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

discovered a way of insuring a similar conclusion about the meaning of Chaucer’s work that could justly be described as “pyteful and dolorous.” The ground for what became a deeply rooted association of the two poems was already prepared in advance.

This telling mixture of misogyny and pathos, so ubiquitous a feature of early modern complaints and epistles, hints at the circulation of a Renaissance Henryson that has remained only slightly less obscure to modern readers than it was to sixteenth-century English readers. Jamie C. Fumo’s important study of early modern complaints hazards another in a long line of what I judge to be misguided attempts to identify Henryson’s “vther quair.” He posits a source in the Lament for the Duchess of Gloucester, though the death of Eleanor Cobham was already very old news by the time Henryson was writing and the Lament survives in only two English manuscripts (447–478). Fumo’s work does demonstrate in rich detail the verbal and symbolic dependence of a range of sixteenth-century complaints on Henryson’s Cresseid. The Metrical Visions (ca. 1552–1554) of George Cavandish, for example, has Anne Boleyn lament adultery in familiar terms:

The “Shore’s Wife” of Thomas Churchyard’s poem (first printed in 1569) becomes leper-like: she learns to beg, bears a “dishe that clapt and gave a heavie sound” (369), and warns women—again, like Cresseid—to “Beware by me” (392).³⁷ Cresseid and Eleanor Cobham finally do come definitively together in Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroicall Epistles, where the duchess finds her life imitating Henryson’s art: