THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Blyithnes in hart, with small possessioun’.
Henryson’s explorations of, and extrapolations from, purely human relationships equally attempt to intermix what
his original readers would have readily recognized as ‘earnest’ and ‘game’. At one extreme, The Bludy Serk interprets
the story of a knight killed by a giant as he rescues a princess from his thrall as a parable of Christ’s salvation of the
human soul (‘godis dochtir deir’). In a far more relaxed moral vein, Robene and Makyne takes the form of a spirited
pastoral dialogue between a shepherd and a country girl in which he first spurns her, changes his mind, and then
finds that she has, quite properly, lost interest in him. Henryson’s most moving poem, The Testament of Cresseid,
shifts us into a very different aspect of ‘game’, this time a ‘play’ with the idea of a continuation of Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde. Right from the beginning of the poem it is obvious that the ‘game’ is very much in earnest. In a ‘doolie
[mournful] sessoun’, the poet makes himself a drink (‘my spreitis to comfort’), stirs his fire to keep warm, and takes
up Chaucer’s poem to read ‘to cut the winter nicht and make it schort’. As he insists, the ‘careful dyte’ - the
melancholy poem - and the season ‘correspond’ and are ‘equivalent’. Images of cold and human misery haunt his own
poem which describes Cresseid’s unhappy life after the end of Chaucer’s narrative and after her desertion by the
feckless Diomeid. When Cresseid curses Venus and Cupid for betraying her, she sees a vision of the planetary gods
led by a miserably frosty Saturn (‘His teith chatterit and cheverit [shivered] with the Chin, | His Ene drowpit, how
sonkin [sunken) his heid, | Out of his Nois [nose] the meldrop [mucus] fast can rin’). The gods curse her impiety and
Saturn afflicts her with a disfiguring leprosy. When Cynthia, the moon goddess, declares, ‘Fra heit of bodie I the now
deprive’, we appreciate how, her passion spent, she too has been given over to the cold. The most painful section of
the poem, that in which Henryson’s Chaucerian ‘pitee’ for his subject is most evident, describes the brief encounter of
Troilus and Cresseid. Neither recognizes the other:
[p. 72]
Then upon him scho kest up baith hir ene,
And with ane blenk it came into his thocht
That he sumtime hir face befoir had sene.
Bot scho was in sic plye [plight] he knew hir nocht;
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.
He passes by, giving the unknown leper a purse of gold ‘for knichtlie pietie and memoriall’. When she learns the
identity of her distant benefactor, she can only agonize over her desertion of a lost and noble lover. Henryson may end
his poem with an insistence that his women readers should not ruin themselves by an indulgence in ‘fals deceptioun’
but it is plain that his sympathy for the desperately miserable Cresseid is grounded in the fact of her painful and self
accusatory discovery of herself. Unlike the April with which Chaucer optimistically begins his Canterbury Tales or
the bright May of a whole succession of garden-based courtly lovers, the ‘doolie sessoun’ has found its ‘cairfull’
subject.
The gnawing cold of the ‘dirk [dark] and drublie [cloudy] dayis’ of a northern winter is also pointedly recalled in
William Dunbar’s lyric ‘In Winter’. Dunbar is a far more various, far more obviously ‘courtly’ and generally less
consistently impressive poet than Henryson. He consciously identified himself with the upper areas of the Scottish
court and its ‘nobles off bluid’ and he was happy both to provide the right poem for the right official occasion (such as
his allegorical celebration of the marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor in 1503, The Thrissill and the Rose) and to
throw off versified complaints about the non-payment of his royal salary (such as the gently mocking Respontio
regis). Dunbar’s variety is evident in his range of subjects and metres. He could, for example, turn his hand to the
splendidly witty account of a meeting of gossips, The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, and allow his merry widow
(who owes something to the Wife of Bath) to confess that she wears colourful and fashionable clothes under her weeds
and that she can impress her late husband’s friends by finding ready tears in a conveniently hidden sponge (‘Than
wring I it full wylely and wetis my chekis | ... Than say thai all that sittis about, “Se ye nought, allace [alas] | Yone
lustlese led (unhappy woman], so leleley [loyally] scho luflit hir husband” ’). He could also debunk the fraudulent
claims of an alchemical friar to be able to fly by calling all the birds of the air to witness against him in Ane Ballat of
the Fenyeit Frier of Tungland. Nevertheless, the same poet could address a devout, and far more lexically and
metrically challenging, ‘ballat’ to the Blessed Virgin Mary and celebrate the resurrection of Christ with a triumphant
and sonorous paean of joy:
Done is a battel on the dragon blak;
Our campioun Chryst confoundit hes his force: