This chapter addresses what theology might become when it is lyrically articulated: less dogmatic, more material; less sure of what it knows, more frank about what it desires. Through a sustained meditation on the work of poets Elizabeth Bradfield, Marie Howe, and Suzanne Paola, as well as that of theologians Josef Pieper and Herbert McCabe, it becomes possible to speak of the body and God, of sex and the sacred, as mutually disclosive. Theology has, for this chapter as for many of its sources, no proper language; the improprieties of lyric may, therefore, provide a particularly appropriate and attentive way of speaking the divine, no more or less than the human.

The introduction briefly outlines the literary culture of fifteenth-century Scotland and the contexts in which Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar were writing. Each text is described and some pertinent critical discourses regarding the works are discussed. Next, the narrative grotesque is situated within a broader critical history related to the critical term ‘grotesque’, which arose in reference to architectural decorations in the late fifteenth century before being adopted into other intellectual discourses. The narrative grotesque is defined as a distinct variety of the grotesque, since it is not limited to visual images and, rather, extends to textual corruptions, hybridisations, and ruptures that are paired with the dissonant affective reactions of horror and humour. The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo are shown to be exemplary starting points for the wider application of the narrative grotesque, since both exhibit numerous and varied ‘grotesqueries’.

Chapter 5 compares the two most significant nationalisation projects to emerge from this context: the referendums on Scottish independence and Britain’s EU membership. The chapter shows that it is not simply a coincidence that these two key questions of Britain’s constitution – Scotland and the EU – became urgent enough for referendums within eighteen months of each other. Both projects were nationalist backlashes against the British state, one from England, the other from Scotland. The chapter explores what an English revolt against the EU through nationalising Britain means.

Building on the way in which intertextuality problematises the concept of linearity in relation to textual transmission, this chapter interrogates the tendency in Bullough-derived critical discourse to distinguish between text and ‘background’. The argument builds on Hulme and Barker’s conceptualisation of ‘con-text’ as part of a constellation of active textual components that are in constant dialogue with each other, rather than as texts that are hierarchically arranged.

Chapter 4 discusses sound in the plays of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare does employ sound effects (as shown throughout this book), the focus of this chapter is on his use of speech to describe and therefore create sound on stage. Following Ross Brown’s claim that ‘Sound is a perceived phenomenon, nothing but subjective interference’, it examines ‘subjective’ sound effects, created in the minds of an audience, entirely by rhetoric. This chapter ranges through Shakespeare’s plays and discusses how the description of sound, here called ‘phonographic’ sound, can create complex and even contradictory soundscapes, heard in the mind. It considers speeches which serve an ekphrastic purpose in describing sound and suggests that the description of sound only emphasises its subjectivity. Shakespeare’s plays ask for sound to be imagined rather than heard: his sound is neither fixed nor certain. Tracing Shakespeare’s metaphor of written sound as paint throughout his work and offering The Tempest and King Lear as case studies, this chapter ranges across Shakespeare’s work to examine his described sound.

This chapter summarises the argument of the book, and looks forward to the ways in which some of these models of childhood were reiterated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the final chapter on The Palyce of Honour the narrative strands are brought together by examining the ways in which Gavin Douglas weaves together pagan allegory with Christianity. The poem is demonstrated to create multiple intersecting hierarchies that highlight Douglas’s humanist-complected understanding of poetics as a mode of divine illumination. The figure of Venus in medieval cosmology and astrology is especially important to this phase of the discussion. Meanwhile, the motifs of are developed from their introduction in the previous chapter. Lastly, Douglas the poet is integrated as contributing yet another subjectivity through his dedication to James IV of Scotland which brings the Scottish king into the hierarchies discovered by the dreamer-narrator.