the supplement “Testamentum Chrisidis, et ejusdem lamentatio,” explicitly recognizing the seven nine-line stanzas as a set piece worthy of attention.32 George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589) cites Cresseid’s complaint to exemplify the rhetorical figure of “Ecphonisis, or the Outcry”:
This citation is all the more remarkable because it represents one of only two quotations of “Chaucer” in Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie—the other descending from the equally apocryphal “Chaucer’s Prophecie.” Puttenham’s two misattributions give a snapshot of the effect of the apocrypha on a late sixteenth-century reader’s understanding of a poet he and his contemporaries were exalting as “the father of our English poets” (232). Elsewhere, Puttenham lauds the “very graue and stately” style of Troilus and Criseyde (76) and judges wanting Gower (“nothing in him highly to be recommended”), Lydgate (“a translatour only and no devisor of that which he wrate”), the poet of Piers Plowman (“a malcontent of that time”), and “Skelton a sharpe Satirist, but with more rayling and scoffery than became a Poet Lawreat” (76). For Puttenham, the true inheritors of this sixteenth-century composite Chaucer are Surrey and Wyatt, “the two chief lanterns of light to all others” who share Chaucer’s “stately” style while “imitating very naturally and studiously their Maister Francis Petrarcha” (76). Standard metaphors of the Chaucerian tradition (the lantern and the master) are here recoined: Wyatt and Surrey become the inheritors of Chaucer as well as Petrarch, lighting the way forward for all subsequent English