The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie

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Schir Johine the Ros, ane thing thair is compild, also known as The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie, is earliest surviving example[1] of the Scottish version of the flyting genre in poetry. The genre takes the form of a contest, or "war of words",[2] between poets, each of whom tries to outclass the other in vituperation and verbal pyrotechnics. It is not certain how the work was composed, but it is likely to have been publicly performed, probably in the style of a poetic joust, by William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy (the two combatants) before the Court of James IV of Scotland.

There are clues in the poem that suggest some of the features the show would have contained. Each of the combatants had a commissar, both of whom are named (and sometimes directly addressed) by the performers: These are, respectively, Sir John the Ross for Dunbar and Quentin Shaw for Kennedy, both of whom were actual persons. Shaw (certainly) and Ross (probably) were also poets and it seems likely that they may have played some material part in the performance. Ross, Shaw and Kennedy are all three named as a group in the closing stanzas of Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris.

Contents

[edit] Outline and performance

In the complete poem as it survives, there are two exchanges. Dunbar opens with a three-stanza challenge which Kennedy matches also in three stanzas. Dunbar's sustained main attack then follows (25 stanzas) moving Kennedy's even longer and equally sustained answer (38 stanzas). In keeping with the genre, there is a great show of quite outrageous verbal dexterity and invention by both combatants which, in each case, builds up to a climax involving doubling and tripling of rhymes and intense alliteration, among other effects.

Though Dunbar uses the standard eight-line ballade stanza for his major attack, his three opening stanzas use the variant ababbccb, and it is in this variant rhyme-scheme that Kennedy replies throughout. The lines are pentameter.

The content of the insults involves a wide range of strategies in mock character assassination, from the low scatalogical to the high political, and most of the insults thrown by Dunbar are matched or answered in kind by Kennedy, giving the poem a balance in overall structure, forby its wildness in detail, so that it never quite seems arbitrary. Some of the accusations involve high crimes of theft, treason and heresy which, at moments - especially if the context was the royal court - add a potentially dangerous sense of political frisson. These were capital crimes with terrible punishments that both combatants took great relish in describing and promising would be visited upon their opponent.

The insults were graphic and personal and again not necessarily arbitrary. The satire, if accurate, conveys a caricature impression of physical appearance and moral vulnerabilites for the two men even though no actual portraits are known to have survived.

Anthologies often print Dunbar's contribution alone, but the contest was evenly matched; Dunbar seems stronger on "fireworks", but Kennedy employs greater tonal subtlety. George Bannatyne, in his manuscript copy, added the postscript Iuge ye now heir quha gat the war.

[edit] Influence

Kennedy and Dunbar's Flyting seems to have been a popular and influential poem that almost became a de rigeur component of Scottish anthologies of verse throughout the 16th and 17th centuries[3]. It is probably one of the earliest works to have been printed by Chepman and Myllar after they were granted the King's license to operate as printers in Edinburgh (1507)[4]. The record of the bardic bout seems to have inspired a legacy of similar contests, most famous of which are the Flyting between Lyndsay and King James V (c.1536)[5], and the Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwarth (c.1598)[6].

Nineteenth and Twentieth century commentators tended to be less favourable towards the poem, such as the makar and critic Tom Scott who regarded it a crude and offensive work unworthy of critical attention.[7]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kinsley, James ed. William Dunbar, Poems OUP 1958, p.128
  2. ^ Meier, Nicole, ed. The Poems of Walter Kennedy, Scottish Text Society, 2008. p.ci
  3. ^ Meier, 2008. p.xcviii
  4. ^ Meier, 2008. p.xcix
  5. ^ Hadley Williams, Janet, ed. Sir David Lyndsay, Selected PoemsASLS Volume 30, 2000. p.257.
  6. ^ Bawcut and Riddy, Longer Scottish Poems, Vol I, Scottish Academic Press, 1987. p.279.
  7. ^ Tom Scott [?1967]

[edit] See also