Dialogues of Desolate Men

Narrating the Conflicted Self in the Dialogical Poetry of David Lyndsay and William Lithgow

Abstract

Literature in early modern Scotland was a medium for education which stemmed from the king and court to the wider community. Historically, Scotland’s literature conveys a penchant for moral and social reform in which the king acted as a spiritual figurehead used to represent the self and society as a whole, enabling the literature to centre around an identifiable exemplar. The parallels between David Lyndsay and William Lithgow are few – they wrote in very different times and were very different men – however, their poetry displays the unease they both felt in their kingless Scotland. The monarchical void forced both poets to identify themselves outwith the influence of the King and Court and to resituate their voices within the new political and cultural landscapes. This paper explores the way in which both poets used the form of dialogue to restructure the method of didactic transmission from taking the monarch as the spiritual moorings, to looking to reason and, as they believed to be the moral epitome, God.