Women Fictional and Historic in Sir David Lyndsay’s Poetry

Abstract

In The Dreme (c.1526) and The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (1530), Sir David Lyndsay gives women salient roles, and in the The Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalene (c. 1537), produces a public statement of mourning for a woman. Yet overall Lyndsay’s masculine focus is noticeable, especially in his earlier writing for his first intended audience and recipient, young James V of Scots. A shared male viewpoint, that of the king and his personal servant, is a literary strategy Lyndsay uses frequently to introduce or develop his case, as in The Answer […] to the Kingis Flyting (c. 1535–36), or Ane Supplication […] in Contemptioun of Syde Taillis (c. 1539–41). No corresponding female focus, however, appears in the poetry composed during the minority of James’s daughter Mary, although Lyndsay, as Lyon King of Arms, retained a close link to the monarch and her deputies, James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, and Marie de Guise-Lorraine, Mary’s mother. Lyndsay shows some awareness of his bias when he laments his inability to address a child queen who presently ‘dwellith in France’ (Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour (1553), ‘Epistil’, 1. 13).¹