The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie

Schir Johine the Ros, ane thing thair is compild, also known as The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie, is the earliest surviving example of the Scottish version of the flyting genre in poetry. The genre takes the form of a contest, or "war of words", between two poets, each trying to outclass the other in vituperation and verbal pyrotechnics. It is not certain how the work was composed, but it is likely to have been publicly performed, probably in the style of a poetic joust by the two combatants, William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, before the Court of James IV of Scotland.

There are clues in the poem that suggest some of the features that the show must have contained. Each of the combatants had a commissar, both of whom are named in the work and sometimes directly addressed by the performers. These are (respectively) Sir John the Ross for Dunbar and Quentin Shaw for Kennedy, both of whom were actual persons. Shaw (certainly) and Ross (probably) were also poets, and it seems possible that they played some material part in the performance.

Ross, Shaw, and Kennedy are all three named as a group in the closing stanzas of Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris.

In the poem as it survives, there are two exchanges. Dunbar opens with a three-stanza address to his commissar which pours lofty scorn on the poetic pretensions of Kennedy and his commissar, describing what must happen if their self-promotion should move him to reluctantly unleash his own far superior powers; which boast Kennedy answers, also in three stanzas, with a direct, highly personalised address to Dunbar, knocking his claims down to size and commanding him to bide his wheesht. Needless to say, Dunbar does not obey the injunction and a sustained poetic attack follows (25 stanzas) which Kennedy matches with a longer and equally sustained reply thirteen stanzas longer again (38).

In keeping with the genre there is a great show of outrageous verbal dexterity and invention by both combatants. Each makar eventually closes their performance with a showy verbal climax involving doubling and tripling of rhymes and much-intensified alliteration.

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