SCOTS Project - www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk

Document : 28
Title    : Prose Urquhart
Author(s): Dr John B Corbett

Copyright holder(s): University of Glasgow: Copyright © 2004 The
University of Glasgow. All rights reserved.

Text

Prose Style (2)
Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty

At the very end of last term we took a look at the way Scots prose evolved
briefly in the 16th Century, developing out of the native tradition of
loosely-connected OE sentences and the continental European (ultimately
Latin) tradition of periodic sentences.  Writers either leaned towards one
style, or, like John Knox at his best, blended the two appropriately to his
dramatic purposes.  Today I want to concentrate on one writer, from the mid
17th Century, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty.  Urquhart is often dismissed
as one of the great eccentrics of the Scottish literary tradition; I am
going to argue that he is a tremendously important transitional figure.  He
is still a great eccentric – some of his writing is simply weird – but
within the weirdness there is a disruption of the elements that marked the
mediaeval and renaissance styles of prose writing, and a foretaste of the
use of Scots in times to come.  It also must be said from the outset that
most of Urquhart's writing is in English.  But occasionally, glimpses of
Scots bleed through, and when they do, the way Urquhart uses his Scots is
significantly modern.  In a way, all modern Scots prose writers are his
children, a fact possibly acknowledged by Alasdair Gray when he made
Urquhart the hero of one of his 'Unlikely Stories, Mostly', 'Logopandocy',
which also offers a pastiche of Urquhart's prose style.

Urquhart was born in 1611, into a Scotland that was now part of the United
Kingdom.  His family was Catholic, turned Episcopalian, and in the disputes
between church and crown that punctuated the 17th Century, he was
essentially Royalist.  He attended university in Aberdeen, at the age of
11, but did not graduate.  He travelled in Europe, returning to Scotland
when civil war was threatening, and when it was clear that his father's
refusal to sign the covenant was putting him in a difficult position.  When
Aberdeen was taken by Covenanting forces in 1640, Urquhart fled to England
where he was accepted into the court circle, being knighted in 1641.  Here,
he began to write, two books of epigrams which received little attention,
and a book on trigonometry which if anything established his reputation as
an eccentric.  This is from the trigonometry book, 'Trissotetras' (1641):

'In all plain rectangled triangles, the ambients are equall in power to the
subtendent; for by demitting from the right angle a perpendicular, there
will arise two correctangles, from whose equiangularity with the great
rectangle will proceed such a proportion amongst the homologall sides of
all the three, that if you can set them right in the rule, beginning your
analogy at the main subtendent (seeing the including sides of the totall
rectangle prove subtendents in the partiall correctangles, and the bases of
those rectanglets, the segments of the great subtendent) it will fall out,
that as the main subtendent is to his base, on either side (for either of
the legs of a rectangled triangle, in reference to one another is both base
and perpendicular) so the same bases, which are subtendents in the lesser
rectangles, are to their bases, the segments of the prime subtendent. 
Then, by the golden rule, we find, that the multiplying of the middle
termes (which is nothing else but the squaring of the comprehending sides
of the prime rectangular) affords two products, equall to the oblongs made
of the great subtendent, and his respective segments, the aggregate
whereof, by equation, is the same with the square of the chief subtendent,
or hypotenusa, which was to be demonstrated.'

It might not be immediately obvious, but if you vaguely remember your
school geometry you might just recognise this as Pythagoras' Theorem: if
you have a right-angled triangle, then the square of the hypotenuse (the
long side) is the sum of the squares of the other two sides.  Urqhuart
takes this (reasonably simple) geometric theorem, and elaborates it to the
point of absurdity – the 'Trissotetras' is a parody of the continental
style of prose writing – the long periodic sentences, built up of
subordinate clauses, parentheses, and embedded phrases.  But as with many
parodies, Urquhart seems in love with the object of his attack – there is
an infectious energy to the wilful obscurity of this joke geometry
treatise.  The obscure Greek terms and technical neologisms give the
treatise the attraction of nonsense poetry – it might be argued that a
Scot writing in English (still at this time a foreign dialect if not a
foreign accent) is more likely to accentuate the foreigness of his written
medium.  It is a strategy used much later in prose by James Joyce (in
'Finnegan's Wake') and in poetry by Hugh MacDiarmid (in his later poems in
'synthetic English', such as 'On a Raised Beach').  Certainly Urquhart's
English is never straightforward.

Urquhart was part of the court circle in England for three years; however,
on the death of his father he returned to manage the estate in Cromarty,
combining this with spells of travel abroad.  He was appalled at the
execution of Charles I and in 1649 and 1650 he joined with Royalist
uprisings in Scotland against the republican side in England.  He was
captured at the battle of Worcester and spent time imprisoned in the Tower
of London and then in Windsor Castle.  Alasdair Gray's short story imagines
a meeting between the Scottish Royalist and the Latin secretary to Oliver
Cromwell, a man by the name of John Milton.  One result of this
imprisonment was that Urquhart was told that his lands in Scotland would be
forfeited if he could not demonstrate that he deserved to keep possession
of them.  Urquhart decided that the best way to demonstrate his worth was
to fulfil his literary ambitions, and so he set about writing and
publishing four books between 1652 and 1653, all with the express purpose
of showing that their author was a heroic figure, a prodigious intellectual
from a noble family.  The first book, 'Pantochronocanon', constructs a
family tree that traces the Urquhart family line all the way back to Adam;
the second, 'Ekskubalauron' (now known better by its subtitle, 'The
Jewel'), sets about drawing up the principles for a very useful universal
language, but also contains passages of narrative about a character called
'The Admirable Crichton', a heroic Scot in Europe. 'Ekskubalauron', like
most of Urquhart's book titles, is a new word, coined from Greek: it
literally means 'gold out of dung', and the English title 'The Jewel' is a
reference to the fable of the Cock and the Jasp that Henryson has a version
of.  The third book, 'Logopandecteision', is largely a reprint of the
previous book, with some additional passages attacking Urquhart's religious
foes and creditors.  The part of 'The Jewel' most often anthologised is the
scene where the Admirable Crichton puts on a dramatic performance at the
court at Mantua, playing fifteen characters on stage for five hours, so
successfully that he has various ladies fainting in the audience.  After
his triumph, he goes to meet his lover, and the subsequent assignation
combines Urqhuart's passionate interest in sex, astronomy, the construction
of sundials, Greek and Latin vocabulary…and, of course, grammar:

'Thus for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with
the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual
unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of
the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of
both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made
the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either.  Here it
was that passion was active, and action passive, they both being overcome
by other, and each the conquerour.  To speak of her hirquitalliency at the
elevation of the pole of his microcosme, or of his luxuriousness to erect a
gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be
expressions full of obscoeness, and offensive to the purity of chaste ears;
yet seeing she was to be his wife, and that she could not be such without
consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may
be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced
act be lawful, that the diction which suppones it, can be of no greater
transgression, unless you would call it a solaecisme, or that vice in
grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine
gender.

visotactil: involving sight & touch
hirquitalliency: delighted shouts
visuriency: desire to be looked at
gnomon: rod
tacturiency: desire to be touched
solaecisme: error in grammar/etiquette
attrectation: touching with hands
exerced act: performed act
definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus: logical definitions are
verified by actual things'

This might be the first sex scene in Scottish prose.  John Knox it ain't,
and not just because it plays about with metaphors for sexual congress: the
rising of the pole star, the erection of a rod on a sundial, and the
ungrammatical 'copulation' of a masculine subject with a feminine
complement.  The prose style is very unlike the plain style that we have
inherited from the reformers.  Again, we have the elaborate periodic
sentences, the neologisms coined from Latin and Greek, and (as in the joke
geometry book) a wildly elaborate habit of circumlocution – of avoiding
direct statement of a simple fact ('they had sex') in favour of absurd
euphemisms and obscure allusions, even Latin tags.  The prose style can be
termed 'baroque' after the excessively decorated, grotesquely ornate
architecture of the late renaissance.

It is a translation of another baroque work, Urquhart's last major literary
effort while imprisoned, that is his greatest and most lasting achievement
– the translation from French of three of François Rabelais' comic prose
narratives about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel.   Rabelais
(c1494-c1553) was a Franciscan monk, then a physician, and subsequently a
satirist.  His satires, which he began publishing in 1532, were highly
successful, but condemned by the church because of their mockery of
religious practices.  After the publication of the third book in the
series, he actually had to flee to Metz, where he practised medicine and
continued publishing there.  The choice of a tremendously rude, surreal
anticlerical satire to translate in order to impress a puritanical
republican administration still strikes me as odd, even though the
anticlerical satire is directed at the Catholic church.  AD Mackie has
argued that 'It wes a Scot, Sir Tam Urquhart, that owreset Rabelais inti a
Suthron muckle enrichit bi Lallans' but if you take a look at Urquhart's
Rabelais, then you're hard-pressed to find much evidence of Scots in it. 
You also have to remember that Urquhart in all his major works is writing
for a very specific audience, namely his English captors and political foes
– he needs to impress them in order to protect his land.  It would be odd
to write largely in Scots for such a specific English-reading audience. 
Moreover, Urquhart is writing at a time when Scots has gone out of fashion,
even in Scotland, as a decorous written medium for literature.  English is
reaching its final phase of standardisation – there is not yet a great
English dictionary, authoritatively setting down the normative spelling for
each English word, but there are spelling books, and even bilingual
word-books in English and other languages.  Urquhart demonstrably had
access to one of these bilingual word-books, Randle Cotgrave's 'Dictionarie
of the French and English Tongues'.  RJ Craik has conclusively demonstrated
the extent to which Urqhuart relied on Cotgrave's dictionary, consulting it
for even the most familiar French words.  Cotgrave had a special symbol [R]
for those words in his dictionary invented by Rabelais, and as a
word-coiner himself, Urquhart would no doubt have enjoyed this aspect of
Rabelais' style.  It has often been said that Urquhart out-does Rabelais,
using six descriptive words where Rabelais only uses four (his translation
of the first three books of Rabelais is half again as long as his source
text), but Craik shows that often this lexical abundancy in Urquhart
derives ultimately from Cotgrave.  If Cotgrave defines one of Rabelais'
terms with three English words, Urquhart simply uses them all.  As Craik
says:

'To the already grotesque and gigantic world of 'Gargantua and Pantagruel'
the transplanting of Cotgrave's synonyms and variants adds still more
colour while leaving unaltered the structural details of Rabelais' tale. 
Once the reader is familiar with Urquhart's expansive methods, he may
suspect the occasions when Cotgrave is consulted, especially when he
encounters short lists, or pairs of words joined by "and" or "or"'. (Craik,
1993: 138)

Urquhart's use of Cotgrave as a point of linguistic reference is
significant in the steady decline of the use of Scots in the 17th Century
as a formal, public, high-style language.  Cotgrave's after all is a
dictionary of French and English; the first extensive monolingual Scots
dictionary, Jamieson's, would not appear until the early 19th Century.  The
only bilingual dictionaries of Scots so far to have appeared are
Scots-English, not Scots-French or Scots-Spanish.  As a translator, then,
Urquhart had to depend on sources that pushed him further towards English
usage.  Even so, there are episodes in Urqhuart's Rabelais when Scots can
be found.  And when you do, it's interesting to see what Urquhart is doing
with it.  I want to focus on two examples.  The first occurs when
Pantagruel meets Panurge, and the two characters attempt to converse.  The
problem is that they do not speak the same language.  In Rabelais, Panurge
attempts to communicate in various languages, ranging from the familiar, to
the obscure and invented: German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Basque, Danish,
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Puzlatory and Buffoonish.  To this sequence of
'double dutch' attempts at communication, Urquhart adds the following:

'Then said Panurge, Lard, ghest tholb be sua virtuis be intelligence ass yi
body schall biss naturall relvth, tholb suld of me pety have; for natur
hass ulss egualy maide; bot fortune sum exaltit hess and oyis deprevit. 
Non ye less viois mou virtius deprevit and virtiuss men discrivis, for anen
ye lad end iss non gud.  Yet lesse said Pantagruel…
('Gargantua and Pantagruel', Bk 2, Ch IX)'

The 'double dutch' that Panurge is speaking here seems to be older Scots. 
There are other elements in it: the <y> is an archaic representation of
<th> (the same <y> as in <ye olde coffee shoppe>) but if this is largely
nonsense, then it's nonsense in something like Scots.  One giant seems to
be saying to the other: 'Lord, if you are so virtuous by intelligence as
your body shall be naturally merciful, you should have pity on me, for
nature has made us equally; but fortune has exalted some and deprived
others' – but it is difficult to make out the rest.  There are here some
Scots markers, several of which we saw last term: the recognisably Scots
<schall>, <sua>, <exaltit>, <deprevit>, <discrivis> [describes], <anen> and
<gud>.  What is significant about this passage is that Urquhart is
implicitly associating older Scots texts with obscure and unreadable
language: Panurge's plea is not understood by Pantagruel because it is in a
barely comprehensible form of language.  Half a century after the Union of
the Crowns the very language written at the Scottish court during the late
king's earlier life is now regarded as archaic, obscure, 'double dutch'. 
We can hear the death knell for Scots as a potential formal standard; it is
by Urquhart's time, quite literally, a joke.  What future then is there for
written Scottish prose?  Urquhart, in another brief passage from
'Pantagruel', gives us a clue.

In this passage, Pantagruel encounters a pretentious student from
provincial Limoges, a 'Limousin'.  The student (in the original text) makes
the mistake of affecting the latinised French of the capital, and the giant
decides to take him down a peg:

'By G—(said Pantagruel), I will teach you to speak, but first come
hither, and tell me whence thou art?  To this the Scholar answered: The
primeval origin of my aves and ataves was indigenerie of the Lemovick
regions, where requiesceth the corpor of the hagiotat St. Martial.  I
understand thee very well (said Pantagruel), when all comes to all, thou
art a Limousin, and thou wilt here by thy affected speech counterfeit the
Parisiens: well, now, come hither, I must shew thee a new trick, and
handsomely give thee combfeat: with this he took him by the throat, saying
to him, Thou flayest the Latine: by St. John, I will make thee flay the
foxe, for I will now flay thee alive: Then began the poor Limousin to cry;
Haw, gwid Maaster, haw, Laord, my halp and St. Marshaw, haw, I'm worried:
Haw, my thropple, the bean of my cragg is bruck!  Haw, for gauad's seck,
lawt my lean, Mawster; waw, waw, waw.  Now (said Pantagruel) thou speakest
naturally, and so let him go, for the poor Limousin had totally berayed,
and throughly conshit his breeches…'

'…but this hug of Pantagruels was such a terrour to him all the dayes of
his life, and took such deep impression in his fancie, that very often,
distracted with sudden affrightments, he would startle and say that
Pantagruel held him by the neck; besides that it procured him in a
continual drought and desire to drink, so that after some few years he died
of the death Roland, in plain English called thirst, a work of divine
vengeance, shewing us that which saith the Philosopher and Aulus Gellius,
that it becometh us to speak according to the common language: and that we
should, (as said Octavian Augustus) strive to shun all strange and unknown
termes with as much heedfulnesse and circumspection as Pilots of ships use
to avoid the rocks and banks in the sea.('Gargantua and Pantagruel', Bk 2,
Ch VI)'

The code-switching in this passage is fascinating: the dominant narrative
is in English, as is the direct speech of Pantagruel.  This, then, is the
privileged, prestigious code.  The direct speech of the Limousin, initially
affected and then 'naturally' provincial, is first of all the latinised
English that Urquhart affects elsewhere in his writings, as we have seen,
and then secondly the localised Aberdeenshire of his upbringing and
university days.  This is not the pastiche older Scots of the passage we
looked at earlier: the phonetic spellings point to very specific regional
Scots: the /w/ in <gwid>, the long vowels in <Maaster, gauad> and the
dropping of the /l/ in <Marshaw> are not part of traditional Scots
orthography; they are spellings that represent the author's own regional
accent.  There are also more general Scots expressions -- <thrapple>,
throat, <cragg> neck, <my lean> alone – but here we have the use of
phonetic spellings in direct speech dramatically to represent a provincial
Scotsman…a technique that will be taken up to some extent by the poets of
the 18th Century and the novelists and dramatists of the 19th and 20th
Centuries.  

The Limousin is the object of linguistic and social mockery in the passage,
yet it is difficult not to identify the Limousin with Urquhart himself. 
Urquhart, like his fellow Scots, would have been a provincial at Charles
I's court, his 'natural' north-eastern speech would have seemed rustic and
comic in London, and in his writing he often affected an obscure style
deliberately drenched in Latin and Greek neologisms and borrowings. 
Self-mockery is not widely considered to be one of Urquhart's more obvious
characteristics – rather the reverse – but he must have recognised
aspects of his own history in the language of the Limousin.  It is
therefore all the more poignant, as well as ironic, when a few lines after
the encounter with Pantagruel, we are told that the Limousin died of an
enormous thirst and that this is evidence of divine vengeance on those who
use affected language.

This is an important point in the linguistic history of literary Scots.  As
the move towards a standard Scots is arrested in the late 16th Century, we
find the rise in the 17th Century of a range of non-standard varieties,
that can carry regional and social meanings that a deracinated, homogenised
standard cannot.  Scottish writers who use specific varieties of Scots to
identify the social and regional roots of their characters can trace their
literary genealogy back to that arch genealogist, Urquhart.

Urquhart's importance is undervalued, I think.  Possibly this is because
none of his books made much impact at the time – they were, perhaps,
considered too eccentric, as I have said, and the lack of response made
Urquhart abandon his translation of Rabelais after Book 3.  Later readers
and writers recognised his worth, though.  In the 18th Century, Sir
Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scotsman who wrote the first English-language
prose essay on the theory of translation, singled Urquhart out for special
praise, despite his vulgarity.  The Urquhart translation of Rabelais is by
common consent the finest of all English-language versions, and remains in
print today – it is the cheap Everyman edition, for example, probably for
copyright reasons as much as its literary worth.  And Urquhart influences
all later translations of Rabelais into English, including JM Cohen's
modern translation for the Penguin Classics series, done in the mid 1950's.
 In his introduction, Cohen acknowledges his debt to Urquhart 'for a
phrase' here and there.  In the Limousin episode, the homage goes further:

'By God,' cried Pantagruel, 'I'll teach you to speak.  But before I do so,
tell me one thing.  Where do you come from?'
To which the scholar replied: 'The primeval origin of my aves and ataves
was indigenous to the Lemovic regions, where requiesces the corpus of the
hagiotate Saint Martial.'
'I understand you all right,' said Pantagruel.  'What it comes to is that
you're a Limousin, and here you want to play the Parisian.  Well, come on
then, and I'll give you a combing.'  Then he took him by the throat and
continued, 'You murder Latin, by Saint John, I'll make you skin the fox. 
I'll skin you alive.'
Then the poor Limousin began to plead: 'Haw, guid master!  Haw lordie! 
Help me, St Marshaw.  Ho, let me alane, for Gaud's sake and dinna hairm
me!'
Whereupon Pantagruel replied, 'Now you're speaking naturally,' and released
him.
('Gargantua and Pantagruel', trans. JM Cohen,  Bk 2, Ch IX)

It's interesting to compare Cohen's and Urquhart's use of Scots in this
passage.  Where Urquhart opts for a more localised variety – his Limousin
is obviously Aberdonian – Cohen opts for a more generalised rural
Scotsman.  His spelling of <guid> is more standardised, and could be
pronounced in various ways (.  Cohen can be considered an  English
translator, using a generalised Scots speech to brand the Scotsman as
provincial; Urqhuart's specific use of his native Aberdonian to do the same
thing is powerfully indicative of how upper-class Scots of his time were
beginning to perceive the way they spoke – they, too, are beginning to
associate it with provincialism and low comedy.  Only seventy years before
Urquhart's translation, as we have seen, King James VI was commissioning
translations into Scots and writing advice for Scottish poets in the Scots
tongue.  By Urquhart's time, the written language of these translations
seems quaint and obscure, and its spoken equivalent is regarded as
unsophisticated and comic.  English seemed to have triumphed… but in
Urquhart's prose there are also clues to the way Scots will be revived.  It
will have the dramatic power to represent the spoken voice, particularly
the voice of the peasant, the worker on the land, and it will be able to
dramatise that voice in all its local and social specificity, in a way that
a bland standard English cannot.

I want, in conclusion, to touch on a topic related to Urquhart's use of
language in the Rabelais translation that is potentially rich but strangely
unexplored.  Rabelais figures large in the critical writings of the early
20th Century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin.  Bakhtin wrote on
numerous topics, including psychology (a critique of Freud), language (a
critique of Saussure) and literature (discourse and the novel; Rabelais and
the concept of 'carnival').   I know that Chris Whyte lectures to you on
the way Bakhtinian concepts of carnival can be applied to 18th Century
poems like 'Christis Kirk on the Grene' and Burns' 'The Holy Fair'; it's
worth, then, looking briefly at how Bakhtinian concepts of discourse and
carnival apply to the Scottish translation of the author that inspired
them, Rabelais.

For Bakhtin, Rabelais falls into the baroque tradition in early prose
writing.  As we have seen, Urquhart's writings fall into this tradition too
– if anything, they out-baroque Rabelais, adding ornamentation to an
already ornate style.  The baroque decoration in Urquhart is also in the
line of descent from the high style, latinate poetry of the mediaeval
makers, as mediated by the polished periodic sentences of the (particularly
Catholic) renaissance prose writers.  These were traditions that were
ultimately to be swept away by the plain style prose of the victorious
reformers in the 16th Century.  For Bakhtin, the distinctive stylistic
characteristic of the novel is its potential for polyphony and
heteroglossia, that is, its ability to contain (a) different languages, and
(b) different social varieties and registers.  We have seen these qualities
in the passages from 'The Jewel' and 'Gargantua and Pantagruel'.  In the
former, the registers associated with astronomy and grammar are mixed
comically with a narrative relating a sexual encounter.  The English is
semi-latinate, and we even find a Latin proverb.  In the latter, the
situation is even more complicated: latinate English and then Aberdonian
dialect represent the French of Paris and Limoges, respectively, and
plainer English represents French.  The distribution of varieties
delineates the characters of plain-speaking Pantagruel, and the affected
Limousin scholar.  The translation picks up resonances specific to the
translator: the mock-Latin and Aberdonian echo the writing and accent of
Urquhart himself, and the apostrophe to St Martial (or St Marshaw) might
remind us that the young Urquhart attended Aberdeen University, whose
principal college is St Martial's College.  Bakhtin's view of language is
that it is primarily dialogic: all speech and writing is a response to
someone else's speech and writing, and is formulated in anticipation of a
further response.  This dialogic process is particularly appropriate to
translation: Urquhart's 'Pantagruel' is a response to Rabelais' Pantagruel,
and both anticipate Cohen's 'Pantagruel'.  Urquhart borrows and reshapes
Rabelais language, mediated by Cotgrave's dictionary, adding and
subtracting meanings as he goes, and Cohen borrows and reshapes Rabelais,
mediated by Urquhart's translation.  No text appears from a vacuum; each
must be viewed as the result of a continuing dialogue between a
multiplicity of authors and their texts.  (There is an argument for
rethinking late 16th Century Scottish poetry and prose as a Bakhtinian
dialogue between Scottish writers and Scottish, English and continental
texts and readers…but I'll leave that to one of you to pick up as an
Honours dissertation.)

A final point about the Bakhtinian concept of carnival.  As this is a
literary concept it might not seem to have much linguistic relevance, but I
think it does.  Bakhtin linked the notion of carnival to his critique of
Freud.  Bakhtin liked the notion of the conscious and the unconscious, but
did not like Freud's implication that they were biologically innate, that
they were somehow there, in the realm of the mind.  Bakhtin reinterpreted
Freud in social and linguistic terms: consciousness was redefined as that
which could be articulated, and the unconscious was that which could not be
articulated, or that which was not yet articulated.  Since all language is
dialogue, it follows that expression – the ability to articulate –
exists in the 'border zone' between the individual and society.  There is
pressure from society to articulate particular concepts and to suppress
others; there is pressure from individual, with his or her often
transgressive desires, to articulate things of which 'official' society
does not approve.  Bakhtin, of course, was writing in a period of Stalinist
oppression – he was sentenced to internal exile for his work, and
apparently published under the pseudonyms of several of his friends, one of
whom was subsequently sacked from his university post, tried and shot. 
'Carnival' for Bakhtin was freedom of expression: the rude, surreal,
scatalogical, low and violent humour of the pompous Limousin shitting
himself as he is throttled by the giant represents the victory of the
individual's primal desires against the decorous, polite, regulating forces
of official consciousness.  The literary-linguistic upshot of all this is
that the rules of decorum, codified in the late 16th Century in Scots by a
Scottish king, the very epitome, after all, of official consciousness, get
thrown away.  Parody and an energetic mixture of styles take over in
carnivalesque writing.  It's not new – you can argue that 'The Tretis of
the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo' is carnivalesque: the primal desires of
the women are pitched against the official consciousness of the
eavesdropping male.  The widow's advice to her younger friends parodies in
exact detail the structure of a saint's life, as she tells them her history
of seduction, blackmail and debauchery.  And it's there in Urquhart, in
spades: in the use of technical and erudite language to portray the sexual
congress of two lovers, and in the use of baroque prose and high language
to tell the scatalogical adventures of a family of giants and their comic
encounters as they wander through France.

I hope I've managed to endear Urquhart to you.  In some ways his prose is
manifestly of its time: the long, complex periodic sentences, adorned with
classical borrowings and Latin tags, harked back to a continental tradition
that became associated in Scotland and England with Catholic apologists,
and the Episcopalian royalist, Urquhart, falls into that category.  The
reformers won out, and we are the inheritors of a plain style as the
vehicle for unadorned truth, and we are suspicious of purple patches.  With
Urquhart, of course, there are no purple patches: it's purple, all the way
through.  Yet in other ways his writings are curiously modern: the fondness
for parody, the excesses, and – most pertinently for this class – his
very occasional use of Scots in direct speech to localise a character by
region (if not yet by class).  Urquhart was released from prison, and he
spent the last years of his life in exile, in Holland.  He died suddenly in
1660, on the same day that Charles II, supported by Scottish troops, was
restored to the crown of the United Kingdom.  His death is reported to be
the result of an excessive fit of laughter on hearing the news – an
appropriate way to go.


This work is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The SCOTS Project and the University of Glasgow do not necessarily endorse,
support or recommend the views expressed in this document.

Information about document and author:

Text
Text audience
Adults (18+): Informed lay people: Males: Females: Audience size: 21-100

Text details
Method of composition: Wordprocessed
Word count: 5187

Text setting
Education: 
Text type
Prepared text (e.g. lecture/talk, sermon, public address/speech): Other: Lecture


Author
Author details
Author id: 608
Title: Dr
Forenames: John
Initials: B
Surname: Corbett
Gender: Male
Decade of birth: 1950
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 17
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Protestantism
Occupation: University Professor
Place of birth: Ayr
Region of birth: S Ayr
Birthplace CSD dialect area: Ayr
Country of birth: Scotland
Place of residence: Bridge of Weir
Region of residence: Renfrew
Residence CSD dialect area: Renfr
Country of residence: Scotland
Father's occupation: Insurance Broker
Father's place of birth: Auchinleck
Father's region of birth: S Ayr
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Ayr
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's occupation: Dental Receptionist
Mother's place of birth: Ayr
Mother's region of birth: S Ayr
Mother's birthplace CSD dialect area: Ayr
Mother's country of birth: Scotland

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: In most everyday situations
Language: Portuguese
Speak: Yes
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: When trying to communicate with my in-laws
Language: Scots
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: In domestic/activist circles; reading literature