DUNBAR, WILLIAM (c. 1460–c. 152o), Scottish poet. He became M.A. at St. Andrews in 1479 and afterwards joined the Order of Observantine Franciscans, at St. Andrews or Edin burgh, proceeding to France as a wandering friar. He spent a few years in Picardy, and was still abroad when, in 1491, Bothwell's mission to secure a bride for the young James IV. reached the French court. About 15oo he returned to Scotland, and became a priest at court, and a royal pensioner. His literary life begins with his attachment to James' household. He is spoken of as the rhymer of Scotland in the accounts of the English Privy Council dealing with the visit of the mission for the hand of Margaret Tudor, rather because he wrote a poem in praise of London than because, as has been stated, he held the post of laureate at the Scottish court. In 1511 he accompanied the queen to Aberdeen and commemorated her visit in verse. Other pieces, such as the Orisoun ("Quhen the Gouernour past in France"), apropos of the setting out of the regent Albany, are of historical interest, but they tell us little more than that Dunbar was alive.
One hundred and one poems have been ascribed to Dunbar. Of these at least 90 are generally accepted as his : of the I 1 at tributed to him it would be hard to say that they should not be considered authentic. Most doubt has clung to his verse tale The Freiris of Berwik.
Dunbar's chief allegorical poems are The Goldyn Targe and The Thrissil and the Rois. The motif of the former is the poet's futile endeavour, in a dream, to ward off the arrows of Dame Beautee by Reason's "scheld of gold." When wounded and made prisoner, he discovers the true beauty of the lady: when she leaves him, he is handed over to Heaviness. The noise of the ship's guns, as the company sails off, wakes the poet to the real pleasures of a May morning. Dunbar works on the same theme in a shorter poem, known as Beauty and the Prisoner. The Thris sil and the Rois is a prothalamium in honour of James IV. and Margaret Tudor, in which the heraldic allegory is based on the familiar beast-parliament.
The greater part of Dunbar's work is occasional—personal and social satire, complaints (in the style familiar in the minor verse of Chaucer's English successors), orisons, and pieces of a humor ous character. The last type shows Dunbar at his best, and points the difference between him and Chaucer. The best speci men of this work, of which the outstanding characteristics are sheer whimsicality and topsy-turvy humour, is The Ballad of Kynd Kittok. This strain runs throughout many of the occa sional poems, and is not wanting in odd passages in Dunbar's con temporaries: and it has the additional interest of showing a direct historical relationship with the work of later Scottish poets, and chiefly with that of Robert Burns. Dunbar's satire is never the gentle funning of Chaucer : more often it becomes invective. Examples of this type are The Satire on Edinburgh, The General Satire, the Epitaph on Donald Owre, and the powerful vision of The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis. In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, an outstanding specimen of a favourite northern form, analogous to the continental estrif, or tenzone, he and his rival reach a height of scurrility which is certainly without parallel in English literature. This poem has the additional interest of showing the racial antipathy between the "Inglis"-speaking inhab itants of the Lothians and the "Scots" or Gaelic-speaking folk of the west country.
There is little in Dunbar which may be called lyrical, and little of the dramatic. His Interlud of the Droichis (Dwarf's) part of the Play, one of the pieces attributed to him, is supposed to be a fragment of a dramatic composition. It is more interesting as evidence of his turn for whimsicality, already referred to, and may for that reason be safely ascribed to his pen. If further selection be made from the large body of miscellaneous poems, the comic poem on the physician, Andro Kennedy, may stand out as one of the best contributions to mediaeval Goliardic litera ture; The Two Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, as one of the richest and most effective pastiches in the older alliterative style, then used by the Scottish Chaucerians for burlesque purposes; Done is a battell on the Dragon Blak, for religious feeling expressed in melodious verse ; and the well-known Lament for the Makaris. The main value of the last is historical, but it, too, shows Dun bar's mastery of form, even when dealing with lists of poetic predecessors.