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

vengeance (“If that thou lyve, thou shalt repenten this / so cruelly that it shal wel be sene”; Prologue F, 339–340).²⁸ But the threat of corporeal punishment for blasphemy (and the enduring scars) certainly represents a crucial antecedent for Cupid’s prosecution of Cresseid in Testament. The transformations and reversals in the exemplary life of Alceste also double uncannily the career of Cresseid in the supplement. Alceste sacrifices herself so that her husband Admetus may cheat death, just as Henryson’s version produces (against all odds) a thriving Troilus and a dying Cresseid. Likewise, if Alceste metamorphoses into a “dayesye,” the image of the sun, Cresseid is transformed from the “flour of luif” (128) into a leaden reflection of the moon with “lumpis haw appeirand in [her] face” (340).

Chaucer’s counter to the charges of blasphemy restates the moral defense of art in categorical terms:

Let me note that this retrospective summation of intention pertains more accurately to Henryson’s supplement than it does to Chaucer’s original poem. The Testament distributes praise and blame in such distinct terms that its former lovers become exemplifications if not personifications of fidelity and falsity: “O, fals Cresseid and trew knicht Troilus” (546). We are a long way here from Troilus’s rhapsodic bliss—“O love, O charite” (3.1254)—(w)rapt in Criseyde’s arms and confusing the two loves, which the Scottish version renders painstakingly distinct. Henryson’s stark disambiguation perhaps takes its clue from Chaucer’s conventional classification of poetry (sub ethice ponitur), parodying with moral seriousness the Legend’s tongue-in-cheek send-up of divine anger and human penitence. He invents an ensaumple and menynge strictly in keeping with the kind of romance Chaucer claimed to have written but obviously did not, yet one also fully in concert with the Legend’s