Penelopes Complaint: or A Mirrour for Wanton Minions

The following transcriptions refer to Peter Colse[1]’s Penelopes Complaint: or, A Mirrour for Wanton Minions. Taken out of Homers Odissea, and written in English (London: [Valentine Simmes] for Hugh Jackson, 1596; USTC 513087). It is a poem of 1299 octosyllabic lines, in six-verse stanzas rhymed AB AB CC. It is divided in sections introduced by subtitles. It is centred on Penelope’s steadfast resolution to preserve her marital fidelity to Odysseus, despite the grief caused by his absence and despite the insistent courtship of the suitors. It concludes with Odysseus’ return, the slaughter of the suitors, and the two spouses’ reunion.

The text is introduced by the following paratexts: title page (<A1r>); dedicatory letter to Edith, wife of Sir Ralph Horsey (on whom see Bettey 2008) (A2<r>); three short acrostic poems by Colse in commendation of Sir Ralph, Edith, and their daughter, the second in sapphic stanzas (<A2v> – <A3r>); a short poem by John May (possibly the bishop of Carlisle, on whom see Summerson 2001) (<A4r>); a short poem written by a S. D., who is identified with Samuel Daniel in Corser 1869, 422 (on Daniel see Pitcher 2004) (<A4r>); Colse’s address to the reader (<A4r>).

Colse’s poem is in the genre of complaint, which became especially popular in the 1590s, with works such as Spenser’s anthology of Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), Thomas Lodge’s The Complaint of Elstred (1593), Michael Drayton’s Matilda and Piers Gaveston (1594), Richard Barnfield’s Complaint of Chastity (1594), Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594), revisited a year later by John Trussel, Raptus I Helenae: The First Rape of Fair Helen (1595), and Thomas Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece (1600) (see Smith, O’Callaghan, and Ross 2018). The model for complaint literature was the popular Mirror for Magistrates, edited by William Baldwin, first published in 1559, and reprinted in 1563, 1571, 1574, 1575, 1578 and 1587. However, Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond redefined the genre on the model of Ovid’s Heroids and Metamorphoses (Brown 2004, 194-5; on Ovid in Tudor England see Reid 2014).

Ovid’s influence is visible in Colse’s poem too. Although both the title page and the letter to Edith Horsey declare only Homer as source, Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, in which she urges her husband to come back to her (713-66), reworks the analogous letter which opens Ovid’s Heroids. It follows closely the model when, at the beginning, Penelope exhorts Ulysses not to reply by writing a useless letter, but by coming in person (715-18, cf. Her. 1.2; Reid 2014, 136); when she reveals that she has sent messengers to Pylos and Sparta to provide her with news on her husband (731-4; cf. Her. 1. 63-5); when she reasserts her unshakable fidelity to Ulysses, in spite of her father Icarius urging her to remarry (749-60; cf. Her. 1.81-4). Moreover, Colse includes in his poem a letter by Ulysses to his wife (874-963), which draws on the letter whose composition is attributed to a certain Sabinus and that was regularly printed in early modern editions of Ovid.[2]

If Colse follows Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond in adopting the model of Ovid (Brown 2004, 195), the identification of the S. D. who authored one of the initial paratexts with Daniel becomes significant. In his short poem, S. D. draws a comparison between Penelope and an English woman whose chastity had been celebrated by Henry Willoughby in his omonymous poem Avisa (DATI). S. D. concludes that Avisa cannot match the exemplary virtues of Penelope. Colse himself presents his poem as a polemic response to Avisa. In the opening letter, he refers to “an unknown author” who “hath of late published a pamphlet called Avisa (overslipping^[3] so many praiseworthy matrons)” and “hath registered the meanest” (A2<r>). In the letter to the reader, he on the one hand reiterates his critics; on the other, he declares: “I follow (I say) the same style, and verse [scil. of Avisa], as neither misliking the method, nor the matter, had it been applied to some worthier subject” (<A4v>). That Colse follows closely the style of Willoughby’s poem has been long recognised (Corse 1869, 424).

Thus, the declared improvement on Willoughby’s Avisa is in the choice of a worthier model of marital chastity. Colse’s poem presents itself from the title page as a “a mirror for wanton minions”: this means, in the mirror tradition,[4] setting an example of virtue in order for unchast women to recognise their fault. In his initial letter, Colse states that he has published the poem after observing  “the shipwreck that noble virtue chastity is subject unto” (A2<r>). In extolling Penelope as the supreme model of chastity, Colse connects to a literary tradition that substantially reworked the Homeric character and her motivations. As Demetriou points out (2015, 87-9), Penelope’s fidelity in the Odyssey is less a matter of an unshakable moral choice than of preservation of Odysseus’ material goods and of Penelope’s social reputation. Moreover, it was not an absolute choice, as Penelope herself was aware of the possibility that she could eventually resign to marry one of the suitors. However, in the following tradition Penelope was “transformed into an exemplar of chastity”, and her fidelity was “turned from a precarious process to an unwavering moral condition and from a question of social choice to one of sexual conduct” (89). The turning point was in Roman elegy – where, we can add, the concern for fidelity in affective relationships far outweighs any other consideration. In Propertius she is the antithesis to the lascivious Roman women (3.12-13) and she rejects Antinous because of his lustfulness (4.5). In Ovid’s Heroides, which we have already mentioned, she emphatically declares to the absent Ulysses: “I am yours, I must be called yours; I shall forever be Penelope, the wife of Ulysses” (tua sum, tua dicar oportet; / Penelope coniunx sempre Ulixis ero; 1.83-4).[5] From Latin elegy, Demetriou follows the route of the idealisation of Penelope to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (Of Famous Women), where she is defined “the purest example of unstained chastity of a matron” (intemerate pudicitie matronis exemplum sanctissimum; Boccaccio 1970, 160). Finally, she quotes the entry for Penelope in Elyot’s Bibliotheca, where she is considered “most chast wife and constant above all the women of her time” (1542, Bb3<r>).

In Colse’s poem, one section is devoted to the “commendation of chastity” (595-612). The above-quoted promise of fidelity of Her. 1.83-4 is expanded as follows:

I will be but Ulysses’ wife:

To him I gave my faith at first,

With him Ile end my love and life.

To him, ere I will fail my faith,

I sure will die a martyr’s death.

(756-60).

With the word “martyr”, the transformation of Penelope into a Christian heroine of chastity is completed.

[1] I was not able to find biographical information on Colse. It appears that there is no entry on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Corse too, in 1869, confesses that he is not informed about his life (424).

[2] In Amores 2, 18, Ovid reveals that his friend Sabinus has written epistolary responses to six letters of Heroides: Odysseus to Penelope, Hippolytus to Phaedra, Aeneas to Dido, Demophoon to Phyllis, Iason to Hypsipyle and Phaon to Sappho. He mentions Sabinus again at Pont. 4, 16, 13-16 as the author of Odysseus’ letter. The manuscript tradition has provided us with three letters that declare to be in response of Ovid’s letter: Odysseus to Penelope, Demophoon to Phyllis and Paris to Oenone. These three response letters were attributed to the humanist Angelus Sabinus, alias Angelo Sani (1837) by Otto Jahn in 1837. After having general acclaim for decades, this attribution was disputed by Bruno Häuptli (Ovidius 1996), who contended that they were the work of an unknown ancient poet. The problem is still open.

[3] “To pass over without notice; to let slip, let pass; to omit to notice, mention, respond to, etc.” (OED).

[4] MIRROR TRADITION

[5] All translation from Latin are mine.

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Elyot, Thomas. 1542. Bibliotheca Eliotae – Eliotis librarie. London: Thomas Berthelet.

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Jahn, Otto. 1837. “A. Sabinus”. Zeitschrift fur die Alterthumswissenschaft 77: 6.

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Smith, Rosalind, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross. 2018. “Complaint”. In A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates, 339-52. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

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