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Scorned Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591)

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Edmund Spenser and Animal Life

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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Abstract

This chapter looks at Spenser’s animal writing through two related lenses. In the first place, it considers animal hermeneutics, using the influential work of Jill Mann to suggest the continuing vitality of medieval models of signification in the foxes and badgers of The Ruines of Time. Secondly, it looks in detail at the neglected Visions of the Worlds Vanitie sequence (also from Complaints) to suggest further connections with medieval genres in the shape of the bestiary. However, as the essay suggests, the detail of these poems works against the simplified moralizing they seem to evoke in favour of the destabilization of conventional hierarchies in ways which remain surprisingly unpredictable.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My thanks to the editors and to Andrew Hadfield and Elisabeth Chaghafi for their instructive comments. For context, see Brown (1999); Rasmussen (2010). All quotations from Complaints are from Spenser (1989). Line numbers to individual poems are given parenthetically in text, preceded with the following abbreviations: RT (The Ruines of Time); VG (Virgils Gnat); MHT (Mother Hubberds Tale); VWV (Visions of the Worlds Vanitie); VP (Visions of Petrarch).

  2. 2.

    For related approaches, Bennett (2010, viii, and passim).

  3. 3.

    For Bartholomaeus’ popularity, see Mann (2009, 25–6).

  4. 4.

    See further Mann (2009, 28–52).

  5. 5.

    See Richard Schell’s perceptive introduction in Spenser (1989, 432).

  6. 6.

    For the sequence of Complaints, Stein (1934, 3–24); Brown (1999, 30–34); Rasmussen (2010, 219–23). Rasmussen’s discussion underlines the problematic placement of Ruines of Rome (229).

  7. 7.

    For similar manoeuvres within The Ruines of Time, see Brown (1999, 125–31); Rasmussen (1981, 159–81).

  8. 8.

    See the presentation of other Complaints sonnet sequences, Ruines of Rome, and Visions of Bellay and Petrarch, as well as Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, in Spenser (1989) and Spenser (1999). Most French editions of Du Bellay in contrast count each new sonnet as a discrete text; see Du Bellay (2009), II, 3–32, for Les Antiquitez de Rome and ‘Le Songe’.

  9. 9.

    The Bodleian copy misprints the siglum as ‘B3’ on X3r; the correct version is given in the Huntington Library copy reproduced in Early English Books Online.

  10. 10.

    See Stein (1934, 67–9); Spenser (1999, 637).

  11. 11.

    The caveat is that none of the Visions has a separate title page, or letter of dedication; see Rasmussen (2010, 220–2).

  12. 12.

    Visions of Petrarch, though based on Petrarch’s Canzioneri 323, makes significant use of Marot’s version, ‘Des Visions de Pétrarque’; see Stein (1934, 112 n10). For the Theatre, see Hadfield (2012, 38–47).

  13. 13.

    See for example Stein (1934, 67–70); Schell’s introductory notes in Spenser (1989, 431–32, 441, 451–52); Rasmussen (2010, 229–30).

  14. 14.

    For the connection of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie with Du Bellay, see Satterthwaite (1960, 113–32). Satterthwaite’s estimation of the sequence is relentlessly negative.

  15. 15.

    Pliny calls his bird ‘trochilus’; see further Spenser (1999, 638). For apocalyptic glossing, see Spenser (1989, 434).

  16. 16.

    See Brown (1999, 169–212), for my reading of this poem in terms of its dialogic relations with the Roman de Renard, on which see further Mann (2009, 17–20).

  17. 17.

    The ‘rediscovery’ of the medieval by Renaissance scholars is a vast topic; see for example the following important collections: Krier (1998), McMullan and Matthews (2007), Stenner et al. (2019).

  18. 18.

    A weakness of all scholarly editions so far is their relatively fitful treatment of the sources for Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. I aim to address aspects of this in my forthcoming edition of Complaints, co-edited with Elisabeth Chaghafi (for Manchester University Press).

  19. 19.

    Spenser (1999, 637). See Aesop (1998, 139). A hitherto unspotted source is a simile in Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI.332–36, when Daedalion tries to rush onto his daughter’s funeral pyre, and is compared with a bull (‘iuvencus’) stung by hornets (‘spicula crabronum’) into mad flight (‘ire fugae’). See Ovid (1984, 144–5), and, for Arthur Golding’s translation, Ovid (2002, 332): ‘as doth a bullock when/A hornet stings him in the neck’ (ll.387–8).

  20. 20.

    See ‘breeze, n.1.’ OED.

  21. 21.

    All quotations from The Faerie Queene are from Spenser (2007), with parenthetical references to book, canto, and stanza.

  22. 22.

    See Miller (1990, 127–8), an exemplary summary of Calidore’s problematic heroism.

  23. 23.

    The line includes further i-related assonance in the dipthong of ‘their’, and a long i-sound in ‘feeble’. My thanks to Elisabeth Chaghafi for this observation.

  24. 24.

    See Dubow (2022) for an illuminating exploration of the tendency of alliteration (which is of course related to assonance) to overflow cultural and formal boundaries in Spenser’s epic.

  25. 25.

    My emphasis.

  26. 26.

    See Brown (2013, 47–57).

  27. 27.

    See VB, ll.79–81, 159–61, 209–10; VP, ll.83–84, 97–98; and VWV, ll.2–7, 20–26, 62–67, 111–12, 153–54. My count excludes past participles in rhyming positions, because the evidence about how they were sounded is ambiguous. Amoretti on my reckoning has twenty one feminine rhymes, and only a couple of instances of two feminine rhymes in the same poem (sonnets LVIII and LXXXV).

  28. 28.

    See Dolven (2010, 390), for Sidney and Spenser as (respectively) mimetic and aesthetic metrists; see Brown (2019, 18, 55–56), for my qualifications to this dichotomy.

  29. 29.

    See further Brown (2013, 53–7); Wilson-Okamura (2013, 161–77).

  30. 30.

    See Spenser (1591), title page, for this phrase as a general designation of the volume’s contents.

  31. 31.

    Spenser (1999, 637).

  32. 32.

    This is not the place for a detailed note on Spenserian didacticism, but this paragraph dialogues with elements of my earlier thinking in The New Poet, as well as more recent work, including Grogan (2009), and Crawford (2017).

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  1. The Open University, Oxon, UK

    Richard Danson Brown

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  1. Richard Danson Brown
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  1. University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Rachel Stenner

  2. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Abigail Shinn

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Brown, R.D. (2024). Scorned Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591). In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_7

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