Description

Book Synopsis

The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer''s vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer''s Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine''s rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem''s unique blend of detachment and compassion.

A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisd

The Testament of Cresseid Seven Fables

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    A Paperback / softback by Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Robert Henryson

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      Publisher: Faber & Faber
      Publication Date: 01/04/2010
      ISBN13: 9780571249664, 978-0571249664
      ISBN10: 0571249663
      Also in:
      Poetry ELT & Literary Studies Literary studies: poetry and poets

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer''s vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer''s Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine''s rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem''s unique blend of detachment and compassion.

      A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisd

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