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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the general scorn and neglect by modern literary scholars of the entire area in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, few poets have fared so ill as the sixteenth-century Scottish Chaucerian Gavin Douglas. To be sure, his name appears frequently enough in histories of literature, and occasionally in studies of Chaucer, or Surrey, or Henryson, Lindsay, Dunbar. But one suspects that Douglas has less often been carefully and sympathetically read than he has been hustled into a dusty place of honor by conventional encomium, or relegated to the ranks of the inconsiderable on the ground that he is a mere “Chaucerian,” a petty tracer of his master's matchless strokes.
1 Eyre-Todd, Medieval Scottish Poetry, Abbotsford Poets (Glasgow, 1892), ii, Ch. iv; “The Scottish Chaucerians,” Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1932), ii, 301.
2 See, e.g., Lauchlan MacLean Watt, Douglas's Aeneid (Cambridge, 1920), pp. 28-29.
3 Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit., ii, 272-273, 294-303, esp. p. 300. See also his The Transition Period (Edinburgh, 1900), pp. 59-62.
4 W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1897), I, 378-380, and T. F. Henderson, Scottish Vernacular Literature (London, 1898), p. 199.
5 One of his more temperate remarks is: “Yet I think the more closely we examine the work of Gavin Douglas, the more we shall find that in him this ‘modern’ quality is only a kind of accident and in no sense a property. He is in spirit and practice a mediaevalist, perhaps more completely so than any of his contemporaries, and certainly much more so than Dunbar. He is essentially a Court allegorist” (p. 59).
6 The Poetical Works of Gavin Douglas, ed. John Small (Edinburgh, 1874), ii, 9-10. Hereinafter quotations from Douglas will be identified by volume and page references to this edition. Although there has been some agitation (by Ezra Pound and J. A. W. Bennett, among others) for a new and more adequate edition, none has yet been promised.
7 Douglas's Aeneid, pp. 1-24.
8 See David Irving, The History of Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh, 1861), pp. 282-287; John M. Ross, Scottish History and Literature (Edinburgh, 1884), pp. 317-374; John Veitch, The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh, 1887), i, 243-282.
9 Andrew Lang, Ward's English Poets (Edinburgh, 1880), i, 159. Courthope, op. cit.; Henderson, op. cit.
10 George Frederick Nott, The Works of Surrey and Wyatt (London, 1815), i, 225-228. The influence of Douglas on Surrey has been generally accepted, though here and elsewhere considerably overemphasized.
11 For an illuminating account of certain other aspects of his early literary reputation see J. A. W. Bennett, “The Early Fame of Gavin Douglas's Eneados,” MLN, lxi (1946), 83-88. William Geddes (A Bibliography of Middle Scots Poets, Scottish Text Soc., 1912, Introd. and pp. 223 ff.) offers a collection of the honorific notices alluded to above.
12 Title of Copland's Black Letter edition of 1553.
13 Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, Univ. Wis. Stud. in Lang. and Lit., 35 (Madison, 1933), pp. 27-28.
14 See Elizabeth Nitchie, Vergil and the English Poets (New York, 1919).
15 Thocht venerable Chaucer, principall poet but peir,
Hevinlie trumpat, horleige and reguleir,
In eloquence balmy, condit, and diall,
Mylky fountane, cleir strand, and rose riall,
Of fresch endyte, throw Albion iland braid .... (ii, 14)
16 “Heir the Translator Direkkis hys buk and excusis hym self,” and “Ane Exclamatioun aganyst detractouris and oncurtas redaris,” appended to the Ruthven MS., as well as in this prologue.
17 History of English Prosody (London, 1906), i, 275.
18 Aeneis, EETS, Extra Ser., xlvii, 1, 3.
19 See Salverda de Grave, Introduction à une Edition Critique du Roman d'Eneas (La Haye, 1898).
20 Watt (see n. 2), p. 60.
21 Works, ii, 292. Though the authorship of these notes has been questioned, they are thought to be authentic. Small says of them: “The curious notes which are contained in pp. 279-295 are written in the margin of the Cambridge Manuscript. They are in a different hand from that of the copyist of the manuscript, and it is conjectured, with much probability, that they were written by Gavin Douglas himself” (ii, 318). Of the Cambridge MS. he notes: “This MS. had apparently been carefully made, and seems to have been in the hands of Douglas himself, as it has several marginal glosses or notes in the Bishop's handwriting” (i, clxxiii). A comparison of the sample of Douglas' handwriting seen in a facsimile of one of his letters to Wolsey (i, frontispiece) with the facsimile of an annotated page of the Cambridge MS. (i, facing p. clxxiii) supports the identification, as does the appearance in one of the notes of a reference to “my Palice of Honour.” The Cambridge MS. has been dated as ca. 1525, but would have had to be in existence before 1521 if it actually was in the Bishop's hands. Since the Lambeth MS. of 1545-46 includes a few notes copied from the Cambridge MS. (or possibly a common source), the notes are certainly not a late addition by some other learned commentator. Presumption of Douglas' authorship is further supported circumstantially by the classical learning and intimate knowledge of Douglas' work evidenced in the notes and comments.
22 Anna Cox Brinton, Mapheus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid (Stanford, 1930), pp. 54, 55.
23 See Tragedy 31, “The Lamentation of King James the Fourth, King of Scots,” A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938).
24 The Miltonic Setting, Past and Present (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 151-152.
25 Lathrop (see n. 13), p. 87.
26 Works, i, cxi. Small gives a full account of Douglas' intrigues for ecclesiastical preferment and his political maneuverings on behalf of his nephew, the Earl of Angus.