Jacobean to Early Stuart: Scottish and English Poetry and Poetics

This chapter reviews the potential for impact of a Scottish poetics on early-Stuart English literary culture around the succession of James VI/I (1603). It identifies four sites of convergence: first, a Jacobean poetics shaped by the pre-1603 court cultures of James VI; second, a Scottish Protestant poetry; third, the emergence of newly fashioned identities for poets and writers (the ‘Scoto-Britains’); and fourth, the interchange of books and manuscripts across the border, which also saw some Scottish poets in English printed collections, and the appearance of English and Scottish poetry alongside each other in manuscript verse anthologies. Much traditional criticism of seventeenth-century English poetry ignores what cultural imports the newly crowned king may have brought with him, and so this chapter argues that there was in fact a dynamic relationship between aspects of Scottish and English poetry and poetics.