The Effect of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada on Spenser’sComplaints

Abstract

The visionary poems of the Complaints are united by themes and imagery relating to the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588. By using imagery and language depicting the fall of the mighty at the hands of the small, Spenser symbolically alludes to the victory over the Catholic Babylon, Spain, which is associated in the poems with imperial Rome as empires that fell. With this context in mind, it is possible to place the visionary poems of the Complaints in a post-Armada discourse and to demonstrate that that they fit into the continuing concern with apocalyptic Protestantism which Spenser exhibited from A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings to The Faerie Queene.

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