I cannot leave Cressida without some mention of the doom which was prepared for her by one of Chaucer’s worthiest disciples, Robert Henryson, in some ways the best of the Scottish poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Shocked by the fact that, in Chaucer’s poem, Cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, Henryson composed a short sequel, The Testament of Cresseid, to show that poetic justice was duly performed. Diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had “all his appetyte and mair, fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her off, to become a common drab.
O fair Cresseid! the flour and A per se
Of Troy and Greece, how wast thow fortunait!
To change in filth all thy feminitie
And be with fleshly lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Grekis, air and late
So giglot-like.
In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for having caused her to love only to lead her to this degradation:
The seed of love was sowen in my face
And ay grew green through your supply and grace.
But now, alas! that seed with frost is slain,
And I fra lovers left, and all forlane.
In revenge Cupid and his mother summon a council of gods and condemn the A per se of Greece and Troy to be a hideous leper. And so she goes forth with the other lepers, armed with bowl and clapper, to beg her bread. One day Troilus rides past the place where she is sitting by the roadside near the gates of Troy:
Then upon him she cast up both her een,
And with ane blenk it cam into his thocht,
That he some time before her face had seen,
But she was in such plight he knew her nocht,
Yet then her look into his mind it brocht
The sweet visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, one sometime his own darling.
He throws her an alms and the poor creature dies. And so the moral sense is satisfied. There is a good deal of superfluous mythology and unnecessary verbiage in The Testament of Cresseid, but the main lines of the poem are firmly and powerfully drawn. Of all the disciples of Chaucer, from Hoccleve and the Monk of Bury down to Mr. Masefield, Henryson may deservedly claim to stand the highest.
FOOTNOTES
- Collected Poems, by Edward Thomas: with a Foreword by W. de la Mare. Selwyn & Blount.
- Wordsworth: an Anthology, edited, with a Preface, by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. R. Cobden-Sanderson.
- Ben Jonson, by G. Gregory Smith. (English Men of Letters Series.) Macmillan, 1919.
Transcriber’s Notes
The following minor changes have been made:
The word “poety” was changed to “poetry” on page 42.
A comma was added after “C” on page 63.
Accents were added to “numérotés” on page 63 and “Où” on page 157.
The end
