Kingis Quair, The

(ca. 1424)

   The Kingis Quair (“The King’s Book”) is an early 15th-century poem consisting of 197 RHYME ROYAL stanzas in a Northern dialect of MIDDLE ENGLISH. The poem survives in a single manuscript from about 1490 (Bodleian Library Arch. Selden B 24), which was discovered and printed only in 1783. The manuscript attributes the poem to King JAMES I of Scotland, although some scholars have questioned the attribution and suggest that it is based only on autobiographical similarities between the events of the text and James’s life. Like the protagonist of the poem, James was a king kidnapped in his youth and held prisoner for 18 years, emerging from his captivity to marry the woman he had fallen in love with while imprisoned—in James’s case, Lady Joan Beaufort. For most readers, however, these similarities and the manuscript attribution, plus the fact that the Scottish chronicler John Major claimed that James had written a poem about Joan prior to their marriage, give us good reason to assume that James is the poem’s author, and that he wrote the poem while in England. The Kingis Quair begins with a royal prisoner who, after reading BOETHIUS, thinks back on his abduction and 18 years in prison, and laments his fortune. He sees a beautiful woman walking in the garden below the tower in which he is kept, and falls in love with her (a scene clearly reminiscent of CHAUCER’s KNIGHT’S TALE). The poem then becomes a DREAM VISION, as the speaker in a dream is whisked through the heavens to the palace of Venus, goddess of love, who agrees to help him attain the Lady. But first, guided by Good Hope, he must visit the house of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who teaches him prudence, and then the goddess Fortune, who gives him a place on her wheel and promises him success in love.When he awakens, he goes to the window of his tower, not knowing whether to believe the dream, when a dove comes to him with a message from heaven that his sorrow over his love will soon end. The poem ends as the narrator gives thanks for everything that has contributed to his winning of his love (even his prison walls), and with an acknowledgement of his debt to Chaucer and to GOWER. The northern dialect of the poem is interspersed with elements of London English, which may reflect James’s long stay in England and his familiarity with the works of Chaucer and other Midland poets. The ALLEGORY of the poem’s central part overwhelms the slender plot of the autobiographical frame, though in that sense the structure of the poem is not unlike Chaucer’s dream visions, like The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS and The PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS. Perhaps the most significant contribution to later literature made by the poem is the term “Rhyme Royal,” which came to be applied, in deference to the royal composer of The Kingis Quair, to the seven-line stanza Chaucer had used and apparently invented.

   Bibliography

   ■ James I of Scotland. The Kingis Quair. Introduction, notes and glossary by John Norton-Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

   ■ The Kingis Quair of James Stewart. Edited by Matthew P. McDiarmid. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973.

   ■ Scheps, Walter, and J. Anna Looney. Middle Scots Poets: A Reference Guide to James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.