poetry. Puttenham’s three examples of the “outcrie” link Cresseid’s complaint with others written by George Gascoigne and Sir Thomas Wyatt, the latter of which was said to be a translation of Petrarch. Thus, this crucial figure for early modern lyric (and ultimately drama), which “vtters our minde by all such words as do shew any extreme passion” in giving voice to “an impotent affection,” is traced back to Chaucer and forward to English Petrarchanism, without any notion that Chaucer’s own complaint (1.400–420) also translates Petrarch or that “Chaucer” in this case is actually a fifteenth-century Scot. It may be that Puttenham’s popular treatise influenced the seventeenth-century scribe of the St. John’s manuscript, who chose to mark this passage in the Testament and implicitly draw the contrast between the “outcrie” of Troilus in book 1 and that of Cresseid. In effect, his two subheadings punctuate a composite work, encouraging a structure of reading attentive to lyrical monologues and inviting comparisons between the formal complaints. The subheadings effectively juxtapose two elements in a composite work, one in which Troilus hyperbolically imagines himself to be dying because of love and the other in which Cresseid really is dying of it.
Thus, I would argue that Thynne’s editions through those of John Stow (1561), Thomas Speght (1598 and 1602), and subsequent reprints, as well as St. John’s manuscript of Troilus, indeed position the Testament precisely within the space it was designed to assume within English literary culture. What Henryson could not have foreseen was the catastrophic effect on Scottish politics after the Battle of Flodden in 1513 or, indeed, Henry VIII’s proprietary, absolutist claims to lordship over all of Britain, in part as a result of Flodden. William Thynne served as the chief clerk of the royal kitchens from at least 1526 through 1533, when he was named as one of two household servants chosen to wait upon Anne Boleyn at her coronation feast. His first Chaucer took shape within what Blodgett characterizes as “an unofficial center for Chaucer studies” (38) from 1522; including many at court devoted to Chaucer’s works, such as Skelton, John Leland, and Brian Tuke. Thynne’s son Francis tells an anecdote of his father’s escape from the clutches of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey—a tale that encourages the inference that the cardinal