Despite what are in certain respects quite similar literary careers, the attitudes towards textual production and literary authority presented by John Skelton and William Dunbar resist close association. Very rarely have the two been studied together. And yet, their position as the vernacular poets most obviously affiliated with the English and Scottish royal courts,1 as well as the broad similarities between those courts as centres of textual production, invites comparison of their diverging claims for the authority of their writings.

Skelton, in The Bowge of Courte, transforms satire of the court into a satire of the poet. His depiction of his textual double, Drede, seems an unlikely strategy for authorial self-promotion; yet it is not too great a leap from self-scrutiny to self-regard, and the Bowge shares with Skelton's Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell an interest in the nature of poetry and the function of the poet expressed through the dream vision. The outcome of the Bowge is apparently to deny the ability of poetry to convey pre-existing truths; however, Skelton's decision to make the poet himself into an object of scrutiny demonstrates his willingness to break down in order to rebuild the concept of authorship, in particular, his authorship, which is given permanent inscription in the Garlande's Skelton Poeta. Dunbar, though working in superficially similar circumstances and – in The Goldyn Targe at least – the same ‘Chaucerian Tradition’, has a quite different use for the dream vision. Dunbar, unlike Skelton, seems less concerned with his personal status as a Scottish author than in his place among a brotherhood of Scots makaris. His allegorical narratives evoke a lively, literary court culture, of which Dunbar is but one valuable exponent, rather than, as will be seen in Skelton and the Garlande, a biographically specific, self-justifying authorship dissociated from any single, external source of poetic legitimation.

Neither poet's strategy was entirely successful in promoting their name and writings: Dunbar's transmission relies on continued interest in the court culture that he represents, whilst Skelton's somewhat convoluted authorship did not long outlive its conception.