This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
memory of “his awin darling” (504) “figurait” (511) within his mind. Creseyd’s recollection of the affair in the Laste Epistle adopts the moral outlook achieved in Henryson, but finally, the limits on her knowledge are reasserted with operatic grandeur at the end of her life and lines. The author of the Epistle recognizes how the supplement functions to transform the reader’s understanding of all that has come before, adding a second refocalization to this telescoping mise en abyme of texts set within earlier texts. His own letter becomes the package in which the ruby ring—given to Criseyde in Chaucer and returned to Troilus at the end of Henryson’s poem—is contained, thereby sealing up a multifaceted allusion.43
The insightful interpretation of the Testament by a sixteenth-century Scots poet provides the model for my approach in chapters 4 and 5.44 Chapter 4 explores what I term the anamorphic character of Henryson’s supplement; chapter 5 discovers Shakespeare employing a strategy akin to that used in the Epistle, one which embeds the whole trajectory of Chaucerian romance within glimpses “awry” toward what is to come in Henryson’s putative sixth book. In a broader sense, my project is itself an attempt at anamorphic reading. I analyze the multiple, even contradictory manifestations of a text thrown into sharp relief by the transformative power of perspective.
The works of Gavin Douglas allow one to weigh the similar mitigating influence of Henryson on a Scottish poet’s understanding of Chaucer before the watershed of 1513. Priscilla Bawcutt concludes that “Douglas saw Henryson not simply as a moralist and homely fabulist but as a vernacular master of the high style” (Gavin Douglas 44). Earlier, I remarked upon the double articulation of the supplement with Chaucer’s Troilus and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Douglas certainly perceived the link between the Testament and the Legend, for he composed a delightful parody of the two in The Palice of Honour (lines 627–771). Like Cresseid, his narrator curses the gods of love, calling them “fals,” (634) and is put on trial for blasphemy and “sic dispyte” (642).45 There are many direct references to Henryson’s planetary court and Cresseid’s punishment in Douglas’s scene, suggesting that the Chaucerian subtext has been thoroughly recast in terms of the more immediate, Scottish