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If the Testament reflects the rise of what R. I. Moore dubbed “a persecuting society,” it also reveals the infectious nature of literary influence. The power of a minor literature stems from its ability to blur boundaries and to amend a major literature from within. National boundaries are often guarded by fears of cultural and physical contagion. Henryson reinscribed such suspicions in what might well be termed a poetics of contagious influence. Deleuze and Guattari label Kafka’s The Trial “an influence machine, a contamination, there is no longer any difference between being outside or inside” (8). My fourth chapter explores the texting of contamination in what I term Henryson’s anamorphic reading of Troilus, tracing the double, mirrored structure of the two works. This structure functions like a diptych in which the supplement literalizes, disfigures, and ultimately transforms the meaning of Chaucer’s work. The Testament represents an especially viral form of imitation wherein metaphors are overwritten by actual metamorphosis and innocent details within Chaucer’s work are shadowed by Henryson’s momento mori reflection of them.
The altered perspective on Troilus and Criseyde introduced by Henryson’s Testament profoundly influenced how later readers understood Chaucer’s masterpiece. However, this regressive form of influence has been widely ignored or underestimated in much recent work on the “Renaissance Chaucer,” just as earlier studies often treated literary influence as a one-way street and largely ignored the history of Henryson’s influence on the reception of Chaucer. Perhaps the most glaring example of this has been in the attempt to discount the influence of Henryson on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, the subject of my final chapter. Leaving Henryson out of the equation yields a misleadingly static picture of Shakespeare reading Chaucer. In fact, the recognition of contaminated and “bifold” traditions helped to inspire Shakespeare’s impure, contagious response to imperial mythmaking. In this play, one finds anamorphic glances awry at the seemingly unavoidable end Henryson installed in the tradition, as the spectral futures that await Troilus and Cressida in the Scottish supplement haunt the compulsive psyches of Shakespeare’s lovers.