miniZibaldone

The Testament of Cresseid & 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 hon...