Robert Henryson's "Doolie Dreame" and the Late Medieval Dream Vision Tradition

Abstract

This essay’s chief purpose is to explore the interpretive advantages of considering Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth-century Testament of Cresseid as a member of the genre of dream vision poetry. The Testament’s literary type is notoriously difficult to pin down, as are many features of its structure. Its title identifies the poem as a literary “testament,” the title character’s expression of her last will and testamentary intentions. Since it offers an alternative ending to Chaucer’s great romance Troilus and Criseyde, the poem’s topic, however, anchors it in the genre of romance. The sole time the poem names its own genre comes near the end, when it describes itself as a brief ballad, a “ballet schort.”1 Overall, its restlessness works against any single generic identification. In his influential Medieval Dream Poetry, A. C. Spearing sidelines the Testament as “a narrative that includes a dream as an important episode” rather than as a dream poem proper, a position that remains substantially unchanged in the criticism to date.2 Like many late medieval poems whose experience is organized by the perspective of a first-person narrator, its openness of form provides the opportunity to showcase a number of lyric genres: complaint, astrological allegory, reflections on the brevity of earthly joy in the memento mori tradition. Finally, Cresseid’s exclusion from love and society links her to the narrators of