The most important poem by the Scottish poet
Robert Henryson is his Testament of Cresseid, Henryson’s
alternative ending to CHAUCER’s TROILUS
AND CRISEYDE. A 616-line poem in rhyme royal
stanzas emulating the text that inspired it, the
poem begins as do Chaucer’s own dream visions,
The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS and The PARLIAMENT OF
FOWLS, with the narrator reading a book—in this
case the Troilus itself. Noting that Chaucer had left
Cresseid’s fate untold, Henryson declares his intention
to write his own tragedy of Cresseid’s end.
The story begins as Diomede has tired of Cresseid
and forsaken her. An alien “fallen” woman in
an enemy camp, she is forced to move in with her
father Calchas, and there blasphemously complains
against Cupid and Venus, blaming them for
her problems. The gods, in their function as planets,
meet in council as they do in Chaucer’s
KNIGHT’S TALE, and decide that Saturn and the
Moon must inflict punishment on Cresseid for her
blasphemy. Saturn takes away her beauty and her
joy, while the Moon strikes her with leprosy—a
disease that in Henryson’s day would have been
equated with syphilis. In the leper house, Cresseid
delivers a memorable COMPLAINT on the common
theme of the transience of earthly happiness.
One day, as Cresseid sits on the side of the road
begging, Troilus rides by and, though he fails to
recognize her, is reminded of his lost love when he
sees her, and throws a handful of gold and jewels in
her lap. After he leaves, another leper tells her that
her benefactor was Troilus himself. Cresseid, realizing
at last Troilus’s true love for her, a love that
she forsook to follow her own lusts and therefore
subjected herself to the vicissitudes of Fortune, is
moved to make her last will and testament. Here,
she accepts responsibility for her downfall, leaving
her worldly fortune to the lepers and sending
Troilus a ring he had given her.
Ultimately the poem uses Chaucer’s Troilus as
its background, but alters the ending, leaving off
Troilus’s death at the hands of Achilles. In his 1532
edition of Chaucer,William Thynne printed Henryson’s
poem as Book 6 of Troilus and Criseyde.
That custom continued through several later editions
of Chaucer.