The Complete Works: Robert Henryson (review)

Scots poetry of the late medieval and early modern periods continues to sit uneasily in the literary canon. For metrical virtuosity and stylistic originality, few (if any) English writers of the late fifteenth century compare with Henyrson, Dunbar, or Douglas. Theirs is a kind of imaginative wonderland, with marvels of lexis, plot, and image around every stanza, and their poems sometimes bear only a tangential connection to rough contemporary compositions like Malory’s Works, the cycle plays, or the poetry of Hawes. The Scots poets demonstrate awareness of earlier scholastic and courtly writings, especially Chaucer’s, but they also seem supremely indifferent to fitting into literary traditions—which is a good thing, because their language, if nothing else, can render them inscrutable to many modern readers. In hoping to clarify and expand the significance of Scots poets in English literary canons, devotees face sometimes formidable obstacles.

David Parkinson’s edition of Henryson’s complete works is to be welcomed in this regard—as an attempt to present the wonderfully obscure language of a wonderfully imaginative poet in ways that invite a broader readership, specifically, given the focus of TEAMS editions, a readership of new undergraduates and postgraduates. This is in fact the second edition of Henryson’s poems that TEAMS has released, the first being a 1997 collaborative effort by Robert Kindrick and Kristie Bixby. Since that volume remains available, online as well as in print, the appearance of the current edition seems a little surprising. But Henryson’s merits as a poet certainly justify a wide readership, and the standard scholarly edition—Denton Fox’s 1981 Poems, one of the finest editions of any medieval poet—is long out of print in paper as well as cloth.

Like all TEAMS editions, The Complete Works strives to be student-friendly. Following a brief introduction treating Henryson’s life (what little we know for certain), the textual authorities, Middle Scots, and Henryson’s artistry, the texts begin with the Moral Fables. The Testament of Cresseid and Orpheus and Eurydice are here as well, of course, as is a host of shorter, lesser-known poems. Parkinson departs from the earlier TEAMS edition by separating poems with “stronger attribution” from those with “weaker attribution” and, like Fox, by excluding “The Want of Wyse Men,” a conventional lament about the failures of the present day that Kindrick and Bixbie include, though skeptically so. Sidebar glosses and translations frame the texts, which are followed by explanatory notes, textual notes, an appendix on Kynaston’s seventeenth-century account of Henryson’s death, a bibliography, and a brief glossary.

The strength of the introduction lies in the breadth of information it offers on manuscript and printed sources, many of which—including the important Bassandyne print—survive in only one copy. To students accustomed to the proliferation of easily accessible texts in bookstores and online, the tenuousness of the Henryson tradition provides a startling indication of how contingent literary history can be. Parkinson’s sense of Henryson’s poetic habits is also astute and well-expressed. Henryson, as he indicates, is innovative in style, bold in a sense of his own artistry, and given to mixing the colloquial and the grand in order to fashion almost preternaturally vivid pictures of his world.

The discussion of language is less successful in two ways. The first involves the status of Middle Scots as a linguistic variety whose genealogy and structure involve direct kinship with northern Middle English but which served culturally prominent roles in early modern Scotland. Shared grammar and divergent history complicate any label one uses—distinct language or dialect of English, a distinction that has been debated with great intensity, often along national lines. The fact that already by the early seventeenth century Scots printers were issuing more books in English—including English “translations” of Scots texts—than they did in Scots further complicates its status. Without directly addressing such matters, the introduction presents the issue both ways...