Robert Henryson
born
1420/30?
died c. 1506
Scottish poet, the finest of early fabulists in
Britain. He is described on some early title
pages as schoolmaster of Dunfermline—probably at
the Benedictine abbey school—and he appears
among the dead poets in William Dunbar’s Lament
for the Makaris, which was printed about 1508.
Henryson’s longest work is The Morall Fabillis
of Esope the Phrygian, Compylit in Eloquent &
Ornate Scottis, a version of 13 fables based
mainly on John Lydgate and William Caxton and
running to more than 400 seven-line stanzas. The
collection has a prologue, and each tale is
adorned with a moralitas. Its virtue lies in the
freshness of the narrative, in the sly humour
and sympathy of Henryson’s animal
characterization, and in his miniatures of the
Scottish countryside.
In The
Testament of Cresseid, a narrative and
“complaint” in 86 stanzas, Henryson completes
the story of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
giving a grim and tragic account of the
faithless heroine’s rejection by her lover
Diomede and her decline into prostitution. The
Testament is more than a splendid piece of
rhetorical craftsmanship; blended with
Henryson’s unwavering concern for justice are an
aesthetic attraction to the repulsive and
grotesque and a refined sense of the variance of
human love.
Among
the shorter poems ascribed to Henryson are the
lovely Orpheus and Eurydice, based on Boethius
and akin to the Testament in mood and style; a
pastourelle, Robene and Makyne, in which a
traditional French genre assimilates the speech
and humour of the Scottish peasantry; and a
number of fine moral narratives and meditations.
