[In the essay below, Stephenson suggests that the initial letters of lines 58-63 of The Testament of Cresseid intentionally form the acrostic “FICTIO,” alluding to an earlier source document for Henryson's work.]

Despite the sort of literary challenge scholars normally accept with eagerness and tenacity, few have taken seriously Robert Henryson's reference to an unnamed, unknown source for the plot of his fifteenth-century Middle Scots poem The Testament of Cresseid. Critics have only rarely raised a challenge to the common assumption that, with his ambiguous reference to “ane vther quair” presenting “the fatall destenie / Of fair Cresseid,”¹ Henryson is simply following Chaucer's precedent of feigning prior authority.

James Kinsley, in a 1952 note to TLS,² argued that Henryson may have found the “germinal idea” for the Testament in G. Myll's The Spektakle of Luf, a 1492 prose work which appears in the Asloan MS. (Kinsley “reiterates”³ the discovery of B. J. Whiting, who had, conversely, seen in The Spektakle of Luf a “probable allusion” to the Testament.⁴) Kinsley's assertion is severely undermined by the fact that the Spektakle is not known to have circulated prior to about 1515, a good decade further into the sixteenth century than Henryson is likely to have lived.⁵ Even Kinsley's critics, however, had to admit at least the possibility that the Testament and the Spektakle derived from a common, undiscovered source.⁶ The author of the Spektakle in fact claimed to be translating a Latin original.

This possibility was taken up some two decades after Kinsley by Eleanor Long.⁷ She proposed that an “anonymous fifteenth-century Scots zealot,” making “free use” of a group of works (including Guido delle Colonne's Historia Destructionis Troiae), compiled “a moral treatise in Latin on the evils of sex” which was translated into Scots by Myll and also “read in the original by Henryson.” Long's argument, though largely ignored, has never been refuted. One suspects this has more to do with the inherent difficulty of proving a negative than with lack of consensus against her thesis; however, a certain tentativeness remains whenever critics and editors comment on the “vther quair.” Charles Elliot, for instance, believes it is “probably poetic fiction”;⁸ Denton Fox is “reasonably certain that [it] never existed”;⁹ Douglas Gray sees “room for doubt.”¹⁰

Thus far no evidence has been sufficient to close the matter. Indeed, as recently as 1985, Mairi Ann Cullen has asserted not only that the “vther quair” existed but that Henryson's poem is a refutation of it.¹¹ I suggest that, on the contrary, the Testament has always provided an indirect but telling statement on the fictive nature of the “vther quair,” in a previously unrecognized acrostic.

In each of the major early witnesses of the complete Testament (Thynne, 1532; Charteris, 1593; Anderson, 1663), the acrostic “FICTIO” appears in the first letters of lines 58-63, the same lines in which the reference to the “vther quair” appears. The Charteris edition of the pertinent stanza reads:

Of his distres me neidis nocht reheirs,
For worthie Chauceir in the samin buik,
In gudelie termis and in ioly veirs,
Compylit hes his cairis, quha will luik.
To brek my sleip ane vther quair I tuik,
In quhilk I fand the fatall destenie
Of fair Cresseid, that endit wretchitlie.

(57-63, emphasis added)

Though four terms within the stanza may be disputed because of variation among the three witnesses, all three witnesses provide identical initial words, and in each witness the acrostic can be clearly perceived. In both Anderson and Charteris, the first lines of stanzas are right indented, giving the acrostic further visual prominence; in Charteris the acrostic is interrupted by a page break between lines 61 and 62, but in Anderson it appears on the page entire.

Howlett's Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford, 1989) gives the following as its third (and most clearly relevant) definition of fictio: “Y feigning, pretence; b (w. ref. to Wisd. iv II). c fiction, fable. d (leg.) legal fiction.” Examples of such usage listed in the entry are as early as 1280 and as late as c. 1450. Perhaps the strongest evidence that the acrostic “FICTIO” is placed intentionally by the author is the appearance of this definition (in the form of a Middle Scots verb) in the famous stanza which immediately succeeds it:

Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?
Nor I wait nocht gif this narratioun
Be authoreist, or fenȝeit of the new
Be sum poeit, throw his inuentioun
Maid to report the lamentatioun
And wofull end of this lustie Creisseid,
And quhat distres scho thoillit, and quhat deid.

(64-70, emphasis added)

Sir Francis Kinaston's 1639 Latin translation of the Testament¹² gives further evidence for connecting fictio and the stanza containing “fenȝeit.” Though Kinaston follows Thynne, who (mistakenly, most editors agree) provides “forged” for “fenȝeit,” the pertinent line in the translation reads “Aut haec de nouo omnia sint ficta.” Obviously, as much as a century and a half after Henryson's floruit, the definitions of fictio and “feigning” remain in close proximity. If one accepts that Henryson intentionally gave fictio this singularly significant position, one can hardly doubt that his reference to the “vther quair” is involved in a pretense.

Notes

1. Lines 61-63. All references to The Testament of Cresseid are from Denton Fox's edition in The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford, 1981).

2. (November 14): 743.

3. See James Gray's note in TLS (March 13, 1953): 176.

4. “A Probable Allusion to Henryson's Testament of Cresseid,” MLR 40 (1945):46-47.

5. See for example Fox's discussion of Henryson's life and dates: xiii-xxv.

6. Gray, op. cit.

7. “Robert Henryson's ‘Uther Quair,’” Comitatus 3 (1972):97-101.

8. Robert Henryson: Poems (Oxford, 1974), 164, note to line 61.

9. Fox: 344, note to line 61.

10. Robert Henryson (Leiden, 1979), 164.

11. In “Cresseid Excused: A Re-Reading of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 137-59, Cullen cites Whiting, Kinsley, and Gray (she is apparently unfamiliar with Long's essay), and then argues that in lines 71-77 Henryson is paraphrasing the “vther quair”—not, she says, the Spektakle of Luf's hypothetical Latin source but one read by that Latin writer (and hence a tale doubly lost)—just as he has paraphrased Book V of Troilus and Criseyde in lines 43-56. Henryson's “invention” then begins only in line 92. She argues that the remainder of the Testament acts as Cresseid's defense against the charges of wantonness levied by the “vther quair.” Cullen is unconvincing, I think, primarily because her structural evidence is weak and her arguments depend on a largely uncritical assumption of a stable narrative voice with definite and singular designs on the reader.

12. The Kinaston translation appears in the first volume of G. Gregory Smith's The Poems of Robert Henryson (Edinburgh, 1914).