reading Troilus quite rare in preceding centuries, whether the edition that readers used identified Henryson as the author of the supplement or not.26 The most significant alteration that Skeat (1894) and subsequent editors have made is the removal of the Testament from its situation directly following Chaucer’s poem. From this edition onward, the official exile of the Testament from Troilus begins, and like Cresseid in exile, it has provoked both sympathy and contempt in equally large measures for its adulterations.
Thynne’s 1532 edition provides colophons before and after the Testament, linking three distinct works in a single chain:
However, this dovetailing of the three works is already broadly called for in Henryson’s articulation of his work between the tragedy of Troilus and the palinode in the Legend of Good Women. At the end of the earlier poem, Chaucer pleads that gentlewomen in his audience blame not him for faithfully recounting Criseyde’s unfaithfulness. He proffers a series of diversionary strategies to avert criticism, including the patently ersatz justification that the poem was written to warn women against treacherous men. In the prologue to the Legend, Chaucer is called into court and onto the carpet, brought up on the very charges of misogyny he tried to forestall in the conclusion to Troilus. This concatenation of response and reply already has in sight the dialogic world of Canterbury Tales, particularly the so-called “marriage group,” except it remains strictly confined to the fin amours simulacrum of trials, judgments, and penances meted out in courts of love. Chaucer thus incorporated responses to Troilus within the evolving corpus of his works, positioning the Legend as a penitential satisfaction for sins committed against women and the gods of love. The benevolent Alceste finally allays Cupid’s desire for