Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer

Starting from the claim that Chaucer’s profoundest legacy to his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century successors was his dynamic, dialogic use of literary form, this chapter shows how the two Scottish works that most fully respond to him (The Kingis Quair and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid) use their textual frames to revise Chaucer’s unsettling modes of mediating a story. They do so in particular to shape new beginnings of and altered endings to familiar genres and stories. Adapting framing modes from Troilus, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament, and even the Canterbury Tales, The Kingis Quair (attributed to James I of Scotland) remakes the Boethian dream vision as an optimistic celebration of faithful heterosexual love. Revising Chaucer negatively, Henryson’s Testament brings beginnings and ends together by inserting itself into a narrative gap in the final book of Troilus, audaciously framing itself ‘within’ and ideologically prying open a prior work.

The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.