Running to 600 lines, The Testament of Cresseid is a masterpiece of late-medieval Scots narrative poetry by Robert Henryson (died c1500). Henryson is thought to have been a Dunfermline schoolteacher, and he is listed among the honoured dead poets in his contemporary William Dunbar's great poem Lament for the Makars (refrain: Timor mortis conturbat me, or Fear of death confounds me). Henryson's Testament takes up the story of the unfortunate Cresseid from Troilus and Criseyde as told by Chaucer, whom Henryson calls "glorious", and sees the heroine through to a bitter end. As Seamus Heaney observes in the introduction to his translation, although the original is not difficult to follow, "people who are neither students nor practising poets are unlikely to make…a deliberate effort" to read it in Scots. So, as with his version of Beowulf (2000), Heaney uses his own prestige to set the poem before a general audience. The hope must be that he will lead the reader into the rich, pithy music, melancholy dignity and all of what Heaney calls "the melody of understanding" of the parallel Scots text. The wintry force and appeal of the poem are certainly apparent in his rendering.
Scots, like the language of Beowulf, is part of the "dark backward" of Heaney's linguistic heritage - he grew up hearing Ulster Scots, while Henryson's didacticworld, with its blend of classical and medieval elements, is structurally appealing to the Catholic imagination. And for the poet happily writing, as Heaney describes himself, "by proxy", the ample but demanding ABABBCC rhyme royal stanza favoured by Chaucer himself presents a congenial challenge, to which the Irish poet's subtly orchestral ear is eminently suited.
The poem itself combines horror and pity, the latter authenticated by the unsparing treatment of the former. Having gone over from the Trojan Troilus to the Greek Diomede, Cressida is then rejected ("When Diomede had sated his desire / And oversated it on this fair lady") and banished, and descends into prostitution. In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for inflicting the pains of love and desire, "now hot, now cold, now blithe, now full of woe / Now green in leaf, now withered on the bough", in Heaney's version.
The infuriated pair summon their fellow gods to a tribunal, a brilliant astrological set piece where Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the rest determine a suitable punishment for Cresseid's presumption, an occasion marked by the gods' rhetorical and argumentative brilliance. The hapless Cresseid is in effect excommunicated, afflicted with leprosy, doomed to wander the world "begging…carrying a cup and clapper". The poet's sympathy is evident but unstated, directed at the suffering Cresseid rather than questioning the justice of her fate.
Even among the lepers Cresseid is an outsider, and destiny deals her a further cruelly precise blow when she encounters her former lover Troilus, who takes pity on her without recognising her. After eloquent self-condemnation, Cresseid goes to her grave. Henryson's humane voice neither disguises nor mitigates the brutally cold and peremptory world he depicts, and in some ways he recalls Dante's handling of the story of the forbidden lovers Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno. And it contrasts with Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott, where Lancelot remarks of the dead lady, "She has a lovely face", unlike the terribly disfigured Cresseid: Tennyson's painterly vision of the medieval world has rather different aesthetic priorities. The Scot writes from the depths of late winter - "Aries, mid-Lent, / Made showers of hail from the north descend / In a great cold I barely could withstand" - and recalls his own experience of the pains of love, though he declares his passions spent. His advice: faithful lovers are as elusive as a needle in a haystack, so beware; but naturally he betrays no expectation that anyone will be able to act on his counsel, and the poem is not so much an awful warning as a tragedy of helpless error. And Heaney succeeds in his task: read him and you'll want to experience the original, too.
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The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson trans Seamus Heaney
Faber £12.99 pp202