Spenser's "Complaints" and the New Poet

Abstract

E . dmund Spenser's volume of Complaints (1591) has often been read in the shadow of his main achievements of the 159os, the publication of the first and the second parts of The Faerie Queene in 1590 and 1596. This perspective may be inevitable if our starting premise is that the best reason to rescue Complaints from obscurity is to allow The Faerie Queene to speak louder. This article argues that Complaints both anticipates and resists a place in the hierarchy of literary kinds that assumes its secondary nature; and then considers how such a reading alters our understanding of Spenser's literary career. An acknowledgment of what I will call Spenser's minor voice enables us to read Complaints unapologetically both before and after The Faerie Queene and to avoid identifying it as either a training ground or a kind of nostalgia for epic achievement. Complaints seems to frustrate attempts to determine its chronology, account for the diverse and seemingly irreconcilable nature of its contents, or settle on the degree of Spenser's participation in its setting foorth. Of the nine poems in the volume, four are sonnet sequences while the others are in rhyme royal, ottava rima, sixaines, or couplets. Each appears with a separate title page: five are dedicated to prominent courtiers or patrons and four are printed with no dedication. The first, The Ruines of Time, is a lament on the destruction of the Roman city of Verulamium followed by an elegy on the deaths of Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, and Sir Philip Sidney. It is followed by The Teares of the Muses, a series of nine laments that deplore the corruption of learning and poetry. Virgils Gnat, the tale of a shepherd's rescue by a humble gnat, is an elaborate mock-heroic complaint translated from the pseudo-Virgilian Culex. Next, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale takes the form of an allegorical beast-fable; its satire, generally assumed to have been directed against Lord Burleigh, was probably