belt, a full purse of gold, and jewels) before riding off, almost fainting for grief when he reaches Troy. The lepers are astounded at the unexpected show of beneficence and when Cresseid asks of her benefactor's identity and is told, she, like Troilus, too is overcome with emotion. She berates herself for her treatment of him and renounces her previously 'selfish' complaints, before sitting down to write her testament, or will, dying soon after. Henryson's portrayal of Cresseid's 'disgrace' and ultimately tragic end, through the narrator of the poem, is observed with a largely rigorous objectivity. Where the narrator comes to judge, rather than reinforcing the institutional admonishment of a 'shocked' or disapproving society, he 'confesses' to his natural pity for Cresseid's misfortune, against the standard view of 'false womanhood' which she was taken in his day to represent. This is perhaps all the more expressive for having been apparently withheld or 'repressed' within the conceit of the poem. The most explicit statement of this breaks through in the passage: Yit nevertheless, quhat ever men deme or say In scornefull langage of thy brukkilnes, I sall excuse als far furth as I may Thy womanheid, thy wisdome and fairnes, The quhilk fortoun hes put to sic distres As hir pleisit, and nathing throw the gilt Of the, throw wickit langage to be spilt! Characters Cresseid, daughter of Calchas, who is punished for breaking her vow of love to Troilus Troilus, one of the sons of Trojan king Priam, and former lover of Cresseid Calchas, Cresseid's loving father. In the Testament, he is a priest of Venus and Cupid. The gods Cupid, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Phoebus, Venus, Mercury, and Cynthia. Structure Throughout the poem, Henryson makes use of the rhyme royal, a rhyme scheme introduced and popularised by Geoffrey Chaucer, and set out as follows- ABABBCC. The stanzas are generally seven lines each in length, and in iambic pentameter. However, in the section in which Cresseid laments her fate from the leper colony (a Complaint), the stanzas are nine lines in length, and with the rhyme scheme AABAABBAB Notes References Modern edition The Poems of Robert Henryson. Ed. Robert L. Kindrick. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Electronic Access. The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables. Robert Henryson. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Bloomsbury House, London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2009 Further reading Gray, Douglas. Robert Henryson. English Writers of the Late