Chapter Seven: ‘And leave this lamentable plaint behinde’: the New Poetry beyond the Complaints

Summary

In the dedicatory sonnet to The Choice of Valentines, Nashe dismissively notes that ‘Complaints and praises everyone can write’, though not everyone can write ‘of love's pleasures’. He presents his erotic poem, probably composed in 1592, as something daringly new in comparison with the drab traditionality of ‘pangs in stately rhymes’. Nashe's cocksure claim to novelty provides a useful starting point as I conclude this study. Though he alludes to traditional complaint, his remark invites consideration of the new poetry beyond the Complaints volume. Now I want to ask what are the further implications of the innovatory poetic Spenser proposes in the major Complaints. Inevitably, this inquiry will repudiate the suggestion that Spenser's poems are work that ‘everyone can write’. The transformation of traditional forms and the rethinking of poetry's relation to the external world in the Complaints illuminate the poetic novelty of two supreme examples of ‘the new poetry’: The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Conclusions

I have argued that Spenser's relationship to tradition is more complex than is usually thought. This complexity is exhibited in two related areas. Spenser's manipulation of the complaint mode displays a critical and innovative response to that traditional form. As a consequence of this self-consciousness, Spenser makes the Complaints into practical explorations of traditional poetics. In the translations, he adopts classic complaint texts to voice his own intellectual and personal agendas. These poems are exercises within the warrant of the complaint tradition: Virgils Gnat translates Culex and uses the ‘Gnatts complaint’ as a suasive oration through which Spenser can petition his own patron.