‘Woman-like complaints’: lost love in the first part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

Although complaint was a flexible and generative mode in the expression of Renaissance love, mobilising a wide range of antecedents in order to express both grief and protest in response to love’s absence, it has achieved little traction as a critical term. This essay foregrounds the ways in which amatory complaint was used for personal, rhetorical and political gain in the English Renaissance, focusing on the poems embedded in Lady Mary Wroth’s prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Rather than a ‘phobically imagined vocality’ for women or the expression of political inaction, complaint offers the grounds upon which Wroth builds a new Sidneian poetics of love, specific to the dynamics of Jacobean court cultures, registering both grief for an idealised past and the pursuit of redress in the present. The mode’s flexibility and breadth enables love to be reinvented and repurposed in this text, pointing to the overlooked possibilities of complaint for the expression of Renaissance love more broadly.