SOURCE: Greentree, Rosemary and Steven R. McKenna. “‘The Hurt Off ane Happie the Vther Makis’: Henryson's Construction of his Audience.” In Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature, edited by Steven R. McKenna, pp. 13-25. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992.

In the following essay, Greentree and McKenna examine Henryson's “construction of his audience” in passages throughout the Moral Fables.

The words of the lion king in “The Trial of the Fox”—“The hurt off ane happie the vther makis” (1065)—cause uproar and laughter in the royal court, ill-natured delight in the agony of the wolf, whose head has been broken by the mare's kick. The lion's sentence derisively restates the Latin maxim feelingly uttered by the fox, when he offers “Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum” as his reason for declining to examine the document under the mare's hoof (1033). At a superficial level, the lion could be merely...