Author: Scott, Alexander
Biography:
SCOTT, Alexander (c. 1520-1582/3: ODNB)
Although there had been earlier printings of some of Scott’s verse by Allan Ramsay in The Evergreen (1720) and in two collections listed in this bibliography—Ancient Scottish Poems (1770, 1780) and A Chronicle of Scottish Poetry (1802)—David Laing’s was the first complete edition. Laing transcribed the poems from the 16th-century Bannatyne manuscript which is now in the NLS. He summarised what little was then known about Scott in his introduction. More information has since come to light and we know that Scott was born in about 1520 and was probably the Alexander Scott who was a musician and a prebendary of the chapel royal in Stirling, Scotland. No record of a marriage has been found but a note in the Bannatyne manuscript indicates that Scott had a wife; he also had two sons, one of whom was named Alexander. Scott was a servant to John Erskine, one of two curators of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the longest of his poems, “New Yeir Gift,” was composed as an address to her. He is known to have lived near Stirling in the 1570s. Scott died sometime between 15 June 1582 and 30 July 1583. For a biographical notice of David Laing see the headnote for William Dunbar. George Bannatyne (ODNB: 1545-1607/8), the compiler of the manuscript in which Scott's poems were preserved, included some of his own verse with that of others; it is printed in Laing's The Poems of George Bannatyne (1824) but with just 9 pages of verse the book is not included in this database. (ODNB 26 Sept. 2024; David Laing, “Introduction,” Poems by Alexander Scott [1821]) SR