SOURCE: Greentree, Rosemary and Steven R. McKenna. “‘The Hurt Off ane Happie the Vther Makis’: Henryson's Construction of his Audience.” In Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature, edited by Steven R. McKenna, pp. 13-25. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992.

[In the following essay, Greentree and McKenna examine Henryson's “construction of his audience” in passages throughout the Moral Fables.]

The words of the lion king in “The Trial of the Fox”—“The hurt off ane happie the vther makis” (1065)—cause uproar and laughter in the royal court, ill-natured delight in the agony of the wolf, whose head has been broken by the mare's kick. The lion's sentence derisively restates the Latin maxim feelingly uttered by the fox, when he offers “Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum” as his reason for declining to examine the document under the mare's hoof (1033). At a superficial level, the lion could be merely describing the fox's usual response of malevolent enjoyment of the suffering of his dupe; more deeply, he draws the court's attention to the wolf as a figure of fun and an example of foolish behavior. In a wider sense, he expresses the purpose of the Moral Fables and reveals their methods.

The closing moments of this fable offer a rare demonstration of successful teaching in the Fables, followed by surprising consequences. One animal, the fox, seems to learn prudence from the example of another's misfortune, and he even states the lesson in the formal style of a proverb. The incident is so concisely expressed that it is almost concealed among apparently important distractions such as the assumption of the fox's inheritance and the procession of the beasts; it provokes malicious laughter in the tale and an unexpectedly spiritual lesson in the moralitas; it involves the characters who most frequently show aspects of clever and brutal villainy in the Fables; and it offers an insight into Henryson's idea of his audience. All of these disparate elements are entirely consistent with Henryson's purpose and methods.

The mare's kick and its consequences exemplify the reversals by which Henryson teaches his audience, jolting them to learn harsh lessons in moralitates drawn from tales which often involve vicious comedy and base characters. The violence of the tales hints at the violence of his teaching methods. Brutal instruction makes the wolf “that new-maid doctour” (1092) and qualifies him to act as confessor when the fox is formally executed, a sinister repetition of his comic role as Freir Volff Waitskaith in “The Fox and the Wolf.” In a similar way, the poem offers sharp lessons to its audience, and implies the reception of the teaching, in comments throughout the work.

We know that the Fables are intended to give pleasure as well as instruction—“[a]mangis ernist to ming merie sport / To blyth the spreit and gar the tyme be schort” (20-21).¹ We know too that medieval comedy is sometimes cruel and unsubtle. We may misguidedly imagine that we can look back from the sophistication of the twentieth century to simple times with primitive amusements. But can any such thoughts prepare us to take moral instruction from such brutal slapstick as the mare's kick? More puzzlingly, do they prepare us to revel in it, as the lion's audience does? To gain some answers, we should look at Henryson's teaching style and at his comments on his audience, from which we may posit his construction of that nebulous entity. Thoughts of the audience may be discerned throughout the Fables, when the Narrator refers to those who are taught and in the direct addresses to his own audience: confiding or stern, sharing pleasures and sorrows, moving from formal deference to intimate acquaintance. Particularly telling references come at the beginning, middle and end of the cycle, when it is read in the balanced progression of the order of the Bassandyne Print.

The audience is first acknowledged in “The Prologue.” The conventional modesty of a conventional narrator is exaggerated to an extreme which undermines the reverence given to those he calls “my maisteris” (29). The familiar metaphors of the nut and bow, the hackneyed request for correction in the translation from his author's Latin to his own “hamelie language and … termis rude” (36), the assurance that the work is offered “Nocht of myself, for vane presumptioun / Bot be request of ane lord” (33-34), all make up a leisurely opening, apparently to precede a conventionally decorous work. The audience can hardly be prepared for the directness of the Narrator's comparison of “mony men in operatioun” to “beistis in conditioun” (48-49) and the rigor of the notion of shameless man transformed to “brutal beist.” Within the stanzas of “The Prologue,” the audience is given both extravagant flattery and harsh condemnation, each implying scant respect. This is an unpromising basis for the relationship of Narrator to audience, quite unlike that of the last stanza of “The Paddock and the Mouse,” where the Narrator bids his “freind” farewell.

Such contradictions clash throughout the fable cycle. Members of the audience may be friends or pupils, willing to learn or incorrigible. The least realistic fable, “The Lion and the Mouse,” told by Aesop in the Narrator's dream, gives the saddest comment on a narrator's effectiveness in Aesop's question: “quhat is it worth to tell a fenȝeit taill, / Quhen haly preiching may na thing auaill?” (1389-90). Yet the mouse of “The Lion and the Mouse” gives a successful demonstration of the preacher's role, perhaps a parody of the fabulist's, when she takes a convincing example from the human world—“oft is sene, ane man off small stature / Reskewit hes ane lord off hie honour” (1499-1500)—to strengthen her case for being released from the lion's paw. This fable is followed by one full of realistic detail, “The Preaching of the Swallow,” which is told through the Narrator's waking experiences. The sentiment which prompted Aesop's question is effectively demonstrated when the birds respond to the swallow's warnings with indifference or derision, and humanity's spiritual blindness and unwillingness to learn are exposed in the grim commentary of the moralitas. Comedy is scarce, except in the cheery chatter of the deluded lark, who laughs about the coming of death and speaks more truth than she knows in her ironically ill-chosen proverbs.

The last fable, “The Paddock and the Mouse,” encapsulates all Henryson's lessons and gives comment on his audience which is at once acute and affectionate. Both toad and mouse are educated creatures; they exemplify receptive members of an audience, but their learning is sadly misused. The toad augments her instruction with devious cunning to deceive the mouse; the mouse recognizes the evil revealed in the toad's horrid appearance, but is defeated by sophistry and her own failing of greed. We may compare the Narrator's gentle and regretful ridicule of the little mouse with his harsh condemnation of the cock of “The Cock and the Jasp.” Both characters are led astray by their urgent hunger and longing for food of a particular kind. The mouse yearns for delicacies: “ryip aitis, … barlie, peis, and quheit” (2792), but the cock seeks “draf or corne, small wormis, or snaillis” (94), morsels which could alert a medieval audience to his baseness.² The cock, “desyrand mair the sempill corne / Than ony iasp, may till ane fule be peir” (141-2), and he is scorned for his lack of perception and enterprise. His pretensions to learning are exposed in his addresses to the jasp, which attempt the high style, but always sink bathetically to the level of his dunghill. The cock is never aware of the lessons about him, and is ruthlessly despised for his complacent ignorance. In contrast, the story of the mouse in the last fable, who is tempted by her educated palate and fails to heed the warnings she perceives, is told with some sorrow. The Narrator deals mildly with her incongruous lack of horse and boat, and his picture of the little creature seems tolerant of her folly.

The cock is an apt figure for erring, unreceptive mankind. He finds the jasp and recognizes it as an object of value, a “riche and nobill thing” (79), but he thinks only of the need for food for his body, “the sempill corne,” not comprehending the possibility of enriching his soul, to which the jasp is “eternall meit” (140). He is harshly judged by the Narrator's double standards because he does not see the worth of the jewel—to a human rather than a bird. Recently, some critics have defended him, saying for example that he shows “an appealing kind of commonsense” (Kratzmann 58). (This merely points out that the Narrator's value system, which he assumes to be absolute, is in fact relative.) However contradictory it may seem, this is not satisfactory for the Narrator, who is concerned with the welfare of the soul as an absolute good unto itself. We may contrast his implied admiration for the learning of the little mouse of the last fable, although she ignores the warnings from human physiognomy, perceived in the visible characteristics of the toad, and so is taken by a natural enemy, the kite, in astonishingly unnatural circumstances. We should perhaps not always make too nice an assessment of the Narrator's methods and messages. He appears many times as shortsighted, often overlooking what would seem to be the obvious point raised in a fable. This is not to suggest that he is too inept as a story teller to catch his own meanings. Rather, the selectivity of his vision, particularly in the moralitates, reveals certain moral and intellectual biases which are themselves indicative of the Narrator's values and ideological orientation. This does not mean he is wrong in the message he attempts to impart, but instead his essential message reflects certain moral and intellectual limits that for the Narrator imply a monologic value system which he seeks to use as the basis of establishing a community with his intended audience. Implicit in this notion is the idea that whatever is inside (i.e. what the Narrator deems good) is itself good, proper, and right; that which is outside acceptable thought or behavior is thus ipso facto bad, improper, and wrong.

The moralitas of “The Paddock and the Mouse” is directed to an individual, familiarly addressed as “thow,” “brother” and “freind.” We may compare the disparity of the general, distant conviviality of “The Prologue” and the particular closeness (community) of the last moralitas with the notion of the implied audience of Troilus and Criseyde, described by Dieter Mehl, who discerns both a listening audience at court and a “more solitary and bookish reader” (173). The tone of the Fables' concluding stanzas differs from the exaggerated courtesy and harsh moralizing found elsewhere in the work, and implies a genuine regard for each member of the audience rather than general condemnation of the faults of mankind. It is far from being an idealized and uncritical regard, though. The lessons of the moralitates preclude any such assumption.

Henryson takes his audience through a harrowing course in moral instruction, in which some comic incidents are quite as violent as the cruel moments of tragedy. In fact, the incidents which we must take seriously are often preceded by comic parallels. We have already mentioned the light-hearted parody of confession administered by the wolf and its gloomy repetition. We may remember too that in “The Fox and the Wolf” the fox was shot by the goatherd, after the entertaining confession, ironically and amusingly fulfilling the prediction of his horoscope. The tale of “The Trial of the Fox” ends with the judicial execution of the fox, after his formal confession to the “new-maid doctour.” There are similar parallels in other fables. The death of the wether comes after the grimly comic chase, and is explained as the punishment due to an upstart who strays from his own territory (and all the tragic transgressions that such an act symbolizes) and tries the patience of lawful authority too far (although, as in “The Cock and the Jasp,” the protagonist is shown in the tale to be doing his best by his own inadequate standards).

The wether's expressed concern about guarding the flock because of the absence of the guard dog in “The Wolf and the Wether” can be viewed as a noble gesture, particularly since the flock itself is defenseless at the beginning of the fable. However, this motivation on the wether's part is countered by what may indeed be his overarching motive—a will to power over the wolf that is intended to strike terror in the heart of the wolf (2535). As the fable plays out, the wether both literally and symbolically breaks boundaries, and in this action Henryson is showing us the potential for a tragic hubris in the wether's character. The wether, in somewhat arrogant fashion, dons a false identity which might tend to place him higher up on the list of aggressive animals. Further, he also accepts the responsibilities of this action of stepping out of one's place in line: “‘All hail the cure I tak it vpon me / Your scheip to keip’” he says to the anxious shepherd (2485-6). Initially, the wether sees fun and games in becoming a dog (2577-8). The fun stops, however, when the toy of the play world, his dog skin, tears off and is left behind on a bush as he pursues the wolf. At this point, the wether has no choice but to acknowledge the reality of his own being and, what is even more important, the effects of having tried to evade that reality by trying to become something greater than nature would allow. His transgression of his bounds, though done in a spirit of play, results in a rude shattering of his play sphere.³ The wolf, when viewed with these matters in mind, can be seen as a necessary corrective that allows for the brutal, tragic education of the wether in his moments before being devoured. The wether is in essence forced to confront the (limited) reality of his own being, as is painfully obvious in his pleadings with the wolf. His claims about never intending to harm the wolf (2558, 2575) are an acute observation post hoc on the grim comedy of his actions. Had he ever succeeded in catching the wolf, the wether would very likely have met in the very same fate he faces at the end of the fable. In his case, failure or success can both lead to destruction. The Narrator attempts to drive the point home to us that, for such a character as the wether, no matter if the motive is arrogant or heroic (assuming there's a difference), any attempt to be other than what nature ordains leads inexorably to tragic consequences. A bitter self-awareness may result, but the message seems to indicate clearly that the price paid for such a knowledge is not worth it.

“The Wolf and the Lamb,” which follows the tale of the wether, presents the brutal killing of a lamb who ventures to drink from the same stream as a tyrannical wolf, but we cannot laugh about this sacrificial death. We are shocked to find that appeals to truth and the law are ineffective against obdurate malevolence, that there may indeed be no justice operative in the world we inhabit. No gruesome comedy or justified punishment could make us indifferent to the wolf's determined cruelty and the Narrator's sharp exposition in the moralitas. A danger presented here, as in “The Sheep and the Dog,” is that the cosmos appears at best indifferent to suffering, if not wholly and downright baleful and malignant, and that its claim to justice and respect is dubious. But the Narrator points to a way out of the existential quandary these questions may pose. The slaughterer of the innocent lamb, in this case with the emphasis on the flesh and blood of the victim, when viewed from the Christian perspective of sin and damnation the Narrator expects his audience to assume, may be seen as the real self-sacrificial victim. That is, the actions committed by the wolf amount to a presumed sacrifice of his soul at the altar of the collective (Christian) moral order, around which and around whom social cohesion is based. The crucifixion is thus the subtext for this fable. In the case of the wolf and the lamb, the poet's construction of an innocent victim (the lamb) is premised on the construction of a victim(izer), the qualities of whom are designed to generate and maintain the desired and dominant socio-religious values in Henryson's audience.⁴

What, we may ask, are the purposes of the frivolous rehearsals of the Narrator's most serious messages? Why should his teachings be perceived and uttered first by the most depraved characters of the Fables? We need to consider the audience for whom the lessons were intended and to realize, as our poet did, that the lessons are needed and must be repeated in many ways because humanity is weak and wilful and very unwilling to pay heed and reform. The Narrator must use a range of methods to gain and focus audience attention, and his engagement of audience interest through the grim comedy of the tales is one of these methods. Having given attention to an amusing incident, members of the audience may more readily be shocked by their perception of a similar but tragic happening.

We may consider the first sequence of fox fables, “The Cock and the Fox,” “The Fox and the Wolf,” and “The Trial of the Fox,” noting the progression in violence of behavior and comedy and the preparation for the lessons eventually drawn. We are delighted to find, in “The Cock and the Fox,” that the villainous fox escapes without harming his intended victim, “gentill Chantecleir.” The brevity of description of characters and setting in this tale implies its familiarity to the audience. Already acquainted with Chaucer's version, they may enjoy Henryson's variations on the theme, such as the short-lived mourning of the hens who would be Chantecleir's widows. The laughter such a tale inspires is untainted by cruel enjoyment of misfortune, since Lowrence is outfoxed by foolish Chantecleir. The enjoyment of the next fable, “The Fox and the Wolf,” is caused by some suffering, but there seems to be no need for reproach. The fox is a villainous character, and in the just, fictitious world of the fable he should not succeed. The pleasure we take in the neatly poised ironies of the tale may be disturbed by the austere moralitas, which tersely warns of the danger of sudden death for those who are unprepared. This method of teaching is elaborated in “The Trial of the Fox.” As has been noted, the court is uninhibited in laughing at the wolf's injury, the fox is formally executed, and the moralitas deals with a relatively inconspicuous incident. Of course, we share the court's delight. As in the previous fable, calamity has come to a villain. Why should his hurt not make us happy? We can enjoy his deserved misfortune at the level of unthinking, heartless fun, but we may be surprised to think that teaching, to ensure joy for the soul, comes at the expense of the wolf.

If we turn our attention at this point to the fox in this fable, we can see again a process of teaching based on the suffering of one distinct character who is isolated and destroyed. The lion, in regal fashion, proclaims that there will be no preying on lambs and kids in a twenty mile radius. This declaration undoubtedly addresses a noteworthy segment of the population at hand, including himself. In this action, it should be plain that the society, any society, must abridge the wants and desires and in some cases the needs of its members for the sake of social cohesion (in a manner similar to that put forth in Rousseau's “Origin of Civil Society”). So, when the fox has his dinner he in effect breaks the law, and thus incurs the death penalty. The fact that the fox, as the wolf and the lion and presumably many of the other members in the society, is a carnivore indicates that any other such creature in the group could likewise wind up in the position in which the fox finds himself at the end of the fable. What this shows is that the laws which place limits on actions do so for the sake of social and moral order. The very notion that beasts of all sorts can form a parliament as they do in this fable points to the founding principles of such order.

The figure who disrupts the stability of this order, the fox, functions as a kind of scapegoat whose violent removal from the society underscores the importance of social conformity to the law. Individuality in his case—that is, his criminality, for the two are inseparable—is his distinguishing mark, that which separates him from the more or less undifferentiated mass of the rest of the herd. As we also see through his execution, violence and vengeance are not necessarily bad things, provided, of course, that they are carried our by the unanimous consent of the community via its legal system. Violence and revenge are taboo only when carried out by individuals—hence the notion of the criminal. When looking at this through the Narrator's eyes, we can see that conformity to a governing order (legal, ideological, moral, or whatever) forms the basis of avoiding suffering such as the fox experiences. What is communal is good, what is individual is bad. The reason for this, as “The Trial of the Fox” and other fables indicate, is that the violator of the “law” through his or her actions calls that very law into question. The violence which raises such questions is in turn answered with violence which, from the Narrator's perspective, renders such questions invalid.⁵

When we shift from the fable world to the human world, we can begin to see the Narrator's didactic intent in terms of crime and punishment. The moral crises that this fox and other foxes in the fables precipitate by violating the rules (sinning, if you will) must be contained in their human manifestations for the human community to survive in a manner that the Narrator deems appropriate. When these foxes are allegorically presented by the Narrator as “temptationis” (1132), “the warld … Quhilk makis man to haif na mynd of deid” (2210-1), and “the Feind” (2431), he is pointing out their threat to the moral order and the community built up around it. The punishment of the fox in “The Trial of the Fox” clearly communicates the Narrator's belief that transgression of the (moral) law entails anti-social behavior and results in punishment. And it is, after all, the law and its communal stability rather than criminal individuality that the Narrator holds dear. For him, his very identity is bound to the value system he embodies in his outlook on life. His didactic impulse thus becomes an attempt to ensure moral conformity in his audience. He achieves this by isolating a “bad” figure and indicating that “badness” (“otherness”) results in pain and death. Even in the bleakest of fables where the bad guys seem to get away with their badness, the overarching Christian value system that informs the fables implies that the get-away is only temporary; an ultimate scheme of justice awaits in the afterlife. (We would stress, however, that this notion stems from the Narrator, not necessarily from the poet himself.)

In short, what the Narrator implies in his teachings is that conformity to the standard notions of moral, ethical, and social behavior keeps the social order from exploding, as “The Trial of the Fox” makes abundantly plain. The sense of “the criminal element,” “immorality,” and “evil” always is embodied in the threatening “other.” For this reason, even though this “other” remains a potential representative of “us,” it must be removed by way of earthly suffering or the notion of damnation in the hereafter.

Throughout the Fables hurt comes to the beasts, with escalation in injustice and severity of physical injury, and in the potential for damage to the soul, culminating in the struggles of the toad and mouse, representing those of the body and soul. The joyous experience of laughter frees us from the restraints which discourage us from examining the viciousness of human nature, just as the cathartic liberation of tragedy frees and purifies the spirit. In Henryson's Fables laughter caused by the hurt of a vicious character often precedes sorrow for the victim. Laughter helps isolate the vicious character and unites the laughers around a common enemy, so to speak. The sorrow we are meant to feel for the innocent victims is a key weapon in the Narrator's arsenal of didactic devices. This sort of pity evokes simultaneous sympathy and revulsion—sympathy for the “good” victim and revulsion for the “villain.” After such experiences we receive instruction, when our customary defenses of reluctance and resistance to moralizing are in disarray. Such violent treatment is needed by an audience that might show resistance, and the Narrator rarely pictures a receptive audience.

The cohesion the Narrator seeks in his audience comes via the purgation of those values he considers evil. In other words, the improper values must be removed from the human social sphere, and ideally this is what the Narrator has in mind. If the audience takes this lesson to heart, then presumably earthly existence will be more harmonious. The ideological conformity that informs the Narrator's moralitates provides for the homogenization and standardization of culture around an unquestioned system of values that provides a guideline for behavior and clear distinctions between good and evil.

The Narrator repeats these lessons, general and particular, throughout the sequence, yet his addresses, whether direct or oblique, imply a growing pessimism about their effectiveness, despite the growing affection for the individuals to whom he speaks. The hurt of Henryson's fabulous creatures can make us “happie” as people who have gained moral instruction, and allows us the experience of cathartic laughter which may make our own hurts more bearable. Any fable exploits the distancing effect of its patently fictitious characters to demonstrate serious issues. The comic rehearsal of the events of some of Henryson's Fables distances his audience even further, but paradoxically induces them to be more receptive by engaging their attention and gaining the response of laughter.

Henryson's Fables are framed by passages which demonstrate his construction of his audience, in the amiable formality of “The Prologue” and the sadly enlightened intimacy of the moralitas of “The Paddock and the Mouse.” In the telling of the tales, there are many glimpses of an audience—the malicious jeerers of the royal court, the unheeding birds, the perceptive fox, the merciful lion, the well-instructed toad and the mouse are some of them. To deal with these there is a range of teachers and methods, and few have any ultimate success. We may wonder if Henryson really expects success. He has no illusions about our aptitude to learn the lessons he teaches. He presents them in ways which are both amusing and tragic, prefiguring the sadly gruesome incidents in grim or gentle jokes, continually using the methods of reversal, shocking those who are unwilling or unable to learn into a fuller understanding, and using the hurts of the body to warn against injury to the soul, hoping that the individuals in his audience may at last enjoy the happiness of Heaven.⁶

Notes

1. On an audience's derivation of pleasure from violent or tragic works, see Packer, Tinsley (esp. 101), and, with particular reference to Henryson's fables, Khinoy (101-102). On the three levels of figural application in verbal art, especially with reference to theories of Plato and Aristotle, see Farrell (11).

2. This is suggested by Denton Fox (“Henryson's Fables” 345) and in the note to line 94 in his edition of the Poems. The notion is denied by George Clark (8).

3. On the notion of the play spheres, see Johann Huizinga's classic study on the subject, Homo Ludens.

4. Social cohesion around a sacrificial victim is an issue discussed at length in Girard's Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat.

5. This consideration of violence owes a debt to Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

6. The authors wish to thank Professor Tom Burton of the University of Adelaide for his comments and suggestions on this essay as it evolved.

Works Cited

Clark, George. “Henryson and Aesop: The Fable Transformed.” ELH 43 (1976): 1-18.

Farrell, Thomas B. “Rhetorical Resemblances: Paradoxes of a Practical Art.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 1-19.

Fox, Denton. “Henryson's Fables.” ELH 29 (1962): 337-56.

Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

———. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.

Henryson, Robert. The Poems of Robert Henryson. Ed. Denton Fox. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1981.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element of Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955.

Khinoy, Stephan. “Tale-Moral Relationships in Henryson's Moral Fables. Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1982): 99-115.

Kratzmann, Gregory. “Henryson's Fables: ‘The Subtle Dyte of Poetry.’” Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 49-70.

Mehl, Dieter. “The Audience of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins. Ed. Beryl Rowland. London: Allen, 1974.

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Tinsley, John. “Tragedy and Christian Beliefs.” Theology. March 1982. 98-106.