Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid by Nickolas A. Haydock (review)

Nickolas Haydock’s Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is an innovative, stimulating, and often challenging, contribution to medieval studies, especially to the scholarship on Middle Scots poetry. This first book-length study of Henryson’s most famous poem presents the reader with an “analysis of the array of orientations implicit in this work” without privileging “a single context or perspective” (p. 2). Haydock’s Lacan-derived “anamorphic” approach involves analyzing “the multiple, even contradictory manifestations of a text thrown into sharp relief by the transformative power of perspective” (p. 23). While Haydock follows others in seeing Henryson’s famous questioning of Chaucer’s authority as the departure point for the Scots poet’s own superb and highly influential version of the inherited story of Troilus and Criseyde, for him Henryson’s invention of an vther quair and creation of a parallel “alternate ending” to the tragic love story call “to mind the branching structures of hypertexts and labyrinthine postmodernism of Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco” (p. 2). Part of Haydock’s project is to claim for Henryson his fitting “status in the literary history of the British Isles” by contextualizing the poet, his poem, and Cresseid in some often surprising ways. This postmodern enterprise leads him, as he says, “to reconstruct a lost idea of authorship and oeuvre that is implicit in the construction of Henryson’s three major works, not least because I believe that had such coherence been preserved and recognized in the tradition, Henryson’s status in the literary history of the British Isles might well have been significantly enhanced” (pp. 98–99).

Linking the poetical and political, as well as invoking a wide range of theorists including Bhabha, Bakhtin, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Stuart Hall, and Mary Louise Pratt, Situational Poetics “traces the itineraries of the Testament of Cresseid as an ‘intercultural text’ through a number of poetic, nationalist, and imperialist conjunctions” (p. 3), foregrounding at the outset the complexity of a “literary culture shared by two nations often at each other’s throats” (p. 34). The book consists of a long, digressive introduction and five lengthy chapters that read like a series of sometimes rather loosely connected monographs. While these offer some detailed and insightful analyses of the poem, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Haydock enthusiastically embraces “muchel of wandrynge by the weye.”

It was the fate of the Testament of Cresseid not only to be separated some time after composition (in the late fifteenth century) from Henryson’s other works but also to be attached for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde by English printers. Haydock invites readers to view the Testament as a supplement that “appends suppositions about Chaucer’s poem in ways that are analogous to the situation of the poetic interpretative glosses at the end of his [Henryson’s] other major works, The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice” (p. 2).

The Introduction, titled “Transcultural Intertextuality and the ‘Vther Quair,”’ ranges widely over theories of borders and marginality, interactivity in relation to minor and major literatures, Chaucerianism, and translation—particularly Seamus Heaney’s modern translation of the Testament—before concluding with the “perspective of twenty-first century Dunfermline” where, according to the early sixteenth-century poet William Dunbar, Henryson died. Haydock’s “ruminations” on a contemporary mural in the city’s reconstructed Abbot House, a mural depicting scenes from the Testament and the Moral Fables, lead him to three key questions he proceeds to explore in the following chapters:

First, what ideas of authorship are reflected in the poems, or even in the few scraps of Henryson’s biography (real or apocryphal) that survive? Second, given the many verbal repetitions and thematic similarities among the three major poems, to what extent are these works mutually illuminating—commenting on, inflecting, or confirming one another? Third, assuming that a distinctive construction of authorship is reflected in...