio, then STS reference; line references appear in brackets; poems,
unless titled, are identiﬁed by their ﬁrst line. The yogh and thorn
symbols and long ‘s’ have been orthographically modernised.

The last dualism is taken from Sara F. Matthews Greco, Ange ou diablesse.
La représentation de la femme au XVIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1991).

David Parkinson, ‘“A Lamentable Storie”: Mary Queen of Scots and the
Inescapable Querelle des Femmes’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald, and
S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild. Essays on Vernacular Culture and
Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000),
141–60 (144). See also Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘The Creation and Self-creation
of Mary Queen of Scots: Rhetoric, Sovereignty, and Female Controversies in
Sixteenth-century Scottish Poetry,’ Scotlands, 5.2 (1998): 65–88.

In reference to the so-called ‘main MS’: respectively, ff. 1–42v; 43v–96v;
97r–210v; 211r–297v; 298v–370r.

William Ramson’s phrase in Joan Hughes and William Ramson eds,
Poetry of the Stewart Court (Canberra: Australian University Press, 1982),
25. Bannatyne’s claim that he transcribed from ‘copeis auld mankit and
mutillait’ (‘The Wryttar to the Reidaris’) may well be disingenuous.

For textual details, see Fox and Ringler eds, ‘A Description of the
Bannatyne Manuscript’, ix-xvii; Denton Fox, ‘Some Scribal Alterations of
Dates in the Bannatyne Manuscript’, Philological Quarterly, 42 (1968),
259–63 and ‘Manuscripts and Prints of Scots Poetry in the Sixteenth
Century’ in Adam J. Aitken et al. eds, Bards and Makars (Glasgow:

182 Notes

University of Glasgow Press, 1977), 156–71 (158–62); J.T.T. Brown, ‘The
Bannatyne Manuscript: a Sixteenth Century Poetical Miscellany’, SHR, 1
(1903–4), 136-58 (139); William Ramson, ‘On Bannatyne’s Editing’, Bards
and Makars, 172–83 (characterising the fourth section as ‘the most tightly
organised’, 174); Hughes and Ramson eds, chapter 2; Gregory
Kratzmann, ‘Sixteenth Century Secular Poetry’, in Cairns Craig ed., The
History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1989), vol. 1, ed. R.D.S. Jack, 105–24. For the manuscript’s historical
context, see John MacQueen ed., Ballattis of Luve (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1970), ‘Introduction’, xi-lxix; Michael Lynch, ‘Queen
Mary’s Triumph: The Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December
1566’, SHR, 69 (1990), 1–21; Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Bannatyne
Manuscript: A Marian Anthology’, Innes Review, 37 (1986), 36–47; ‘The
Printed Book that Never Was: George Bannatyne’s Poetic Anthology
(1568)’, in J.M.M. Hermans and K. van der Hoek eds, Boeken in de late
Middeleeuwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1993), 101–10; Theo van
Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction between Literature and History in Queen
Mary’s Edinburgh: the Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical
Context’, in A.A. MacDonald et al. eds, The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies
in Literature, Religion, History and Culture Offered to John Durkan (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1994), 183–225. Criticism of the manuscript has largely focused
on the religious section (see in particular the work of Alasdair A.
MacDonald), and on the number of canonical medieval and early
modern Scottish works which the anthology contains (by Dunbar,
Henryson, David Lyndsay, for example). For the best and most recent
reading of the fourth section, see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘The Political
Dimensions of Desire and Sexuality in Poems of the Bannatyne
Manuscript’, in Stephen R. McKenna ed., Selected Essays on Scottish Language
and Literature. A Festschrift in Honour of Allan H. MacLaine (Lampeter: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1992), 75–96, and see further note 13 below.

For analysis of this ‘1565’ elision, see Fox, ‘Some Scribal Alterations’ and
MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’. The date of ‘1568’ appears on the ﬁrst
leaf of the Draft MS; on ff. 97r, 290v, 298r, 375r. On f. 290, ‘1565’
appears, then emended to ‘1568’ (similarly on f. 298 ‘1566’ is ‘overwrit-
ten’ to ‘1568’). ‘1562’ is found on f. 90; hence Fox concludes that most of
the manuscript was copied in 1562–5, and that ‘1568’ denotes the year of
completion, a hypothesis most recently substantiated by MacDonald.

‘A Marian Anthology’, 40.

‘My hairt is heich above’, anon., f. 231r, STS 307 (4); ‘Quhat art thow /
lufe for till allow’, anon., f. 248r, STS 353 (34).

‘Gif langour makis men licht’, f. 244r, STS 338-9. See Caroline Bingham,
Darnley. A Life of Henry Stuart Lord Darnley Consort of Mary Queen of Scots
(London: Constable, 1995), 92–6, citing another lyric by Darnley possi-
bly addressed to Mary from BL Add. MS 17942 (the Devonshire MS), f.
57. Fox and Ringler, xxxv, consider the attribution of this fairly conven-
tional love lyric (which only refers to an abstract female beloved and not
Mary) doubtful.

MacDonald, ‘A Marian Anthology’, 40; Sir Thomas Craig, Epithalamium
quo Mariae Scotorum Reginae Nuptiae Celebravit (Edinburgh, 1565).

Notes 183

MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’, discussing the probable reluctance of the
printer, Thomas Bassandyne ‘who might otherwise have been interested
in putting out the manuscript as a printed book’ (6); see also
MacDonald’s ‘Poetry, Politics, and Reformation Censorship in Sixteenth-
century Scotland’, English Studies, 64 (1983), 410–21; ‘Censorship and the
Reformation’, File. A Literary Journal, 1 (1992), 8–16; ‘Catholic Devotion
into Protestant Lyric’: The Case of the Contemplacioun of Synnaris’,
Innes Review, 35 (1984), 58–97. It is interesting to note the occurrences of
the actual term, ‘reformation’: for example, the marginal insertion in
‘Ane uthir ballat of vnpossibiliteis co[m]paird to the trewth of wemen in
luve’, anon., ff. 266r-v, STS vol. 4, 42–3: ‘quhe[n] wra[n]gus deid[is]
neid[is] no reformatioun’ (24).

Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘“The Wryttar to the Reidaris”: Editing Practices and
Politics in the Bannatyne Manuscript’, SSL, 31 (2000), 14–30: 20. Carolyn
Ives has recently offered alternative readings of Bannatyne’s motives,
suggesting the conscious ideological formation of a cultural and nation-
alistic identity: ‘Shifting Borders and Fluctuating Margins: the Politics of
Bannatyne’s Self-Representation and the Construction of Scottish
National Identity’, paper presented to the Eighth International
Conference of Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and
Literature, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 17–21 August, 1996. I am most
grateful to her for letting me have a copy of this yet unpublished essay.

14 Parkinson,

151.

15 Newlyn,

14.

f. 211v, STS 241 (1-2).

‘As phebus bricht in speir meridiane’, ff. 230v–1r, STS 305–7 and ‘No
woundir is altho

my hairt be thrall’, ff. 234r–234v, STS (309–11).

See Brown; MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’.

See MacDonald, ‘Marian Anthology’, 41, for summary.

The phrase is from J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print. A Note on the
Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139–64.

For a survey of the Bannatyne family and circle as constituing a literate
reading public, see van Heijnsbergen, ‘Prosopographical’, 186 ff.

Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender. Authorship and Publication in the
English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 32. That the
manuscript preserves only the most popular or pre-eminent poems is
implied by the existence of a folio leaf, EUL MS La.II.656, an incomplete
lyric (four and a half stanzas in sixteenth-century secretary hand) which
bears striking afﬁnities to the archetypal Bannatyne lyric.

‘To yow that is ye harbre of my Hairt’, anon., f. 219r, STS 265 (36).

‘ffresche fragrent ﬂour of bewty souerane’, anon., f. 219v, STS 267 (28).

‘ffresche fragrent ﬂour’ (37, 46–7).

‘Sen that I am a prisoneir’ (ff. 214r–15r), anonymous but attributed to
Dunbar in the Reidpeth manuscript, and ‘In may as that aurora did
upspring’ (ff. 283r–4r), ‘Now culit is dame venus brand’ (ff. 284r–285v),
‘Thir ladyis fair’ (ff. 261r-v); ‘The garmont of gud ladeis’, ff. 215r-v, by
Henryson; ‘Ane aigit ma[n] twys fourty yeiris’ by Kennedy; ‘The prolog of
the fourtt book of Virgell’ (ff. 291r–4v) from the Eneados of Gavin
Douglas.

184 Notes

‘Stewart’ (ascribed ﬁve lyrics, therefore the most proliﬁc named lyricist
after Scott) has been identiﬁed by van Heijnsbergen as William Stewart
whose family had close links with the Bannatynes; Steill (ascribed two
lyrics) is identiﬁed by MacQueen, Ballattis, xxxiv–v, as George Steill, a
courtier of James V; ‘Fethy’ (ascribed two lyrics) has been identiﬁed as
the musician John Fethy, organist and chanter of the Chapel Royal (Scott
was presented with its prebend; MacQueen, xxx–xxxii but see Shire,
37–8, 260); for the unresolved identity of ‘Clerk’, see Fox and Ringler eds,
xxii; the ‘Weddirburne’ attribution in four lyrics may allude to one of
three brothers, James, John or Robert (Fox and Ringler eds, xxxv);
‘Mersar’ (ascribed three lyrics) may be the poet named by Dunbar in his
litany of poets in memoriam, ‘That did in luf so liﬂy write…’ (Fox and
Ringler eds, xxxii). There is also a doubtful attribution to ‘Montgomery’
(ff. 253r-v).

‘The song of troyelus’ appears on ff. 230r-v, copied from Thynne’s 1532
edition of Chaucer (Fox and Ringler, xxxiv). For an interesting discussion
of apparent Chaucerian misogyny, see David Parkinson and Carolyn
Ives, ‘Scottish Chaucer, Misogynist Chaucer’, in Barbara Kline and
Thomas Prendergast eds, Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea
of the Authentic Text 1400–1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1994). Also found on f. 220v is a copy of three stanzas from Lydgate’s
Temple of Glas (Fox and Ringler, xxxiii).

This raises the important question whether the fourth pairt was intended
to be read in a rigorously sequential manner.

MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book’.

Tasso, cited in Nesca A Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance
(London, 1935), 153.

‘The moir I luve and serf at all my mycht, anon., f. 249r, STS 356 (3–5).

Cf. ‘My hairt is heich aboif’.

‘Was not gud king salamon’, ‘q ane inglisma[n]’, f. 216r, STS 255–6 (51–2).

Terms drawn from ‘In to my Hairt emprentit is so soir’, anon., f. 220v,
STS 270 (2); ‘fﬂour of all fairheid’, anon., f. 227r, STS 291 (6).

‘My Hairt is thrall’, anon., f. 223r, STS 277 (22); Annibale Romei, cited in
Robb, 159. On conceptions and canons of female beauty in the period, see
Naomi Yavneh, ‘The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch’, in James
Grantham Turner ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Texts,
Institutions, Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133–57.

‘Quhen tayis bank’ anon. ff. 229r-v STS 296–300 (82, 84); ‘Maist ameyn
roseir’ attributed to ‘Stewart’; f.219r STS 265 (3).

‘O lusty ﬂour of yow

benyng and bricht’, anon., f. 238v, STS 323 (4–5).

The only example of desiring or active female sexuality is the incomplete
lyric ‘Lait lait on sleip as I wes laid’ (f. 233v, STS 308–9, 17–24).

‘Maist ameyn roseir’ (10); ‘fﬂour of all fairheid’ (16–19).

‘Quhen tayis bank’, (75–6).

‘As phebus bricht’, (20–1). Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Petrarchan Lyric and the
Strategies of Description’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols eds,
Mimesis. From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1980), 100–9 (104). For a summary of the European
blason, originating in the Blasons anatomiques du corps feminin (1536), see

Notes 185

Cathy Yendell, ‘A la recherche du corps perdu: a capstone of the Renaissance
blasons anatomiques’, Romance Notes, 26 (1985), 135–42.

‘Maist ameyn roseir’ (8–9); ‘fﬂour of all fairheid’ (6–9); ‘As phebus bricht’
(8–11).

‘Na woundir is’, anon., f. 234r, STS 309 (5).

‘My Hairt is thrall’ (34–5); ‘The bewty of Hir amorus ene’, anon., f. 218r,
STS 261 (11–13); ‘The well of vertew’, anon., f. 218r, STS 263 (1–4).

Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ‘The Body, Appearance, and Sexuality’, in
Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot eds, A History of Women in the West
(originally published as Storia delle donne in Occidente) 4 vols (Cambridge,
Mass.: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), vol. 2,
Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes eds. Natalie Zemon Davis and
Arlette Farge, 46–84 (58). In conventional medieval moral texts, associ-
ated with sin, but in neo-Platonist writing reﬂecting the beauty of the
woman’s soul, or in the quintessential courtly text a mirror of her virtue.

Joannes L. Vives, De institutio foeminae christianae (1524) trans. Richard
Hyrde, A very Frutefull and Pleasant Booke, called the Instruction of a
Christen woman (London, 1557), sig. Iiiiiv. See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Nets
and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth century
Women’s Lyrics’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse eds,
The Ideology of Conduct. Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality
(London: Methuen, 1987), 39–72.

‘O lusty ﬂour of yowt benyng and bricht’, anon., f. 238v, STS 324
(19–20): ‘ryt nobill of blud…/honorable gentill…’.

See van Heijnsbergen, ‘Prosopographical context’, 186ff, for
identiﬁcation of the manuscript’s urban milieu.

‘ffor to declair the high magniﬁcens’, ascribed to Stewart, ff. 215v–16r,
STS 256–8 (42–8).

While the spiritual perfection of the female beloved is intrinsic to the philo-
sophical erotic tradition (Beatrice, Laura), it might be conjectured that in
Bannatyne the alliance drawn between female sexuality and morality is
designed to appeal to, or be made acceptable for, for a female audience.

That the same writers, notably Scott and ‘Weddirburne’, should contribute
a piece to each mode itself suggests an ironic awareness of the conventions.

Newlyn, ‘Political Dimensions’, ﬁrst suggested the generic inﬂuence of
the querelle. For a variety of literary and cultural readings of the
querelle des femmes, ﬁrst so-called by Abel Lefranc in Les ecrivains
français de la Renaissance (1914) in an essay on Rabelais. Francis Lee
Utley, The Crooked Rib. An Analytical Index to the Argument about
Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1948) provides an excellent
source and reference guide.

In MacKenna ed., 76; see also her earlier pioneering essay, ‘Luve, Lichery
and Evill Wemen: the Satiric Tradition in the Bannatyne Manuscript’,
SSL, 26 (1991), 283–93.

Jordan, 12.

Sydney Anglo, ‘The Courtier. The Renaissance and Changing Ideals’, The
Courts of Europe. Politics, Patronage and Royalty 1400–1800 (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1977), 33–54 (37).

186 Notes

Signiﬁcantly, there are no identiﬁable female-authored poems in the manu-
script; this does not preclude female authorship of the substantial number
of anonymous poems but these facts, combined with the distinct lack even
of female-voiced poems, suggests a strongly masculine-gendering of the
feminine in the Bannatyne manuscript and raises interesting questions
about the scope for female literary utterance in the Marian period.

Woodbridge, 5.

Ibid., 113–17.

Ibid., 17.

See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men. English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

‘In all this warld no man may wit’, anon., ff. 257r–8r, STS vol. 4, 20 (9–11).

‘My hairt is quhyt…’, anon., f. 256v; STS 18–19; this lyric may partly
demonstrate the quality of copia which has been identiﬁed as a character-
istic of many of the pamphlets: Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara
F. McManus eds, Half Humankind: Texts and Contexts of the Controversy
about Women in England 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1985), 40-1.

‘In all this warld…’ (33–40).

Leon Battista Alberti, cited in Kelly, ‘Early Feminist Theory’, 11.

‘ffane wald I luve bot quhair abowt’, ascribed to ‘Clerk’, f. 255r, STS
13–14 (7).

See Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 4.

ff. 252r-v, attributed to Stewart, STS vol. 4, 6–8.

anon., ff. 257r–258r, STS vol. 4, 18–19.

‘In all this world…’, ff.257v–8v, STS 19–22.

‘This work quhe sall sie or reid’, STS 24–6, ff. 258v–259r (28–31).

ff. 258v–259v; STS vol. 4, 23–5. Fox and Ringler, xxxvi, note that this is
derived from ‘The Remedy of Love’ (stanzas 20-9 and 38) which exists
only in Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer, and subsequent reprints.

It is this ‘public’ voice (or the illusion thereof) that allows for mock-
retractions or excusatio (eg. Scott’s ‘I muse and m[er]vellis…’, f. 254v, STS
vol. 4, 11–13: ‘I wat gud wemen will not wyt me/nor of this sedull be
eschamit’, 73–4).

From the late twelfth century ‘Life of Secundus’: see Carleton Brown,
‘Mulier est Hominis Confusio’, Modern Language Notes, 35 (1920), 479–82,
for its history.

For a succinct analysis of the principal Christian and classical Latin tradi-
tions, see Jacques Dalarun, ‘The Clerical Gaze’ and Claude Thomasset,
‘The Nature of Woman’, in Klapisch-Zuber ed., 15–42; 43–69.

ff. 260r-v, STS 28–30 attributed to ‘weddirburne’.

Related to the Pauline dictum, ‘but I suffer not a woman to teach…’;
St John Chrysostom imputed female garrulity to Eve’s transgression
(Blamires ed., 59).

Anon., f. 262r, STS vol 4, 32 (1–7); there are copies of this in the
Maitland folio and in the Reidpeth MS with an additional stanza, and
also in the Book of the Dean of Lismore where there is a false attribution
to ‘chawseir’: Fox and Ringler, xxxvii.

Notes 187

St Jerome writes that the love of women is always ‘insatiable’ (Blamires
ed., 68); for a survey of Renaissance physiological theories of female sex-
uality, Aristotelian and Galenic in origin, see Fletcher, 61ff; MacLean;
Renaissance Woman: a Sourcebook. Constructions of Femininity in England,
ed. Kate Aughterson (London: Routledge, 1995), chapters 2 and 4.

See Maclean, 16ff; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a.92.1, cited in Blamires
et al., 93.

‘Devyce proves and eik humilitie’ (32), anon., f. 262v, STS 34-5 which
is also found in Bod MS Arch. Selden B. 24 (Fox and Ringler, xxxvii);
‘O wicket wemen wilfull and variable’ (15), anon., f. 263r, STS 35–6.

‘Devyce proves’ (29, 3).

Ibid., 36–40. For the classic argument of Eve’s temptation, conventionally
cited by negative querelle polemicists, and the curse inﬂicted see
Augustine, ‘De Genesi ad Litteram’, and Ambrose, cited in Blamires et al.,
79, 61.

ff. 263v–4r, STS 36–7.

‘I muse and m[er]vellis in my mynd’, ff. 254r-v, STS 13 (69–70).

Even though the case for exact imitation or borrowing is difﬁcult to sub-
stantiate given the generic nature of anti-feminist rhetoric.

‘My luve wes fals’ attributed to Weddiburne, f.260r STS 28(14).

‘Devyce proves and eik humilitie’ (47–9).

‘All tho that list of wemen evill to speik’, ff. 275r-6v, STS vol. 4, 64–70
(169–75), attributed erroneously to Chaucer; Fox and Ringler, xxxvii,
suggest this may have been copied from Thynne’s 1532 Chaucer.

ff. 269r–76r, STS vol. 4, 49–64.

Fox and Ramson, xxxvii, where the suggestion is made that this was
copied from Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer in which Hoccleve’s copy
appears. There is an excellent dual edition of L’Epistre and Hoccleve’s
Letter of Cupid: Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter eds, Poems of
Cupid: Christine de Pisan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours and Dit de la Rose,
Thomas Hoccleve’s The letter of Cupid: editions and translations with George
Sewell’s The proclamation of Cupid (Leiden: Brill, 1990).

See J.A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot: Variorum, Ashgate, 1994),
53–4, for a complete list of manuscripts of the ‘Letter of Cupid’, predom-
inantly ‘courtly writing’ concerning women. The copy is inscribed on ff.
211v–217. The manuscript was commissioned by Henry, third Lord
Sinclair, and also contains a number of Chaucerian texts which may pos-
sibly contribute to the Bannatyne misattribution (though the ‘Letter’,
Hoccleve’s earliest dateable poem, was widely misattributed to Chaucer
until the end of the sixteenth century). For a full description of the man-
uscript, see Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, The Works of
Chaucer and The Kingis Quair. A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS
Arch. Selden. B. 24 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 1–25. There are a
signiﬁcant number of orthographical and substantive variants between
Selden B. 24 and the Bannatyne copy (including a textual rearrangement
of the two stanzas in praise of St Margaret).

Christine’s 822 line poem is condensed to 476 lines. For a variety of crit-
ical responses, see Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early
Fifteenth-century English Poetic (1968; Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

188 Notes

1981), 77–84 ; Diane Bornstein, ‘Anti-Feminism in Thomas Hoccleve’s
Translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours’, English
Language Notes, 19 (1981), 7–14; John F. Fleming, ‘Hoccleve’s “Letter of
Cupid” and the “Quarrel” over the Roman de la Rose’, Medium Aevum, 40
(1971), 21–40; William A. Quinn, ‘Hoccleve’s “Epistle of Cupid”’,
Explicator, 45 (1986), 7–10; Roger Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and
Hoccleve: the Letter of Cupid’, in Catherine Batt ed., Essays on Thomas
Hoccleve (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 19–54; Karen A. Winstead, ‘“I am
othir to yow than yee weene”: Hoccleve, Women, and the Series’,
Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 143–55; Glenda K. McLeod, ‘A Case of
faulx semblans: L’Epistre au dieu d’amours and The Letter of Cupid’, in
McLeod ed., The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through
the Nineteenth Centuries (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1991), 11–24, argues that
Hoccleve’s poem tries to defend women but less competently because of
several marked omissions and ‘reinterpretations’. Quinn interprets it as
parodic and conservative; Bornstein contends that Hoccleve reduces
Christine’s social and courtly exemplars, turns Cupid into a ‘jester’ (8),
and alters the presentation of the Virgin.

In their ‘Introduction’, Fenster and Carpenter stress the inﬂuence of
Chaucer upon Hoccleve’s work, in particular The Legend of Good Women.

See Eric Hicks, Le Débat sur Le Roman de la Rose; édition critique, introduction,
traductions (Paris: Champion, 1977). There were no extant printed editions
of Christine’s works, but many manuscripts were in circulation throughout
the sixteenth-century: Jordan, 105-6. For the transmission of Hoccleve’s
manuscript and wirnesses, see Fenster and Carpenter, 171–2. The poem was
not assigned to Hoccleve until Thomas Speght’s edition of Chaucer in 1598.

Kelly, ‘Early Feminist Theory’, 10–11; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist
Consciousness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), pp. 144ff. The standard account of Christine’s life is
Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York:
Persea Books, 1984). Christine was well known in English court circles; her
son accompanied the Earl of Salisbury to England in 1398; she presented
copies of her writing to Salisbury in which Henry IV took interest.

‘All tho yat list of wemen ill to speik’ (79–80).

‘All tho yat list…’ (113–17; 75–7).

‘ffor to declair the high magniﬁcens’, ff. 277r–8r, STS 71–3 (11–12),
attributed to Stewart (the poem also appears on ff. 216r-v).

‘I think thir men ar verry fals and vane’, ff. 279r-v, STS 76–9, attributed
to Wedderburn (48–9). For an identical argument, see Castiglione, Il Libro
del Cortegiano, trans. Thomas Hoby, ed. Virginia Cox (London:
Everyman, 1994), against ‘Thow that hath made books’, and ‘religious
men’: ‘a veile of holinesse…tourne all their thoghtes to deﬁle the chaste
mind of some woman…’ (261).

100

‘All tho yat list of wemen evill to speik’ (9–13). Compare also
Wedderburn: ‘Ar we not maid of wemenis ﬂesch and blude/And in thair
bosom we ar bred and borne’ (94–5); Dunbar’s ‘Now of wemen this I say
for me’, f. 278r, STS 75: ‘Thay ws consaif with pane and be thame
fed/W

in thair breistis thair we be boun to bed…’ (13–14).

101

‘ffor to declair…’ (42).

Notes 189

102

Ibid. (53). For a sensitive analysis of the Virgin’s religious and iconic
status in medieval and Renaissance thought, see Marina Warner, Alone of
All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1976).

103

‘ffor to declair…’ (41). For a succinct account of historical transforma-
tions of the Virgin’s doctrinal and artistic meanings see Jaroslav
Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996) and Warner. There is an extensive literature on Mariology: for
more detailed accounts see, for example, Juniper Carol ed., Mariology,
3 vols (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955–61); Carol Graef, Mary: A History of
Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963–5).

104

‘All tho yat list…’ (160–8). Both ‘the lettre’ and other lyrics also glorify
the women who did not, unlike ‘sainct petir’, forsake Christ: ‘l[ett]re’
(428–9); ‘I think thir men…’ (29–35).

105 Irenaeus,

Against Heresies, V.xix.1, cited in Pelikan, 87.

106

‘All tho yat list…’ (141–7).

107

‘ffor to declair’ (18), recalling 1 Cor.11: 7: ‘but woman is the glory of
man’ (Woodbridge, 11). Jordan comments on this common strategy of
the defences that ‘a deﬁciency of certain attributes, particularly physical
strength, is the basis of great virtue’ (88).

108 Bornstein,

12.

109

Fenster and Carpenter, 198.

110 Quinn,

111

There is an interesting rearrangement in the stanza’s ﬁnal line: ‘the feith
of god/ holy virgyne’ becomes in the Bannatyne text ‘[th]e faith of holy
god thow virgyne’; while this may be an accidental transposition, it is
nevertheless suggestive: St Margaret is apostrophised as a virgin only, and
the sanctifying epithet qualiﬁes God in a more liturgical phrase, as if to
emphasise the process of the ‘conversion’; though where St Margaret’s
was originally the power of Roman Catholic conversion, now it is
imbued with the Reformed ‘doctrene’.

112

‘Thir billis ar brevit…’, attributed to Mersar f. 278r, STS 73 (3–7).

113

Cancelled stanza of ‘Thir billis ar brevit…’.

114 Pelikan,

84ff.

115 As

the Marian historian Michael Lynch and others have pointed out,

such an apparent culmination of the Reformation crises of 1559 and
1560 failed to constitute the ‘religious revolution’ which it is often
assumed: Michael Lynch ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 8.

116

There is only one explicit poem of Marian devotion: the ‘song of the
virgin mary/callit magniﬁcat anima mea d[omi]nu[m], Draft MS, 22–4,
and Main MS, ff. 25v–6v, based on the Magniﬁcat (Canticle of Mary),
Luke 1:46–55. Marian allusions occur within the body of devotional
poems per se on ff. 27r, 28v, 29v–30v; 33r, 36v, 38v, 39v–40r; these are
almost exclusively concerned with the Annunciation, and Mary’s role
as the Virgin Mother of God (focusing on Mary’s womb and virgin
body, and her response to the angel Gabriel’s salutation in the
Gospel).

190 Notes

117

Annabel Lee Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation. The Conditions of
Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison, Wis.: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984), 8.

118

‘Leif luve my luve no langar thow it lyk’, anon., f. 281r, STS 82 (7–12,
15–16).

119

ff. 289r–90r, STS 102-7

120

‘O ma[n] transfformit and vnnaturall’, attributed to Wedderburn, ff.
287v–88v, STS 98–102 (113-19).

121

f. 293v–94r, STS 114 (201–7).

122

‘Quhat meneth this…’ (20), wrongly attributed to Chaucer, ff.
280v–283r, STS 82–7.

123

‘Quhat meneth this…’ (29, 57, 65–7, 71, 78, 84, 92).

124

Exempliﬁed by Dunbar’s lyric, ‘Quha will behald of luve the chance’, f.
281r, STS 81.

125

Chiara Frugoni, ‘The Imagined Woman’, in Klapisch-Zuber ed., 336–422
(360).

126 Parkinson,

160.

127

‘All tho that list…’ (160), Fox, ‘Manuscripts and Prints’, notes that in
this text, ‘taken from Thynne, he [Bannatyne] makes some Protestant
expurgations’ (166), presumably to diminish the Mariological praise;
see also Shire, 21–3. It is perhaps easier to perceive the protestantised
excisions rather than to assess what remains signiﬁcantly
‘Catholicised’; and in the Bannatyne fourth love corpus, Marian allu-
sions remain unexpurgated, perhaps because of the threat posed to the
conceptual and ideological coherence of the querelle poems should they
be entirely removed.

Chapter 3

1 ‘Fail not to let her see all this letter’: in G.P.V. Akrigg ed., Letters of King

James VI and I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 75.
Speculatively dated 27 November 1586; William Keith was one of James’s
two London agents.

2 ‘Heere shalt thou see clearlie, as in a glasse, the miseries of this wauering

world’: ‘The Avthovr to the Reader’, The Furies, printed in His Maiesties
Poeticall Exercises at vacant houres (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1591), sig.
3r; James Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh
and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 98. Citations from James’s poetry
are orthographically based on the ﬁrst printed edition or, in the case of
unpublished poetry, the most appropriate ‘copy text’ manuscript (all rele-
vant manuscript sources are identiﬁed; where a manuscript text exists in
two orthographic versions, Scots and Anglo-Scots, the former is usually pre-
ferred as, by inference, the earliest version); in citation of texts, reference is
also made to Craigie’s two volume edition, abbreviated as STS to distinguish
it from Craigie’s edition of the Basilikon Doron.

3 BL Add. MS 24195, f. 2r; STS vol. 2, 69, see note 22 below for detail of

manuscript context. For readings of the erotic poems to date, see Murray

Notes 191

F. Markland, ‘A Note on Spenser and the Scottish Sonneteers’, SSL, 1 (1966–7),
136–40 (139); Antonia Fraser, James VI of Scotland and I of England (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; 1994), 52; R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King
James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. Jack, 125–39 (128, 130); Jonathan
Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature. Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and
their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 22–5; J. Derrick
McClure, ‘‘‘O Phoenix Escossois’: James VI as Poet’, in Alisoun Gardner-
Medwin and Janet Hadley Williams eds, A Day Estivall (Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press, 1990), 96–111 (106–7). See also the newly published collec-
tion edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Royal Subjects. Essays on the
Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002).

4 Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchison and

Co., 1969), 148.

5 ‘Ane Schort Treatise, conteining some Reulis and cautelis to be obseruit and

eshewit in Scottis Poesie’ (Reulis), sig. Liiijv; STS vol. 1, 76; ‘commoun’ is
most probably meant in a linguistic or stylistic sense; the term, ‘commoun
verse’ which he advocates for ‘materis of love’ is probably derived from
Ronsard’s Abbrège de l’Art Poétique Francois (1565).

6 Reulis, sig. Mr STS vol. 1, 76; the sonnet is found on sig. Kiiijr, prefacing the

actual text of the Reulis, and recapitulating the aesthetic of ‘ingyne’ implied
in the sonnet immediately preceding, ‘Sonnet of the Avthovr to the
Reader’, sig. Kiijv.

7 Essayes of a Prentise, ‘The twelf Sonnets of Inuocations to the Goddis’, sig.

Aiiijr, ‘Sonnet. 2’, line 12, STS vol. 1, 9. This theory of artful illusionism is
probably inﬂuenced by Quintilian’s theory of evidentia and the translation
of the verbal into the visual or perceptual. See also Roderick J. Lyall, ‘James
VI and the Cultural Crisis’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch eds, The
Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 55–70.

8 Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), in discussion of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (7).

9 Each MS is described respectively in Allan F. Westcott, New Poems by James I of

England (New York: AMS Press, 1966), xi–xvi and Craigie, Poems, vol. 1,
lxxi–vii. Bodley, 165 contains only two of the BL Amatoria texts, ‘as falcounis
ar’ (ff. 43r-44v), and ‘if mourning micht amende’, later titled ‘A Dier at her
M:

ties

Desyr’ (ff. 46r-v). These are each written on separate manuscripts and

bound together with the other works, including the Lepanto and the Furies.
There are interesting linguistic differences between the texts which show the
later angliﬁed revisions of original Scots orthography, suggesting a clear pre-
1603 dating and the cultural sensitivity of post-Union linguistic afﬁliations.

10 For further details see Westcott, New Poems, xiv–xv and STS vol. 2, 206–10.

Two different hands are identiﬁable in the inscription of the poems
between ff. 4r and 29r.

11 Curtis Perry, ‘Royal Authorship and Problems of Manuscript Attribution in

the Poems of King James VI & I’, Notes and Queries, 46.2 (1999), 243–6. I am
most grateful to Professor Perry for letting me consult his article in advance
of publication.

12 There are a number of verbal similarities between James’s attributed poetry

and that by Alexander Montgomerie and John Stewart; James’s adoption of
such tropes becomes a public acknowledgement of reciprocity and poetic debt.

192 Notes

13 The ﬁrst Amatoria sonnet occasioned a ‘reply’ from Henry Constable (STS

vol. 2, 225); see Joan Grundy ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1960), ‘Introduction’, 28–31, and Constable’s
other two sonnets to James, one of which proclaims James’s poetic separa-
tion from ‘others hooded with blind loue’ (implying that profane love is an
unﬁt sovereign subject; 140–1). Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the
English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),14, also
cites a likely imitation of the ﬁrst Amatoria sonnet by Nicholas Breton in
Stephen Powle’s commonplace book: ‘A passionate Sonnet made by the
Kinge of Scots uppon difﬁculties ariseing to crosse his proceedinge in love &
marriage with his most worthie to be esteemed Queene’.

14 Akrigg, Letters, 92–3 (NLS MS 33.1.1).
15 Ibid., 92. For James’s arrangement of other noble marriages, see Mathew,

James I (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 55.

16 Ibid., 92. Akrigg asserts that the poem ‘apparently has been lost’ (93).
17 In another letter published by Akrigg (93–4), James urges that the

Countess consent to his request on the grounds that Lindsay is now of
appropriately marriageable degree: ‘ye may be matched with that rank
which ye presently possess […]’ (93). Lindsay and the Countess appear to
have married in May 1590 (94). Lindsay was described as the ‘King’s only
minion…his nightly bed-fellow’ in 1588 (Akrigg, 93, citing CSP Scottish
1586–88, 558).

18 This survives both in BL Add. MS 24195 and Bodley 165: see STS vol. 2,

134–47.

19 Westcott, 78–9, later endorsed by STS vol. 1, 228.
20 Add. MS 24195, ff. 14r–16r; STS vol. 2, 81–2 (50–6).
21 The later metaphorical expansion into the image of the storm-tossed ship is

also an emblematic image (in Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (Lyon, 1545), for
example, signifying ‘Spes proxima’), as well as a popular petrarchistic
conceit for erotic suffering. The Jamesian conceit of the court as bereft of its
beautiful light is interestingly paralleled by Ronsard’s valedictory poetry to
Mary herself: Fleming, 68, notes the similarity to the conceit of the lost
‘perle précieuse’ in the ‘Elégie sur le départ de la Royne d’Escosse’ but there
is also another resemblance in the ‘Elégie a H. L’Huillier, Seigneur de
Maisonﬂeur’ (1564): ‘Nous perdons de la court le beau Soleil qui luit’ (3), in
Paul Laumonier ed., Oeuvres complètes, 20 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1914–75),
vol. 12, 189.

22 See Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire in the Amatoria of James VI’,

for detailed analysis of this text, and speculation upon the reasons for its
inclusion in an ostensibly erotic ‘anthology’.

23 Goldberg, 25.
24 There was a further ceremony by Lutheran rites on 21 January 1590 at

Kronborg. Only on 21 April 1590 did the newly anointed Queen Anna
and James begin a successful return voyage to Scotland; the storms were
attributed to the demonic work of witches. Anna has tradictionally been
referred to as Anne; however, more recently there is a tendency to refer
to her by her baptismal name and I have adopted this throughout this
text.

25 See David Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding. The Marriage of James VI

and Anne of Denmark (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1997). See

Notes 193

also the ofﬁcial documents transcribed in J.T.G. Craig, Papers relative to the
Marriage of King James the sixth of Scotland with the Princess Anna of Denmark
(Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1828).

26 STS vol. 2, 68–9. Add. MS 24195, ff. 4r–5v; to avoid confusion, I number the

twelve chronologically and not according to their inconsistent numbering
in the manuscript; hence each quotation will be located by sonnet number
and then line reference.

27 Wilson, 89, and Bingham, 116ff.
28 For an account of the coronation and entry of Anna into Edinburgh see

Craig, 37–42; Stevenson, 57–63, 100–120; Michael Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony
and Ritual during the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Lynch and Goodare
eds, 71–92. The marriage constituted a poetic commission in itself (see NLS
Adv. 19.3.29 by Jacob Jacobsen Wolf) but there are no surviving epithala-
mia by the Scottish Jacobean coterie.

29 Sir James Melville, Memoirs of his Own Life (Edinburgh, 1827), 373.
30 Akrigg, 95.
31 6: 7–12; f. 6v, STS vol. 2, 70. The conceit suggests sexual possession

(preﬁguring the imminent sexual union within marriage?) but is especially
redolent of Jupiter’s sexual possession of Ganymede, cupbearer to Zeus,
who was carried off by an eagle, possibly Zeus in disguise. For the common
Renaissance homoerotic interpretation of this, see James Sazlow, Ganymede
in the Renaissance: homosexuality in art and society (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986); for another Jamesian variation on the conceit, see
the Phoenix, 56–60.

32 ‘What mortall man may liue but hart’ (5), Add. 24195, ff. 27v–29r, Bodley

ff. 52v–53v; STS vol. 2 94–8. See also the poem entitled ‘The beginning of
his Mties jurnei to Denmarke; neuer ended’, Bodley 15, ff. 57r–v, BL Add
24195, ff. 56r–7r, STS vol. 2, 144–9, found under the aegis of ‘All the kings
short poesis’ but suggestive of collaborative or coterie authorship.

33 ‘What mortall man’ (29–32).
34 ‘James imposes his power on her [Anna]’: Goldberg, 25.
35 For James’s other references to the idea of inspired furor (expounded in the

French rhetorical treatises of Sebillet and du Mans which inﬂuenced James’s
own, and poetically in, for example, Ronsard’s Hymne de l’Automne, XII,
46ff) see ‘A Sonnet on du Bartas’ (Add. 24195, f. 34r, the second Du
Bartasian sonnet, STS vol. 1, 102), and the series of twelve mythological
sonnets printed in the Essayes. Buchanan may also have been an inﬂuence:
in particular, his Ptolemaic-based, cosmographical poetry, the Sphaera, to
which James’s own cosmological sonnets (‘Ad hoc creaturae destinatae
sunt, vt in eis glorificetur Creator’, printed at the end of the Lepanto, and
two ‘on Ticho Brahe’, Add. 24195, ff. 32r-v, STS vol. 2, 99–101), may be
indebted. On the Sphaera, see Yasmin Haskell, ‘Renaissance Latin Didactic
Poetry on the Stars: Wonder, Myth, and Science’, Renaissance Studies, 12.4
(1998), 495–522.

36 Goldberg, 21.
37 Goldberg, 25; Goldberg considers this analogous to the same process of

‘transformation’ in James’s attitude to Mary that he deﬁnes as ﬁrst opposi-
tional, then as a silencing or suppression of the queen’s ‘menacing force’
(25).

194 Notes

38 ‘And will any still worship Juno’s godhead or humbly lay sacriﬁce upon her

altars?’ Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, Loeb, 2 vols. trans. H. Rushton
Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), vol. 1, 245.

39 ‘Thy task, O queen, is to search out thy desire; my duty is to do thy

bidding’, ibid., 247.

40 For example, ‘Vpon occasion of some great disorders in Scotland’ (11–12),

Add. MS 24195, f. 45r, STS vol. 2, 119: ‘In vaine descended I of Royal
race/Which by succession made a king of me’. In The Trew Law of Free
Monarchies, James also identiﬁes himself with Fergus, the Irish chieftain
who subdued Scotland. For the political and constitutional uses of
Scotland’s mythical sovereign past, see Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut:
Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in
Mason ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 73–4.

41 See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition

and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1972, ﬁrst pub. 1953), on the mythological genealogy of
Renaissance princes celebrated in ‘art and poetry [which] joined forces to
attest the divinity of the sovereign […]’ (32).

42 For discussion of the 1569 portrait of Elizabeth depicting the queen winning

the prize, see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of
Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 150–1.

43 Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power. Elizabethan Literature and the

Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 67, citing Wind’s Pagan
Mysteries in the Renaissance.

44 Identiﬁed by Westcott, 73, ‘Voyant ces monts de veue ainsi lointaine’, but

while structurally and semantically close to the original, James’s concen-
trates on alliterative ﬂourish (‘et de grands vents leur cime est toute plaine’,
line 8, becomes ‘From them great windes doe hurle with hiddeous beir’; ‘ma
foi est certaine’, line 4, becomes ‘my faithe a steadfast stone’).

45 The Boke named The Gouernour ed. H.H.S. Croft, 2 vols (London, 1883),

vol. 1, 4. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38ff, offers a gendered
interpretation of humoural theory as subversive of ‘a speciﬁcally masculine
vision of social order and individual rationality’ (38).

46 The conceit of death as metamorphosis is found also in James’s second

sonnet on Du Bartas: ‘His soule in starre, his furie in ﬁres most strange/His
pen in Phoenix, corps in ﬂoure shall change’ (13–14, Add. 24195, f. 34r, STS
vol. 2, 102).

47 Add. 24195, ff. 10v–13r; MS Bodley 165, ff. 46r–6v; STS vol. 2, 74–9. In Add.

24195, it was originally titled ‘on her M:tie’s desyr’.

48 Text based on the orthographically Scots version in Bodley (f. 46r; STS

vol. 1 77); (41–5).

49 Clare McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest:

Anne of Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’,
in L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the
Wild (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 177–98 (181).

50 This kind of excusatio is used, for example, by Jehan Le Fevre: ‘For if some

women are evil and perverse and abnormal, it does not necessarily follow
that all of them are so cruel and wicked; nor should all of them be lumped

Notes 195

together in this general reproach…’: Aleuin Blamires et al. eds, Women
Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 193.

51 See Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic

Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

52 Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early

Modern England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake eds, Culture and Politics in
Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 117–138.

53 ‘The Auvthors Preface to the Reader’, The Lepanto, printed in Poeticall

Exercises, sig. Hr, STS vol. 1, 200.

54 ‘A dreame’ (10–13). On other similarities between Jamesian erotic and non-

erotic poetry, see, for example, the echo of the phrase, ‘Dame Rheas fruictfull
face’ from ‘A dreame’ in ‘Sonnet to Chancellor Maitlane [Maitland]’ (3), Add.
24195, f. 37r, STS vol. 1, 107); ‘what am I who on Pegasian backe/Does ﬂee
amongs the Nymphs immortall faire’ compared to the ﬁrst Anna sonnet.

55 On humoral imagery in James’s translation of Du Bartas’s La Premier

Sepmaine, entitled the Furies, see R.D.S. Jack, ‘Imitation in the Scottish
Sonnet’, Comparative Literature, 20 (1968), 313–28, and Ian Ross, ‘Verse
Translation at the Court of King James VI of Scotland’, Texas Studies in
Language and Literature, 4 (1962), 252–67.

56 Apollo’s oracular role is the conceit of Montgomerie’s Delphic poem,

‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’, which James included in the Reulis and
Cautelis as the exemplar of love poetry.

57 The ‘dreame’, of course, draws on the fashionable mode of lapidary symbol-

ism: see, for example, Remy Bealleau, Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres
précieux.

58 Another less frequent incarnation of James’s mythological roles as well as a

common emblematic ﬁgure: see Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schoene,
Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1967), 1610, for a variety of Orpheus emblems to
which James might be alluding. In ‘The Translators Invocation’, in Poeticall
Exercises, sig. 8r, there is an allusion to Orpheus: ‘(Alluring ORPHEVS) with his
songs/he sweetlie doth inchaunt/The MVSES nyne to laue their leeds/That
they before did haunt/And take them to his vulgare toung’ (21–5).

59 Essayes, sig. Gijr-Iijv; there is a manuscript copy in Bodley 165, ff. 36r–42r.
60 Allan F. Westcott (ed.), New Poems by James I of England (New York: AMS

Press, 1966), 71.

61 Melville, Memoirs, 275.
62 Bingham, 53. See Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, 45–6, 235–7, for another

assessment of the Esmé relationship.

63 CSP (Border), vol. 1, cited in David Moysie ed., Memoirs of the Affairs of

Scotland 1577–1603 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1830), 55.

64 Melville, Memoirs, 275.
65 See further William Forbes-Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary

Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh: 1885): Esmé was favoured by John Leslie,
the Bishop of Ross (chief pro-Marian reprentative), as a positive force for
Catholic restoration in Scotland.

66 David Bergeron, James I and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press, 1999), 33, 37.

196 Notes

67 Though the poem also explicitly indicts the twin allegorical forces of Nature

and Fortune.

68 See Bergeron, 36–8, on the evolution of their love and revealing contempo-

rary comments on Esmé’s apparent corruption of the king. Michael B.
Young’s recent James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) analyses the political inﬂuence of what he
argues to be the king’s incontrovertible homosexuality.

69 Ford, 106; on James’s triumphal entry into London in 1603, the phoenix

iconography was deployed (‘Nova Felix Arabia Arch’); the newly created
phoenix represented the new monarch succeeding Elizabeth, rising from
her ashes; see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the
Stuart Court 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 10.

70 In Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1545), for example, of which James possessed

a copy (‘Textbooks of King James’, in T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s
Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1944–50), vol. 1, 535). NLS MS 2063, f. 103r, belonging to William Fowler,
contains written and illustrated instructions for the phoenix emblem.

71 Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (Carlton: Ruth Bean

Publishers, 1986), 63, 106; Mary adopted it as an emblem in her tapestry,
perhaps ‘in memory of her beloved mother’ (63).

72 For Buchanan, see Ford, 10, based on Claudian. Du Bartas eulogised James

as ‘ô phoenix escossois’ in the prefatory poem to his translation of the
king’s Lepanto (see McClure, 97). Montgomerie incarnates James himself as
the phoenix in a sonnet which exalts James as ‘Quintessenst of Kings’
(David Parkinson ed., The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, 2 vols
[Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000], 67: 18 (13)).

73 Guss, 161–2.
74 Bergeron, 61.
75 ‘Fame puts her away and hides her in the fragrant rich bosom of the

Arabian mountains, but she ﬂies haughty through our own skies’ (12–14):
translation from Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. The Rime Sparse
and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976) 330–1.

76 Bergeron, 58.
77 He was buried by James in King Henry’s chapel at Westminster in 1624

where Anna was also interred, and where he himself would be only one
year later. See Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion and Poetry in the Circle
of James VI: John Burel and his Surviving Works’, in Mapstone ed., 199–248
(209ff), for a sensitive account of Ludovic’s political and cultural inﬂuence.

78 Bergeron, 52.
79 Even James’s printed poetry was frequently ushered forth with an apologia; as,

for example, ‘The Authour to the Reader’ appended to the Poeticall Exercises
(1591), regarding poems composed in ‘my verie young and tender yeares’.

80 Bergeron,

53.

Chapter 4

1 Il Libro del Cortegiano trans. The Book of the Courtier by Thomas Hoby, ed.

Virginia Cox (London: Everyman, 1994), 120.

Notes 197

2 NLS MS Adv. 19.2.6 (ff. 7r–11r prefatory material; ff. 11v–61v the Roland

Furiovs; ff. 62r–103r the Rapsodies; ff. 109r–158v the Schersing; ff. 159r-v the
‘fairweill’). See John Purves, ‘The Abbregement of Roland Furious, by John
Stewart of Baldynneis, and the early knowledge of Ariosto in England’, Italian
Studies, 3 (1939), 65–82, for a succinct description of the manuscript (75). All
quotations from Stewart’s poetry are here based on the orthography and punc-
tuation of the sole manuscript, NLS Adv. 19.2.6; but for convenience reference
is also made to the Scottish Text Society edition, Thomas Crockett ed., The
Poems of John Stewart of Baldynneis (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1913)
(volume 1 of an incompleted two-volume edition), which is abbreviated in
citation to STS (this edition incorrectly numbers the foliation).

3 Criticism on Stewart favours the Orlando Furioso at the expense of the lyrics.

See Matthew P. McDiarmid, ‘Notes on the Poems of John Stewart of
Baldynneis’, Review of English Studies, 24 (1948), 12–18, and ‘John Stewart of
Baldynneis’, SHR, 29 (1950), 52–63. R.D.S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James
VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press, 1988), vol. 1 ed. R.D.S. Jack, 125–39, and The
Italian Inﬂuence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1979); Sandra M. Bell, ‘Poetry and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’,
unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s University, Ontario, 1995), considers Stewart’s
poetry as wholly acquiescent conﬁrmation of James’s supremacy and his
Protestant imperialism (134–48). Janet Smith, Les Sonnets elisabéthains (Paris,
1929) lists probable European Petrarchist sources for seven Rapsodies sonnets
(326). McDiarmid, ‘Notes’, discusses the inﬂuence of Phillipe Desportes’
Premières Oeuvres on four sonnets (13, 15). See most recently Donna Rodger,
‘John Stewart of Baldynneis: ane maist perfyt prentes’, in Neil McMillan and
Kirsten Stirling eds, Odd Alliances (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1999), 2–11, and
Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Poetic Objects of Desire: rhetorical culture and seduc-
tive arts in the lyrics of John Stewart of Baldynneis’, Scottish Literary Journal
26.1 (1999), 7–28; and Donna Heddle [Rodger], ‘An edition of John Stewart’s
Orlando Furioso’, unpub. PhD diss. (University of Edinburgh, 2001).

4 ‘To his Maiestie vith presentatio[n]/Of this volume./Sonnet’, (1–3), f. 103r,

STS 192; H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of
Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 90–1.

5 For the fullest biographical account, see McDiarmid, ‘John Stewart’.
6 Elizabeth Stewart’s marriage to James Gray, brother of the ﬁfth Lord Gray, was

dissolved at her instigation on grounds of adultery on 10 June 1581. John
Stewart, acting as one of the executors of the paternal estate, took possession
of Red Castle in Perthshire in opposition to the property claims of his stepfa-
ther which led to a series of direct conﬂicts between Stewart, defending Red
Castle and his mother’s right to it with the aid of Andrew Gray of Dunninald,
and James Gray. The latter charged Stewart before the Privy Council at Stirling
with unlawful seizure of Red Castle. Stewart failed to appear at trial. On 1 April
1579, he was ordered to surrender the castle to Gray. In May, Stewart sought
legal redress and Robert Erskine of Dun was solicited to ensure that the castle
would be defended and Stewart brought safely before the Council. Possibly in
order to secure the protective alliance with Andrew Gray of Dunninald, he
entered a marriage contract at Red Castle on 19 November 1579 (registered on
25 July 1580) with Catherine Gray, his daughter.

198 Notes

7 The exceptions occur on f. 72r, STS 124, ‘To His familiar freind In Cowrt’

(7) where ‘welth’ is repeated and crossed out; and on f. 97v, STS 181, ‘The
answuir of the foirsaid hostes. Sonnet’ (9) where ‘for’ is inserted above the
line in darker ink. On dating, see McDiarmid, ‘Notes’, 12.

8 Purves, 75, notes on f. 1v the book-plate of John, Earl of Roxburghe, 1703;

see the Scots Peerage, vol. 7, 350.

9 ‘Ane Prayer in Adversitie’, ff. 63v–4v, STS 104–6; ‘Ane Prayer and

Thankisgiwing’, ff. 65r–6r, STS 107–9. The suppliant language between sov-
ereign and subject is transposed to the religious realm: ‘His guidnes yit sall
ons restoir/His seruant frie of euerie smart’ (f. 66r, 81–4).

10 f. 67r, STS 109 (63–4).
11 ff. 67v–8r, STS. 122–3.
12 ff. 70v–2r, f. 72r, STS 124.
13 ff. 72r-v; STS 125–6.
14 f. 94v, STS 175; f.90r, STS 164.
15 See f. 73v, STS 127, ‘To his Maiestie the ﬁrst of Ianvar. 1582’; f. 74r, STS 128,

‘To His Maiestie the ﬁrst of Ianvar vith Presentation of ane lawrell trie
formit of Gould. 1583’; f. 75r, STS 130, ‘To his Maiestie the day of his coro-
nation Vith Laurell’. On the typical social and occasional circumstances of
English court poetry (such as the New Year’s gift), see Arthur Marotti,
Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 2–3.

16 For example, ‘To ane Honorabill and Distressit Ladie’, ‘To ane Honarabill

Ladie’, ‘In the end of ane letter to ane Honorabill Ladie’, ‘Ane Answer to the
letter of ane honorabill Ladie’ (see ff. 66v–7v, STS 110–12; ff. 70r-v, STS
120–1; f. 71v, STS 122–3; ff. 79r-v, STS 141–2).

17 f. 76v, STS 134–5.
18 See Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, The Poetics of Imitation. Anacreon and the

Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
210. See also John O’Brien, Anacreon Redivius. A Study of Anacreontic
Translation in Mid-Sixteenth Century France (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995). Stewart’s poem is probably modelled on the frag-
ment: ‘The Muses tied Love with garlands and handed him over to
Beauty. And now Cythereia brings ransom and seeks to have him
released. But if he is released, he will not leave but will stay: he has
learned to be her slave’. Greek Lyric trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb
Classical Library, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1988), II, 189–91; see
Henry Stephanus, Anacreontis et aliorum lyricorum aliquot poëtarum Odae
(Paris, 1556), 117.

19 For ampliﬁcation of ‘the material’ as concept and artefact in Renaissance

texts, see Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass eds.,
Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).

20 The little putto enclosed in crystal which she possesses evokes an emblem-

atic image; Stewart’s gloss (28–32) on the crystal Cupid recalls an emblem
exposition, characteristic of Scottish Jacobean court poetry.

21 Jack, Choice, 13ff, and History, 130.
22 See further Dunnigan, ‘Poetic Objects’.
23 Hoby ed., Cox, 276 (my italics).

Notes 199

24 ‘In Com[m]endation of two constant lvifers’, f. 80r, STS 143. This is clearly

an allusion to James, characteristically imaged by the sun-god and the harp
of David; the mythological and biblical coalesce.

25 ‘To his Maiestie the ﬁrst of Ianvar: 1582’, f. 73v, STS 127 (1–3). Exempliﬁed,

for example, by the rhetoric of ‘To his Maiestie the ﬁrst of ianvar’, f. 74r,
STS 128; ‘At command of his Maiestie in prais of the art of poesie’, f. 74r,
STS 129; ‘To his Maiestie with presentation of this volume’, f. 103r, STS 192.

26 ‘To the former effect. Ane vther sonnet’, f. 88r, STS 160 (5–9).
27 ‘The Prolog’, f. 111r, STS 196 (9–11).
28 Ane Schersing, ‘The Mateir’, f. 114r, STS 200 (11–12).
29 ‘To the former effect. Ane vther sonnet’, f. 88r, STS 160 (5–9). The sonnet,

‘In prais of his Maiesties Work’, f. 87v, STS 159, seems to allude to James’s
translation of Du Bartas: ‘Sum holie Angill…’ (7–9), and in the third sonnet
in this apparent series, f. 88v, STS 161, to James’s ‘Dewyise celest’ (4). This
has bearings for his own poetry: ‘Muse than assist me vith sum mater
meit/Meit mychtie mater As his Muse dois wse…’ (7–8).

30 ‘The Prolog’, Ane Schersing, f. 111v, STS 197 (31–6).
31 ‘The Prolog’ (39).
32 This is, of course, declared by the title; it probably alludes to Petrarch’s

‘primo giovenile errore’ in the Rime.

33 ‘To his Maiestie/Sonnet’, f. 63r, STS 103 (7–10) (though here there is also

more subtly the promise of mutual reward: James will prove himself virtu-
ous in attending to Stewart’s writing).

34 ‘To his Maiestie/Sonnet’ (11–12).
35 ‘To his Maiestie the ﬁrst of Ianvar. 1582’, f. 74v, STS 127 (21).
36 ‘Ane giltles hart possessit bot vith luif/Is suir as Rock that storms may not

remuif’: ‘[o]f ane Thochtles and Frie Hart from Vorldie Cair’, f. 101v, STS
187 (13–14).

37 Stewart’s theoretical advocacy of verbal purity is intensiﬁed in his

Protestant visionary allegory, Ane Schersing.

38 ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’,

ELH, 50 (1983), 415–59 (440).

39 f. 74r, STS 129 (5).
40 f. 87v, STS 159 (7).
41 ‘Ane New sort of rymand rym’, ff. 82v–3v, STS 149–51 (73).
42 Ane New sort’, l. 65.
43 f. 96v, STS 179.
44 The phoenix allusion explicitly occurs in the series of sonnets ‘In Prais of

his majesties work’, unambiguously signing its referent, James: ‘Quhat foull
may matche the Phenix in the skyis?’: f. 90r, STS 162 (4)

45 ‘To His familiar friend In Court’, f. 72r, STS 124 (5–6).
46 f. 100r, STS 186; see ‘To Fame. Sonnet’, f. 102r, STS 191 also.
47 ‘Ane New sort of rymand rym’ (15); ‘To his Maiestie. Sonnet’, f. 83r, STS 148

(5–6).

48 f. 91v, STS 168 (5–6, 14).
49 Hoby ed., Cox, 279.
50 f. 101r, STS 188.
51 ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’: Francis Bacon, Essays, intro. Michael

J. Hawkins (London: Everyman 1972), 17–18.

200 Notes

52 Hyginus, Fabularum Liber, Basel 1535 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc.,

1976), 186: ‘Endymione uero pastorem amasse dicitur duplo scilicet
modo, seu quod primus hominu Endymion cursum lunae inuenerit,
unde & triginta annos dormisse dicitur […]’; see also Natalis Comes,
Mythologiae (Venice, 1567), Book III, and Boccaccio, Genealogiae (Venice,
1494), Book V.

53 See Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquised Voices. Feminist Theory and English

Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992).

54 ‘Of Ane Salutation Of Ane Host to His Hostes’ and ‘The Ansuir of The

Foirsaid Hostes’, ff. 97r-v; STS 180–1.

55 See Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century

and their Inﬂuence on the Literatures of Europe (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1920), 168–213.

56 Cixous, La Jeune Née (1976), in The Newly Born Woman with Catherine

Clément, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), 85.

57 Sarah Cornell, ‘Hélène Cixous and les Etudes Féminines’, in The Body and the

Text. Hélène Cixous Reading and Teaching (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1990), 36.

58 Joannes L. Vives, De Institutione foeminae Christianae (1524) trans. Richard

Hyrde, A very frutefull and pleasant boke, called the instruccion of a Christen
woman (London, 1545), Book I, sig. Mr.

59 Peerage of Scotland, vol. 2, claims 1598; vol. 8, 1578. The latter is perhaps the

most likely date given that her parents married in 1556, and Stewart’s ‘buik’
as a whole suggests a late 1570s–1580s dating.

60 See further Dunnigan, 59–78.
61 f. 69v, STS 118; f. 70r, STS 119.
62 f. 115r, STS 202.
63 f. 98r, STS 182 ‘The deedlie dolor which I do induir/So dois combuir my

bodie all in baill’ (2); f. 98r, STS 183 (1–2): ‘Sen that our saull of deuyn
mater maid/is losit captiwe in our corps of cair/Quhilk formd of erth vnto
the erth dois leid […].

64 f. 96v, STS 179 (9–12).
65 f. 91v, STS 168.
66 ‘Of Amitie’, f. 95v; STS 177. See also ‘Of Fidelitie’, f. 94v; STS 175. ‘To his

Darrest Freind’, f. 81v; STS 145; ‘To his Rycht inteirlie belowit Freind’,
f. 67v; STS 113.

67 See Ethics, Books VIII and IX; De Amicitia, especially Books VI and VII.

Stewart’s ‘amitie’ sonnet deploys the characteristic exemplariness of the
friendship discourse but his example of Nisus does not seem to appear in
any of the standard exempla. For the homoerotic implications of male
amicitia, see Forrest Tyler Stevens, ‘Erasmus’s “Tigress”: the language of
Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter’, in Jonathan Goldberg
ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994),
124–40, and in the Scottish context as an exemplar of female same-sex
eroticism, Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Feminising the early modern erotic:
female-voiced love lyrics and Mary, Queen of Scots’ in Later Sixteenth-
Century Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton: Tuckwell Press,
2002).

Notes 201

68 Book II, xxix; xxx.
69 Italian Inﬂuence, 72.
70 f. 111r, STS 195 (12); ‘In prais of his Maiesteis Vork’, f. 87v, STS 159 (1);

f. 7r, STS 3 (1–2).

Chapter 5

1 For citation of poems, I have adopted David Parkinson’s practice in his

valuable new edition: The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, STS, 2 vols
(Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000). Parkinson reproduces titles when
assigned to poems in the manuscript witness (see note 3 below), unlike the
original STS edition by James Cranstoun, The Poems of Alexander
Montgomerie (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1887) which included a
number of arbitrarily assigned titles. Where a title is inscribed in the manu-
script source, it is always given; if not, the ﬁrst line is given; where there are
untitled poems in a sequence, this is numerically indicated (e.g. II, III, IV).
Hence, the location of a poem is indicated ﬁrst by title, folio number, in
Parkinson’s edition, and number within sequence where appropriate.
Orthography and punctuation are based on the original manuscript (with
the exception of modernised ‘yogh’ and the expansion of ‘and’). I have fol-
lowed Parkinson’s additional punctuation (line endings, mid-line comma,
parenthesis).

2 For criticism of Montgomerie’s love poetry, see R.D.S. Jack, ‘The Theme of

Fortune in the Verse of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 10 (1983), 25–44;
‘The Lyrics of Alexander Montgomerie’, RES, 20 (1969), 168–181; and espe-
cially Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985).
One of the earliest, inﬂuential readings was Helena Shire’s Song, Dance and
Poetry of the Court of James VI of Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), 82–116, 139–80. For the most recent readings of
Montgomerie’s work, see the collection of essays in the special issue of SLJ,
26.2 (1999), and R.J. Lyall, ‘James VI and the Sixteenth-century Cultural
Crisis’, in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch eds, The Reign of James VI
(West Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 55–70.

3 Thomas Dempster, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorumlib. XIX (1627),

496. A considerable lyric corpus survives; well over a third of the 124
lyrics (including sonnets) attributed to Montgomerie in the main manu-
script source, EUL Drummond De. 3. 70 (known as the ‘Ker manuscript’,
after its owner and possible scribe, Margaret Ker; see Parkinson, vol. 2,
2–6), are amatory in subject. None were printed though several are
extracted in James’s Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie
(Edinburgh: Thomas Vautrollier, 1584); see Parkinson, vol. 1, xv–xvi for
full list of prints. Dating of the manuscript itself, as well as the internal
dating of the poems, is difﬁcult to determine conclusively, though
Montgomerie’s most proliﬁc period was probably the late 1570s and
especially the early to mid 1580s; Parkinson suggests an early date
between 1596–1600 (3). There are certain coherent thematic and generic
groupings within the lyric corpus, but overall neither authorial nor
scribal intention regarding their arrangement can probably be warranted.

202 Notes

Evident care has been taken in the transcription and the aesthetic pre-
sentation of the manuscript. Montgomerie’s lyrics are frequently tran-
scribed in seventeenth-century Scottish songbooks and commonplace
books: for example, NLS Adv.5.2.14, f. 16v and Adv.81.9.12, f. 12r. For
musicological comment see Shire; D. James Ross, Musick Fyne. Robert
Carver and the Art of Music in Sixteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: The
Mercat Press, 1993), 134–7; for transcription of musical texts of
Montgomerie’s songs, see Shire and Kenneth Elliott eds, Music of Scotland
1500–1700, Musica Brittanica, vol. XV (London: Stainer and Bell, 1975).

4 For the most recent general account of Montgomerie’s life, see Parkinson,

11–15. Extensive biographical information can be found in one of the earli-
est authoritative editions: George Stevenson ed, Poems of Alexander
Montgomerie and other pieces from Laing MS No. 447, STS, Supplementary
Volume, (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1910), vii–lxv, and in the
genealogical and documentation appendices, 249–335.

5 See Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Female Gifts: Rhetoric, Beauty and the Beloved in

the Lyrics of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 59-78, for an analy-
sis of female beauty as a verbal and ideological trope.

6 For discussion of ‘The Navigatioun’ and ‘A Cartell of the Thre Ventrous

Knights’, see Jack, 17–24; Shire, 83–4; R.J. Lyall, ‘Montgomerie and the
Moment of Mannerism’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 45–8.

7 Montgomerie’s afﬁliations with prominent members of the Scottish

Catholic nobility, such as the Earl of Huntly, are well attested by Stevenson
(253, 269, 273) who also cites the Catholic sympathies of the Eglinton
branch of the Montgomeries (269); Ludovic, second Duke of Lennox and
son of Esmé Stewart, ‘acknowledg[ed] Montgomerie’s services’ (x; 270; 280);
Jack perceives a possible allusion to Esmé as the king’s ‘umquhyle Maister’
in one of Montgomerie’s ‘exile’ sonnets (6).

8 Jack, 5; Shire, 82–3.
9 Stevenson, 272, citing Register of the Privy Seal, 1586.

10 Lyall, ‘Netherlands’: ‘ […] whose story was it? Montgomerie’s, deceiving the

King? Or one in which the King himself was a participant?’ (62).

11 Stevenson, 284; Jack, 13.
12 Stevenson, 270–83; for transcription of the document of 1583, see

Stevenson, 301–2 and 306–8 for its ratiﬁcation.

13 John Durkan, ‘The Date of Alexander Montgomerie’s death’, Innes Review,

34 (1983), 91–2; ironically, pressure from James and the court ensured that
Montgomerie’s death was somehow sanctiﬁed.

14 Mark Dilworth, ‘New Light on Alexander Montgomerie’, The Bibliotheck, 4

(1965), 230–5: ‘Epigramma’ III (1–2); ‘Epicedion’ (13–14). Helena Shire,
‘Alexander Montgomerie: the oppositione of the court to conscience’, SSL, 3
(1966), 144–50, translates these Latin inscriptions as: ‘While the poet
Montgomerie, passionate in his devotion to the Roman faith, was dying –
and love of holy religion was dying [with him]…’; ‘I [Montgomerie] was a
determined and vigorous enemy of heretical teachings. I always detested
falsehood and strongly attacked the “Picards” [Protestants] with force of
arms and with a song’.

15 Lyall, ‘Netherlands’, 63: ‘“Picardi” seems to have been used in Catholic

circles as a generic term for Protestants.’

Notes 203

16 Shire, 136. For a sensitive alternative reading, see Jack, 106–34.
17 On the Constable source, see Stevenson, xv; lvii–lix; 290; Shire, 83, 136.
18 On Lauder, servant to the imprisoned queen, see Shire, 77–8, 81; Jack, 90,

endorses the resonance of the sonnet’s ﬁrst line, ‘I wald see mare [Mary] nor
ony thing I sie’ (‘James Lauder I wald se mare’, f. 71v–2r, Parkinson 78).

19 ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione. 3 Son.’, ff.69v–70r; Parkinson 75. III (1–4).
20 It is interesting that the sonnet preceding the sequence is addressed to Lady

Lilias Ruthven, third daughter of William, ﬁrst Earl of Gowrie, and the ﬁrst
wife of Ludovic, Duke of Lennox (see Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion
and Poetry in the Circle of James VI: John Burel and his surviving works’, in
L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the Wild
Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance
Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 199–248 (210)); this panegyric is domi-
nated by the symbol of the lily representing the Duchess, perhaps
signiﬁcantly for the Catholic Lennoxes, a symbol of feminine purity with
particular Marian associations.

21 Mary’s own penitential poetry draws on Magdalene iconography: see Sarah

M. Dunnigan, ‘Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots’, in Mary R. Reichardt ed., A Bio-
Bibliographical Dictionary of Catholic Women Writers (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2001), 369–74.

22 Jack, 71, traces echoes of the Catholic liturgy in the penitential poems. In

‘The Theme of Fortune in the Verse of Alexander Montgomerie’, SLJ, 10
(1983), 25–44, Jack also suggests that ‘A Ladyis Lamentatione’ might be
related to the Marian cause (37). Parkinson interestingly notes how the
Catholic afﬁliations and nature of the Ker MS (principle witness of
Montgomerie’s lyrics) may have compromised potential ownership; hence
its probable ‘donation’ from the Ker family to the library of the Tounis
College in 1627 (Parkinson, vol. 1, 4).

23 Ane Schort Treatise conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be eschewit in Scottis

Poesie in The Essayes of a Prentise (Edinburgh, 1584), sig. Miiijv.

24 See, for example, the conceit of the ‘Solsequium’ in the ﬁnal stanza of

James’s ‘A complaint of his mistressis absence from Court’ which may
allude to Montgomerie’s lyric, ‘Lyk as the dum Solsequium’, printed partly
in the Reulis; the conceit of the lizard’s affection in sonnet nine of James’s
‘Anna’ sonnets may allude to Montgomerie’s third sonnet to Robert
Hudson: see Parkinson, vol. 1, 113. The phrase, ‘foolish Phaeton’, in James’s
third sonnet on the astronomer Tycho Brahe (BL Add. MS 24195, f. 32r,
STS, vol. 2, 101–2) echoes Montgomerie’s ‘Solsequium’ lyric (Poems, 33-6).
In James’s Phoenix poem, the Echo anagram sonnet alludes to Apollo ‘From
Delphos syne […] cum with speid’ which occurs in another song-lyric of
Montgomerie’s, ‘Before the Greeks durst enterpryse’ (74).

25 R.J. Lyall, ‘Moment of Mannerism’, which contains an especially fruitful

discussion of Montgomerie’s mannerism in relation to the rhetoric of
public, ceremonial pieces, notably ‘The Navigatioun’ (45–8); see also his
‘[C]ultural crisis’.

26 op. cit., sig. Mr.
27 ‘To Robert Hudsone. 5 Son.’, ff. 67r-8v, Parkinson 72.II: 1–6. (Unless

stated otherwise, all subsequent references are to vol. 1 of Parkinson’s
edition.)

204 Notes

28 ‘The Oppositione of the Court to Conscience’, ff. 9r-v, Parkinson 8: 13–18.
29 Montgomerie’s rhetoric in these sonnets (‘To his Majestie for his Pensioun’,

Parkinson 68.I–IV) is skilfully redoubling and qualifying, grammatically
deferring the imputation of any guilt on James’s part; see Jack, 97–9, for
analysis of these texts, and more recently Gerard Carruthers, ‘Form and
Substance in the Poetry of the ‘Castalian Band’, SLJ, 26.2 (1999), 7–17 (12),
and Lyall, ‘Moment of Mannerism’, 55–6.

30 ‘To Robert Hudsone’, Parkinson 68.III: 1–4 and 68.IV: 13–14.
31 Bodley 165, f. 47r; in the more angliﬁed text of Add. MS 24195, the title

(crossed out) identiﬁes Montgomerie’s sin as that of ‘great bragging’ (f. 46r);
STS vol. 2, 120–1.

32 Bodley, f. 47r (1-8); STS 121.
33 Shire,

Song, Dance and Poetry, 87–9. In BL Add. MS 24195, a further stanza

reﬁnes the apparent persona which the king adopted: ‘I William Mow’.

34 Thomas A. Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love. Cupid in Renaissance Literature

(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 19.

35 See Song, Dance and Poetry, 90–1, 111, 123.
36 Jack, ‘The Theme of Fortune’, 32.
37 For contrasting readings of the poem, see Shire and Jack. Sandra Bell, ‘Poetry

and Politics in the Scottish Renaissance’, unpub. PhD diss. (Queen’s
University, Ontario, 1995), inﬂuenced by Shire’s reading, suggests that lines
161–2 where the blind Cupid ‘schot his mother’ (footnote 82: 170) is a cri-
tique of James’s quiescence in the Elizabethan treatment of Mary.
Dempster, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum lib. XIX (Bononiae: Typis
Nicolai Thebaldini, 1627), 496, construes the poem as a religious allegory
but of the superiority of the spiritual as opposed to profane life rather than
any speciﬁcally denominational allegory.

38 See Vincenzo Cartari, Le Imagini degli Dei (New York: Garland Publishing,

1976), 495, 516; Natalie Comes, Mythologiae, Venice 1567 (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1976), 386–9, 481; Boccaccio, Book 3 xxii, xxiv; 5, xxii; 9, iv.

39 ‘Lyk as Aglauros’ ,ff. 30r–31r, Parkinson 30: 23–5.
40 ‘The sacriﬁce of Cupid’, ff. 31v–2r, Parkinson 31.
41 In other Cupid poems, Montgomerie plays in similar terms on the alliance

of sacred and profane devotion: e.g. ‘Blind Love if ever thou made bitter
sweet’ (Parkinson 15).

42 ‘Against the God of Love’, ff. 80r-v, Parkinson 97: 1–6.
43 Jack, Montgomerie, 85.
44 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Blind Cupid’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York:

Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 109ff.

45 ‘Go, Pen and Paper’, f. 75r, Parkinson 86.III: 13–14.
46 ‘Vha vald behald him a god sa grievis’, f. 76r, Parkinson 87.IV; Ronsard,

‘Qui voudra voir comme Amour me surmonte’.

47 ‘The well of Love’, ff. 18r-19r, Parkinson 17: 9–16.
48 ‘Of the same well’, ff. 19r-v, Parkinson 18: 2–4.
49 ‘Blind Love’, ff. 16v–17r, Parkinson 15: 10–18.
50 The sonnet discussed earlier, ‘Against the God of Love’, might be inter-

preted as a metaphor of misgovernance; such an erotic speculum principem
might not have been misplaced if stemming from the early years of the rel-
atively young sovereign’s reign.

Notes 205

51 The popularity of Cupid as an emblem or device is copiously illustrated by

Alciati, for example: Emblematum Liber, VII, XXXIII, LXVI, LXXII, LXXVI.

52 Shire, 111.
53 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. A Cultural Poetics

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 41, 73; on the problematic
troping and ‘naming’ of same-sex desire, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in
Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 11, and Jonathan
Goldberg, Sodometries. Renaissance Texts. Modern Sexualities (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 17; see also Alan Stewart, Close Readers:
Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1997).

54 ‘Before the Greeks’, ff. 43v–44r, Parkinson 43.
55 Song, Dance and Poetry, 94. Shire’s footnote is cautious: ‘This concluding

stanza is cited in the King’s “Tretis” as is the stanza describing Cupido from
“The Cherrie and the Slae”… because they directly ﬁgured the King himself
– and the poets’s affection for him?’ In her unpublished paper, ‘The Play of
the Poet and the King’, AUL MS 3407/6/3/12/1, Shire pursues the relation-
ship between James and Montgomerie in more biographical and historical
detail, drawing on The Cherrie and the Slae, yet without suggesting homo-
erotic implications.

56 Lyall, ‘Formalist Historicism and Older Scots Poetry’, Etudes Ecossaises, 1

(1992), 39–48 (46–8), notes the poem’s ironic exclusion of the fact that the
oracle was fulﬁlled only after the duration of a ten-year war (46–8).

57 Shire, 94.
58 ‘Lyk as the dum Solseqium’, MS ff. 21r–22r, Parkinson 21.
59 D.C.

Coleman,

An Illustrated Love ‘“Canzionere”. The Délie of Maurice Scève

(Genève: Slatkine, 1981), 31; she also cites its use in a sonnet by Bembo,
‘L’alta cagione…’. See also Paul Ardouin, Devises et emblèmes d’amour dans la
Délie de Maurice Scève, ou, La volonté de perfection dans la création d’une oeuvre
d’art (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1987).

60 Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (Studie sul concettismo;

Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964), 109, cites its presence as an
emblem in Vaenius; Capaccio, ff. 125v–6r, declares its signiﬁcations of love,
friendship, spiritual afﬁnity, citing Camillo Camilli’s motto, “Soli et
Semper”, ‘signiﬁcando amor dedicato ad vna Donna sol […]’ while the
actual emblem illustrated bears the motto, ‘Despicis Aspicio Si’.

61 Samuel Daniel, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius, contayning a discourse of rare

inuention, both Militarie and Amorous called Imprese (London, 1585), sig. Biiiv.

62 The emblem of the sunﬂower had several different meanings: in Capaccio,

for example, the heliotrope signiﬁes friendship, secular and spiritual love,
and (suggestive in the present context), the love of inferior for superior:
Delle Impresa Trattato Di Giulio Cesare Capaccio. In tre libri diuiso (Naples,
1592), I, ff. 125r-v.

63 See James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and

Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

64 See further Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘“O venus soverane”: Erotic Politics and

Poetic Practice at the Courts of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI’, in
Susanne Hagemann ed., Terranglian Territories (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000),
361–77.

206 Notes

65 f. 67r (12).
66 ‘The cruell pane and grevous smart’, ff. 35r-v, Parkinson 35: 37–42.
67 See Lyall, ‘Cultural Crisis’, 49, for a further ‘neat covert allusion’ to the

Phoenix and therefore Lennox in the sonnet ‘In Prais of the Kings
Vranie’which also weaves together Apollo and Titan symbolism as well as a
comparison to David.

68 See the sonnet, ‘To the for me’, f. 74r, Parkinson 86.I for another Phoenix

allusion: ‘I love the freshest Phoenix fair!’ (13)

69 The Reinvention of Love. Poetry, politics and culture from Sidney to Milton

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 194.

70 ‘The Poets Complaint of his Nativitie’, ff. 11v–12r, Parkinson 18: 33–5.
71 ‘Lyk as Aglauros’ (15–21).
72 ‘To the for me’, Parkinson 86.II: 1, 8.
73 Montgomerie’s sonnet based on Constable’s, ‘Thyne ee the glasse’, MS ff.

71r-v, Parkinson 77.II, punning on ‘I’ and ‘ee’ [eye], is a joyful evocation of
surrendered material and spiritual identities.

74 Jacques

Lacan,

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed Jacques-

Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 103.

75 Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London:

Methuen, 1984), 107.

76 ‘Had I a foe that hated me to dead’, ff. 76v–7r, Parkinson 89: 5–12.
77 See

Panofsky,

Meaning in the Visual Arts.

78 ‘Ressave this harte vhois Constancie wes sik’, ff. 33r-v, Parkinson 33.
79 ‘O plesand plant’, ff. 43r-v, Parkinson 42: 12–15.
80 For a different conceit of the Holy Ghost in Montgomerie’s poetry, see ‘A

godly Prayer’, Parkinson 4: 50.

81 ‘Formalist Historicism’, 84.
82 ‘The wofull working of my woundit hairt’, ff. 50r-v, Parkinson 50: 9–11, 16.
83 Jack, 56.
84 MS f. 71v, Parkinson 77. III.
85 Il Cortegiano trans. Hoby, 354. Montgomerie’s erotic kiss may also be mod-

elled on Johannes Secundus’ Basia or Marullus’ ‘Epigrammaton’.

86 It may also allude to the neo-Platonic conceit of the ‘death’ occasioned by

the departure of the lover’s soul from the body: see Donald Guss, John
Donne Petrarchist. Italianate conceits and love theory in the Songs and Sonets
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), note 15, 204.

87 ‘The Poets Dreme’, ff. 3v–4r, Parkinson 3: 1–4.

Chapter 6

1 William Alexander’s Aurora is the exception: a sequence probably composed

while Alexander was at the Jacobean Scottish court but not printed until
1604 in London; on that basis, it has been excluded from consideration in
the present book (see ‘Conclusion: Love’s End’ for further details).

2 ‘The Vranie translated’ (25–9), in Essayes of a Prentise (Edinburgh, 1584), sig.

Dijr, W.A. Craigie ed., The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh
and London: Blackwood, 1955), vol. 1, 19.

Notes 207

3 Fowler’s love poetry, including his translation of Petrarch’s Trionﬁ, is

inscribed in several manuscripts later associated with his uncle, William
Drummond of Hawthornden, but none of it was published in his lifetime:
the relevant MSS are NLS MS 2063–5 (subsequently referred to as the
Hawthornden MSS); EUL MS De.368 (known as the Drummond manu-
script) which contains a copy of The Tarantula, ff. 1–36v; and EUL MS
De.1.10, a presentation copy of Fowler’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionﬁ.
The excellent Scottish Text Society edition, The Works of William Fowler
edited by Henry W. Meikle, James Craigie, and John Purves, 3 vols
(Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1912–39), mostly retains original
orthography with some editorial punctuation; but the poems are often mis-
leadingly numbered in the interest of presenting a poetic chronology.
Reference here is accordingly made ﬁrst to the relevant manuscript, then to
the STS edition; line references are given in brackets; if there is no title, the
ﬁrst line of the relevant poem is cited where appropriate. Unless stated, the
Drummond MS (here abbreviated as Dr. MS) is generally the preferred
source. For his short sequence on death, see Hawthornden MS 2063, ff.
38r–49r, STS vol. 1, 233–43.

4 For an account of Fowler’s cultural role in relation to Anna, see Clare

McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of
Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’, in
L.A.J.R. Houven, A.A. MacDonald, and S. Mapstone eds, A Palace in the
Wild. Essays on vernacular culture and humanism in late-medieval and
Renaissance Scotland (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 177–98 (185–6).

5 STS vol. 3, xxi.
6 See Hawthornden MSS 2060, f. 229r and 2063, ff. 105v, 127r. The other

notable female dedicatee of Fowler’s lyrics is Mary Middlemore, another
gentlewoman at Anna’s court (see ‘Meditation vpon Virgin Maryes Hatt’,
Hawthornden MS 2063, f. 72r, STS 268, and ‘Aetna’, f. 78r, STS 269).

7 ‘T

O MY

ADY

RBELLA

. Extempore’, Hawthornden MS 2063, f. 247r, STS vol. 1,

262 (3–4). In the topographical poem to Arbella on f. 58r, ‘To the true,
Ho:

ble

, most vertuous, and onlie/deseruing La: of Highest titles: The La:

Arbella/Steward: vppon my passage downe the Thames to/London: Ianuarie
the : 8 : 1603’, Fowler alludes to her as ‘next to our kinge as next by bloud
and name’ (20), perhaps a politically sensitive comment, given James’s
desire to arrange a marriage between Arbella and Ludovic Stuart, Earl of
Lennox (see Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Politics, Passion and Poetry in the Circle of
James VI: John Burel and His Surviving Works’, in Mapstone ed., 199–248
(211–12)). Other lyrics to Arbella from Fowler include Hawthornden MS
2063, f. 68r, STS 319, ‘To my onely L. Arb.’. The untitled sonnet, ‘Once
wandringe forth in Maye’, found in the collection of poems in NLS MS
2065, ff. 16r–35r (Fowler’s authorship of which is contested) on f. 25r, pro-
vides implicit evidence for Fowler’s authorship: the visionary beloved
whose ‘name begins & endeth with an A’ is probably the ubiquitous
Arbella. Recent commentators also cite Fowler’s ‘bad’ poetry among the
many dedicatory and praise poems she received (Barbara Kiefer Lewalski,
Writing Women in Jacobean England [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993], 81).

208 Notes

8 Though there is a Latin prose dedication to Arbella in Hawthornden MS

2064, ff. 6r-v, dated 1604, in which he offers unidentiﬁed work to her.

9 An Answer to the Calumnious Letter and Erroneous propositiouns of an apostat

named M. Io. Hammiltoun (John Leprevik, 1581), STS vol. 2, 25, 28. Despite
such ﬁerce allegiance to the Protestant cause, Fowler’s political gestures are
occasionally contradictory: he was associated with Esmé Stewart, Duke of
Lennox, who was exiled from Scotland before his death on account of his
Catholic afﬁliations, and brieﬂy imprisoned in England because of visits to
the French ambassador, Mauvissière (Fowler was allegedly the ﬁrst to report
Lennox’s death to the latter). Despite Fowler’s printed polemic against the
‘whorish’ Roman church, he confesses to an association with ‘the Frenche
course and the Queen of Scotts’: An Answer, STS vol. 2, 25; STS vol. 3, xvii.

10 R.D.S. Jack observes that Fowler’s ‘whole output is modelled on the Rime’

(The Italian Inﬂuence on Scottish Literature [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1972], 82). Though other vernacular Italian sources can also be traced
in his writing (see Janet C. Smith, Les Sonnets elisabéthains [Paris, 1929], and
Jack), Petrarch constitutes a central underlying model of philosophical and
theological ‘authority’ for Fowler’s amatory writing. For a critical survey of
Fowler’s work, see John Purves’s excellent survey, ‘Fowler and Scoto-Italian
Cultural Relations in the Sixteenth Century’, STS vol. 3, lxxx–cl; Jack,
‘William Fowler and Italian Literature’, MLR, 65 (1970), 481–92; Jack,
Scottish Literature’s Debt to Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1986), 9-13; Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in Cairns Craig ed., History
of Scottish Literature, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988),
vol. 1 ed. R.D.S. Jack, 125–39 (129).

11 Canzone 366 (7–8): ‘who has always replied/to whoever called on her with

faith’ (Robert M. Durling trans. and ed., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse
and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 574).

12 ‘Sueit lovlye kis[s]s and vncontrold disdaynes’, f. 35v, STS 187; found also

on f. 25r of Dr. MS, STS 186.

13 f. 36v, STS 207.
14 ‘Muse, yow fair dame, from whense doth ﬂow this vayne’, Dr. MS, f. 27r;

STS 191 (4).

15 Compare Petrarch’s allusion to Christ’s sacriﬁce in the Rime sparse, 357.
16 ‘Eternal lord, God of immortal glore’, Dr. MS f. 36r, STS 206.
17 Canzone 264 (48–9): ‘a more blessed hope by gazing at the heavens’

(Durling, 428).

18 See Giuzeppe Mazzotta, ‘The Canzionere and the Language of the Self’,

Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), 271–96 (272).

19 Jack, Italian Inﬂuence, 85.
20 Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), 210.
21 Cf. sonnet 349 (9–14): ‘O happy that day when, going forth from my earthly

prison, may leave broken and scattered this heavy, frail, and mortal garment
of mine, and may depart from such thick shadows, ﬂying so far up into the
beautiful clear sky that I may see my Lord and my lady!’ (Durling, 546).

22 Canzone 360 (31–4): ‘He [Love] has made me love God less than I ought

and be less concerned for myself; for a lady I have equally disregarded all
cares (Durling, 562).

Notes 209

23 Sonnet 365 (7–8): ‘help my strayed frail soul and ﬁll out with your grace all

that she lacks’ (Durling, 574).

Petrarch’s Secret or the Soul’s Conﬂict with Passion. Three dialogues between

himself and S. Augustine trans. William H. Draper (Westport: Hyperion Press,
1978), 124, translated into the sins of God-forgetfulness and self-forgetful-
ness. In the Rime, canzone 70, Petrarch admonishes himself for being
deﬂected from God-created beauty by the beautiful immanence of Laura
within nature.

25 ‘The day is done the Sunn doth ells declyne’ (13), Dr. MS, f. 11v, STS 156;

‘Suld I not heate these harmefull hands and blame’ (4), Dr. MS f. 9r, STS
152.

26 ‘ I hope sueit saule to see at my return’ (2, 6), f. 12v, STS 158.
27 As in ‘Bellisa faire as I am bound I byde’, Dr. MS f. 26r, STS 190: ‘my faithe

lyk to your hyde’ (9); see also ‘[G]if mortal prayers move immortal pouers’,
f. 5r, STS 147: ‘who never in my faithe did fant or fayle’ (7).

28 Compare ‘O of my barren muse the birthfull seed’, Dr. MS f. 27v, STS 191:

‘o glore of earthe and pryde of euerye place’ (13).

29 ‘Schip brokken men whome stormye seas sore toss’ (14), Dr. MS f. 24v, STS

184; ‘Tuix heavenes and her whome onlye I adore’, Dr. MS f. 33v, STS 199;
‘Pryde of my spreits and brightnes of my eyes’ (6), Dr. MS f. 2v, STS 140 and
Hawthornden f. 27r and f. 51v, STS 141 (on f. 27r, ‘holye’ is replaced by
‘heauenly’).

30 ‘Bellisa pansiue satt and in her hands’, Hawthornden MS f. 25v, STS 210

(1–6).

31 The tarantula conceit stems from Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (see Purves,

cxxi, suggesting also ‘the extravagances of Marino and other Neapolitan
poets of the seventeenth century’); the association between the poison of
desire and of the spider may also come from the etymological association
between Venus and venom.

32 ‘Newe wondar of the world, one mo than seaven’, Dr. MS f. 13r, STS 160

(4–10).

33 Rime, sonnet 326 (3–4): ‘beauty […] closed […] up in a little grave’ (Durling,

514).

34 ‘The tabill’, Hawthornden MS 2063, ff. 253r-v; STS 333–4.
35 A sequential cohesion to these nine poems is strongly implied but not nec-

essarily endorsed by the manuscript arrangement: ‘Elagie’, f. 38r, ‘My witts
and thochts’ and ‘A Dreame’, f. 38v; ff. 39r-v introduce a new manuscript
binding with the text of ‘cap i’ of the ‘Triumph of Love’; ff. 40r–41v ‘Alread
those’; ff. 42r-v blank; f. 43r psalm 129; ff. 43r–44r blank; 44v–45v ‘ffor his
valentyne’; on a new manuscript binding, f. 46r, ‘Dial’ and ‘renponit’, and
then order in STS conforms to MS until f. 48v.

36 ‘My witts and thoughts togeather ar att stryfe’, f. 38v, STS 234 (5–8).
37 ‘The air and the earth and the sea ought to weep for the lineage of man, for

without her it is like a meadow without ﬂowers […]’ (9–11; Durling, 534).

38 ‘A Dreame’, f. 38r, STS 235 (9–12).
39 Rime sonnet 342 (12–14): ‘“What good,” she says, “is knowledge to one

who despairs? Weep no longer, have you not wept enough for me? For
would that you were as much alive as I am not dead!”’ (Durling, 538).

40 ‘My witts and thoughts…’, f. 38v, STS 234 (3).

210 Notes

41 ‘Dial’, f. 46r, STS 236 (1–4).
42 f. 46r, STS 237 (13–14).
43 ‘My cheare and mirth my plesour is exyled’, f. 46r, STS 238 (3).
44 Rime sonnet 248 (8): this beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure’

(Durling, 410).

45 f. 46v, STS 239 (11–14).
46 ‘A Fantasie’, f. 49r, STS 243.
47 Cf. canzone 359 (60–6).
48 Sonnet 319 (9–11): ‘her better form, which still lives and shall always live

up in the highest heaven, makes me ever more in love with her beauties…’
(Durling, 498).

49 Sonnet 327 (14).
50 Sonnet 317 (9–14): ‘If only she had lived we would have come to where,

speaking, I could have put down in those chaste ears the ancient burden of
my sweet thoughts, and she would perhaps have answered me with some
holy word, sighing, though our faces were changed, and the hair of both’
(Durling, 496).

51 ‘Would I had so sorrowful a style that I could win my Laura back from

Death as Orpheus won his Eurydice…’ (49–50; Durling, 526).

52 ‘If they can go so high, my weary rhymes, as to reach her who is beyond

sorrow and weeping and with her beauties now makes Heaven glad, she will
surely recognise my changed style’ (61–4; Durling, 528).

53 Sonnet 346 (13).
54 Sturm-Maddox, 104.
55 ‘ma tropp’ era alta al mio peso terrestre,/et poco poi n’uscì in tutto di vista’,

sonnet 335 (9–10): ‘but she was too high for my terrestrial weight, and a
little after she went entirely out of my sight’ (Durling, 532).

56 ff. 47r-v seem to constitute a deﬁnitive sequence.
57 ‘In by way roadds I ran a restles race’, f. 13v, STS 252; though this sonnet

does not fall within this ostensible sequence, it is pertinent to include it
because of its preoccupation with sin.

58 ‘My winding scheits my steidfast love sal end’, f. 47v, STS 249. (1–14). The

‘faucos’ transcription is uncertain.

59 See William J. Kennedy, Authorising Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1994).

60 The

Rime’s theological or religious ‘meaning’ could be doctrinally affected

by the Catholic or Protestant persuasion of its reader; see Kennedy, 141ff.

61 Ane Answer, STS vol. 2, 25 (1–14).
62 Ibid., 56.

Conclusion

1 See L.E. Kastner and H.B. Charlton eds, The Poetical Works of William Alexander

Earl of Stirling, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1929).

2 Alexander Craig, Amorose Songes and Sonets (1608) in David Laing ed., Poetical

Works (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1873); William Drummond, sonnet
sequence of 1616, in L.E. Kastner, Poetical Works, STS, 2 vols (Edinburgh and
London, 1913).

Notes 211

3 Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII. Literary Culture and the Arts

of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 38.

4 The Vranie (169, 178), in Essayes of a Prentise, sig. Eijr: James Craigie, The

Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood,
1958), vol. 1, 27.

5 David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment. Ideas of

Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1993), 102.

6 Robert H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 226.

7 See Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly Authority: the politics of Stuart Family

Images’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers
eds, Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early
Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5; also Caroline
Bingham, Relations between Mary Queen of Scots and Her Son King James VI of
Scotland, Royal Stewart Papers 19 (London: Royal Stewart Society, 1982).

8 M. de Fontenay, envoy of Mary’s to James in a letter to Mary’s secretary,

15 August 1584 in Robert Ashton ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London:
Hutchison, 1969), 1. On the ‘spectral’ relationship between Mary and James,
see Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots. Romance and Nation (London:
Routledge, 1998), 71.

212 Notes

Acts of Sederunt, 30
Alberti, Leon Battista, 57
Alexander, William, 107

Aurora, 167

Allan, David, 168
Amor, 132

see also Cupid

Anger, Jane, 62
Angus, Earl of see Archibald Douglas
Anna of Denmark, 81–91, 95, 149
Anne (Lady Glammis), 80, 95
Anne of Denmark see Anna of

Denmark

Aretino, Pietro, 116
anti-Catholicism, 7, 9, 15–16, 22, 27
anti-feminism, 7, 51
anti-Petrarchanism, 21, 162
Aristotle

Nichomachean Ethics, 122

authorship

collaborative, 79, 103, 132
female poetic, 49, 63, 120

Bacon, Francis, 78
Bannatyne, George, 47, 169
Bannatyne manuscript, 7, 9, 46–73

as politicised anthology, 47–52
‘contemptis of luve and evill

wemen’, 51, 52, 55–61

Marian context of, 47–51, 61
poetic rhetoric in, 55–61
querelle des femmes poetry, 55–61
religious context of, 51–2
‘songis of love’, 52–5, 56
authors
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 51, 58, 62
‘Clerk’, 51, 57
Douglas, Gavin, 51, 70–1
Dunbar, William, 49, 51, 70
‘Fethy’, 51
Henryson, Robert, 51
Kennedy, Walter, 51, 71
‘Mersar’, 51, 68

‘Moffat’, 51, 59
Scott, Alexander, 3, 23, 49, 51, 61,

‘Stewart’, 51, 54–5
‘Weddirburne’, 51
texts
‘Aganis mariage of evill wyfes’, 60
‘All tho that list of wemen evill to

speik’, 66, 67

‘As phebus bricht in speir

meridiane’, 53

‘ffresche fragrent ﬂour of bewty

souerane’, 50

‘fﬂour of all fairheid’, 53
‘In all this warld no man may wit’,

56, 57

‘Leif luve my luve no langar thow it

lyk’, 70

‘L[ett]re of Cupeid’, 62–6, 68
‘Maist ameyn roseir’, 53
‘My hairt is thrall begone me fro’,

‘My luve wes fals and full of ﬂattry’,

‘Moffat’, 59

‘O ma[n] transformit and

vnnaturall’, ‘Weddirburne’,
70

‘The bewty of Hir amorus ene’, 54
‘The moir I luve and serf at all my

mycht’, 52

‘The well of vertew and ﬂour of

woma[n]heid’, 54

Barclay, Hugh, of Ladyland, 126
Beaton, James, of Creich, 118, 127
Beauvoir, Simone de, 60
Beilin, Elaine, 42
Bell, Sandra, 7
Bembo, Pietro, 36, 38, 39, 154
Bergeron, David, 98–9, 100, 102, 103
Betoun, Elizabeth, 107
Bhaba, Homi, 4
Bishop, Thomas, 17
Blackwood, Adam, 23

213

Index

body, the see coporeality
Boece, Hector, 83
Bornstein, Diane, 62–3, 67
Bothwell, Francis, Earl of, 149
Bothwell, James Hepburn, Earl of, 17,

21, 23, 25, 28, 32, 37, 44

relationship with Mary, Queen of

Scots, 22, 24, 26, 30–1

Brantôme, Pierre de, 15, 19
Bruno, Giordano, 38, 102
Buchanan, George, 16–17, 23, 100

Admonitioun, 17
Detectio, 17
Detectioun, 16–17, 21, 23, 24, 25,

26, 30, 33, 37, 43, 61

Psalms, 23
Silvae, 17

caritas, 70, 121, 133
‘Castalian band’ see coteries, Jacobean
Castiglione, Baldassare, 56, 110,

1231

Il Cortegiano, 56, 154

Catholicism, 98

and femininity, 7–8, 9
in poetry, 126–8
see also Counter-Reformation;

Mariology

Cecil, Sir William, 17
Charles I, 79
Châtelard, 24
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 51, 58, 620

Troilus and Criseyde, 51
see also ‘Bannatyne manuscript’

Christianity see Catholicism;

Counter-Reformation;
Manichaeism; Protestantism;
Reformation

and erotic desire see ‘passional’ love

Christine de Pisan

L’Epistre au dieu d’amours, 62–6,

67z8

Cicero, Marcus Tullius

De Amicitia, 122–3

Cixous, Hélène, 9, 116
‘Clerk’, 57
Clewett, Richard, 4
Constable, Henry, 127
corporeality, 29–33, 37–40, 87, 146

coteries

coterie culture, 77, 79–80, 103, 126,

131

Jacobean, 79–80, 82, 103

Counter-Reformation, 126, 128
court culture, 8, 108

anti-courtliness, 130
courtliness in poetry, 80–1, 105–6,

113

as performative culture, 9
articulation of desire in, 9

Craig, Alexander, 107, 167
Craig, Thomas, 49
Cupid, representations of, 109, 110,

132–8, 144

cupiditas, 22, 47, 61, 68–71

Darnley, Henry Stewart, Lord, 3, 6,

15, 24, 25, 26, 37, 48, 49, 51

d’Aubigny, Maréchal, 98
Davidson, Peter, 17
Dempster, Thomas, 126
desire

and mourning/loss, 10, 39–41,

100–1, 103, 162

as lack or absence, 38–40, 143–4
female, 15–17, 20, 21, 559–61,

89–91, 116–18

psychoanalytic theories of, 21,

143–4, 138–9

see also eroticism; love

Desportes, Philippe, 113
Dilworth, Mark, 127
Donne, John, 149
Douglas, Archibald, Earl of Angus,

Douglas, Gavin, 51

Eneados, 70–2

Douglas, Lady Jean, 79
Drummond, William, of

Hawthornden, 162, 167–8

History, 168
Poems, 162

Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 92,

100

Judit, La, 5
Seconde Sepmaine, ou Enfance du

Monde, La, 5, 91

L’Vranie ou Muse Celeste, 5, 111, 121

214 Index

Du Bellay, Joachim

Deffense et illustration de la langue

francaise, 6

Duff, Thomas, 127
Dunbar, 24, 30, 31
Dunbar, William, 49, 51, 70
Durkan, John, 2, 17, 127

Edinburgh, 48, 82
Elizabeth I, 15, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 48,

77, 85, 149

Eros, 132

see also Cupid

eroticism

and abnegation, 27–9, 36–7
and masochism, 32–3
as danger, 3–8, 10, 26
and religious redemption see

‘passional’ love

as reﬂection of the Fall see

‘passional’ love

Cupid, representations of, 109, 110,

132–8, 144

erotic allegory, 92–7, 99–103, 110,

140–1

erotic death, 87, 92–4, 145–7,

156–62

erotic dreams, 91–7
erotic imagination, 92–3
erotic pleasure, 148
erotic poetry, condemnation of,

15–16, 23–7

homoeroticism, 9, 80, 98, 113, 123,

132, 142–3

le petit mort, 146, 147
see also desire; love

Erskin, John, of Dun, 24
Erskine, Sir Thomas, 79
Erskine, William, 127
Eve, 67

Felman, Shoshana, 20
Fénelon, La Mothe, 16
‘Fethy’, 51
Ficino, Marsilio, 38, 39–41, 147, 162
Fineman, Joel, 90
Fleming, Lady Jean, 150
Fowler, William, 2, 3, 8, 149–63, 167,

168, 169

Answer to the Calumnious Letter and

Erroneous propositiouns of an
apostat named M. Io.
Hammiltoun, An, 150–2

Epistle, 163
Tarantula of Love, The, 5–6, 11, 106,

149, 150, 151–63

Triumphs (translation of Petrarch’s

Trionﬁ), 5, 150

Fradenburg, Louise, 7, 29
Fraser, Antonia, 31
French literature

Catholic poetry, 8
poetics, 6
Protestant, 5
see also du Bartas; du Bellay; de

Ronsard; Labé

Gambara, Veronica, 20
Gasgoigne, George, 4
gender see eroticism; homoeroticism;

women

Girard, René, 21
Glammis, Lady see Anne (Lady

Glammis)

Glammis, Lord see Patrick Lyon
Glasgow Cathedral, 127
Goldberg, Jonathan, 81, 83, 86
Gordon, George, Earl of Huntly, 80
Gordon, Lady Jean, 21
Gravdal, Kathryn, 43
Guillet, Pernette de, 20, 29
Guise, Marie de, 8, 100

Hamilton, John, 151
Harvey, Elizabeth, 115
Heijnsbergen, Theo van, 48, 50
Henryson, Robert, 51
Hepburn, James see Earl of Bothwell
Hoccleve, Thomas, 62–4, 67–8
Holyrood, Palace of, 38
homoeroticism, 9, 80, 98, 113, 123,

132, 142–3

Horapollo

Hieroglyphics, 100

Hudson, Robert, 130
Hudson, Thomas, 5
Huntly, Earl of see George Gordon
Hyde, Thomas A., 133

Index 215

idolatory

Mary, Queen of Scots and, 27
Protestant fear of, 163
women and, 72, 155–7

Innermeith, Lord see John Stewart,

Lord Innermeith

Jack, R.D.S., 2, 3, 123, 133
Jacobean culture, 77–167
Jacobean Renaissance culture, 2–3, 77
James III, 7
James IV, 7
James V, 107
James VI, 1, 7, 20, 25, 29, 44, 45,

77–104, 105–13, 120, 121, 123,
124, 125–48, 149, 169

erotic poetry, 76

see also ‘the Anna sonnets’;

Amatoria; Ane Metaphoricall

Invention of a Tragedie called

Phoenix

Jacobean poetry about, 100,

105–13, 120–4, 129–44

literary collaboration and, 79, 103,

132

literary theory of, 4, 8, 77–9, 82,

103–4

love poetry to Anna of Denmark,

81–91

relation with Alexander

Montgomerie, 125–48

relation with Elizabeth I, 77
relation with Esmé Stewart, Duke of

Lennox, 80, 97–104

relation with Mary, Queen of Scots,

44, 167

representation as Apollo, 8, 86, 93,

96, 101–2, 110, 129, 137,
140–51

self-representation in poetry, 9
works
‘All the kings short poesis’ see

Amatoria

Amatoria, 79, 81–97
‘Anna sonnets’, the, 81–91
Basilikon Doron, 22, 81, 98, 99
Daemonologie, 81
Essayes of a Prentise, The, 3–5, 6, 96,

97, 100, 102, 103, 107, 129

Furies, The (translation of Du Bartas’

La Seconde Sepmaine), 5, 91

Lepanto, 91, 92
Phoenix, Ane Metaphoricall Invention

of a Tragedie called, 9, 81, 91,
97–104, 142

Poeticall Exercises, 91
Schort Treatise, containing Some

Reulis and Cautelis to be
observit and eschewit in Scottis
poesie, Ane, 3, 78

Urania, 8, 111, 121
Works, 103

Javitch, 132
Jones, Ann Rosalind, 42, 43
Jordan, Constance, 56

Kennedy, Walter, 51

‘Ane aigit man’, 71

Kennedy, William J., 162
Knox, John, 23, 24

History of the Reformation, 24

Kristeva, Julia, 9

Labé, Louise, 20, 33, 39

Evvres, 16

Lacan, Jacques, 143–4
Lauder, James, 127
Laumonier, Paul, 8
Lekprevik, Robert, 3, 25, 151
Lennox, Esmé Stewart, Duke/Earl of,

17, 18, 80, 91, 97–104, 121, 142

Leone, 38, 44
Lerer, Seth, 168
Leslie, John, Bishop of Ross, 19, 22,

Defence, 18, 26

Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 22, 27
Liddisdaill, 32
Lindsay, Alexander, 79
love

amicitia/friendship, 108, 122
amour courtis see courtly love
caritas, 70, 121, 133
courtly, 28, 47, 54
erotic see eroticism
‘mortal love’, 144–8, 157–62
Neo-platonic, 147
‘passional’, 7, 125, 145, 168

216 Index

Petrarchan see Petrarchism
redemptive see ‘passional’ love
sacred and profane, 5–6, 10
‘sovereign love’, 9–10, 48, 105–6,

110–12, 120, 129

spiritual see Neo-Platonic love; Neo-

Platonism; caritas

love-god see Cupid
Low, Anthony, 143
Lyall, R.J., 126, 129, 146
Lynch, Michael, 2, 26, 48
Lyndsay, David

Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, 120

Lyon, Patrick, Lord Glammis, 80

MacDonald, Alasdair, 48, 49, 51
Machiavelli, Niccolò

Il Principe, 149

MacQueen, John, 2
Madonna, The, 23

see also Mariology, Virgin Mary

Maitland, Sir John, 150
Manichaeism, 47, 58, 61, 71
maniero, 129
mannerism, 129, 133, 146, 148
mannerismo, 129
manuscript culture, 50, 72, 103

see also coterie culture

Marian culture, 15–74
Mariology, 9, 62–9

Blessed Virgin Mary, 8, 9, 47, 54,

65–9, 151, 163

Mary as the Second Eve, 67
Our Lady, 72
Regina Maria, 51

Marshall, Rosalind, 31
martyrdom, 33, 39–43, 88, 125, 133,

144–8

l’amant martyr, 155

martyrs, 125

see also martyrdom

Mary, Queen of Scots, 1, 2, 3, 6–7, 8,

103, 127–8, 149, 163, 167

adultery of, 6, 21
and martyrdom, 33, 40–3
anti-feminist debate about, 7, 9,

23–7

authorship controversy about,

15–20

Catholicism of, 7, 40–3
erotic poetry of, see ‘The Casket-

Sonnets’

execution of, 77, 167
implicated in murder of Henry

Stewart, Lord Darnley, 6, 15,
26

marriage to Henry Stewart, Lord

Darnley, 48, 51

martyrdom of, 40
political controversies about, 6,

16–18, 24

rape of, 29–32, 38, 39
relationship with James Hepburn,

Earl of Bothwell, 22, 24, 26,
30–1

relationship with James VI, 44, 167
relationship with Elizabeth I, 22, 26
religious poetry of, 40–3
works
‘Casket-Sonnets, The’, 6, 7, 15–45

marginal gloss of, 17–18, 21, 28,

‘violation sonnet’, the, 29–32, 38,

‘Tetrasticha ou Quatrains a son ﬁls’,

169

Mazzotta, Giuzeppe, 154
McDiarmid, Matthew, 2, 107
McManus, Clare, 89
Medici, Lorenzo de, 39
Melville, James, 21, 82
‘Mersar’, 51, 68
Meun, Jean de, 64
Mirandola, Pico della, 38
‘Moffat’, 51, 59
monarchy

absolutism of, 82–6
and poetic rhetoric, 8–9
divine right of, 3, 83
erotic desire of monarch, 78–9
erotic devotion to see ‘sovereign

love’

self-representation of, 3–4, 9, 24

Montgomerie, Alexander, 2, 3, 8, 10,

104, 116, 118, 124, 125–48,
149, 168

The Cherrie and the Slae, 91, 127,

133

Index 217

Montgomerie, Alexander

con’t

lyrics and sonnets, 125–48

Moray, Earl of see James Stewart
Morton, James Douglas, Earl of, 104
mourning/loss, 10, 39–40, 99–100,

103, 144–8, 162

Murray, Sir John, 80

Neo-Platonism, 28, 37–40, 86, 132, 147
New Historicism, 2
Newlyn, Evelyn S., 49, 55

Oslo, 81
Ovid, 64

Metamorphoses, 140

Parkinson, David, 24, 25, 47, 49
Patterson, Annabel, 69
Perry, Curtis,79
Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca], 1, 153

representation of Laura, 101, 151,

157, 158, 160, 161

Rime sparse [Canzionere], 8, 11, 101,

133, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158,
160, 163

Secretum, 163
Trionﬁ, 5, 123, 151
Trionfo d’amore, 134
Trionfo della morte, 163
see also anti-Petrarchism;

Petrarchism

as rhetoric, 19, 91
as philosophy of love, 33
feminisation of, 15

Phillips, J.E., 24
Phillipy, Patricia, 43
Plaidy, Jean 31
Pliny the Elder

Natural History, 100

Plotinus, 36, 38
poetry

as ‘gift’, 9–10, 50–1, 105–7, 118,

123–4, 150

dialogic, 105
epistolary, 98, 99
epithalamia, 17, 48–9, 80
erotic poetry, condemnation of,

15–16, 22–7

erotic poetry by women see

Gambara; Guillet; Labé; Mary
Queen of Scots’
‘casket–sonnets’; Stampa

erotic poetry by men see Fowler;

James VI; Montgomerie; John
Stewart

poetic rhetoric and display, 109–10
see also mannerism
poetic rhetoric and truth, 22–3,

77–9

songs see Bannatyne manuscript,

‘songis of love’

sonnet sequences, 149
tragedy, 11

politics

and eros, 1–2, 3–7, 15, 27, 72–3,

103–4

and erotic language, 4–5
political turmoil, 3, 15

print culture, 50
Protestantism

censorship, 49
poetics, 129, 151
poetic propaganda, 23
see also anti–Catholicism;

Reformation

Puttenham, George, 113

querelle des femmes, 47, 51, 55–61, 62,

63, 69–73

Quinn, William A., 68

Ramsay, Allan, 47
Reformation, 69

poetic propaganda, 23

Regina Maria, 51, 73

see also Mariology, Virgin Mary

Roman de la Rose, Le, 63
Renaissance, Scottish, 2–3

see also Jacobean Renaissance

culture

Ronsard, Pierre de, 8, 15, 18, 23, 135,

147

Elegie à la Royne d’Ecosse, 23

Ross, Ian, 2
Ruscelli, Girolamo

Imprese Illustri, 141

Ruthven Raid, 4, 98, 102, 104, 113

218 Index

Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 86
Scève, Maurice

Délie, 140

Scott, Alexander, 3, 23, 49, 51, 61, 70
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 56
Sharpe, Kevin, 90–1
Shire, Helena, 2, 127, 131, 133, 135,

137, 140

Sidney, Sir Philip, 163
Smith, Bruce, 138
Spenser, Edmund, 163

Amoretti, 163

Speroni, Sperone, 39
spiritual love see caritas; Neo-

Platonism

Spynie, Lord see Alexander Lindsay
Stampa, Gaspara, 20, 28
‘Stewart’, 51, 54–5
Stewart, Esmé see Duke/Earl of

Lennox

Stewart, Henrietta, 80
Stewart, Henry see Lord Darnley
Stewart, James, Earl of Moray, 17, 18
Stewart, John, 2, 3, 8, 9, 97, 105–24,

142, 149, 168

Ane Schersing out of Trew Felicitie,

106, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124

Rapsodies, 105–24, 129

Stewart, John, Lord Innermeith, 107
Stewart, Mary see Mary, Queen of

Scots

Stuart, Arbella, 150

Tasso, Torquato, 52
Tertullian, 59
Tullibardine, Earl of see Sir John

Murray

Tyrone, Earl of, 127

Union of the Crowns, 3, 167

Vaughan, Robert

A Dialogue defensyve for women

agaynst malycius detractors, 62

Vickers, Brian, 53
Virgin Mary, 8, 54, 65–9, 151, 163

see also Mariology, Madonna (The)

Vives, Joannes L., 54

De Institutione foeminiae Christianae,

Waldegrave, Robert, 127
Walsingham, Francis, 149
Watson, James, 47
‘Weddirburne’, 51, 70
Weldon, Anthony, 98
Wemyss, Lady Cecilia, 118
Wemyss, Sir David, 118
Wemyss, Margaret, 107, 118–20
Westcott, Allan F., 96
Wittig, Monique, 45
women

and poetic authorship, 49, 63, 120
beauty of, 23, 52–5
chastity of, 24, 26, 52, 121–2
debate about see querelle des femmes
desire of, 15–16, 20, 21, 59–61,

69–71, 116–18

female-voiced poetry, 19–20, 106,

115–18, 122–4, 128

and misogyny see anti-feminism
and motherhood, 65–6
rape of, 24, 25, 30–3, 42, 43
represented as Lucretia, 33
represented as Magdalene, 43
represented as Medea, 25
represented as Venus, 23, 25, 121
sexuality of see women, desire of
virginity of, 52, 65–9, 118, 121
virtue of, 62–8
visual images of, 25

Wood, John, 15
Woodbridge, Linda, 56
Wormald, Jenny, 32–3, 98
Woudhuysen, H.R., 106
Wroth, Mary

‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, 42

Würzburg, Abbey of, 127

Index 219

Document Outline

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Texts and Abbreviations
Introduction: Amorous Histories – from Marian to Jacobean Eros
I The Marian Period
- 1 Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Scots and the Emergence of Desire
- 2 Demonic and Angelic Women: The Erotics of Renunciation and Mariology in the Bannatyne Manuscript
Part II The Jacobean Period
Conclusion: Love's End
Notes
Index

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