Robert Henryson and Father Aesop: Authority in the Moral Fables

Robert Henryson and Father Aesop: Authority in the MoralFables Tim William Machan Marquette University RECENT CRffiCAL discussion of Robrn Hen,yson's Mo,a/ Fable, has emphasized that the fables are not primarily notable for their "delight­ fully vivid and appealing" descriptions ofthe animal characters, 1 the terms in which they had been regularly dismissed. Indeed, the serious and genuine nature of Henryson's concern for the human condition seems unquestionable, as do the diverse artistry of the Fables and the sophistica­ tion of its themes.2 One of these themes, which Denton Fox has briefly explored, involves a self-consciousness about authorship which runs throughout Henryson's works. In Fox's words, one of the "profound re­ semblances" among Orpheus and Eurydice, The Testament of Cresseid, and the Mora/Fables "has to do with the figure of the poet and function of 1 George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 89. 2 Among the important studies in this regard are the following: John MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967); Howard Roerecke, "The Integrity and Symmetry of Robert Henryson's Moral Fables, Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1969; Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: E. Brill, 1979); Denton Fox, ed., Introduction, The Poems ofRobert Henryson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981); Stephan Kinoy, "Tale-Moral Relationships in Henryson's Moral Fables," SSL 17 (1982):99115 ; Dieter Mehl, "Robert Henryson's Moral Fables as Experiments in Didactic Narrative," in Ulrich Broich, Theo Stemmler, and Gerd Stratmann, eds., Functions of Literature: Essays PresentedtoErwin Wolffon His Sixtieth Birthday (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1981), pp. 8199 ; C. David Benson, "O Moral Henryson," in Robert F. Yeager, ed., Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 215-35; Gregory Kratzmann, "Henryson'sFables: 'The Subtell Dyte ofPoetry,"' SSL 20 (1985): 49-70; George D. Gopen, "The Essential Seriousness of Robert Henryson's Moral Fables: A Study in Struc­ ture," SP82 (1985):42-59; and Gopen's introduction to his edition The Moral Fables ofAesop (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), which in part synthesizes the SP article. More generally see Louise 0. Fradenburg, "Henryson Scholarship: The Recent De­ cades," in Yeager, ed., Fifteenth-Century Studies, pp. 655-92. 193 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER poetry."3 As contemporary as such a thematic concern might sound, how­ ever, it is a concern which emerges largely as a response to specific cultural determinants offourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular poetry which admitted authority and authorship as characteristics only of classical and ecclesiastical writers and texts. The term "auctor" itself was reserved for ancient poets, church fathers, and learned commentators, while a ver­ nacular writer, whatever he may have thought ofhimselfas an artist, was a "makar."4 The extent to which, indeed, vernacular medieval English writ­ ers could think ofthemselves as artists is problematic, inasmuch as English did not have published, standardized handbooks ofgrammar or style- the tools, so to speak, for measuring artistry- until the early to middle part of the sixteenth century.s Henryson's interest in "the figure ofthe poet and the function ofpoetry" was also very likely contextually conditioned by his respect for Chaucer, who not simply revolutionized vernacular meter, narrative, and charac­ terization but also introduced to English less tangible yet perhaps more revolutionary attitudes toward vernacular writers. But inasmuch as Chaucer wrote with cultural constraints similar to the ones Henryson confronted, the English poet typically toys with the authorial posture at the same time he insists he is only a compiler or translator. In his introduction to the "Canticus Troili" ofbook 1 of Trozfus and Criseyde, for instance, Chaucer is careful to deny himselfany responsibility for the poem and to impute it all to his author Lollius (1.393-99): And of his song naught only the sentence, As writ myn auctour called Lollius, But pleinly, save oure tonges difference, I dar we! seyn, in al, that Troilus Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here, Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here.6 3 "The Coherence of Henryson's Work," in...