Reading the text of Henryson's Fables

Reading the texts of Henryson's Fables

Robert Henryson is undoubtedly one of the major figures not just of early Scottish literature, but of Scottish literature in general. His major works, The Moral Fables and The Testament of Cresseid, display an outstanding level of literary craftsmanship and philosophical depth. However, his works have come down to us in editorially unsatisfactory forms, mostly dating from late after the time of writing (c. 1480), copied from earlier versions that are now lost, and with texts that are incomplete or whose authority is far from clear. Yet what may be unsatisfactory for editors may be critically fruitful in other ways. Taking the Moral Fables as a preliminary test case, it may be possible to see that texts deemed faulty or deficient might still provide useful insights into the historical resonances and reception of Henryson's work.

The Moral Fables has the most convoluted textual history of any of Henryson's works. The surviving texts show that Henryson wrote thirteen fables plus a prologue. The Makculloch manuscript (EUL Laing III.149), which dates from 1477 and was added to into the early sixteenth century, contains the prologue and "The Cock and the Jasp". The Asloan manuscript (NLS MS 16500) from the early sixteenth century contains the fable of "The Two Mice". The 1658 Bannatyne Manuscript (NLS Adv. MS 1.1.6) contains the "Prologue" and ten of the fables. BL MS Harley 3865, with a title page dated 1571, is the most complete manuscript, featuring the prologue and all thirteen fables. This is something the Harleian manuscript has in common with the extant early printed editions of the Fables. Of these surviving editions, the earliest were produced in Edinburgh, the first one by Robert Lepreuik for Henry Charteris in 1570, closely followed by an edition printed by Thomas Bassadyne in 1571. Another edition was printed in London by Richard Smith in 1577, and a fourth was printed in 1621 by Andro Hart, again in Edinburgh.

In investigating the fables' texts, scholars have for the most part been preoccupied with negotiating the numerous differences between the various manuscripts and editions to reconstruct the lost original which Henryson himself wrote. This is an important and necessary project, but a consequence has been a view of the different texts of the Fables as primarily an obstacle to understanding, full or 'problems' and 'mystery'¹, a smokescreen through which we must peer to discern, however vaguely, the shape of the lost original text. Rather than thus seeing the variations between the surviving witnesses primarily in negative terms, as imperfect versions of the lost original, it may prove beneficial in studying Henryson, as it has done with many other writers from this period, to consider the differences in a more positive way. The various texts of the poems might in many cases be seen as distinct appropriations and reinscriptions that can tell us something of the ways in which different readers may have approached the Fables at different times.

Full consideration of what the differences between the witnesses might reveal about how Henryson was being interpreted and applied in different contexts, of course, would require an in-depth study. There is much need to separate wheat from chaff in terms of variant readings (sometimes scribes might simply misread their source and produce nonsense, for instance) and much uncertainty concerning the relationship between the witnesses and the sources that they may have drawn on. Nonetheless, some preliminary analysis might at least open up possibilities for further fruitful study.

One of the most pressing issues for analysts of the Fables has been the order in which they should appear. The most widely accepted arrangement is as follows:

  1. The prologue and 'The Cock and the Jasp'
  2. 'The Two Mice'
  3. 'The Cock and the Fox'
  4. 'The Fox and the Wolf'
  5. 'The Trial of the Fox'
  6. 'The Sheep and the Dog'
  7. 'The Lion and the Mouse'
  8. 'The Preaching of the Swallow'
  9. 'The Fox, the Wolf and the Cadger'
  10. 'The Fox, the Wolf and the Husbandsman'
  11. 'The Wolf and the Wedder'
  12. 'The Wolf and the Lamb'
  13. 'The Paddock and the Mouse'.

While some critics have scruples about this arrangement² it does have the recommendation of being the order in which they are presented in the extant early manuscripts and printed editions that give complete texts of all the Fables. This order has also been argued to provide a neat symmetrical arrangement of fables from the Aesopic and Reynardian traditions and also to provide a gradual darkening of tone that adds an important dimension to the collection's moral tone.³

Earlier manuscripts, however, show no regard for this ordering. The title page of the Asloan Manuscript, for instance, indicates that it originally contained seven fables (assuming that the lost 'Parliament of Bestis' is 'The Trial of the Fox'). These, if we adopt the numbering from above, were arranged thus: 13, 8, 7, 3, 4, 5, 2. The Bannatyne Manuscript orders its ten fables as follows (again using the same numbering system): 8, 3, 4, 1, 13, 2, 6, 12, 7.

Moreover, the Asloan and Bannatyne manuscripts do not even group the fables together as a unit. The Asloan title page tells us that it placed the first six of its Henryson fables together. It then inserted a number of other poems: 'By a Palace as I couth Pas', 'A Ballat of Treuth', The Buke of the Howlat, and The Tale of the Fyve Bestis. Only after these does 'The Two Mice' appear. In the Bannatyne Manuscript, the first fable from Henryson is immediately followed by The Buke of the Howlat. Bannatyne also inserts, between the fourth and fifth of the fables, Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and 'The Bludy Serk'.

Of course, the incompleteness and unusual ordering of the Fables in these manuscripts might stem from practical difficulties: Asloan and Bannatyne may have been working from texts that were themselves incomplete or possibly damaged and they may have copied their texts as they came to hand. However, when we consider how freely they arrange the fables and their willingness to interpose other poems between them without apology or comment, it does seem that the compilers of these manuscripts were quite untroubled by the literary consequences of such problems. Given this, it seems likely that Asloan and Bannatyne were simply reading Henryson's Fables with much less sense of their structural cohesion and unity than is implied by the later witnesses. [...]

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¹ Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 32-33;, xii.

² See John MacQueen, Complete and Full with Numbers: The Narrative Poetry of Robert Henryson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 285-89

³ Georg D. Gopen, 'The Essential Seriousness of Henryson's Moral Fables: A Study in Structure', Studies in Philology 82:1 (Winter 1985), 42-59; Denton Fox (ed.), The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), lxxv-lxxxi.