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

precursor. Douglas’s Eneados prologues follow Henryson’s lead in their skeptical response to Chaucer’s authority and their diplomatic tolerance of his lapses; they also translate a classic text into a different clime and a new climate of learning. Influential in this were Henryson’s recommendation of a correspondence between meteorological prologues and poetic matter as well as his complicated responses to the conflicting demands of literary authorities set within a local context.⁴⁶ Having politely set aside Chaucer’s Dido in the first prologue and vented his spleen on Caxton’s redacted version, Douglas returns in the fourth prologue to introduce the tragedy of the Carthaginian queen in an extended stylization of Henryson’s Chaucerianism:

Only the brief second and the extensive fourth prologue employ rhyme royal stanzas of Troilus and the Testament, probably because Douglas deems books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid tragedies.⁴⁷ He invokes the same supernaturally luminescent Venus that opens the Testament to expose the complete cycle of “fenyit … plesance,” “lust,” and “pennance,” revealed in the further adventures of Cresseid, in whose “fragil flesche … the fykkil seyd” of love is also sown.⁴⁸ In the third stanza, Douglas turns to a full-blown stylization of the final stanza of Cresseid’s complaint, addressed not (as in her version) to the ladies of Greece and Troy but to Venus herself.⁴⁹ He also revisits the famous self-diagnosis of the Testament’s narrator: “Thocht lufe be hait, yit in ane man of age / It kindillis nocht sa sone as in youtheid, / Of quhome the blude is flowing in ane rage” (Testament 29–31) in an extensive survey of the “kyndely passioun, engendrit of heyt / Kyndlyt in the hart, ourspredyng al the corss” (114–115) through the life cycle from infancy to old age, counseling “temperat warmness” (127). For Douglas, Dido’s culpability in her tragedy is