Front Matter (introduction) The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables by Robert Henryson
Introduction [by translator, Seamus Heaney]
Little
enough is known about Robert Henryson, ‘a schoolmaster of Dunfermline ’
and master poet in the Scots language: born perhaps in the 1420s, he was dead
by 1505, the year his younger contemporary William Dunbar mourned his passing
in ‘Lament for the Makars.’ In a couplet where the rhyme tolls very sweetly and
solemnly, Dunbar says that death ‘In Dunfermelyne…has done roun [whispered]/ To
Maister Robert Henrisoun’, although here the title ‘Maister’ has more to do
with the deceased man’s status as a university graduate than with his
profession as a teacher or his reputation as the author of three major
narrative poems—The Testament of Cresseid,
The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice—as well as a number
of shorter lyrics including the incomparable (and probably untranslatable) ‘Robyn
and Makene’.
The honorific title is an early
indication that Henryson was a learned poet, even though his learning,
according to one distinguished editor, would have been considered very
old-fashioned by the standards of contemporary Continental humanism. ‘In so far
as the terms have any meaning,’ Denton Fox writes in his 1987 edition of The Poems, ‘Henryson belongs firmly to
the Middle Ages, not to the Renaissance.’ Yet he belongs also in the eternal
present of the perfectly pitched, a poet whose knowledge of life is matched by
the range of his art, whose constant awareness of the world’s hardness and
injustice is mitigated by his irony, tenderheartedness, and ever-ready sense of
humour.
Most important of all, however, is Henryson’s ‘sound
of sense’, the way his voice is (as he might have put it) ‘mingit’ with the
verse forms, the way it can modulate from insinuation to instruction, from
high-toned earnestness to wily familiarity - and it was this sensation of
intimacy with a speaker at once sober and playful that inspired me to begin
putting the not very difficult Scots language of his originals into rhymed
stanzas of more immediately accessible English.
But why begin at all, the reader may ask, since the
Scots is not, in fact, so opaque? Anybody determined to have a go at it can
turn to Denton Fox’s edition or to the Henryson section of Douglas Gray’s
conveniently annotated Selected Poems of
Robert Henryson and William Dunbar. Reading his work in this way may be a
slow process—eyes to-ing and fro-ing between text and glossary, getting used to
the unfamiliar orthography, ears testing out and taking in the measure of the
metre—but it is still a fulfilling experience. And yet people who are neither
students nor practising poets are unlikely to make such a deliberate effort.
I began to make the versions of Henryson included
in this book because of a combination of the three motives for translation
identified by the poet and translator Eliot Weinberger. First and foremost,
advocacy for the work in question, for unless this poetry is brought out of the
university syllabus and on to the shelves ‘a great prince in prison lies’. But
Weinberger’s other two motives were equally operative: refreshment from a
different speech and culture, and the pleasures of ‘writing by proxy’.
Re-reading Henryson some forty years after I had
first encountered him as an undergraduate, I experienced what John Dryden
called (in his preface to Fables, Ancient
and Modern) a ‘transfusion’, and the fact that Dryden used the term in
relation to his modernisation of Chaucer made it all the more applicable to my
own case: what I was involved in, after all, was the modernisation of work by
one of a group of Scottish poets who shared Dryden’s high regard for the genius
of ‘The noble Chaucer, of makers flower’, and who brought about a significant
flowering in the literary life of Scotland during the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.
None of them, however, showed a greater degree of
admiration for their English forebear or was more influenced by his achievement
than Robert Henryson. Not only did he write The
Testament of Cresseid, in which he explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness
to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
but in The Testament, Orpheus and
Eurydice and the fables, he employs the rhyme royal stanza, the form
established by the English poet for work of high seriousness, although it must
be said that Henryson made it a fit vehicle for much homelier modes and matter.
Chaucer’s Troilus deals with that Trojan
protagonist’s love for Cressida (as Shakespeare names her in his dramatisation
of the story) and with Cressida’s subsequent betrayal of Troilus when she
abandons him and goes off with the Greek hero Diomede. Henryson takes all this
as read but refers to another source which carries the story further, to the
point where his Cresseid (stress on second syllable) is abandoned in her turn
by Diomede. After an introduction of several attractively confidential stanzas
which present the poet as an ageing man in a wintry season, no longer as
erotically susceptible as he would wish, we are quickly in medias res, in the Greek camp with the cast-off heroine who now
goes about ‘available’ to the rank and file ‘like any common pick-up’.
Subsequently she manages to· return home to her
father Calchas, where she begins to recuperate in isolation, but then -
disastrously - she rebukes Cupid and Venus, the god and goddess of love,
blaming her comedown on them:
O false Cupid, none is to blame but you,
You and your mother who is love’s blind goddess.
You gave me to believe and I trusted you,
That the seed of love was sown in my face –
and
so on. And then, in a manner of speaking, all heaven breaks loose. A
convocation of the planets occurs and the poet starts upon a long set-piece of
characterisation and description as he introduces the gods who are the geniuses
of the different planets, a passage which allows him to demonstrate rather
splendidly his store of classical and medieval learning.
This interlude may hold up the action, much as a
masque will in a Shakespearean play, or an Olympian scene in classical epic,
but it is still thoroughly of its time - a pageant, a sequence of tableaux,
reminiscent of those that rolled their way through medieval York and Chester at
Easter, showing how the inhabitants of the Christian heaven were also critically
involved in the affairs of mortals on earth - not least those who, like
Cresseid, had incurred the divine wrath.
Immediately then, as a result of the gods’
judgement, Cresseid is stricken with leprosy and doomed to spend the rest of
her life as a beggar in a leper colony, a fate which. allows for another great
set-piece, her lament for the way of life and the beauty she has lost; yet it
is also a fate which will bring her in the painful end to an encounter with her
former lover Troilus, as he returns in triumph from a victory over ‘the Grecian
knights’. This is one of the most famous and affecting scenes in literature, a
recognition scene (as Douglas Gray observes) all the more powerful for
containing no recognition:
Than upon him scho kest up
baith hir ene—
And with ane blenk it come
into his thocht
That he sumtime hir face
befoir had sene.
Bot scho was in sic plye he
knew hir nocht;
Yit than hir luilc into his
mynd had brocht
The sweit visage and
amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid,sumtyme
his awin darling.
Upon him then she cast up both her eyes
And at a glance it came into his thought
That he some time before had seen her face
But she was in such state he knew her not;
Yet still into his mind her look had brought
The features and the amorous sweet glancing
Of fair Cresseid, one time his own, his darling.
Swiftly then the tale concludes. Troilus is
overcome by an involuntary fit of trembling and showers alms of gold into
Cresseid’s lap, then rides away, leaving her to discover his identity from the
lepers. After which she utters another love lament, then takes pen and paper to
compose her testament, bequeathing her ‘royall ring set with this rubie reid’
to Troilus, and having settled all earthly affairs, expires in grief.
Some said he made a tomb of marble grey
And wrote her name on it and an inscription
In golden letters, above where she lay
Inside her grave. These were the words set down:
‘Lo, fair ladies, Cresseid of Troy town,
Accounted once the flower of womanhood,
Of late a leper, under this stone lies dead.’
It is customary to contrast Henryson’s grave
handling of this tale with Chaucer’s rather more beguiling treatment. Both
strike a wholly mature note, but the Scottish poet’s is more richly freighted
with an ‘ample power/ To chasten and subdue’. Weight of judgement, a tenderness
that isn’t clammy, a dry-eyed sympathy—these are the Henryson hallmarks,
attributes of a moral understanding reluctant to moralise, yet one that is
naturally and unfalteringly instructive. Henryson is a narrative poet whom you
read
not only for the story but for the melody of understanding in the storytelling
voice. If Hugh MacDiarmid had been asked half a millennium later what be meant
by saying that the kind of poetry he wanted was ‘the poetry of a grown man’, he
could have pointed straight to The
Testament.
This was also the poetry of a man whose imaginative
sympathy prevailed over the stock responses of his time. To his contemporaries,
Henryson’s entitlement as a poet would have depended to a considerable extent
on his intellectual attainments, his education in astronomy and astrology, in
matters legal and literary, but from our point of view he proves himself more
by his singular compassion for the character of Cresseid. Available to him all
along was the rhetoric of condemnation, the trope of woman as the daughter of
Eve, temptress, snare, Jezebel. But Henryson eschews this pulpit-speak:
And yet whatever men may think or say
Contemptuously about your quick compliance
I will excuse to what extent I may
Your womanhood, wisdom and loveliness
Which the whim of fortune put to such distress.
There is a unique steadiness about the movement of Henryson’s
stanzas, a fine and definite modulation between the colloquial and the graver,
more considered elements of his style. If his rhetoric is elevated, his
sounding line nevertheless goes deep:
Ane doolie sessoun to ane
cairfull dyte
Suld correspond and be
equivalent:
Richt sa it was quhen I began
to wryte
This tragedie…
Here the phonetic make-up contributes strongly if
stealthily to the emotional power of the declaration. The ‘oo’ in ‘doolie’
makes the doleful meaning of the word even more doleful, and the gloom of it is
just that little bit gloomier when the ‘oo’ sound gets repeated in ‘sessoun’; and then comes that succession of
reluctant, braking Scottish ‘r’s in ‘cairfull’ and ‘correspond’ and
(especially) ‘tragedie’. Foreboding about the grievous story he has to tell is
already present in the undermusic of what purports to be a mere throat clearing
exercise by a professional. And if my own sense-clearing could not hope to
capture fully that tolling tragic note, it could at least echo the metre and
approximate the rhyme:
A gloomy time, a poem full of hurt
Should correspond and be equivalent.
Just so it was when I began my work
On this retelling…
What had actually started me ‘on this retelling’
was the chance sighting of a Henryson text in a British Library exhibition
called Chapter and Verse. This
included an early illustrated manuscript of his ‘moral fable’, ‘The Cock and
the Jasp’, and I was so taken by the jaunty, canty note of its opening lines
that I felt an urge to get it into my own words. I was further encouraged in
this because, a little while earlier, after I had given a reading of my Beowulf translation in the Lincoln
Center in New York, the director had suggested that I should translate some other
narrative that could be performed by an actor. Very soon afterwards, therefore,
I began to do ‘The Cock and the Jasp’ into English stanzas, and even thought of
preparing a Henryson selection to be called Four
Fables and a Testament. So, working on the principle that the bigger job
should be tackled first, I immediately faced into the ‘tragedie’.
I enjoyed the work because Henryson’s language led
me back into what might be called ‘the hidden Scotland County Antrim
After I read the full collection of thirteen
fables, however, I realised that to present only four of them would be to sell Henryson
short. The collection contains some of his fiercest allegories of human
existence—‘The Preaching of the Swallow’ and ‘The Toad and the Mouse’—as well
as some of his gentlest presentations of decency in civic and domestic life—‘The
Two Mice’, ‘The Lion and the Mouse’; but in all of these, as well as in ‘The
Fox, the Wolf and the Carter’ and ‘The Fox, the Wolf and the Farmer’, there is
also satire and social realism—even if the society involved is that of wild
animals.
Much can be said about the sources of these tales
and about the overall structure of the collection, but here it will suffice to
note that while Aesop is credited throughout as the original author, the fables
derive from and greatly expand on later compendia and textbooks, in. particular
one by Gualterus Anglicus (Walter the Englishman) and another one, the Roman de Renart, a well-known anthology
of fox tales. Equally important, however, is the fact that these tales of
tricky and innocent beasts and birds were part of the common oral culture of Europe , a store of folk wisdom as pervasive and unifying
at vernacu1ar level as the doctrines and visions of Christianity were in the
higher realms of scholastic culture.
Not that Henryson was indifferent to those higher
registers of thought and discourse. The structure of his understanding was
determined by the medieval world picture of human life situated on a plane
between animal and angel, human beings
a
dual compound of soul and body, caught between heavenly aspiring intellect and
down-dragging carnal appetite. If he was a schoolteacher, he was also a school
man. If he was professionally aware of the classics, he’ was equally and
perhaps even anxiously aware of the confessional.
In fact, much of the charm and strength of the
fables comes from the way Henryson’s hospitable imagination seems to enjoy open
access to both the educated lingua franca
and the subcultural codes of his late medieval world. Sometimes this adds a
touch of sophisticated comedy, as when the mouse (in the final fable) launches
into an argument based on the principles of physiognomy; sometimes it adds
pathos, as when the swallow preaches the virtue of prudence to the doomed,
ineducable little birds; sometimes it adds a touch of donnish humour, as when
the wolf unexpectedly adduces his knowledge of contract law to claim ownership
of the oxen in ‘The Fox, the Wolf and the Farmer’.
More importantly, this easy passage between the
oral and learned culture, between the rhetoric of the clerks and the rascality
of the beasts, establishes his world as a credible hierarchical place of social
order and seasonal cycles, a world where custom and ceremony can never rule out
criminality and deception or a judicious style occlude actual injustice. The
stylistic reward for this inclusive vision is felt, moreover, in the nice
modulation: that occurs between the storytelling voice of the fable proper and
the didactic voice of the ‘Moralitas’: if the latter is often much less
confiding, more button-lipped and tendentious, this is no more than a dramatic
rendering of the overall double perspective, of an intelligence stretched
between the homely and the homiletic.
The genre demanded the application of a formal ‘moralitas’
yet the requirement also suited something strict and disciplined in Henryson’s
temperament, so there is integrity in the procedure rather than a mere tagging
on of sententiae. But the richest
moments in the fables are those when the natural world or the human predicament
calls forth Henryson’s rapture or his realism, whether it be in the dream
vision of his meeting with Aesop at the beginning of ‘The Lion and the Mouse’
or the description of the changing seasons in ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’ or
the verve and villainy of the fox in dialogue with the wolf prior to their
duping of the carter:
‘Still,’ said the wolf, ‘by banks and braes you
wend
And slink along and steal up on your prey.’
‘Sir,’ said the fox, ‘you know how these things
end.
They catch my scent down wind from far away
And scatter fast and leave me in dismay.
They could be lying sleeping in a field
But once I’m close they’re off. It puts me wild.’
Beasts
they may be, but through their agency Henryson creates a work which answers
MacDiarmid’s big challenging definition of poetry as ‘human existence come to
life’.
Copyright © Farrar, Straus and Giroux
