Robert Henryson's "Doolie Dreame" and the Late Medieval Dream Vision Tradition

"And on that sleve these wordes were wrete: A false abstracte cometh from a fals concrete."

(John Skelton, The Bowge of Court)

This essay's chief purpose is to explore the interpretive advantages of considering Robert Henryson's late fifteenth-century Testament of Cresseid as a member of the genre of dream vision poetry. The Testament's literary type is notoriously difficult to pin down, as are many features of its structure. Its title identifies the poem as a literary "testament," the title character's expression of her last will and testamentary intentions. Since it offers an alternative ending to Chaucer's great romance Troilus and Criseyde, the poem's topic, however, anchors it in the genre of romance. The sole time the poem names its own genre comes near the end, when it describes itself as a brief ballad, a "ballet schort."¹ Overall, its restlessness works against any single generic identification. In his influential Medieval Dream Poetry, A. C. Spearing sidelines the Testament as "a narrative that includes a dream as an important episode" rather than as a dream poem proper, a position that remains substantially unchanged in the criticism to date.² Like many late medieval poems whose experience is organized by the perspective of a first-person narrator, its openness of form provides the opportunity to showcase a number of lyric genres: complaint, astrological allegory, reflections on the brevity of earthly joy in the memento mori tradition. Finally, Cresseid's exclusion from love and society links her to the narrators of the increasingly popular genre of late medieval prison poetry.³ There is ultimately little to suggest that the dream experience supplies the main outline of the poem's narrative form. Indeed, the dream within the poem belongs to the romance heroine rather than, as might be expected in a dream vision, to the narrator himself, and it lasts for only about two hundred lines, less than one third of the poem.

Considering such obstacles, a reader must ask what possible advantages can there be to identifying the Testament as a dream vision? Perhaps a better and less purely rhetorical question, however, would be this: if the Testament is not a dream vision, then what is it? A literary work's functional genre is usually established near its beginning, giving readers a framework for interpretation. Without such a framework, poems, especially experimental ones like Henryson's, can quickly collapse into incoherence. Correspondingly, in the opening lines of the Testament, Henryson swiftly and firmly establishes the expectations appropriate to a dream vision, even if the poem's genre later becomes more complicated. Also, as was common in the genre, he draws a picture of the setting and climate appropriate to his topic ("[a]ne doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte / … equiualent" [ll. 1–2]) and isolates his careworn narrator there, correspondingly beset by seasonal assaults: "Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend, / That scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend. / Ȝit neuertheless within myne oratur / I stude" (ll. 6–9).⁴ Most importantly, of course, the narrator determines to occupy his sleepless night first with "ane quair" (l. 40), a book that turns out to be Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and then with "ane vther quair" (l. 61)—the book that provides the topic of the poem—and that offers an alternative ending to Chaucer's work. These attempts, especially of an old weary narrator, beyond the amorous pastimes of youth, to pass the night with a book in hand strongly recall similar moments, in poems like Chaucer's own Book of the Duchess or Parliament of Fowls, when literary reflection or recreation quickly led a humorously inept dreamer into an embedded dream vision on a topic related to his reading. At the same time, the substitution of one book for another also works to thematize the precariousness of literary truth and prepares the reader for the first major generic shift in the poem, which comes when this book, rather than putting the narrator to sleep, provides entertainment for a wakeful night and indeed...