This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
The very’st Leper, of Cares Hospitall;
That from my State a Presence held in awe,
Glad here to kennel in a Pad of Straw. (153–158)38
Such specific references to details from the Testament belie critical narratives of an ambient darkening of Criseyde’s reputation. They demonstrate that the poem was widely and closely read in England. Its language and imagery haunt the laments of women in extremis throughout the literary history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, the influence of these six hundred-odd verses is grossly out of proportion with respect to Chaucer’s epic romance, which is roughly fifteen times longer.
A more complex example reflecting this disproportionate, retrospective form of influence is the recursively structured Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troilus.39 The author situates the composition of a Heroides-like epistle within a space and time near the end of the Testament, just as Henryson had nested his supplement late in Chaucer’s poem, before the death of Troilus:
His sometyme Creseyd send,
If so she may whose lothed lyfe
And lynes at ones must end.
My wish unseene was but to see
The ones before my deathe,
Which sight unawares yet longe desyred
Dothe stopp my vitall breathe. (1–8)40
This poet recognizes what some contemporary readers miss: the immediate cause of Cresseid’s death is not leprosy per se but rather the shock of learning that she had been reunited with Troilus though she failed to recognize him.41 The paradoxical “wish unseene” and “sight unawares” recall the pathetic failures of recognition in the Testament. Yet, the poet of the Laste Epistle also follows Henryson’s precedent in fabricating a competing, irreconcilable supplement, an epistle written just before Cresseid’s death, the time occupied in Henryson’s version