Castalian Band

The Castalian Band is a modern name given to a grouping of Scottish Jacobean poets, or makars, which is said to have flourished between the 1580s and early 1590s in the court of James VI and consciously modelled on the French example of the Pléiade.

[citation needed] However, the persistence of the idea of the Castalian Band has its own interest – as Bawcutt noted, suggesting that it is grounded in a desire to identify a strong Scottish Renaissance culture.

The King wrote a detailed treatise intended to establish a standard of practice in Scots poetry – his Reulis and Cautelis – and there may well have been gatherings of poets at James' court.

The brothers Thomas and Robert Hudson from the North of England, were appointed as by James not only as poets but as court musicians helping to lead the musical "revival" he regarded as going hand-in-hand with his literary programme.

[15] Ayton was one of the first Scottish poets to have written explicitly in English, while Alexander wrote rhymed tragedies in a genre sometimes referred to as closet drama[16] and assisted the King in his metrical translations of the Psalms of David.

Although there is no direct record of Scottish court drama in the late 16th century, one verse play in Scots does intriguingly survive from the period, an eminently performable comedy of love, Philotus,[17] which is known today only from an anonymous edition published in London in 1603.

[21] The full range of their prolific output has never properly been represented in modern publication and much in their writing, situated in a continuous tradition from the period of earlier writers such as Dunbar, prefigures the metaphysical poets in England.

Not only are the 'Castalians' of interest in their own right as the last court poets in a purely Scottish context, but at their best, and especially when their language is correctly appraised, their proficient use of sometimes highly mannered verse forms to express complex ideas and personal emotion can stand with later popular works of figures such as Donne, Herrick and Marvell.

[23] Yet James at the same time conscious of his increasingly likely future accession to the English throne also gave his publisher, Robert Waldegrave, permission to anglicise his Scots manuscripts when going to press for consumption in England.