Abstract
AbstractStarting 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.
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