RICHARD HOLLAND AND "THE BUKE OF THE HOWLAT": REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

One problem case (though not necessarily for all the reasons just mentioned) is Richard Holland's mid-fifteenth-century poem The Buke of the Howlat, pronounced by the most recent editor 'more narrowly datable, on internal grounds, than most medieval poems'.3 Despite the latter claim, much of the attention paid to the poem has been devoted to determining the date of composition, and over the years a perhaps surprising number of suggestions have been advanced.4 The present essay revisits this vexed issue from a new perspective - one which allows for the possibility that the textual witnesses (all of which are of the sixteenth century) may actually preserve the poem in a form that allows the poet to respond to circumstances different from those which formed the original background of the work. In other words, the problem of dating the Howlat may be reducible to the impossibility of offering a single date for two chronologically separate states of the poem. The current consensus on dating, it will be argued, overlooks signs of authorial revision, and it has neglected some evidence with a bearing on the moment of revision.