London or the World? The Paradox of Culture in (post-) Jacobean Scotland

Abstract

It is a commonplace of Scottish literary historiography that the accession of James VI to the English throne marked an irreversible turning point, that the departure of the king and his court created a cultural vacuum which would remain unfilled until the published anthologies of Allan Ramsay and James Watson initiated a ‘Vernacular Revival’ a century later. There is, of course, a substantial element of truth in this: by comparison with the achievements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seventeenth-century Scottish literature seems to have little to offer in aesthetic terms, and the displacement of much cultural activity to London undoubtedly played a part in this. Yet the story is, as always, much too complex to be reduced to such stark claims. The Scots tradition had been eroded by the influence of the English Bible from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the undeniable achievements of James’s court circle in the 1580s had to some degree been dissipated by the time of the death of Elizabeth. This is not the place to investigate the forces which had combined to produce this situation, but there is a corresponding argument to be made regarding the immediate aftermath of James’s departure to London. The cultural map of Britain between 1603 and 1642 was more varied than a grand récit constructed by generations of Anglocentric criticism has been prepared to acknowledge, and the commemoration of this quatercentenary provides a splendid opportunity to revise its lineaments.