Alexander Montgomerie

The outstanding courtier-poet of the Scottish reign of James VI and I, Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1550-1598) was a gifted lyricist whose Catholicism made his position at court unusually problematic. This study combines a detailed investigation of Montgomerie's biography with a careful reading of his verse, bringing out the ways in which the poet's increasingly difficult personal circumstances are reflected in the development of a new poetics. It also seeks to situate Montgomerie's poetry within a two-pronged model of later sixteenth-century British culture against the background of the European development of Mannerist aesthetics and the emergence of the early Baroque.