Editing and Introduction by Claire Longing, Colin Sproles, Katherine Christy, and McKenzie Vines
Claire Longing, Colin Sproles, Katherine Christy, and McKenzie Vines are undergraduate students at the University of Central Arkansas
Elizabeth Melvill, now Ladie Culros Yonger, was born in or after 1575 near Collessie, Fife, Scotland. She was a young woman very dedicated to her education as well as her role as a poet. She was a well known Reformed Protestant and an active supporter of radical Presbyterianism.
A good bit of her poems included details about her spiritual journey and beliefs while also implementing themes of issues that were going on at the time. The significant work of “A Godly Dream” was published in Edinburgh in 1606 by Robert Charteris, who was the king’s printer at the time. The work starts out talking about the struggles of living a sinful life and the wretchedness of the world around the speaker. They then fall asleep and their spirit goes into a dream and is met by a guide that identifies himself as “I am thy God” (A4r, Line 7). The writer uses this allegory of a dream to demonstrate one’s spiritual journey is not an easy journey to walk. The author expresses that the road with Christ is narrow and the wide one, the road without him, leads to destruction. There are biblical principles that are emphasized such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life”, a reference from John 14:6, and “I am thy spouse”, alluding to the principle that Christ is married to the bride of Christ, the Church.
There are a couple of things we would recommend one should know before reading this text. We recommend that the reader should understand the things that are going on politically during that time period. There was a lot of religious tension that was present because of the English reformation. Another thing is that there is a lot of allegory being used throughout the text, meaning there are a lot of allusions and imagery that have a deeper meaning behind them. Although it might be a bit tricky to understand at first, it might be best to read slowly to first try to understand the allusion and then dive deeper to understand what the text is alluding to.
Editorial Note
Throughout the process of editing Yonger and Melvill’s “A Godlie Dreame”, our group decided to edit the words in the text that were not of modern spelling. There were a lot of words that had extra vowels within and at the end of them. This is an effect of the time period in which this piece was written. Words were spelled however the writer thought they sounded. Alternatively, in our modern English, we don’t use extra vowels to spell words that don’t actually need them. An example of this would be, “dream” instead of “dreame”. In addition to spelling, we made the correction of certain consonants that are now spelled with vowels, such as “doing” instead of “dwning”. Another editorial decision that we made was to change some of the Old English language into Modern English. There were a lot of uses of words like “Thou” and “Thy” that we changed to their modern translation. There were other minor changes to spelling that we corrected, but the last significant thing we decided to edit was some syntax errors. Some of the sentences didn’t flow smoothly, which led to some comprehension issues, so we used some more modern synonyms to help with that.
Bibliography
Hagan, Anette. Review of Blazing a Trail, Review of A Godlie Dreame Scottish Review of Books, 8 Mar. 2019, pp. 1–1. https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/free-content/nls-trailblazing/