‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay...’: The Autobiographical Impulse in the Dream Poetry of William Dunbar
Keywords:
William Dunbar, poetry, Early Modern, Middle Scots, autobiographyAbstract
This article considers the dream-framed first person allegories of the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460-1513?) as an example of ‘autobiography before autobiography’ in pre-modern Scotland. Dunbar’s poetry offers a vivid representation of the society and spectacle of the court of James IV (1473-1513; r. 1488-1513), though little biographical information about the poet himself. His poetry is celebrated for its great tonal and generic variety; but this very versatility poses problems for the recovery of ‘[t]he “real” Dunbar’. In this article, I show how in poems such as The Goldyn Targe, The Thrissil and the Rois, and ‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay’, Dunbar affirms his role as a makar or ‘maker’ at court, but positions himself as the exponent of a lively, literary, court culture, rather than a psychologically complex, individuated self. In this, I suggest, Dunbar’s poetry demonstrates an alternative approach to autobiography: the development of a corporate rather than an individual sense of identity, and a pathway for thinking about quasi-autobiographical self-representation outside of the Burckhardtian paradigm of the Renaissance development of the individual. Dunbar professes to represent, while in practice he reinvents, love, praise, and ribaldry at the Scottish court. This is autobiography, I propose, not of an individual, but of a time, place, and patron, and is as literary as it is historical.
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