Table Of Content‘THE NEW POET’
Novelty and Tradition
in Spenser’s Complaints
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‘THE NEW POET’
Novelty and Tradition
in Spenser’s Complaints
RICHARD DANSON BROWN
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 1999 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Senate House, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 3BX
Copyright © 1999 Richard Danson Brown
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ-
ten permission of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available for this book
ISBN 0-85323-803-0 cased
0-85323-813-8 paper
Typeset by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd, Bolton
Printed in Great Britain by
Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
Abbreviations x
Introduction ‘Subject unto chaunge’: Spenser’s 1
Complaintsand the New Poetry
PART ONE: THE TRANSLATIONS
Chapter One ‘Clowdie teares’:
Poetic and Doctrinal Tensions in Virgils Gnat 39
Chapter Two Forming the ‘first garland
of free Poësie’ in France and England, 1558–91 63
PART TWO: THE MAJOR COMPLAINTS
Chapter Three A ‘goodlie bridge’
between the Old and the New: the Transformation
of Complaint in The Ruines of Time 99
Chapter Four Poetry’s ‘liuing tongue’
in The Teares of the Muses 133
Chapter Five Cracking the Nut?
Mother Hubberds Tale’s Attack on Traditional Notions
of Poetic Value 169
Chapter Six ‘Excellent device and wondrous slight’:
Muiopotmos and Complaints’ Poetics 213
Chapter Seven ‘And leave this lamentable
plaint behinde’: the New Poetry beyond the Complaints 255
Appendix Urania-Astraea and ‘DivineElisa’ in
The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–88) 271
Bibliography 275
Index 289
v
For Andrea Lyons
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been made possible through the support of Jacques
Berthoud, Jean and Jonathan Brown and Andrea Lyons ‘to whome’,
in Spenser’s words, ‘I acknowledge my selfe bounden, by manie sin-
gular favours and great graces’.
I would also like to thank other colleagues and students at the
University of York: Graham Parry, John Roe, Mike Cordner, Geoff
Wall, Jessica Aldis and Zoë Anderson for their enthusiasm and
encouragement at various times in the process of this undertaking.
At Oxford, Elizabeth Mackenzie and Nicholas Shrimpton first
encouraged me as an undergraduate and have continued their sup-
port; Emrys Jones from the same university was courteous and infor-
mative in his reading of the work at an earlier stage.
I would like to acknowledge the vital moral and financial support
given to me by other friends and family members: Barbara and
David Jupe, Phil Barclay and Emma Robinson, Oliver Bond, Clare
Jackson and Barney and Louise Quinn. Finally, I must thank the
University Libraries of York and Newcastle upon Tyne.
vii
PREFACE
This book is a modest monument to my ten year long enthusiasm for
the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Though strictly a work of literary his-
tory, it necessarily embodies my sense of Spenser’s aesthetic excel-
lence; I hope that at the very least, these ‘vaine labours of terrestriall
wit’ may encourage others to explore the diversity of Spenser’s artis-
tic achievements.
This study argues that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is
more complex than is usually thought. Through a detailed reading of
the Complaints, I suggest that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator,
whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by
these different texts. I suggest that the Complaints are a ‘poetics in
practice’, which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new
poetry which emerges through Spenser’s transformation of tradi-
tional complaint.
The Introduction reviews scholarly reconstructions of the first
publication of the Complaints volume in 1591, and investigates the
traditional poetics and forms of complaint poetry available to
Spenser. The study is then divided into two parts. Part One consid-
ers the translations included in Complaintsas traditional texts which
demonstrate Spenser’s ability to replicate conventional complaint
and his understanding of received notions of poetic meaning. In the
Chapter 1 I read Virgils Gnat as at once a faithful translation of the
pseudo-Virgilian Culex, and an autobiographical appropriation of its
primary allegory, retaining a basic confidence in traditional theories
of allegory. In Chapter 2, I argue that Ruines of Rome exhibits both
Spenser’s desire to emulate the achievements of Du Bellay in English,
and his concern to differentiate his own poetry doctrinally from Du
Bellay’s troubling precedent.
Part Two explores the major, or Spenserian, Complaintsas a devel-
opment from these traditional positions to the innovative practice of
Mother Hubberds Taleand Muiopotmos. In Chapter 3 I argue that The
Ruines of Timeis a self-consciously transitional text, which voices the
viii
Preface ix
tension between the humanist notion of literary immortality and
Christian world-contempt, and transforms complaint into an inter-
rogation of poetry itself. In Chapter 4 I see The Teares of the Musesas
continuing The Ruines of Time’s debate between humanism and
Christianity, but in a context of cultural change which puts both
humanist and Christian ideas under pressure and envisages that the
poetry represented by the complaining Muses may not recover its
diminished prestige. In Chapter 5 I argue that Mother Hubberds Tale
represents a radical break with the traditional fable form, articulating
through complaint the narrator’s social and poetic anxieties about the
moral implications of the tale he rewrites: the poem no longer being
tied to a didactic aesthetic, it achieves novelty through its troubled
vision of a disunified world. In Chapter 6, I present Muiopotmos as
an elegant demonstration of the ambiguity of the worlds of both arti-
fice and mortality: like Mother Hubberds Tale, its fable self-con-
sciously repudiates conventional didacticism in favour of a
recognition of the arbitrariness of the mortal life.
Finally, Chapter 7 suggests that the process I have investigated in
Complaints – in which a new poetry is created out of the perceived
failure of traditional forms – can also be seen in the wider English
poetry of the 1580s and 1590s.
ix
