Abstract

Literature of the late Renaissance period in Scotland is best understood in the light of the two monarchs, mother and son, who governed the nation between 1561 and 1603. Scottish court culture in this period was alternately shaped, inhibited and nurtured by the political fortunes of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots (1542–87) and James VI (1566–1625). Within four decades, the Catholic queen from a powerful Franco-Scottish dynasty was first deposed, then beheaded; a succession of Protestant regents reigned calamitously; and the young king, exiled and estranged from his mother, inherited a politically and religiously troubled crown which, after twenty-four years of relatively successful governance, would find union with England's in 1603. The political vicissitudes of the Marian and Jacobean periods in Scotland charted an erratic path for artistic culture. Perhaps because of this, the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ in Scotland, the counterpart of England's Elizabethan one, has yet to find firm root in the literary historiography of later sixteenth-century Britain. Yet the conventional meaning of the term, ‘Renaissance’, as ‘rebirth’, accurately sums up the prolific efforts of Scottish poets to create art which had national, as well as aesthetic, currency. This essay begins by exploring literary culture in Mary's reign, suggesting that, despite its relative fragility, the long shadow which it cast over subsequent decades proved the necessary impetus for the ‘Renaissance’ of James VI's reign. That ‘Renaissance’ was relatively short-lived, since regal union in 1603 dictated the end of Scotland's independent monarchy, and of literary art which had emerged out of the enriching conditions of sovereignty. This survey of the distinctive nature of Scottish literature in the reigns of Mary and James traces the major themes and preoccupations of a culture which was geographically placed at the periphery of Europe but which increasingly sought to prove its artistic centrality in the face of political change.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00141.x