TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID

   by Robert Henryson

(late 15th century)

   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.