1.
Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde concludes with the killing of Troilus, by
Hector, but does not tell what happened to Criseyde. The fifteenth
century Scottish poet Robert Henryson made good this lack by writing
a sequel, The
Testament of Cresseid. Since in her callousness she
abandoned the heartbroken Troilus for Diomede, poetic justice
demanded that she come to a bad end. Accordingly, in Henryson’s
poem she is discarded by Diomedes and is reduced to little better
than a disgraced camp-follower of the Greeks. Then the gods meet in
conclave and, at Cupid’s behest, vote to inflict leprosy on her.
Slightly before her death, Troilus rides by and pauses to give her a
mite of charity, but she is so disfigured that he does not recognize
her. Henryson’s sequel was sufficiently satisfactory that,
beginning with Thynne’s 1542 edition, an anglicized version
regularly came after Troilus in Renaissance volumes of
Chaucer’s works.
2.
Accordingly, when in the seventeenth century the courtier-poet Sir
Francis Kynaston [1587 - 1642] prepared his annotated version
of Troilus, accompanied by a Latin translation, he included a
text and translation of The
Testament of Creseid (see also here).
Elsewhere in the Philological Museum series of texts, I have
presented an edition of Kynaston’s
Chaucer translation, and it makes sense to include his
translation of Henryson’s poem as well. The translations are
identical in nature. Both feature rhyme stanzas written in rhyme
royal, the seven-line scheme employed by Chaucer and also, for most
of his poem, by Henryson. This, however, creates problems because for
Creseida’s lament at lines 407 - 468 the Scottish poet shifted
to eight- and nine-line stanzas but Kynaston did not choose to
imitate him. Hence he was obliged to omit one of Henryson’s
stanzas, and also to compress the material of the others into seven
lines. Furthermore, a peculiarity of Kynaston’s Chaucer
translation is that Books IV and V are drastically abridged, and his
excisions are almost always made for the purpose of shortening long
speeches. In the same way, he omitted Creseida’s five-stanza
speech near the end of Henryson’s poem (540 - 574).
3.
Kynaston’s finished work was never published, and is preserved
in the Bodleian Library ms. Add. C 287 (dated to 1639, with a 1640
censor’s imprimatur). A transcript of his translation of The
Testament of Cresseid has been printed, by G. Gregory Smith,
The Poems of Robert Henryson (Scottish Text Series,
Edinburgh, 1906 - 14) I.xcvii - clxii. But in this case a simple
transcription is unsatisfactory. Although the manuscript is
identified as an autograph in the Bodleian Library card catalogue
entry, as Smith himself suspected, it is in fact a copy ms., and its
Latin text is not infrequently marred by errors. Then too, the
manuscript text is sparsely, and often inaccurately, punctuated.
Editorial intervention is therefore required.
4.
I have discussed Kynaston, his work as a translator, the Bodleian
manuscript, and issues of editorial practice, in my Introduction
to
his Chaucer translation. The reader may also be referred to
Lawrence V. Ryan, “A Neo-Latin Version of Henryson’s Testament of
Cressid,” in I. D. MacFarlane (ed.), Acta
Conventus Neolatini Sanctandreani. Proceedings of the Fifth
International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Binghamton N. Y.,
1986) 481 - 91, and to Denton Fox’s magisterial The Poems of
Robert Henryson (Oxford, 1981).