Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and Its Sources

Summary

Robert Henryson (1425?–1506?), a Scottish poet and schoolmaster, remained fairly independent when imitating Chaucer in his The Testament of Cresseid; but the Scotsman's stanzas are often as harmonious as his master's. Unlike the Testament or Henryson's Morall Fabillis (late 1480s, inspired by Aesop), texts which have enjoyed critical attention, Orpheus and Eurydice has suffered relative neglect in modern studies. Thus Harriet H. Wood damns the work with faint praise by calling it “the most ambitious, but not the most successful” among Henryson's poems, while John MacQueen, who has worked most on Orpheus and Eurydice, rightly laments the fact that it “has received so little in the way of perceptive formal criticism.” One of the reasons for this lack of interest may be the complex and often obscure multiplicity of literary and philosophical auctoritates invoked in the poem, imposing upon it an excessive weight, and this characteristic makes Orpheus an exception in the corpus of Henryson's poetical production. The Scottish poet is generally quite straightforward in declaring his sources, even if he may be deceptive in handling them: in the case of the more expertly written Testament of Cresseid, or of the Morall Fabillis, a single auctoritas is invoked for each: Chaucer in the former case, Aesop in the latter.