Dunbar, William

William Dunbar (?1456–1513) was a highly versatile Scottish poet whose work incorporated the extremes of diction, namely an ornate, artificial, and highly Latinate vocabulary in his religious poems and the crudest imaginable low-register diction in his satires, most notably in the flyting match with his fellow poet Walter Kennedy. ( Flyting is a curious genre, an individual and ex- tended display of verbal skill in the fine art of savage insult, which reached its highest point in the Scottish court, several of the participants being aristocrats and major poets.) Dunbar was a Master of Arts, and more surprisingly, a Franciscan preaching friar in the king’s service for a number of years and received a royal pension by King James IV. Although not as well known as his famous predecessor Geoffrey Chaucer, he shows many of the same qualities.

The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (ca. 1503) is over 550 lines long. Kennedy, who was of royal blood, had similar academic qualifications and was greatly admired as a poet. Fairly extensive quotations from this remarkable match are given in the entry for flyting. These show that sexual insults figure to a higher degree than would be expected in England. Dunbar also wrote a notable satirical parody of a courtly love debate called “The Two Married Women and the Widow.” Dunbar’s ladies are very cynical and physical. The Widow (whose sexual values are reminiscent of Chaucer’s adventurous and much-married Wife of Bath) shows total contempt for her dominated husband, cuckolding him (l. 380), making him do all the housework (l. 351) and emasculating him:

Quhen I that grom geldit of gudis and of nature
[When I had castrated that fellow of his goods and potency]
(l. 392)

The Widow is sexually opportunistic and crude in her language. Her aggression is also expressed in the demeaning terms used of the husband, such as wif carll (“woman-man”), grom (“groom”), schaik (“fellow”), and that auld schrew (“that old bugger”). These are all low-class or insulting terms, and are pointedly juxtaposed by the upper-class company the Widow claims to enjoy, that of knychtis (“knights”), clerkis (“scholars”), and cortly persons . The reader begins to suspect that the Widow is perhaps indulging in a courtly cum erotic fantasy with baronis and knychtis / And othir bachilleris blith (“jolly young knights”) who entertain her in various ways:

Sum rounis and sum ralyeis and sum redis ballatis,
[Some whisper and some jest and some read ballads]
Sum raiffis furgh rudly with riatus speche
[Some rant forth rudely with wanton speech]

Sum stalwartly steppis with a stout corage
[Some step boldly and stout-heartedly into my chamber]
And a stif standard thing staiffis in mi neiff;
[And thrust a stiff rampant penis into my fist]
(ll. 480-86)

The main features of the Widow’s outrageous behavior, namely sexual promiscuity, predatoriness, snobbery, and the language of a fishwife, suggest that Dunbar was using certain misogynist stereotypical notions in his poem, rather as Chaucer had in his creation of the Wife of Bath.