Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cressei ...

and the king both vetted additions to the Chaucer canon. Wolsey judged The Pilgrim’s Tale to be heretical and succeeded in having it removed from the second edition whereas Henry VIII is credited with shielding Thynne from personal harm. The printer’s Chaucer manuscripts were culled, according to his son, before the official dissolution of the monasteries by a royal commission “to serche all the liberaries of Englande for Chaucers Workes, so that oute of all the Abbies of this Realme … he was fully furnished with [a] multitude of Bookes.”³³ It seems reasonable to infer, then, that such a manuscript contained Thynne’s witness for the Testament and that powerful men at court vetted the supplement.³⁴

One can only imagine what Cardinal Wolsey might have made of Henryson’s Star Chamber and the punishments it meted out for slander, blasphemy, and promiscuity. But, such speculation leads one back to more general concerns with the context within which Henryson’s work was first printed in England. In the midst of the king’s desperately pursued divorce and the movement to establish an English church, a misogynist Chaucer was every bit as indispensible as a Wycliffite one.³⁵ Again, one can only wonder what King Henry might have made of Diomeid’s “lybel of repudie” in 1532. More certain, however, is that the discovery of Henryson’s work provided authoritative conclusions about the meaning of Chaucer’s Troilus that earlier editions had already begun working to establish. Wynkyn de Worde’s 1517 Chaucer appends a more modest conclusion, which he falsely attributes to “The Auctor”:

De Worde’s forged conclusion goes on to evoke the prototypical exemplars of the misogynist tradition: Aristotle, Virgil, and Samson, who join worthy Troilus among the men deceived by “unkind” women. His language recalls Chaucer’s, and there is no hint of a familiarity with Henryson. But Thynne, who consulted both Caxton and de Worde, had