Pe rhaps because it lies in a valley overshadowed by the twin peaks of Chaucer and Spenser, the English and Scots poetry of the fifteenth century receives relatively little critical or pedagogical attention at the undergraduate level. The anthologies exposing most English majors to early literature present little from the century outside of some anonymous lyrics, some excerpts from Malory, and a few specimens of religious drama. Chaucer's immediate poetic successors -- Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and our instant case, Robert Henryson (1420?-1506?) -- are largely ignored. Moreover, many of these poets' work are difficult to find except in out-of- print scholarly editions or in the editions of the Early English and Scottish Text Societies. A graduate seminar I took in the mid-80's on the century's poetry found itself in the unfortunate case of having to rely on duplicating excerpts from library holdings, as affordable student editions were not at the time in print.
Kindrick's new edition of Henryson's poems, published by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS), takes an admirable step toward filling that deficiency. The volume will not replace Denton Fox's (Oxford, 1981) critical edition of the Scots Chaucerian's works, but it wasn't designed to. As with the other TEAMS volumes, the emphasis is on enabling students to readily engage the poems: lexical glosses are in the margins, explanatory notes are kept to the minimum necessary to understand arcane or local references, and the poems' introductions set up critical and historical contexts without jading a student's reading toward one critical approach over another. The editor's textual decisions seem all quite sensible, especially when the goal is creating tenable readings for the uninitiated. The bibliographies are ample as even the most advanced student would need. This volume may be of interest not only to teachers and students of fifteenth-century works, but also to those interested in the various traditions in which Henryson works: the beast fable, moral allegory, the exemplum, the matter of Troy, and the allegorization of the Orpheus myth.
As the introduction notes, little is known about Henryson's life or even the dating of his works; some fragmentary life records -- or possible life records -- are all we have to go on, besides the poems. Those who begin to read them will see quickly that Henryson is not a poet of the first rank, but he is pleasingly competent within his limitations. He largely composes in the seven-line rhyme royal stanza, which he manages adroitly, but occasionally and effectively varies his prosody with an eight-line stanza or with rhymed pentameter. His subject matter is conventional, and his characteristic genre of moral allegory in many ways limits his poetic voice and vision. Nevertheless, he is artful, clever, and quite learned, especially in matters of music, natural science, and the law, and he works well within his received traditions. While he never transcends the forms and material on which his art depends, he does find space and life within them that often please and surprise. And he sometimes deploys a Chaucerian narratorial voice, full of winks and nods and nudges, that one can never quite tell when to take seriously.
This is nowhere more evident than in the volume's opening work, the Morall Fabillis, Henryson's contemporization of animal fables from a variety of sources. The opening fable, "The Cock and the Jasp" concludes with a moralitas jarringly at odds with the moral the fable's historia seemed to be leading up to. Aside from advising readers to be alert for irony elsewhere in the collection, this early moment emphasizes a characteristic Henryson theme, that the appetites, delighted by the fable, and the intellect, informed by the moral, often stand profoundly apart. The fables engage at times in social criticism, such as in "The Trial of the Fox" and "The Dog and the Sheep," which depict the justice system as run not by objective jurists but by (what else in a fable?) self- interested beasts. Henryson likewise pokes at the mores and tastes of the burgher class in "The Two Mice." However, the collection overall is uneven. While many of the fables cleverly present contemporary figures from court, cloister, and pasture in animal guise, many also have predictable or conventional moralities, and a number of moments make one wonder if the fables were conceived as a literary unity or composed piecemeal and then collected together. Some evidence suggests Henryson was a schoolmaster; it may be he composed the individual tales as lessons for his pupils over some years.
Many have come to Henryson by way of his Testament of Cresseid, his continuation of Chaucer's romance (and once held to be by Chaucer himself), in which Criseyde complains of her fate to the planets and gets stricken with leprosy for the affront. Aside from drawing from Chaucerian matter, Henryson draws from Chaucer's manner, as the poem is full of elusive moments. It begins as if a Chaucerian dream poem, with a lovesick narrator by the fire with a book on a rainy night, but the expected sleep and vision never occur; Henryson reverses the expectation that the conventions establish. That the end of the poem doesn't return to this opening frame makes the issue of genre more troubling. Like Chaucer, too, Henryson claims his tale is from a nonexistent source. Further, the judgement imposed on Criseyde is full of Chaucerian ambiguity: does she suffer for her unfaithfulness to Troilus and the rules of fin amour? Or, given the Boethian overtones of Troilus and Criseyde, is this a matter of bad fortune rendered through malign planets ultimately working some good in the victim's soul? At any rate, the poem becomes an interesting study not only in Chaucer's reception in the late fifteenth century, but in the continuation of his ironic methods.
Orpheus and Eurydice is perhaps the last significant contribution to the medieval Orpheus tradition, blending, as John Friedman writes in Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970), two different strains of rendering the Orpheus myth that had grown apart: the moral/allegorical and the courtly. Henryson's contributions to the tradition include Orpheus' ascent to the planets in search of the missing Eurydice, and giving Hell a landscape that seems a mixture of Dante and the Scottish moors. Appended to this moving rendition of the myth is a perplexing moralitas that figures Orpheus as human intellect and Eurydice as the appetites, and the plot as a search for a decorous relationship between them. The allegory ostensibly follows that of Nicholas Trivet (Dominican, 1265-1334) on Boethius' version of the story in De Consolatione, but Henryson's allegory deviates from both the source and from the details of the tale at so many places that one might suspect it of being more a critique of the allegorical tradition than a continuation of it.
The edition includes Henryson's minor poems, many of doubtful attribution. Most are pleasant but unremarkable renderings of traditional themes: piety, death, and love. Of these, "The Bludy Sark" and "Robyn and Makyn" are noteworthy, the first for its mythic minimalism onto which is attached an effective and surprising religious allegory; the second for its connections with the pastoral tradition. The poem, "Sum Practyse of Medicyne," is a curious piece for its coarse and scatological bent, not to mention its atypical verse form (for Henryson), and seems entirely out of place with the rest of the poet's moral work, although it is attributed to Henryson in one manuscript.
Included in an appendix is the anonymous Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus, edited by Anne McKim, a late sixteenth-century work that is clearly dependent on Henryson's Testament. The work will be of interest to those tracing the entire Troilus tradition from Benoit through Boccaccio and Chaucer to Shakespeare.
I have but two misgivings about this volume. The first is rather mild, which is that the practice of intermingling textual with explanatory notes is troublesome in a student edition. The intended consumers of this edition are less attuned to textual issues than are scholars, and are thus likely to ignore the notes altogether when they see that most of them have to do with textual variants, some of them trite. Textual notes would be better off placed separately; those in need of more extensive apparatus should consult Fox's edition or Smith's comprehensive edition for the Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1906, 1908, 1914), which includes the important variants of each work.
My other misgiving is a bit more philosophical. Where ought we fit an edition like this into our curriculum? Clearly there are a number of points where some Henryson work or another could be used -- in a course in non-Chaucerian Middle English poetry, for example, or in a course on late medieval literature, or in a seminar on allegory. Several of his individual works might be exemplary in survey courses, or courses on special topics, such as the fable, or on medieval stances toward classical mythology. Even a course on Chaucer might profitably use The Testament of Cresseid. But have we an author weighty enough to justify asking students to purchase a complete edition, even one as reasonably priced as this? I read and write about Henryson myself as a personal pleasure and academic pursuit, but I have a hard time seeing his work supplant that of Langland, Julian of Norwich, the Pearl poet, or the Wakefield Master in what little space I have to teach non-Chaucerian work. To be fair, I work strictly with undergraduates, and the graduate course may be a more likely venue for Kindrick's edition. In such a venue, or perhaps even in an advanced undergraduate seminar on a special topic, the low cost of this book might allow its purchase even if only for assignment of one of its major poems. And, of course, college libraries should buy at least one copy of this volume to assist students in independent work.
Perhaps my complaint is less with the book than the position of late medieval literature in the typical curriculum for the undergraduate or even graduate English student. There are too many topics and authors to study, too much theory to learn, too great an urge to read the moderns, and a shrinking number of courses in which to teach anything. That notwithstanding, Henryson is clearly a talent worthy of greater recognition, and the publication of a student edition of his poems may indicate he is on the cusp of receiving his due.