Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Robert Henryson :: Á³îãðàô³ÿ

Robert Henryson :: Á³îãðàô³ÿ

Robert Henryson (alternative spelling: Henrysoun) was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline. There is no record of when or where Henryson was born or educated. The earliest found unconfirmed reference to him occurs in September 1462 when a man of his name with license to teach is on record as having taken a post in the recently founded University of Glasgow. If this was the poet, as is usually assumed, then the citation indicates that he had completed studies in both arts and canon law. With no record of him as a student in Scotland, it is normally thought that he graduated in a university furth of the land, possibly in Leuven, Paris or Bologna. Almost all early references to Henryson firmly associate his name with Dunfermline. He probably had some attachment to the city's Benedictine abbey, the burial place for many of the kingdom's monarchs and an important centre for pilgrimage close to a major ferry-crossing en-route to St Andrews. Direct unconfirmed evidence for this connection occurs in 1478 when his name appears as a witness on abbey charters. According to the poet William Dunbar, Henryson died in Dunfermline. An apocryphal story by the English poet Francis Kynaston in the early 17th century refers to the flux as the cause of death, but this has not been established. The year of death also is unknown, although 1498 or 1499, a time of plague in the burgh, have been tentatively suggested. His poetry was composed in Middle Scots at a time when this had become a state language. It is one of the most important bodies of work in the canon of early Scottish literature. Because there is so little is known regarding the life of Henryson, it is difficult to identify the dates of publication of his works. Most are assumed to have been written in the years from 1450 to 1490. His most critically acclaimed poem, The Testament of Cresseid, has been asserted to be the preeminent narrative in medieval Scottish literature. The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian is Henryson's famous collection of imaginative Aesopic fables. Fabillis also includes several stories of Reynard the fox that belong to the beast-epic, a medieval cycle of folktales. The stories of The Morall Fabillis are recognized for their significant employment of moralitas, a broad, philosophical implication integrated into the narrative as a lesson and advocating a political or spiritual interpretation of the text. Henryson's lesser-known poems include Orpheus and Eurydice, in which he exposes the thematic discord of the received version, “Robene and Makyne,” a comical love-debate in the style of the French pastourelle, and “The Bludy Serk,” a ballad-like tale of a lady's rescue by a wounded knight. His surviving corpus amounts to almost exactly 5000 lines.