Complaint

This chapter provides an account of early modern poetry of complaint across multiple genres, from expressions of loss edging upon elegy to demands for reparation close to satire. It surveys the surprisingly broad manifestations of complaint in early modern England and Scotland, across three broad categories: erotic complaint (often female‐voiced), religious complaint, and political complaint, each of which contain smaller subgenres: the prison poem, the answer poem, the historical complaint, and the psalm lamentation. Permeable, episodic, and culturally reactive, the mode of complaint privileges unfamiliar forms of early modern subjectivity. Specifically, its speakers embrace failure, irresolution, and a lack of mastery in ways that complicate current critical orthodoxies about gender, writing, and power.