‘This is the edition of the Complaints for the foreseeable future. It sums up our knowledge of these poems and their unstable mode, preparing its readers for future work. The text is freshly edited, and the extensive notes are wide-ranging, learned and helpful. After a nuanced discussion of the complaint-mode, the introduction shows how the volume responds to its historical, political and literary contexts, and how subsequent writers respond in turn to it. This book is essential for anyone interested in sixteenth century poetry.’
—William A. Oram, Smith College

‘This new stand-alone scholarly edition of Edmund Spenser's Complaints, the first such one since 1928, is ample recompense for the long wait. Editors Richard Danson Brown and Elisabeth Chaghafi have furnished scholars with what should quickly become a go-to resource for not only the study of these “sundry small poemes”, published in 1591, but also for Spenser's poetics, ambitions, contexts, career, and afterlife in scholarship. There is nothing small, in volume or in aims, about this edition. From their Introduction – lengthy, thorough but not dense, erudite yet engaging – to their copious annotations, which point readers in almost any interpretive, analytical direction they might wish to go, Brown and Chaghafi accomplish in spades what they set out to do: give us timely “new ways” to understand Spenser's Complaints.’
—Judith Owens, University of Manitoba

‘Literary history may not have been kind to the Complaints, but Richard Danson Brown and Elisabeth Chaghafi certainly have been in producing the edition for which we have all been waiting. With an erudite introduction, reader-friendly text, and informative footnotes, this will be an edition for the ages. Complaints will no longer languish as a neglected byway in the Spenserian canon, but be central to debates about his poetic identity and status.’
—Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex

Richard Danson Brown is Professor of English Literature at The Open University
Elisabeth Chaghafi is Lecturer in English at the University of Tübingen

Introduction: Piteous plaints and simple devices: Spenser’s Complaints in context
1 An overview of the contents
2 The scandal of Complaints
3 ‘This so curious net-worke’: Complaints in creative critical context
4 The text of Complaints: from 1591 to 1611 and beyond
5 The early reception of Complaints in print and manuscript
6 The text and editorial procedures

Complaints
The Printer to the Gentle Reader
The Ruines of Time
The Teares of the Muses
Virgils Gnat
Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale
Ruines of Rome: by Bellay
Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie
Visions of the Worlds Vanitie
Visions of Bellay
Visions of Petrarch

Appendix 1: Daphnaïda
Appendix 2: Poems from van der Noot A Theatre for Worldlings (1569)
Appendix 3: By Syrithe Pugh:
- Culex: Introduction to the Culex
- Transcription of the Dumaeus edition
- The Dumaeus Culex: An annotated prose translation

Textual appendix: Q and F variants

Glossary
Bibliography and further reading
Index