Scottish Authors > Gavin Douglas Poet c.1476-1522

Gavin Douglas (c.1476-1522) was a younger son of Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus; membership of this powerful family clearly aided his early rise to high office in the church. Douglas was educated at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 1494. He possibly later studied in Paris. By 1503 he held several minor benefices, and was provost of the important collegiate church of St Giles, Edinburgh. He was a highly ambitious man, and during the troubled minority of James V sought further promotion in the church, becoming Bishop of Dunkeld in 1516. Later in the reign Douglas's association with the cause of his nephew Archibald, sixth Earl of Angus (whom he privately called a "witless fuill"), brought him into conflict with the regent, the Duke of Albany; he fled to England and died in exile in London in 1522.

All Douglas's surviving works belong to the early part of his life during the reign of James IV. The Palice of honour is a complex allegorical dream-poem, dedicated to the King and probably composed in 1501. The nature of honour was a topic much discussed in the sixteenth century; Douglas here attributes highest value to heroic honour, won by virtue and courage in battle, but he implies that for himself the most congenial route to honour is poetry. The work is highly introspective, and enlivened by dry wit and irony.

Douglas's most famous poem is a translation of Virgil's Aeneid, completed in 1513 just before the battle of Flodden. The Eneados, to use Douglas's own title, was a pioneering work; the first of the great Renaissance translations from the classics, and one closely based (which was not then a common practice) on Virgil's own text. Douglas was fired by a double purpose: to transfer to his native tongue something of the "fouth", or linguistic richness, of Latin, and also to communicate an intimate knowledge of Virgil's great poem to his countrymen.

The translation is in heroic couplets, and a little more diffuse than Virgil. Where Douglas is most successful is in descriptive passages - the hunt in book IV, battle-scenes, and storms at sea - or portraits, such as those of Charon the ferryman of hell, and Venus disguised as a huntress,

With wynd waving hir haris lowsit [loosened] of tres,

Hir skirt kiltit til hir bair kne

(I. ve. 26-7)

Much of Douglas's most original writing is found in the Prologues that he provided for each book. These illuminate his principles and methods as a translator; and three, depicting a frosty December, a May morning, and a June night, reveal his genius for precise and sensuous description of the natural world. The Prologues convey a vivid sense of Douglas's personality, lively, bookish, and argumentative.

The link with Virgil is what kept Douglas's name alive, during the centuries when many early Scottish poets were forgotten. Today, however, he is highly appreciated, both as an excellent translator and also as a poet with a distinctive voice and remarkable "fouth" of language.

Virgil's Aeneid translated into Scottish verse by Gavin Douglas, ed. David F. C.Coldwell, 4 vols. Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1957-64.

Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: a critical study, Edinburgh, 1976.

Priscilla Bawcutt

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