SOURCE: Cox, Catherine S. “Froward Language and Wanton Play: The ‘Commoun’ Text of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.” Studies in Scottish Literature 29 (1996): 58-72.

In the following essay, Cox analyzes the narrator, the title character, and the theme of errancy in The Testament of Cresseid.

In the Testament of Cresseid, Henryson's treatment of Chaucer's Criseyde is mediated textually by a voice that is itself a participant in the text; the Testament narrator may be read as both narrative voice and literary character, the former existing discursively, as a rhetorical construct, and the latter as mimetic reality, having an imagined history and psychology. The narrator embodies Henryson's reading of Chaucer's text as the protagonist of sequences in which he re-reads and re-writes the story of Cresseid's “woefull end.” As well, the narrator's central character, Cresseid, further embodies these layers of reading and writing, and thus problematic and compelling parallels exist between...