Abstract
Calling attention to the diversity and breadth of early modern women’s engagement with complaint, this chapter considers how complaint might be understood as a mode available to the woman writer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It outlines the formal parameters of complaint, as well as the ways in which its Renaissance forms have been shaped by a largely male-authored Ovidian tradition in which women’s voices have been appropriated and ventriloquised. Rather than reinforcing women’s exclusion from the mode, however, this chapter introduces the ways in which women have drawn on a range of traditions, amatory, political, and devotional, to produce a rich and diverse corpus. The volume as a whole introduces new complaint writers, new complaint texts, and new complaint forms, and explores the complex ways in which women deployed the mode for personal, religious, political, and literary purposes. Rather than an overdetermined, Ovidian tradition off-limits to the woman writer, complaint emerges through this chapter as a foundational vehicle for early modern subjects both male and female to express grief, protest, abandonment, and loss, to generate compassion for their cause, and to engage wider communities in sympathetic support. This chapter argues for the centrality of complaint to the early modern writer, focusing on women’s role in shaping its traditions, modes of circulation, and political, cultural, and religious impact.
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Notes
- 1.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS Osborn b. 226, 86–87. We have modernised the text of the poem.
- 2.
The manuscript is discussed in Alison Shell, “‘Often to my Self I make my mone’: Early Modern Women’s Poetry from the Feilding Family,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry: Selected Papers from the Trinity-Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 259–78.
- 3.
John Kerrigan, ed. Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and “Female Complaint”: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1. See also Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and the Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 4.
Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 2. See also Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
- 5.
Danielle Clarke, “‘Form’d into words by your divided lips’: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition,” in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 61.
- 6.
See, for example, Betty Travitsky, “The ‘Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 1 (1980): 76–94; Wendy Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,” English Literary History 58, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 35–62; M. L. Stapleton, “Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney Read Ovid’s Heroides,” Studies in Philology (2008): 487–519; Rosalind Smith, “‘I Thus Goe Arm’d to Field’: Lindamira’s Complaint,” Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 1 (2001): 73–85; Clare R. Kinney, “Turn and Counterturn: Reappraising Mary Wroth’s Poetic Labyrinths,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 85–102; and Kinney, “Mary Wroth Romances Ovid: Refiguring Metamorphosis and Complaint in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 241–56; Katherine Heavey, “Aphra Behn’s Oenone to Paris: Ovidian Paraphrase by Women Writers,” Translation and Literature 23 (2014): 303–20; and Susan Wiseman, “‘Perfectly Ovidian’? Dryden’s Epistles, Behn’s ‘Oenone,’ Yarico’s Island,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 417–33.
- 7.
Two recent PhD theses are Katherine Jo Smith, Ovidian Female-Voiced Complaint Poetry in Early Modern England (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2016); and Sabine Blackmore, “In soft Complaints no longer Ease I find”: Poetic Configurations of Melancholy by Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (PhD diss., Humboldt University of Berlin, 2015).
- 8.
Important work in this area includes the special issue of Renaissance Studies edited by Susan Wiseman, “The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroides in the Renaissance and Restoration,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008).
- 9.
Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, edited by William A. Oran et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Samuel Daniel, Delia. Contayning certayne Sonnets: vvith the complaint of Rosamond (London, 1592) sig. Bb iv; Thomas Lodge, The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, edited by Edmund Gosse (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963); Michael Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (London: Nicholas Link, 1597); William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets Never before Imprinted (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609).
- 10.
Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 106–29: Gerard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974; reprinted 1992), 67.
- 11.
Barbara Lewalski, “Introduction: Issues and Approaches,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 5.
- 12.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie (London, 1595), sig. Cv, quoted in Lewalski, Renaissance Genres, 14.
- 13.
John Frow, Genre (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 65.
- 14.
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebborn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 115.
- 15.
Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 302.
- 16.
Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poesy. In Sidney: A Defence of Poetry, edited by J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 43–44.
- 17.
See Frow, Genre, 63–7.
- 18.
Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 5, “What’s Hecuba to Him?”, 131, 139–40. See also Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 19.
See Gavin Alexander, “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 97–112.
- 20.
We borrow here Katherine Rowe’s phrase, as quoted in Lynn Enterline’s Afterword to this volume. See Enterline, 316, and Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 10.
- 21.
Clarke, “Formd into words,” 63; and Clarke, “Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the Articulation of the Feminine in the English Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008), 385.
- 22.
Katharine Craik, “Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2002), 439.
- 23.
At the time of printing, our forthcoming first and last line digital index of early modern women’s complaint poetry contains over 380 individual entries and identifies 32 women as complaint writers. See Jake Arthur and Rosalind Smith’s essay in this volume for a description of the index’s scope.
- 24.
Calls to a feminist formalism include Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Lara Dodds and Michelle M. Dowd, “The Case for a Feminist Return to Form,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 1 (2018): 82–91.
- 25.
Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 26.
See, for example, Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999).
- 27.
For the catalogue of the Countess of Bridgewater’s library, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); for Elizabeth Middleton, see Victoria Burke and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Elizabeth Middleton, John Bourchier and the Compilation of Seventeenth-Century Religious Manuscripts,” The Library 2, no. 2 (2001): 131–160; and for Fowler, see The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition, ed. Deborah Aldrich-Watson (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS and RETS, 2000), 36–40. The complaints in Fowler’s manuscript are discussed in Arthur and Smith’s essay in this volume.
- 28.
See also Peter Auger, Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 29.
For the female voice in English books of ayres, see Scott A. Trudell, “Performing Women in English Books of Ayres,” in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 15–29; and Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For manuscript songbooks compiled by Scottish women, see Sebastiaan Verweij, The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 186–9.
- 30.
Calvin, Commentary on Psalms, 1:xxxvii.
- 31.
Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 32.
See Schmitz, The Fall of Women, 169–198; Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 30–31; and Alison Thorne, “The Politics of Female Supplication in the Book of Esther,” in Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550–1700, ed. Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 95–110.
- 33.
Barbara MacKay’s paraphrase of the lamentations of Jeremiah is National Library of Scotland, Wod. Qu XXVII, fols. 24r–28r. For Job, see Victoria Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” English Literary History 76, no. 3 (September 2009): 625–660; and Susan Wiseman’s essay in this volume.
- 34.
See, for example, Molekamp, Women and the Bible; and Victoria Brownlee, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For another new exploration of religious complaint, see Sarah C. E. Ross, “Then will I hallelujahs ever sing’: Hester Pulter’s Devotional Complaints,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (forthcoming, 2020).
- 35.
Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1 and 3.
- 36.
See Rosalind Smith, “‘Woman-like complaints’: Lost Love in The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” Textual Practice 33 (2019): 1341–62.
- 37.
Samuel Daniel, Delia. Contayning certayne Sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond. London, 1592. Sig. Bb iv.
- 38.
For a revision of Wall’s argument, see Kevin Dunn’s essay in Imagining Early Modern Histories, which argues that Daniel resolutely refuses cross dressing as part of his assumption of literary authority to comment on public affairs in order to assert his position as witness rather than plainant: “Rosamond the complaint becomes, in this scheme, an instance of his techné, not of his suffering; his skills are those of the poetic bureaucrat, not the poetic courtier.” Kevin Dunn, “‘Secretaire now, but to the dead’: Samuel Daniel and the Just Aesthetics of History,” in Imagining Early Modern Histories, ed. Allison Kavey and Elizabeth Ketner (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2016), 163.
- 39.
See Kerrigan, 1–2 for an example of criticism emphasising the female speaker’s isolation.
- 40.
Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Mountgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 502.
- 41.
Shell, “Often to my Self I make my mone,” 267, 270.
- 42.
Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poesy, 44.
- 43.
King’oo considers the difference between a psalm of lament and a psalm of penitence: “In form-critical terms, it depends on how much of the psalmist’s complaint is also a confession, a plea for forgiveness, or an expression of a desire to turn from wickedness to righteousness.” Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 6.
- 44.
See Marcy L. North, “Ambiguities of Female Authorship and the Accessible Archive,” in Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 73–87.
- 45.
Johanna Drucker, Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 198–199.
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Ross, S.C.E., Smith, R. (2020). Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_1
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