The Scottish , James VI, and John Stewart of Baldynneis

Katherine McClune

This essay investigates the sonnet form in later sixteenth-century Scottish poetry, with particular emphasis on the of John Stewart of Baldynneis. The Scottish sonneteers’ varied and innovative use of the sonnet form is analysed, incorporating an analysis of the influence of James VI’s Reulis and Cautelis upon Scottish usage Keywords: Amatoria; ; Eneados; ; James VI; Alexander Montgomerie; Moral Fabillis; Reulis and Cautelis; sonnets; Scottish sonnet form; Spenserian sonnet form; John Stewart of Baldynneis.

“Only in before 1603 does love cease to dominate [the sonnet form]” (Jack 1985: 79). Jack’s brave assertion identifies a par- ticular feature of Scottish sonneteering – in contemporary Europe, the sonnet was particularly identified with the exposition of love. While love “is not the only occupation of the sonnet”, the form is the “commemorator of love […] [Petrarch’s love sonnet] was the glass of fashion and the mould of form for European sonneteers from the Ren- aissance to the nineteenth century” (Spiller 1992: 1). As used by its most distinguished European exponents, Dante and Petrarch, it was immersed in passion and desire, while the French poets who most influenced the Scots were predisposed also to use the type to examine matters of love. English sonneteers followed their European influences. Tottel’s Miscellany shows marked preoccupation with love, with sonnets including “Complaint of the louer disdained”, and “Vow to loue faithfully howsoeuer he be rewarded” (Rollins ed. 1928: 1: 9, 11). The first major published sonnet sequence in English, Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (1582) is subtitled “Passionate Centurie of Loue”, while John Soowthern’s much-maligned Pandora sequence (1584) is directed to an audience “that [is] lyke vs amourous” (Klein ed. 1984). The Scots propensity virtually to reject love as a defining topic is thus aberrant within the general European tradition. Lyall’s argument that Older Scots texts are inevitably influenced by their participation “in a literary system which is a mechanism both of stability and of change”, and by the “sociopolitical environment” (Lyall 1992: 40) within which they are produced, is of significance here. These poems must be 166 Katherine McClune viewed both within their context in Scottish literary tradition, and – sociopolitically – in terms of their response to James’s Reulis and Cautelis, a poetic instruction manual with a double-edged resonance, addressed to reader-poets and authored by a poet-king. The peculiarly (though not uniquely) Scottish preoccupation with the relationship between authorship, readership, and right judgement is exemplified in a chronologically broad spectrum of work, from James I’s Kingis Quair to Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae. The symbiotic relationship between the ability to “read” or “interpret” accurately – whether reading a literary text or reading oneself – and moral acuity is an important literary conceit, illustrated in the polysemous title of Stewart’s poem: “Thir verse disschyphre rycht as I tham bind, / Or than e sall no perfyt sentence find” (Crockett ed. 1913: 158. All further references to Stewart’s poetry are taken from this edition) where Stewart’s usage highlights the shift in meaning of “sentence” from a “rational human observation” to a “grammatical unity making a complete utterance”. Spiller suggests that this devel- opment is linked to the shifting notion of what eloquence involved, which led to the lessening popularity of the sonnet form. (Spiller 1998: 105). For Scots poets, literature was more than entertainment; it was a moral activity, requiring keen interpretation on the reader’s part. For instance, Robert Henryson’s concern with reader perception is evident throughout his work. The Fables contain the famous anal- ogy between the hidden educative qualities of the “feneit fabill” and “The nuttis schell [which], thocht it be hard and teuch, / Haldis the kirnell, sueit and delectabill” (Fox ed. 1981: 3). In The Testament of Cresseid, textual authority is undermined by an unreliable narrator, determined to “excuse” Criseyde, and reliant upon the sensual, epito- mised in the revelation that he is Venus’s servant (Fox ed. 1981: 111– 12). The correspondingly incomplete nature of his “moralitas”, amounting to a simplistic warning against “fals deceptioun” in love (Fox ed. 1981: 131), obliges the reader to appraise both the “story”, and the narrator’s ethical judgement thereof. Though the discrete moralitates of the Fables and Orpheus imply more secure interpreta- tive ground, they are often surprisingly inconclusive, requiring the reader to make an evaluation that potentially challenges the authority of the provided moral readings. Twenty-five years later, Gavin Douglas developed this in his Eneados, endeavouring to avoid the problems related to the pagan text by framing Virgil’s narrative with