Robert Henryson – författare

This is the first serious attempt to produce a critical text for all Henryson's poems. The text is based on all available material. There is a commentary and a glossary, and an introduction discusses Henryson's life and the sources of his poems.

The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated; their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. Seven Fables and The Testament of Cresseid is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.

Originally published in 1926 as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains the full text of The Testament of Cresseid by fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. A short editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Henryson and Scottish poetry.

Though definitive information about the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson remains elusive, the quality of the poetry that bears his name is self-evident: consistently achieving what David J. Parkinson describes as “a rhetorical ideal of brevity replete with significance,” these Middle Scots works possess an interpretive richness, knowledge of classical and medieval authorities, and command of multilingual vocabulary befitting Henryson’s title of “master.” Composed amid Middle Scots’s consolidation into Scotland’s official language in the late Middle Ages, Henryson’s poetry reflects in language and theme this pivotal moment in Scottish history. This edition collects all works attributed to Henryson, including his adaptations and interpretations of Aesop’s Fables; his The Testament of Cresseid, an epilogue to Geoffrey Chaucer’sTroilus and Criseyde; Orpheus and Eurydice; and twelve shorter poems grouped by the available evidence for their attribution to Henryson, all accompanied by glosses, explanatory and textual notes, and a guide to Henryson’s language.