Since it is customary for literary scholars and historians to concentrate their studies in the traditions of just one country, it is always refreshing to encounter a book that aspires to cross the national and disciplinary boundaries. Jon Robinson points out, quite rightly, that the court poets of the early sixteenth century often traveled to foreign courts, met visitors from foreign lands, and read foreign literature, so their works were composed in a cosmopolitan rather than a parochial environment. He also considers the parallels between the poets of the English and Scottish courts to have been especially significant, since they had common cultural roots and were writing in variant branches of the same mother tongue: the middle-Scots makars usually called their language “Inglis.” Furthermore, he contends that court poetry of the period was not autotelic and cannot be fully understood by only dissecting its literary allusions, rhetorical devices, and metaphorical flourishes. For Robinson, poets were not free agents impulsively exploring the emotional and psychological byways of their personal creativity but were constrained by the imperatives of patronage and politics, reciting or circulating their verses among people who could make or break their careers; therefore, Robinson's analysis is grounded in performative pragmatics. His poets were either active participants in the competitive, faction-ridden, back-biting, sycophantic milieu of court patronage and politics or else they were men of thwarted ambition, out of favor and seeking readmission to the arena of power, influence, and affluence. In either case, their poetry was shaped by the political, religious, diplomatic, and dynastic interests of royal patrons, and it needs to be understood within this historical context. For Robinson, much of the courtly oeuvre can be classified directly or indirectly as panegyric or propaganda. Thus, for instance, a poem that at first glance is simply a conventional love lyric, in which the poet fears his mistress will desert him (Thomas Wyatt's Disdain me not), could also be read as expressing strategic sympathy for Henry VIII's courtship of Anne Boleyn (155–58). Since Wyatt had once been a rival of the king's for Anne's affections, this might also have been an act of self-defense. Robinson clearly identifies and emphasizes a tendency toward pragmatic dissimulation, whereby courtly poets adopted insincere attitudes or inauthentic personas to allow themselves to survive and prosper in a dangerously fickle society.

The greatest strength of Robinson's study is his forensic engagement with the poems selected for examination. From the Scottish tradition, he considers works by Dunbar, Lindsay, and Buchanan, while the English poets under his microscope are More, Skelton, Elyot, and especially Wyatt. One might quibble at the neglect of Gavin Douglas or the earl of Surrey, who are mentioned only in passing, but his choice is nevertheless a fairly representative sample of the court poets of the period. The poems that receive the most intense scrutiny are David Lindsay's Dreme, Complaynt, and Testament of the Papyngo; Thomas Elyot's Pasquil the Playne; and Thomas Wyatt's A Spending Hand, My Own John Poyntz, Whoso List to Hunt, and Disdain me not; some others are given lesser attention. Robinson describes his key texts in fine detail, offering interpretations that extend, modify, and challenge the readings of other critics and placing the poems within the context of the court politics of the time. He draws on a range of literary and historical sources from Chaucer to Castiglione, from the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland to contemporary letters, to depict the courtly milieu and to establish that the experiences of the Scottish and English poets, notwithstanding some significant differences, had many common features that informed and shaped their texts in similar ways. His contention that the full implications of many poems are not self-evident and require familiarity with their historical and political contexts is, of course, unimpeachable.

For all the detailed scholarship and valuable insights presented here, this book nevertheless disappoints to an extent. This is largely because the sweeping promises of the title are not fulfilled: Selected Poems of the English and Scottish Courts in Their Political and Cultural Context, 1500–1540 would have been a more accurate description of the contents, since the prose literature of the courts is not analyzed and the wider political and cultural developments are not fully examined in their own right but only so far as they illuminate the chosen poems. Furthermore, students seeking a broad understanding of the poems of Thomas Wyatt and his contemporaries will find this book helpful in indicating some of the questions that need to be asked of the texts, but they would have to look elsewhere for comprehensive surveys of the genre since the poems chosen for scrutiny here are quite a small sample of the courtly works of the selected authors. In the case of Sir David Lindsay, for example, only three out of eight of his surviving court poems are examined, and so the standard texts remain Douglas Hamer's edition of the complete works (Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, The Works, 1490–1555, 4 vols. [Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1931–36]) and Carol Edington's contextual study, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (East Linton, 1995). However, Robinson's book, with its stress on the dishonesty of poetic personas, makes an interesting addition to the “wider reading” category of bibliographies of British Renaissance literature.