absolute, a matter of intemperate love: “Throw fulych lust wrocht thine awyn ondoyng” (228). Chaucer’s Dido, the sympathetic victim of men and Venus, must then be understood in the unmitigated terms of Henryson’s Cresseid, who blames her own lust and resolves, “Nane but myself as now I will accuse” (574).
Marginal glossing in the Cambridge, Trinity College manuscript of the Eneados (MS O.3.12) confirms that Douglas is here drawing on the conventional Augustinian distinction between the two loves, cupiditas et caritas (“lustis inordinate” and “charite,” lines 182 and 205).50 An equally uncompromising distinction between cupidity and charity is also reached at the end of the Testament, where Cresseid condemns her “fleschelie foull affectioune … inclynit to lustis lecherous” (558–559) and commends the “continence” (555), faithfulness, and chastity of Troilus. Thus, Douglas approaches the Dido story through a notion of tragedy adopted from Henryson’s prologue and the revelations of his heroine, disambiguating Chaucer’s Dido just as Henryson had Chaucer’s Criseyde.51 This broad indebtedness to the metaphors of Henryson’s poem recalls similar stylizations of Chaucer by Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Hawes, but it also has an edge the English versions do not possess. Henryson’s portrayal of Cresseid is richly complicated by the representation of the narrator as an unlikely fellow sufferer, but Douglas rails against those with snow on the roof vainly trying to light a fire in the chimney:
That slotteris furth euermar in sluggardy….
Thir Venus warkis in youthhed ar foly,
Bot into eild thai turn a fury rage. (164–165, 168–169)
Douglas was fond of such comical flyting with his predecessors (compare this to his exchange with the Italian poet Maffeo Vegio in the thirteenth prologue), but the playful insult also functions to deflate Henryson’s professed sympathy for his heroine. It is a rougher version of the chidden Chaucer of the first prologue, who “was evir (God wait) all womanis frend” (449), and it renders feckless the attempt of Henryson’s impotent narrator to identify with the warm-blooded Troilus, just as the first prologue sets aside Chaucer’s overly gallant response to Dido.