Literature in early modern Scotland

In the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots and the minority of her son James VI, cultural pursuits were limited by the lack of a royal court and by political turmoil.

There were isolated Scottish plays, but the system of professional companies of players and theatres that developed in England in this period was absent in Scotland.

The accession of James VI to the English throne in 1603 meant a loss of the court as a centre of patronage and he increasingly favoured the language of southern England.

This period was marked by the work of the first named female Scottish poets, such as Elizabeth Melville, whose Ane Godlie Dream (1603) was the first book published by a woman in Scotland.

The early eighteenth century was also a period of innovation in Gaelic vernacular poetry that mixed traditional forms with influences from the Lowlands.

By the early modern era Gaelic had been in geographical decline for three centuries and had begun to be a second class language, confined to the Highlands and Islands.

[1] The tradition of classic Gaelic poetry survived longer in Scotland than in Ireland, with the last fully competent member of the MacMhuirich dynasty, who were hereditary poets to the Lords of the Isles and then the Donalds of Clanranald, still working in the early eighteenth century.

These court poets, or makars, who were mainly clerics included Robert Henryson (c. 1450-c. 1505), who re-worked Medieval and Classical sources, such as Chaucer and Aesop in works such as his Testament of Cresseid and The Morall Fabillis.

William Dunbar (1460–1513) produced satires, lyrics, invectives and dream visions that established the vernacular as a flexible medium for poetry of any kind.

It was the first complete translation of a major classical text in an Anglian language, finished in 1513, but overshadowed by the disaster at Flodden that brought the reign to an end.

[9] As a patron of poets and authors James V (r. 1513–42) supported William Stewart and John Bellenden, who translated the Latin History of Scotland compiled in 1527 by Hector Boece, into verse and prose.

[8] George Buchanan (1506–82) had a major influence as a Latin poet, founding a tradition of neo-Latin poetry that would continue in to the seventeenth century.

[12] From the 1550s, in the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots (r. 1542–67) and the minority of her son James VI (r. 1567–1625), cultural pursuits were limited by the lack of a royal court and by political turmoil.

Nevertheless, poets from this period included Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586), who produced meditative and satirical verses in the style of Dunbar; John Rolland (fl.

1530–75), who wrote allegorical satires in the tradition of Douglas and courtier and minister Alexander Hume (c. 1556–1609), whose corpus of work includes nature poetry and epistolary verse.

Alexander Scott's (?1520–82/3) use of short verse designed to be sung to music, opened the way for the Castalian poets of James VI's adult reign.

[14] He became patron and member of a loose circle of Scottish Jacobean court poets and musicians, later called the Castalian Band, which included William Fowler (c. 1560–1612), John Stewart of Baldynneis (c. 1545–c.

[19] James VI and his wife Anne of Denmark personally dressed in costume and took part in masques, performances at weddings that typically involved music, dance, and disguise.

[21] Having extolled the virtues of Scots "poesie", after his accession to the English throne, James VI increasingly favoured the language of southern England.

A number of Scottish poets, including William Alexander, John Murray and Robert Aytoun, accompanied the king to London, where they continued to write,[23] but they soon began to anglicise their written language.

[2] The tradition of neo-Latin poetry reached its fruition with the publication of the anthology of the Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum (1637), published in Amsterdam by Arthur Johnston (c.1579–1641) and Sir John Scott of Scotstarvet (1585–1670) and containing work by the major Scottish practitioners since Buchanan.

[29] They were probably composed and transmitted orally and only began to be written down and printed, often as broadsides and as part of chapbooks, later being recorded and noted in books by collectors including Robert Burns and Walter Scott.

In 1663 Edinburgh lawyer William Clerke wrote Marciano or the Discovery, a play about the restoration of a legitimate dynasty in Florence after many years of civil war.

He laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, publishing The Ever Green (1724), a collection that included many major poetic works of the Stewart period.

He also mixed these traditions with influences from the Lowlands, including Thompson's Seasons, which helped inspire a new form of nature poetry in Gaelic, which was not focused on their relations to human concerns.

James Thomson's plays often dealt with the contest between public duty and private feelings, included Sophonisba (1730), Agamemnon (1738) and Tancrid and Sigismuda (1745), the last of which was an international success.

[44] In Scotland a troop of English players came to Edinburgh in 1715 where they performed Macbeth and a series of Restoration comedies, but they soon left, perhaps because of objections from local kirk presbyteries.

By 1725 English actor Anthony Aston, a friend of Ramsay, was performing in Edinburgh, but seems to have fallen foul of the Scottish Master of the Revels, who licensed plays, companies and playhouses, and soon left.