Sir David Lyndsay had revised and expanded his 1540 morality play The Satyre of the Thrie Estatis for a 1552 production, juxtaposing lively colloquial diction and comic character portrayal with moving and earnest satire of political and ecclesiastical corruption.

Lyndsay’s support for his contemporary, Scottish reformer John Knox, and his fervent belief in the need for just government and religious reform, is reflected in his allegorical poem of 1553, A Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, which is in part an indictment of Catholicism.

Scottish poet Gawin Douglas’s The Palace of Honour is posthumously published in the same year, as is the Eneados, his outstanding translation of Vergil’s Aenid.

Among the earliest translations of the Aeneid into a dialect of English, and the first successful example of its kind in the British Isles, it adheres closely to the Latin original.

Douglas captures the joy and brightness of Vergil, and makes good use of the great range of words available to him, particularly in describing storms and the sea.

In his original prologues to each book of the Aeneid, Douglas includes much fine literary criticism, autobiography, and nature description.