Cosmology, Sexuality, and Music in Robert Henryson’s “Orpheus and Eurydice”

Abstract

Widely considered by critics as the most important of the Middle Scots poets (a group usually encompassing, in addition to Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and James I of Scotland), almost everything about Henryson’s life is conjecture. His work primarily circulated during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and most scholars have agreed that he was the master of the grammar school at the Benedictine Abbey in Dunfermline, Fife. Henryson is clearly influenced by Chaucer, and it is for this that he is often relegated to the status of “Scottish Chaucerian,” a title that does not take into account his own rich poetic abilities and additions to the medieval canon.¹ How Henryson exceeds and pays homage to this influence is evident in his “Orpheus and Eurydice,” which reflects Chaucer’s interest in the philosophy of Boethius; but it is not from Chaucer that Henryson finds his muse here, but rather Boethius himself, from whom Henryson takes the legend of Orpheus and to whom he directs his moralizing epilogue of the poem. Henryson also states that he is drawing on the Anglo-Norman chronicler Nicholas Trivet’s analysis of the story, which explicitly links the Boethian cosmology he writes into the story to that of a sexual and moral lesson. Despite these named sources, though, there is really no known analogue for Henryson’s version of the story; other than the skeletal structure of the tale, it appears to be mainly of his own invention.