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by her testament. The epistle resumes the complete trajectory of the love affair, but retells it from within the perspective of Cresseid’s recognition at the end of the Testament. This nesting of allusions effectively paraphrases Troilus as it appears in retrospect from the altered consciousness created by Henryson’s work. At the end of the Laste Epistle, Creseyd’s thoughts and hopes come full circle, back to the present time:
Suche artes as erste were paste,
Did beate in massy marble stronge
Eternlly to laste.
But love in mowld of memory,
Imprintes in perfitt harte
The loved, so that deathe itself
Can noght the same devert.
As nowe by the, O Troyalus deare,
I may plainely may appeare,
Dothe ought resemble yet the shape
That Cresyade once did beare?
It cannot be; but nowe, but nowe,
My ghost must hence depart. (277–286)
Commonly in Heroidean epistles pathos is intensified by the gap between the limited knowledge of the speaker and what the audience knows from earlier sources to be the case. Creseyd here imagines the possibility—realized in Henryson—that her image as she was remains impressed in the “mowld” of Troilus’s memory. Henryson’s own elaborate description of the memory trace recalls and confirms the impression of Criseyde upon the immutably faithful heart of Troilus, in which began “to sticken / of hir his fixe and deepe impressioun” early in book 1 of Chaucer’s poem (see Kratzmann 84). The intricately coded citation in the Laste Epistle relies upon the audience’s recognition of the concatenated echoes: what “cannot be” has already occurred. The comparison between inscribed marble—“for hurt men wrytis in the marbell stane,”42 as Henryson said in another context—and the durable impressions of memory recall the young Trojan’s cold epitaph for Cresseid, contrasting it implicitly with the warmer, private