"Strange showes": Spenser's Double Vision of Imperial and Papal Vanities

Edmund Spenser's "Visions of the worlds vanitie" was published in 1591 as one of several poems in his Complaints, which includes some translations and original works often sharing classical motifs. It is a visionary poem addressed to a "faire Ladie" and consisting of twelve stanzas, nine of which are fables about a large, vain animal or thing plagued by a small one.¹ The minimal scholarly attention the poem received over its first three centuries can be summed up in W. L. Renwick's statement that "these Visions . . . [are] parables of the limitations of power [and] have little but historical interest for us. The single idea they enclose is obvious enough; I can find no line of connexion between the images, except that they all concern animals, as if Spenser had been reading his Aesop." He even cautioned against deeper readings of any of the Complaints poems, noting that their primary focus is the "fleetingness of strength and power and beauty." This scholarly stance has calcified in the last hundred years. William Sipple, in his 1984 Spenserian reference guide, observes that "the bulk of the scholarship on the individual poems [in Complaints] concerns Spenser's varied exploration of the themes of the world's vanity." Richard McCabe, commentating in 1999, finds in "Visions" merely a "series of miniature beast fables emblematically illustrating the insecurity of power but designed to lead, in the climactically positioned sonnet 11, to a perception of the value of 'mean things' or lowly persons," and in 2001 Anne Lake Prescott briefly assesses the poem as a sonnet sequence that "recounts various instances of small creatures that bring down the mighty."²

In 1957, however, Alfred W. Satterthwaite cited "general critical agreement that the Visions of the worlds vanitie is 'unimportant and derivative'" but allowed there is merit in Francesco Viglione's theory that the poem may be interpreted as referring to the demise of the Church of Rome. He noted, though, that if the theory were true "one might expect to find in the sonnets themselves some clear indication, whether explicit or symbolical, of propagandistic intention. One searches in vain, however, for any implied connection between the [fabled] examples of pride and the Roman Church."³

Satterthwaite and other critics may have searched in vain, but a closer reading of each beast fable does indeed reveal exactly such connections. Each stanza is densely packed with highly specific allusions—gleaned from such Spenserian sources as Plutarch and John Lydgate—to two parallel, chronological series of mighty individuals: the most notorious leaders of the Roman Empire and of the Roman Catholic Church. In these fables we find that the vain, powerful beasts or things connote pre-Fall emperors and pre-Reformation popes, and the small, seemingly weak creatures represent the individuals of lesser stature who were responsible for their downfalls. For instance, the fifth stanza's sea monster, stabbed in the neck by a swordfish, suggests the monster Nero, who was also killed by a stab wound to the neck; in parallel, it may also connote the monstrous Borgia pope Alexander VI, vociferously condemned by the "sword of the Lord" Savonarola. The eighth stanza's pompous, tower-decorated elephant, downed by a mere ant, evokes the gift to Pope Leo X of a tower-bearing elephant which soon died; the parasite-afflicted pope's excessive mourning of his beloved beast gave Martin Luther ample fodder for his first pamphlets. Based on an abundance of similar allusions and the chronology of both parallels, I will argue that "Visions" is far more than a desultory lament about vanity or the ephemeral nature of power. It is also a prophetic commentary on specific leaders whose flaws made them and their respective institutions vulnerable to demise—demise that was accelerated by seemingly insignificant "little people." Spenser, by writing a poem to a "faire Ladie" (13) that evokes specific fallen leaders in two imperial lines (one of which England considered its historical heritage and the other from which it was forcefully separating), pointedly insinuates that if she is not careful to restrain her...