SOURCE: Marlin, John. “‘Arestyus is Noucht bot Gude Vertewe’: The Perplexing Moralitas to Henryson's Orpheus and Erudices.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (2000): 137-53.

[In the following essay, Marlin discusses the Henryson's intent in Orpheus and Erudices to both elicit an affective response from his reader and to supply a moral exegesis of the poem.]

Relations between affect and intellect are often uneasy in the act of reading poetry. This tension is inherent in the very act of exegesis, which reorders aesthetic constructs into analytic categories, often by bringing a poem into a relationship with a complex of ideas external to it. Sometimes, however, this tension is also inherent within a literary work itself. As Wesley Trimpi has argued, a poem, when seeking an affective response, will often be at odds with its attempt to engage the intellect if one aim is pursued at the expense of the other, a problem he calls “the ancient dilemma of representation and knowledge.”¹ A decorous discursive relationship between affect and reason in a poem requires that these aims be properly balanced.

It is just this balance that is at stake in Robert Henryson's Tale of Orpheus and Erudices his Queene.² It is a two-part composition, the first part composed of a mostly rhyme-royale adaptation of the story of Orpheus in the Underworld, and the second part offering a 218-line allegorical moralitas explicating that story in decasyllabic couplets—thus, an ostensibly self-interpreting work. Henryson stands near the end of a long line of medieval writers who adapted and allegorized Orpheus,³ and the Middle-Scots Chaucerian is a credit to the tradition. Like other medieval classicists, Henryson conflates and adapts the Orpheus stories of Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil into a composite account; unlike many of his predecessors, he sensitively amplifies the humanity and pathos of Orpheus's plight. In these regards, the first part of Henryson's poem is rivaled perhaps only by Sir Orfeo, earning it considerable appreciation from scholars of Henryson and the medieval Orpheus tradition.

Less charitable reviews have been the lot of the moralitas. It ostensibly follows Nicholas Trivet's (c. 1265-1334)⁴ commentary on Boethius's version of the Orpheus story, found in Book III of De Consolatione Philosophiae.⁵ Trivet, an English Dominican, wrote a number of theological and historical treatises, as well as a number of commentaries on patristic and classical works. His commentary on Boethius, surviving in 38 manuscripts, was one of the most widely disseminated treatments of De Consolatione in the late Middle Ages;⁶ it would have been known not only to Henryson, but to any of his readers schooled in the liberal arts. Trivet's allegorization follows closely the spirit, and even the letter of the long medieval tradition of Orpheus commentary; indeed, it has been called “almost plagiarized” from Guillaume of Conche's twelfth-century commentary on Boethius.⁷ To the extent Trivet varies from Guillaume, it is to lay a coat of Aristotelian varnish over Guillaume's Platonism, the sort of revision that might be expected near the end of the age of scholasticism. Trivet also incorporates some minor concepts that seem to be derived from the works of the Second and Third Vatican mythographers and Bernardus Silvestris.⁸ Guillaume's commentary, in turn, elaborates and extensively revises earlier commentaries by Notker of Labeo (11^th c.) and Remigius of Auxerre (10^th c.).

At the core of all of these allegorizations is the moral Boethius himself draws from the Orpheus story in De Consolatione Philosophiae: “This fable applies to all of you who seek to raise your minds to sovereign day. For whoever is conquered and turns his eyes to the pit of hell, looking into the inferno, loses all of the excellence he has gained.”⁹ Boethius uses the Orpheus story to illustrate and amplify the Consolatio's thesis, that man's happiness depends on his rational faculties ruling him, not his appetite for the temporal gifts of a blind, unjust Fortune. Hence, Guillaume and Trivet allegorize the story as the progress of a bifurcated soul: Orpheus represents some form of the intellect, and Eurydice some form of the appetites (“natural concupiscence” in Guillaume; the “affections of man” in Trivet). In this scheme, when the intellect masters the appetites or affections, the soul is rightly ordered and can ascend to genuine beatitude. But when love of concupiscence overpowers the intellect, as represented by Orpheus's look back, the disordered soul becomes re-enslaved to temporalia and forfeits its bliss.

Following this line, Henryson's allegory figures Orpheus as the “part intellectiue” of the soul (428) and Erudice as “oure affection / Be fantasy oft movit vp and doun” (431-2). Erudice's death is caused by the affection's flight from virtue and toward worldliness. Orpheus's ascent through the planets, Henryson's original contribution to the tale, signifies contrition for misdirected appetites (446), and his descent into the underworld signifies the intellect's attempt to recover sovereignty over the affections. The poet's musical performances in the underworld represent “quhen reson and perfyte sapience / Playis apon the harp of eloquens, / And persuadis our fleschly appetyte / To leif the thoct of wardly delyte” (507-510). The reunion of Orpheus and Erudice marks “Quhen oure desire wyth reson makis pes” (617); Orpheus's fatal backward glance, is, predictably, a return to worldliness and sin (624-6).

Typical of the moralitas detractors is Douglas Gray, who writes that it “does its best to drag [the poem] down into the mass of poems which are simply typical of their age.”¹⁰ While this judgment stems from a general perception that the moralitas deflates the tale's tragic power, a good part of what disturbs readers is a perplexing contradiction between the poem and the moralitas with respect to the character Aristaeus. In classical antiquity, Aristaeus appears only in Virgil's version of the myth,¹¹ and is responsible for Eurydice's death. Medieval adapters regularly brought him into their conflations of the story's several versions; in his, Henryson casts him as a “bustuos” herdsman:

And whan he saw this lady solitar,
Barfute, with shankis quhytar than the snawe,
Prikkit with lust, he thocht withoutin mar
Hir till oppres—and till hir can he drawe.

(98-102)

Fleeing him, she steps on a venomous serpent, is bitten, dies, and is carried to the Underworld. In allegorizing this passage, the moralitas states, surprisingly: “Arestyus, this hird that couth persewe / Erudices, is noucht bot gude vertewe” (435-6).

Unlikely as it seems to have a ravisher “prikkit with lust” signifying virtue (and Henryson and his sources clearly refer here to morality and not potency), the poet seems to be merely following Trivet's and Guillaume's commentaries, both of which figure Aristaeus the same way; hence, Nicholas: “aristeus qui interpretatur virtus” (Aristaeus, who is interpreted as virtue), and Guillaume: “Aristeus ponitur virtute: ares enim est virtus” (Aristeus is set down for virtue, for “ares” [a contraction for the Greek “aretes,” moral excellence] is virtue).¹² But such tension between tale and allegory is not evident in their versions, as their Aristaeus is merely a name, a flat or abstract type; indeed, he doesn't even appear as a character in the version of the tale they are allegorizing, but is brought into their commentaries through long-standing tradition.¹³ In adapting his sources, Henryson depicts the herdsman as an individual with personality, mannerisms and real desires, even to the idiosyncrasy of a foot fetish. He likewise deviates from his classical source material: Virgil's Aristaeus is not explicitly “bustuos”; any lecherous intent on his part is at best understated.¹⁴ Further, the moralitas's “Arestyus … / is noucht bot gude vertewe” expresses a certainty about the herdsman's signification—almost the certainty of a bluff—not so evident in Trivet's “Aristaeus qui interpretatur virtus.” It is as if Henryson purposely adapted his sources at this point to drive the tale and its moralitas in opposite directions.

This dissonance between tale and allegory has generated some critical consternation. Friedman observes somewhat modestly that “relations between the story and the moralitas are uneasy, with the moralitas sometimes contradicting the fable itself.”¹⁵ Louis puts it more bluntly: “Henryson apparently forgot his moral when he was writing the actual poem.”¹⁶ MacQueen creatively attempts to reconcile the discrepancy by considering Aristaeus' role as a beast-keeper¹⁷ (line 98) allegorically equivalent to moral virtue's role in keeping control over the carnal passions—the beastly part of man.¹⁸ The text frustrates this reading, however, as the “bustuos” herdsman (Henryson used this same word to describe the natural inclination of the bear in his Morale Fabilles) is as much one of the herd as he is over it: he desires “to oppres” Eurydice, rather than bring her into the flock.¹⁹ Despite this problem with Aristaeus, readers see the moralitas as the key to the tale's meaning, at least to a degree. MacQueen's reading of the poem is thoroughly grounded in the moralitas; McDiarmid believes that “Henryson expects the clerkly reader to recognize the moral meaning in the tragedy that will follow, to reconsider the story once he has read the concluding moralitas and still feel it as a tale of human beings, and not merely abstractions.”²⁰ Dorena Wright attempts a mean between accepting and rejecting the allegory, speculating that “either Henryson has wavered uneasily between an allegorical and a non-allegorical method, or (as I prefer to believe) he intended the moralitas to provide an optional and added level of meaning, not the obligatory key to the entire poem.”²¹

Regardless of their stance on the moralitas's role in explicating the myth, the critics almost universally declare it a poetic failure, a great letdown after the sensitive and expressive pair of stanzas that end the tale. Barron writes, “there is a paucity of invention in its application to the narrative, a lack of zest in the plodding couplets which make it difficult to accept as the poet's primary interest” in the poem.²² The dissonance between the two parts of the work render it “a defective expression of what the poet has to say,” according to McDiarmid.²³

These arguments over the function and poetic worth of the moralitas hinge on two critical assumptions, both arising from its explicit claims. The first is that the moralitas is supposed to be a harmonious decoding of the tale: after all, it is rather long, translates characters into allegorical figures, and states that the tale's “doctryne and gude instruction” are “hid vnder the cloke of poesie” (418, 420).²⁴ The second assumption is that the moralitas is, as it claims to be, a careful rendering of Nicholas's commentary. Even McDiarmid, who observes some discrepancies between the moralitas and its sources, believes Henryson “would not have wished to differ from [the commentary's] analysis or been conscious of the differences of meaning that he does introduce.”²⁵

Reasonable as these assumptions seem at first glance, they deserve a second, and not merely because adopting them dooms the poem aesthetically. Henryson was a Chaucerian poet who was probably a schoolmaster, practicing lawyer, and well-traveled humanist;²⁶ most likely he understood all too well the discrepancies introduced into a text through translation. Hence, a more satisfying understanding of the poem might stem from suspending these assumptions and examining whether the tale and its moralitas might be reconciled through irony. Such a reading must begin with not a little critical circumspection and justification; due to the privilege irony receives in New Criticism and more recent theoretical schools, questionable ironic considerations of medieval poets and especially of Chaucer have proliferated in recent years. In his biography of Chaucer, Derek Pearsall aptly remarks that readings based on an ironic narrator often “substitute for the enigmatic and elusive intentions of the author the only too obvious intentions of the critic. The cult of the [Chaucerian fallible] persona has thus become a technique for systematically ironizing the text and appropriating it to the service of particular kinds of programmatic interpretation.”²⁷ How then, might we ascertain the presence of irony in this poem without merely asserting it at those points where the literal text inconveniences our theoretical preconceptions?

A useful if conservative approach would be to consider what irony meant to medieval writers and readers. Rhetorical theorists and encyclopedists of the period generally defined irony as a verbal structure that says one thing but “means” its opposite (or at least means something else), and that opposition is signaled verbally or vocally. Representative of this definition is Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, which states, “Ironia est sententia per pronunciationem contrarium habens intellectum” (Irony is a statement having, through the manner in which it is uttered, a contrary meaning).²⁸ Hence, it is a deliberate act on the part of the author; it “presupposes conscious intention (of a character in the work or the poet) and cannot arise fortuitously.”²⁹ This sense of intentionality differentiates irony in medieval exegesis from the discovery of unconscious verbal or conceptual contradictions that characterizes many contemporary psychoanalytic and poststructuralist treatments of poetry. The role of authorial intention in explicating poetry is, to say the least, a problematic issue amongst modern critics—to many it is anathema—but to medieval readers uncovering the writer's intended meaning was a normal part of literary interpretation. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, argued in his Didascalion that readers should try to determine “quod potissimum scriptor senserit” (what, above all, the author meant) as well as the “voluntas scriptoris” (the inclination of the author).³⁰ Hence, in developing an ironic reading of the text we might first look for signs of “conscious artistry with which the poet imposes his view of things on the material handed down to him,”³¹ through adaptation or re-rendering. Further, we must consider whether the poem's most likely original audiences would have recognized the presence of a set of ironic signifiers, that is, Isidore's per pronunciationem, as irony presupposes an audience of initiates that can see the intended reversal of the literal sense.³² We might also inquire into whether irony is a characteristic or common practice in the larger body of the poet's works, or the tradition within which he normally writes, although these alone cannot confirm that any particular work is to be taken ironically. Finally, we should ascertain whether the proposed ironic reading plays back into the poem's announced thematic concerns.

Conscious artistry seems to be at work in the numerous points of tension between the main parts of the poem. As noted earlier, both the character of Aristaeus in the tale and his symbolic value in the moralitas have been meaningfully altered from the form in which they appear in the original sources in such a way as to intensify their incompatibility. Aristaeus represents but one of many conflicts between the tale and the moralitas that have been heightened through such adaptation. From the outset, differences in style and manner drive the poem's parts against each other. By developing Orpheus's psychology and subjectivity beyond what one finds in the classical renditions of the story, Henryson's tale achieves a heightened emotional intensity, most notably in Orpheus's planctus (135-183) and in his despair at seeing Eurydice's beauty corrupted in hell (352-356). This amplified pathos marks all the more strongly the vocal shift at the beginning of the moralitas, signaled by the prosodic shift from rhyme royale to couplets, as well as by the direct address, “Lo, worthy folk” (415): this change in pronunciatio invites the audience to adopt a new mode of reading, to leave the world of realized, sympathetic characters and enter the world of analytic commentary. Further, the moralitas reduces the tale's more rounded human characters to one-dimensional personifications of intellectual qualities, such that the experience of moving from Orpheus's tragic discovery to the moral's propositional discourse is quite jarring. It is a shift from affect to reason—the integration of which is the theme of the moralitas.

These vocal and methodological tensions between commentary and tale echo through their substantive dissonances. A slight rupture occurs early in the moralitas, where it identifies Calliope as eloquence (426). That this is a traditional interpretation there is no doubt;³³ but it is noteworthy that the tale associates Calliope purely with music (43-5, 68-70) while assigning eloquence to Mercury (213), the classical god of rhetoric. In other words, the poem recognizes music and rhetoric as distinct arts with their own methods. While this is a slight distinction—after all, in medieval allegory the same quality can be indicated by different figures³⁴—it does suggest that the poem and the moralitas might be working out of different interpretive schemata. Yet the most important substantive discrepancies are those which occur in the moralitas's allegory of plot. Although Orpheus's descent from Phoebus and Calliope (61-3) mark him as an apt figure of the intellect, his thorough characterization as a courtly lover undercuts that figuration.³⁵ His “accord” (84) with Eurydice is not an image of reason controlling the desires, but of “myrth, blythnes, gret plesans, and gret play,” (88). His long complaint at Eurydice's passing shows “His hart was sa apon his lusty quene” (149), and when he petitions the planets for her return, he confesses to Venus that “I am your avin trewe knycht” (206). When Orpheus recognizes Eurydice in the deepest part of Tartarus, he bemoans the loss of “thy rude as rose with chekis quhite, / Thy cristall eyne with blenkis amorouse, / Thi lippis red to kis diliciouse” (354-6). Returning from the Underworld the couple are “talkand of play and sport” (385), underscoring Orpheus's consistent motivation to recover the “warldlie ioye” (89) they once had. Throughout, the hero wants to indulge, not redeem, his desires: he, not Eurydice, seems a proper figure of the affections. The conventions of courtly romance that Henryson imports into the traditional story strain those of the moral and theological allegory customarily attached to it, and this juxtaposition of traditions creates an instance of the “generic instability” Fyler finds characteristic of both Chaucerian and Ovidian irony, that is, the practice of extablishing one set of generic expectations, only to undermine them by shifting genre.³⁶

Orpheus's cupidity wedges tale and moral apart at other points. The moralitas equates the hero's long and moving lament on his queen's death with when “parfyte reson wepis wondir sare, / Seand oure appetite thusgate mys-fare” (445-6), ostensibly an expression of contrition for misplaced desire. But in the actual complaint Orpheus regrets only the loss of “plesance and play” (154); he repeatedly cries, “Quhar art thou gane, my luf Erudices?” (143). Here again the gap between tale and allegory widens from the poet's adaptations of his sources. While Orpheus's lament in the woods is stock in both classical and medieval versions of the story, it is rarely developed in the courtly and unambiguously cupidinous terms Henryson deploys. And while Nicholas's commentary mentions the intellect weeping for the affect, he figures it not as a sign of contrition; rather, he holds the intellect culpable: “et ideo [intellectus] non debet flectere aspectum ad [a]effectum” (ll. 76-7). Indeed, Henryson's tale reflects Nicholas's commentary better than his moralitas, which follows a logic of its own. A similar disjunction occurs in the moralitas's rendering of the journey to the spheres, which ostensibly symbolizes repentance and a turn to spirituality: Orpheus “passis vp to the hevvn belyue, / Shawand till us the lif contemplatyve” (447-448). Yet in the tale, no such repentance occurs. Orpheus's only motive for visiting the heavens is his desire to recover Eurydice: his pleas to Jupiter, Apollo and Venus all make this plain. Orpheus here may be a figure of praying amiss, but not of “the lif contemplatyve.”

This exegetical discord continues in the moralitas's account of Orpheus's five concerts in hell (the classical sources depict only one, another case of Henryson's crafting his material, gaining emphasis through repetition). The moralitas figures the cessation of punishments in Hades following Orpheus's songs as a reordering of the soul—that reason, combined with eloquence, are quieting the desires:

Bot quhen oure mynd is myngit with sapience,
And plais apon the harp of eloquence;
That is to say, makis persuasioun
To draw oure will and oure affection
In ewiry elde, fra sin and foule delyte,
This dog our saule has no power to byte.

(469-74)

But again, this is not what happens in the poem. Orpheus plays the music of the spheres, which he discovers as if by accident in his trip to heaven (218-246), not to quell his desires, but in response to either fear of the tormentors or pity for the tormented—perhaps the same misplaced pity for which Virgil chastises Dante in the Inferno.³⁷ In essence, his eloquence helps him gratify his desire, rather than subordinate it. Moreover, the moral effects of his music are dubious. While Cerberus and the furies doze off to Orpheus's lullaby, Ixioun “out of the quhele can crepe / And stall away” (272-3) presumably to continue his “hardy and curageouse” lechery. Similarly, Tantalus steals a sip from the river (286-8), and Tithyus, while still bound, gains lasting relief from the ravenous grip (300-2). If the tormented represent wrong desires, Orpheus's music actually quiets the guards that hold those desires in check—exactly opposite to the moralitas's interpretation.³⁸ Henryson cannot plead that he is merely following his auctoritees. In Ovid and Boethius, as well as Nicholas's commentary, when Orpheus plays his harp the furies weep instead of sleep, Ixioun's wheel merely stops for a short spell, Tantalus is so moved by the song that he ignores the waters he could drink, and the eagle tearing at Tityus's bowels pauses a moment instead of flying away.³⁹ Nicholas's commentary emphasizes the furies' role as avengers of sin (“ultrices,” ll. 182-3), and notes that the sapience and eloquence figured by Orpheus's music quiet the desires rather than give them opportunities for release. Once again Henryson's adaptations have created a tension which would not have existed otherwise.

The final discord between tale and moral comes when the moralitas announces its thesis: “Than Orpheus has wone Erudices / Quhen oure desire wyth reson makis pes, / And sekis vp to contemplacion” (616-618). Where, exactly, in the tale Orpheus achieves this moment of psychic reintegration is hard to find. Even standing before Pluto, Orpheus mourns Eurydice's loss of beauty, indicating his concern for material rather than spiritual good. And after being reunited, “thai went, talkand of play and sport” (383), hardly an image of the reason seeking “vp to contemplacion,” as the moralitas figures it to be (618). As with the case of Aristaeus, the character of events throughout the fiction seems at odds with their allegorical figuration. That so many of the discrepancies stem from the way sources have been adapted argues that the cumulative dissonance between tale and moral is designed; and, given the wide dissemination of Nicholas's commentary, not to mention the general popularity of the Orpheus legend in medieval schooling, Henryson's most literate readers would likely have been sensitive to these adaptations.

Given the number of moments at which tale and moral seem in conflict, it seems surprising that anyone accepts the moralitas's claim that it interprets the tale. But several parts of the moralitas, especially in the beginning, are in concord with the poem. For example, Orpheus, given his parentage, seems a good figure of the soul's intellective faculty. Eurydice, in demanding marriage of Orpheus and in her penchant to wander in the meadows, seems an apt figure of human affect. The marriage arrangement, in which Eurydice tells Orpheus “In this province ye sall be king and lord” (83), clearly figures the proper relationship between reason and desire. However, the farther into the moralitas one reads, the more the discrepancies compound, creating a wider gap between fiction and interpretation. It is as if the moralitas begins on solid premises but then takes on a life of its own, independent of the tale, driven less by the language and context of the poem than by its own conceptual framework. This is not to say that the moralitas is intellectually bankrupt. It contains moments of fine insight: the notion of reason making peace with desire is appealing in terms of medieval psychology and spirituality, and the figuring of Orpheus's harp as reason and eloquence quieting the desires is a lovely rendering of the medieval idea of the proper role of rhetoric. Arguably, it reaches the same moral conclusion as the tale it supposedly interprets—that is, that ungoverned affections will take you straight to hell. But when the moralitas arrives at such moments, it is by its own methods and pursuing its own purposes, inspired by the tale, but not explicating it.

We perhaps should not be surprised to see such a gap between fiction and allegory in a work by Henryson. His later and more famous work, the Morale Fables is full of surprising moralities that deploy unpredictable allegorical values that make the reader dependent upon the commentator. And as in Orpheus, throughout the Fables the morals routinely upset the expectations set up in the tales. This pattern of reversal works by gaining our emotions for the tales' sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes good-natured characters and evoking a visceral judgement on their black-comedic outcomes, but then examining them in the light of what is often rather stern moral reasoning.⁴⁰ The tension between tale and moral evident throughout the fables suggests that the morals do not dictate our understanding of the tale; rather, they temper it. The fables engage our affections; the morals cause us to examine them, just as they cause us to reconsider our moral judgment.⁴¹ The reader is invited to negotiate apparently valid claims to truth from different sources—from affect and intellect.⁴²

Does a comparable negotiation occur in Orpheus? An approach to that problem may be found in the poem's Chaucerisms. We could virtually ignore the Testament of Cresseid and the Tale of Chauntecleir and infer Chaucer's influence on Henryson from Orpheus and Erudices alone. Written mostly in rhyme-royale, the stanza form of Troilus and several of the Canterbury Tales, the poem resonates with Chaucerisms. As Friedman notes, Orpheus's petitions to Jupiter, Apollo and Venus are reminiscent of Palamon and Arcites's prayers in the Knight's Tale, and Orpheus's moving complaint (134-183) has echoes of the complaint of the Black Knight in The Book of the Duchess.⁴³ Many of the poem's Chaucerisms are more direct. The poem's naming of Proserpine as the Queen of Faery comes from the Merchant's Tale (IV (E) 2236f)⁴⁴ (and Proserpine seems to get the last word in Henryson's hell, just as she does in January's garden). Henryson's figuring of Watling Street as the Milky Way (188) derives from the House of Fame (935-44); that work may be the source for Orpheus's flight to the spheres, as well.

Henryson borrows not only from Chaucer's material, but also from his manner. Narrating Orpheus is an apologetic persona such as we find in Chaucer's dream poems and a few of the Canterbury Tales. After reciting the long list of musical terms, the narrator confesses, “Of sik musik to wryte I do bot dote, / Thar-for at this mater a stra I lay, / For in my lif I coud newir syng a note” (240-3). Naturally, he goes on at a later point to speak of how Orpheus “playit mony suete proporcion / With base tonys in ypodorica, / With gemilling in ypolerica” (played many sweet chords, with bass tones in the Hypodorian mode, with harmony in the Hypolocrian⁴⁵ mode) (368-70), somewhat like the Knight and other pilgrims who say they will speak no more on a subject and then tarry on it—albeit to a purpose. Further, Henryson's work is rife with Chaucerian digression. The prolix catalogs of the muses, musical terms, and notables in hell all draw us out of the plot's essential action, and these moments of somewhat tedious erudition and arcana smack just a bit of the pedantic eagle in the House of Fame. Finally, bookishness, a Chaucerian concern for auctoritee, pervades the poem. The narrator carefully identifies and enthusiastically endorses his sources, and reminds us at points that his commentary comes from the library: “I sall the tell sum part, as I haue red” (490). And as we have seen above, we can trust Henryson to follow faithfully his announced sources about as much as we can Chaucer.

This accumulation of Chaucerisms suggests that we might search for one more: a fallible narrator, fallible because he is naive, self-deceived or self-interested. Positing such a narrator may answer a question many have asked, which is, why does Henryson include the moralitas at all? There is lesson enough in Orpheus's reversal and his discovery of the simple but profound truth that the weakness of human love (the look back) undermines its power (to raise the dead); those who want more of a moral might examine the poem's political trappings for lessons on princely conduct. MacQueen's notion that a medieval reader would typically see such a commentary at the end of a poem is not persuasive. Whether or not morals might be found at the end of texts is a matter of genre. Middle-English and Middle-Scots vernacular adaptations of classical mythology did not universally or even characteristically include allegorical commentary: none appear appended to the text of Sir Orfeo or the works of Gower, James I and Dunbar.

A fifteenth-century Scottish reader might come across a glossed classical text—like the De Consolatione containing Nicholas's commentary—or hear a lector expound upon an ancient myth. In any case, the commentary would be by someone other than the poet, and it seems that this is exactly what Henryson has mimicked in the moralitas to Orpheus and Erudices; this would have been more evident to an audience hearing an oral performance of the poem than it may be for readers. The shift in pronunciatio signaled by the change in meter and verse form is accompanied by a shift in address: the third-person narration that dominates the tale gives way to a direct address to the reader—“Lo, worthy folk” (415)—suggesting a fictive rhetorical situation wherein a lecturer addresses several auditors. Throughout the moralitas the speaker identifies with his audience: he refers to “our affection” (431), “oure myndis” (436), “our myndis ee” (453), “the feruent lufe / We suld have” (449-50), “oure appetit” (445), and “oure desyre” (455). The moralitas becomes personal and communal, with a tone more of speaking than of writing (another deviation from Nicholas's commentary, which remains impersonal and expository entirely in the third person, with the pronoun nos occurring only once near the end). Hence, we might examine the speaker of the moralitas as a character as individuated and idiosyncratic as Orpheus or Aristaeus, a character whose interests and weaknesses influence our reading of the poem.

This speaker is pedantic and bookish, and, while not quite the ostensible bore of the House of Fame's eagle, he is verbose and confident in his sources. Like Chauntecleir, he exudes confidence for the “olde bookes” that buttress his argument, which is “Rycht full of frute and seriositee” (424). Significantly, his presentation is marked by moments where he loses logical and rhetorical control of his material, perhaps suggesting personal enthusiasms. For instance, with respect to the crimes of Tantalus he translates two clauses of Nicholas (“Tantalus avarum significat … quia non sustinet in necessitatibus suis ea [diuicias] expendere, quia delectatus uisu peccunie non uult aceruum diminuere” [214-219])⁴⁶ into a fourteen line invective on miserliness (531-544); one almost hears the annoyance of the scrivener or barrister who hasn't been paid. He likewise treats Tityus's desire to divine the future, which Nicholas (222-236) handles with dry, scholastic etymologies, with a lengthy (571-599) outburst against divination, witchcraft, and sorcery. Caught up in this diatribe, he omits from his exegesis of Tityus the formula with which he ends that of each of the other monsters—how Orpheus's harp of reason and eloquence stills the inordinate or misplaced desire figured by each creature. As silence is often significant in Chaucer, it is also so in Henryson: could this absence mark the narrator's personal disquiet of mind? The subject of his invective is divination, and he is striving to divine intellective meaning from a poetic text, something which is hardly among “sic maner of thingis / Quhilk vpoun trew and certaine causis hingis” (590-1), self-proclaimed as the proper object of divination. Perhaps he senses at this moment that his own presentation judges itself, and he loses his thread.

With his moralizing, faith in intellection and love of study, full of “doctryne and gude instruction” (417), this narrator stands in marked contrast to the characters of the tale, who are explicitly driven by affection and appetite, the commentator's figurations notwithstanding. As a man who trusts to things discernible “be calculatioun” (595), and unwitting of the divide between his own theory and its practice, he fulfills his own picture of Orpheus: a widowed reason (627), an intellect out of touch with its affections. It is revealing that he recognizes affect “Is alway prompt and redy to fall doun” (628), but not intellect. His scheme of the relationship between reason and emotion finds no space even for his own righteous indignation or his own enthusiasm for study and commentary. Indeed, the only affection finding a place in his allegory is contrition—an emotion consequent to moral reasoning and, hence, a validation of his own theory.

There may be other and better ways to psychologize the lapses in logical and narrative control within the moralitas, its progressive deviation from the text on which it comments, and its manner of creating expectations only to frustrate them. What matters is that these rhetorical features are present and therefore can be psychologized, that the moralitas is colored by the concerns of a subjective narrator; moreover, that coloring falls squarely into the most common medieval topoi of irony: feigned praise.⁴⁷ The moralitas seems to be endorsing Trivet's commentary, but actually presents an instance of the “vatic pretense” that Fyler finds in many of Chaucer's and Ovid's narrators,⁴⁸ that is, a narrator who, like the House of Fame's persona, promises the profound and the remarkable, but then systematically deflates those promises and undercuts his own authority. So read, the moralitas becomes an artful demonstration of how commentary, through the obsessions and personal concerns of its author, takes on a life of its own independent of its literary object. As such, it is also a demonstration, almost a self-satire, of the digressive style, interpretive excesses and personal enthusiasms, all mixed with moments of wisdom, that mark medieval commentary, especially when it emanates from a mind in which reason and desire are at odds. As happens in the Canterbury Tales, the tale sets a standard that judges the teller.

By postulating a fallible narrator we might also understand how the poem's two divisions work together as a literary unit. The moralitas's announced theme is the right relationship between affect and reason, and its ideal is a harmony between the two—the balance about which Trimpi writes. Achieving that balance is the problem Henryson's work explores. The tale, with its narrative structure driven by discoveries and reversals, its poetic diction and decoration, and its affect-seeking hero himself “be fantasy oft movit vp and doun” (432) engages our affect and seeks an emotional catharsis. The moralitas, with its ratiocinative narrator insisting to the point of self-validation on the primacy of the intellect, depicts a widowed reason, an intellect out of touch with, or at least operating independent of, its affections. As in the morals to the Fabilles, the commentator insists on his own interpretive authority while drawing our intellect in a direction our affect might resist. Because he pursues a purely intellective aim (Trimpi's “knowledge”) at the expense of and ignoring its related affect (“representation”), he soon diverges from the tale and follows his own path to a self-contradictory destination. But following the affective route is no more satisfactory: the tale's Orpheus seeks the object of his affections through heaven and hell and finds in the end that those affections themselves betray him. Hence, in terms of medieval psychology, the will is left to shift anxiously between affective and cognitive impulses, recognizing the potential danger in pursuing either to its ultimate consequences.

The potential for harmonious cooperation between affect and intellect remains problematic. There are points where the tale and moralitas find concord, but these are at best ephemeral, similar to what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” In the end, the poem is a representation of its stated theme—that is, the inherent tension between the soul's faculties, whose integration can last no longer than Orpheus's and Eurydice's reunion. Perhaps here Henryson reflects the anxieties of his own age, a period of intellectual turmoil, wherein long-standing scientific, political, and religious certainties were in question, and wherein faith in an overarching intellectual order that dissolved all contradictions had long been on the wane.⁴⁹ While Henryson may not have been genius enough to devise new poetic forms to express these tensions, he fully recognized and exploited the potential of the Chaucerian tradition. And in grasping the spirit of Chaucer, Henryson has also grasped something of the spirit of that other great ironist, Ovid, whose Metamorphoses inspired the medieval Orpheus tradition. Indeed, Henryson's artfully problematic moralitas to Orpheus and Erudices exposes the dubious wisdom of persistent medieval attempts to fix a stable meaning on a work whose theme is omnia mutant.

Notes

1. Muses of One Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

2. All quotations from Henryson are from Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

3. For a review of the medieval Orpheus tradition, see John B. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

4. For more on Trivet's career, see Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 58-65.

5. B.L. Addit. MS 19585, ff. 61b-63b, and B.N. MS lat. 18424. Line numbers in this essay refer to the extract of Nicholas's commentary appearing in Fox, 384-391.

6. Friedman, Orpheus, 110.

7. Fox, Poems, cvi.

8. Trivet's emphasis on Orpheus's eloquence may stem from the Vatican mythographers, who noted the civilizing effect of music. Bernardus used Orpheus's geneology to establish his allegorical value, as do Trivet and Henryson. Friedman, 110, 112. Henryson elaborates this genealogy even further; see lines 1-70 of the poem.

9. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 74.

10. Robert Henryson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979), 240.

11. Georgicon IV, 436f.

12. Fox, Poems, 385, l.47; Friedman, Orpheus, 108.

13. Aristaeus enters allegorizations of Orpheus as early as the sixth century, in the Mythologiae of Fulgentius. Subsequently, he appeared as a matter of course in commentaries on Ovid and Boethius, even when not a character in the primary text: Fox, 415; Friedman, 89. For instance, see the marginal gloss to X.10 in The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, ed. Frank T. Coulson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991), 119.

14. Virgil describes the incident as follows:

    illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps,
    immanem ante pedes hydrum moritura puella
    seruantem ripas alta non uidit in herba.

    (457-9)

    (This one, indeed, when she fled from you headlong through the river, the fated girl did not see before her feet an observer on the bank, a monstrous serpent in the tall grass.) R. A. B. Mynors, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 97. All translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

15. Friedman, Orpheus, 203.

16. Kenneth R. R. G. Louis, “Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Traditions of the Middle Ages,” Speculum 41 (1966), 654.

17. In the Georgics, Aristaeus is a beekeeper. In early medieval commentary, he became a herdsman, so the change in occupation is not Henryson's original contribution. See Friedman, 108f.

18. John MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 34-5.

19. Friedman writes, “there is little evidence to support [MacQueen's reading] in either the Orpheus tradition or in Henryson's poem, Orpheus, (239 n69). Matthew McDiarmid simply states, “I do not understand MacQueen”: Robert Henryson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 61 n13.

20. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson, 55. Gray, Robert Henryson, 237, is somewhat less committal; while he sees sufficient points of contact between the tale and the moralitas to make the latter something of a guide to the former, he feels the two are in conflict enough that “It would be wrong … to force the allegorical reading of the moralitas on to every detail of the story.”

21. Dorena A. Wright, “Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the Tradition of the Muses,” in Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 46-7.

22. William Raymond Johnston Barron, Robert Henryson: Selected Poems (Manchester: Fyfield, 1981), 12. Louis, 646, concurs: “He makes his characters and their tragedy so attractive that the moralitas, by comparison, becomes dull and ineffectual. His primary interest is clearly not in the moralitas at all.”

23. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson, 59-60.

24. The moralitas's remark that Nicholas “Applyis it [the tale] to gud moralite” might suggest that the moralitas is not deployed as an allegorical decoding of the poem, but rather as one moral application of the poem among many potential modes of understanding it. However, “apply” in Middle Scots also meant “to apply by interpretation” (Douglas used it in this sense); hence, the term still carries the sense of exegesis, and probably does in this context. See A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, ed. William A. Craigle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), I. 96.

25. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson, 43. Fox, Poems, clx, echoes this sentiment: “although [Henryson] departs from [Trivet] in some particulars, he does not make any essential changes in Trivet's allegory.”

26. See Barron, 9-10; Smith, xxii-xxv; McDiarmid, Robert Henryson, 1-23.

27. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 86. Cf. Jonathan Culler: “Irony, the cynic might say, is the ultimate form of recuperation and naturalization, whereby we ensure that the text says only what we want to hear.” Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), 156.

28. Etymologiarum, ed. William Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), I:73. Likewise, Augustine, On Christian Doctrine: “Now irony indicates by inflection what it wishes to be understood, as when we say to a man who is doing evil, ‘You are doing well’”; trans. D. W. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 103. For an introduction to the treatment of irony in the medieval encylopediae and rhetorical treatises, see the first chapter of Simon Gaunt, Troubadors and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

29. Dennis H. Green, Irony in the Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 6.

30. Vi.xi Patrologia Latina, 176, 808. Likewise, John of Salisbury complains that teachers of philosophy rendered interpretations “contra mens auctoris” (contrary to the mind of the author); Metalogicon, ii.xvii, PL 199, 874. In a paper on “Interpretation and Scholastic Method,” (Conference on Representation and Interpretation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, April 20, 1995), Prof. Jorge Garcia argued that twelfth-century interpreters of Aristotle and other authors routinely claimed that they were attempting to recover the “intellegens auctoris” and even the “intentio auctoris.”

31. Green, Irony, 6.

32. Green, Irony, 3.

33. See Friedman, Orpheus, 112.

34. This type of covalence is suggested by Bernardus Silvestris in his Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid, ed. E. G. Schreiber and T. E. Maresca (Lincoln and London: Univ. Nebraska Press, 1979), 11.

35. Gray finds the root of Orpheus's characterization in the romance tradition, as does Louis.

36. John Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 3, 4-8, 13, 20.

37. There are other allusions to Inferno in the tale, which suggests that Henryson may have had this meaning in mind. For example, the “ferefull strete” that “For slidderiness scant” (305, 307), and the “mony pape and cardinal,” “bischopis” and “Abbottis” in hell (338-42) are Dantesque.

38. Incidentally, these features of the text call into question MacQueen's allegorization, in which the figures in hell represent “various dangers which beset the intellectual power in its quest for the appetites. … Orpheus overcomes all these obstructions, only to succumb finally when he is on the very brink of complete success.”

39. See Ovid, Metamorphoseon X, 40-48, and Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, L. III m. 12.

40. For a more thorough development of this thesis, see Harold. E. Toliver, “Robert Henryson: From Moralitas to Irony,” in English Studies 46 (1965), 300-9.

41. Toliver finds a similar distance between poem and narratorial commentary at work in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, as does Sydney Harth, “Henryson Reinterpreted,” in Essays in Criticism 11 (1961), 471-80. It seems the poet's consistent practice.

42. Although Henryson's poems are not definitively dated, most likely the Fabillis came later than Orpheus. I am suggesting, then, that Henryson adopted this method of ironic distancing earlier in this career than has previously been indicated.

43. Friedman, 199-200. The complaint might also find roots in Lydgate's Complaint of the Black Knight or in any number of secular lyrics circulating at the time. Fleeing to the woods and sobbing “farewell” were common tropes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century lyrics about lost love.

44. In Sir Orfeo the queen and king of faery take Eurydice away, but they are not explicitly identified as Proserpine and Pluto. Friedman notes that “There are, to my knowledge, no other references to Proserpine as queen of the Fairies except by Chaucer” (198).

45. Conjectural translation; Fox notes that there is no evidence of this musical mode being known in Henryson's; it might be a “nonce formation” that might not “make musical sense” (411-12); presumably a knowing audience would see a parody on hyperspecialized musical terminology.

46. “Tantalus symbolizes the avaricious man, who cannot bear to spend those riches for his own necessities, as he, delighted by the sight, does not wish to diminish his heap of money.”

47. See Gaunt, 9, and Green, 139-40; feigned praise is the most common example of irony used in medieval rhetorics; see the example from Augustine, n28 above.

48. Fyler, 22, 43.

49. Hence, Gray, 30: “It is certainly not surprising that in a period when past certainties were being undermined we should find in literature a liking for enigmas, contradictions, and ironies.”