Final Versions

Renaissance Visionary Poems

Spenser’s oeuvre of translation is not an isolated body of work but one that exists in a larger poetic and cultural context. A Theatre For Voluptuous Wordlings, which contains Spenser’s first published poetry, is an intriguingly multi-national, multi-media, and multi-genre project. Before the volume appeared in English in 1569, it had already appeared in French and Dutch in 1568 (printed by John Dale). A Theatre contains not only poems but also images that present a literal rendering of the action or scene described in the accompanying poem; at the same time, each illustration, because it can only represent one part of the action of its accompanying poem, suggests an interpretation of the poem. Please see Joseph Loewenstein’s description of the manner in which poem and illustration interact in the Criticism And Bibliography section of the site. Below the user will find an image and accompanying poem that together constitute a sample opening:


The pictures in the English edition of A Theatre derive from woodcuts based closely on the images presented in the French and Dutch language editions of the text. While the woodcuts are competent enough, they lack the fine detail and rich chiaroscuro of the copperplate engravings on which they are based.
In terms of proportion, the poems and illustrations in A Theatre are not its most significant matter. That distinction belongs to the prose pieces written by Van Der Noot that surround the poems and illustrations. The first piece is a dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth I and the second a lengthy interpretive essay in which Van Der Noot exorciates the Roman Catholic Church for its worldliness and corruption of the Gospel.

A somewhat complex genealogy stands behind the poems that appear in A Theatre. The first set of poems (six sonnets and a four-line envoy), titled "Epigrams,"

Francesco Petrarca

is based on Clément Marot’s reworking of Francesco Petrarca’s “Canzone Of Visions” included in Petrarca’s collection Rime Sparsa. Marot (1496-1544) was a Protestant French poet most famous for his extremely popular and influential translations into French of the Psalmes. Perhaps Marot’s religious affiliations and the acclaim he received for his translation of scriptural material are what led Van Der Noot both to include Marot’s work in A Theatre and construe it as an appropriate platform for the anti-Catholic polemic of the prose pieces included in the volume.

Clement Marot

The second set of poems, titled "Sonets," consists of twelve blank-verse “sonnets”—ten of which are based on Joachim Du Bellay’s "Songe" ("Songe" is French for "dream") which follows the poet’s lengthy narrative poem Les Antiquities De Rome. (Spenser eventually translated Les Antiquities as the “Ruines Of Rome” and included the sequence in Complaints).

The remaining poems in the "Songe"—which contain explicitly apocalyptic imagery and themes missing from Du Bellay’s poems—are likely Van Der Noot’s original compositions. Why Van Der Noot felt compelled to include poems by Du Bellay (1522-1560)

Joachim Du Bellay

in A Theatre is unclear; perhaps the best guess is that Van Der Noot found the attitude of world-weariness in the sequence amenable to condemnation of “vanity” that, alongside the anti-Catholic polemic, is the abiding theme of A Theatre.

If the motivation behind Van Der Noot's decision to include Du Bellay's poetry in A Theatre is uncertain, so too is Spenser's reason for revising his original translations of Du Bellay's poems and including those revisions in the the collection Complaints (1591). What we can be certain of is the nature of those revisions; quite simply, Spenser recast his original blank-verse sonnets into the rhymed form of English sonnets. He also replaced the explicitly apocalyptic poems (which, again, were not by Du Bellay) with translations of the poems that appear in Du Bellay's sequence so that Spenser's later set of translations corresponds exactly to Du Bellay's "Songe" in terms of the order of the sonnets. For further consideration of Spenser’s revisions of the material he included in A Theatre for the later collection Complaints, please see the essay “Edmund Spenser And The Discipline Of Translation” in the Criticism And Bibliography section of this site.

Edited by James A. Williams. Questions or comments may be sent to: jawillia@artsci.wustl.edu