On Inset Complaints in Spenser’s the Faerie Queene (The Britomart Plot)

Abstract

A special kind of complaint poems appeared as inset pieces within larger literary works of the English Renaissance. One notorious example is Spenser’s grand poem The Faerie Queene containing several inset complaints. The article considers a group of inset pieces from Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene, which seems to be a 7-part lamentation cycle. Drawing on existing scholarship, the article discusses the following passages: a complaint of the martial maid Britomart (a courtly lament, which triggers the cycle of lamentations); a complaint of nymph Cymoent concerning her son’s wounds and false prophesy (marine elegy); prince Arthur’s complaint (an invection against Night and mishap); Florimell’s complaint (a prisoner’s lament); three invocations of Cymoent to three gods concerning the troubles of her son Marinell and of his bride Florimell. All these complaints, like the whole poem, are in Spenserian stanza. This study deals with various specifics of Spenser’s inset series of complaints comparing it to inset poetic cycles created by Philip Sidney (the Old Arcadia) and by William Shakespeare (Love’s Labour’s Lost).