Chapter 5 - “To take on me the payn / Ther fall to remember”

Summary

This chapter looks at the mid-century complaint movement and early modern memory culture, with a focus on George Cavendish’s collection of individual stories, Metrical Visions, and its connections with various memory networks. Often cloaked in an outward conservativism affirming traditional hierarchies, the mid-century complaint poem demonstrates networks of power very different from those depicted in medieval tragic poetry. Composed of the imagined testimonies of trauma victims, speaking from the grave, complaint locates individual memories and affects within political systems. Less famous than its almost-contemporary complaint collection The Mirror for Magistrates, Metrical Visions combines the traditional protest complaint with an awareness of the various facets of an individual memory and the role that networks in those memories. Mid-century complaint invents a way of speaking that evolves into the Shakespearean soliloquy. As such, complaint poetry acts as a bridge between medieval tragic poetry and early modern dramatic tragedy.