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tormented heroines. Establishing a stronghold on the border between the two works, the Janus-like situation of Henryson’s poem looks back to Troilus and forward to the pathos of Chaucer’s legendarily complicated women, introducing a similar tale which focuses almost exclusively on a woman’s suffering, complaint, and death. Like Chaucer’s Ovidian heroines, Henryson’s Cresseid is an abandoned woman whose plight evokes strong emotional responses in an audience envisioned as feminine.29 When at the end Cresseid accepts responsibility for her ordeal, she has perhaps in Henryson’s judgment become worthy to take her place among the abandoned and victimized heroines in the Legend.30
A different though equally remarkable example of the Testament’s belated conjuncture with Troilus occurs in the St. John’s College manuscript (Cambridge MS L.1), the lion’s share of which was produced in the second decade of the fifteenth century. A seventeenth-century scribe—the sixth to leave traces in the manuscript, according to Beadle and Griffiths (xxiv)—inserts missing stanzas into the margins of Troilus, readings he had obtained from Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer or a later reprint. The same scribe also adds eight leaves at the end of the book and copies The Testament of Cresseid into it. Both kinds of added text—the missing stanzas from Chaucer and Henryson’s complete poem—seem to have been included to repair omissions in the manuscript. The Testament takes on the same character as dropped stanzas or scribal eye skips—all are treated as missing components adduced to complete a partial witness. The seventeenth-century scribe also inserted two (and only two) marginal subheadings marking, respectively, “The Songe of Troilus” in book 1 at line 400 (folio 6v) and “The Complaint of Creseid” at line 406 (folio 127r) in the transcription of the Testament. These subheadings establish the parallelism between the two complaints, which occur in almost exactly the same position (roughly four hundred lines into each poem). They suggest a concern to allow easy reference to classic examples of what had become quite a popular genre in early modern England—the complaint.31
“The Complaint of Cresseid” already had some currency as an exemplary text in the genre. John Leland’s Life of Chaucer (c. 1540) titled