On one hand, Henryson’s vther quair is positioned as an alternate ending in parallel with book 5 of Troilus, calling to mind the branching structures of hypertexts and labyrinthine postmodernisms of Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco, who also has a vision of a book as yet unwritten. Henryson’s self-canonization places the work he is composing already on the shelf, a quire ready-made to be bound with Troilus—as it duly was in many editions from William Thynne’s 1532 Chaucer onwards.4 On the other hand, Testament does not simply attach itself to its precursor; it also has intrusive designs on the interpretation of the earlier work. Henryson’s supplement has often been grouped with other fifteenth-century English continuations of Chaucer, but it is in fact more akin to Dante’s and Jean de Meun’s revisitations of earlier works or the metafictions of recent novels such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad.5 The “sore conclusioun” (614) appends suppositions about Chaucer’s poem in ways that are analogous to the situation of the poetic interpretative glosses at the end of his other major works, The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice. These glosses entail certain moral or allegorical senses and contain, chasten, or rechannel other kinds of responses (Fox, Poems 21). Indeed, the conjuncture of Troilus and Testament in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century black-letter editions of Chaucer creates a situation in which one text influences the reception of another to a degree unprecedented in English literature.
Yet, Henryson establishes a local and individual perspective with respect to the Chaucer tradition as well, a distinctiveness and originality reflected most clearly in his invention of a new episode in the matter of Troy—the first in Europe in three centuries and the first ever to be written in the British Isles. He also hazards a critical reaction to English literary history by an outsider looking to join yet preserve a cultural apartness with respect to that tradition. His prologue (lines 1–70) dramatizes the dialogical nature of literary influence within the context of a shared language and a shared border. My analysis of the array of orientations implicit in this work but rendered explicit in varying ways at different times and places does not privilege a single context or perspective. Rather, I address questions of poetic authority, influences and traditions,