Biography
Other info : Bibliography
Robert Henryson (Middle Scots: Robert Henrysoun) was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities. Little is known of his life, but evidence suggests that he was a teacher who had training in law and the humanities, that he had a connection with Dunfermline Abbey and that he may also have been associated for a period with Glasgow University. His poetry was composed in Middle Scots at a time when this had become a state language. It is one of the most important bodies of work in the canon of early Scottish literature.
His writing consists mainly of narrative works highly inventive in their development of story-telling techniques. He generally achieved a canny balance of humour and high seriousness which is often multi-layered in its effects. This is especially so in his Morall Fabillis, in which he expresses a consistent but complex world view that seems standard, on the surface, vis a vis the major ruling power of the church, while containing critical and questioning elements. This range is further extended in his Testament of Cresseid with its more tragic vision. Overall, his themes and tone convey an attractive impression of humanity and compassionate intellect. He was a subtle rhetorician and remains to this day one of the finest in the Scots language.
Although his writing usually incorporated a typically medieval didactic purpose, it also has much in common with other artistic currents of northern Europe which were generally developing, such the realism of Flemish painting, the historical candour of Barbour or the narrative scepticism of Chaucer. An example is his subtle use of psychology to convey individual character in carefully dramatised, recognisable daily-life situations which tend to eschew fantastic elements.
His surviving body of work amounts to almost exactly 5000 lines.
Henryson's surviving canon consists of three long poems and around twelve miscellaneous short works in various genres. The longest poem is his Morall Fabillis, a tight, intricately structured set of thirteen fable stories in a cycle that runs just short of 3000 lines. Two other long works survive, both a little over 600 lines each. One is his dynamic and inventive version of the Orpheus story and the other, his Testament of Cresseid, is a tale of moral and psychological subtlety in a tragic mode founded upon the literary conceit of "completing" the story-arc for a character in a poem by Chaucer.
The range of Henryson's shorter works includes a highly original pastourelle on a theme of love, as well as a bawdy passage of comic flyting which targets the medical practises of his day, a highly crafted and compressed poem of Marian devotion, some allegorical works, some philosophical meditations, and a prayer against the pest. As with his longer works, his outward themes often carry important subtexts.
Constructing a sure chronology for Henryson's writings is not possible, but his Orpheus story may have been written earlier in his career, during his time in Glasgow, since one of its principal sources was contained in the university library. Internal evidence has been used to suggest that the Morall Fabillis were composed during the 1480s.
