The two sonnet-sequences that conclude the 1591 Complaints, The Visions of Bellay and The Visions of Petrarch, are translations. They resume an engagement with the sonnet form and with two European pioneers in the practice of sonneteering that began before Spenser matriculated at Cambridge. The full title of the latter sequence – The Visions of Petrarch formerly translated – establishes a genetic link to the seven Epigrams that appear near the beginning of van der Noot’s Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569). In the Theatre, those “formerly translated” douzaines are followed by fifteen “Sonets,” eleven of which had been translated from Du Bellay’s Songe, and because those eleven sonnets so closely resemble the versions in The Visions of Bellay, we infer the same genetic tether between the Sonets and the Visions of Bellay. In his Variorum edition of 1805, Todd identified the young Spenser as the former translator whose work had gone unidentified in the Theatre, and there has been no serious scholarly challenge to that assessment.
The Epigrams of the Theatre are not translated directly from Petrarch’s seven-stanza “Canzone of Visions” (Rime sparse 323), but from a French version by Marot, which van der Noot reformats as six douzaines and a four-line envoy. When Spenser transformed those Epigrams into The Visions of Petrarch, he refashioned the douzaines as sonnets, heightening the formal parallels between these poems and The Visions of Bellay.
The theme of both visionary sequences is the transience of earthly things and the vanity of our investments in them. It had been Petrarch’s achievement in the Rime sparse to make a secure place for this religious theme within an account of frustrated love, thus complicating and dignifying the melancholy of erotic disappointment. A century and a half after Petrarch had established this melancholy as one of the fundamental tonalities of love poetry, and of the sonnet in particular, Du Bellay set out radically to refashion the traditional sonnet by stripping it of its erotic concerns, preserving only its orientation to transience and vanity. In 1558, he published Les Antiquitez de Rome, a series of thirty-two sonnets in which the poet conjures the spirits of antiquity to survey the physical, cultural, and (by implication) spiritual rubble into which modern Rome had fallen; to that sequence, he had appended a dream-vision in fifteen sonnets modelled on the narrative of Petrarch’s “Canzone of Visions.” This sequence, Songe, stays close to the Roman theme of the Antiquitez, but softens its fearful atmosphere: each poem describes a marvelous apparition – an obelisk, a triumphal arch, a phoenix, a monstrous beast – and then narrates the portentous destruction, death, or disappearance of that marvel. The sequence routinizes despair.
Van der Noot’s Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings presses these poems into polemical service. The Theatre includes translations of all six of the Marot-Petrarch douzaines, but the Sonets that follow include translations of only eleven of the fifteen sonnets in Songe, followed by four sonnets based on chapters 13, 17-19, and 21-22 of The Book of Revelation (also translated, although the author of the French original has never been identified). Van der Noot rehearses traditional vanitas themes in his commentary on the Marot-Petrarch poems, but when he turns to the Du Bellay translations he construes the splendors of Rome as the idolatrous pomp of a corrupt Roman Church, and celebrates the decay of Roman culture as an instance of divine punishment. The mild adjustments in phrasing that Spenser introduced when he revised these translations do little to change their sense; yet, as published in Complaints, removed from the heated polemical context of the Theatre, both sequences seem much less fierce and specific, although a Protestant residue, even a hint of apocalypticism, continues to hover over The Visions of Bellay.
The new context in which Spenser’s translations find themselves is determining in other ways. Complaints not only removes the poems from the polemical context of van der Noot’s commentary, it also strips away the woodcut illustrations that had accompanied them in the Theatre. These illustrations, printed on the right side of each opening, place image and visionary description in dialogue, so that the two seem to refer to each other more immediately than to events and objects outside the frame of the book itself. This complicated relationship, familiar to early modern readers of emblem books, is dissolved in Complaints, so that the poems in both sequences of Visions speak without “lateral” reference.
Rewriting the douzaines of the Theatre as sonnets for the Visions of Petrarch, Spenser derived some latitude from the extra two lines; the revisions for the Visions of Bellay, on the other hand, were exercises in constraint. Translating Du Bellay for the Theatre, Spenser had relinquished the rhyme scheme of his original – indeed, he had relinquished rhyme altogether: the blank-verse sonnets are an ingenious formal success, quite uncharacteristic productions of a poet who would eventually commit himself – more ardently, perhaps, than any English poet of his era – to rhyme. When Spenser revised the Theatre translations for The Visions of Bellay, he chose to restore them to rhyme, and by that choice obliged himself to make substantial adjustments in diction and syntax. He adopted the so-called Shakespearean sonnet form – rhymed ababcdcdefefgg – rather than more difficult rhyme pattern he developed for the 1595 Amoretti – ababbcbccdcdee – though he often secured some of the formal continuities of the Amoretti-form by frequent recourse to strong assonantal ties between successive quatrains. Spenser evidently returned to Du Bellay’s French original as he reworked the poems: adjustments in the diction suggest an effort to bring the new translation somewhat closer to their source.
The Visions of Bellay comprises not only the revised, rhymed translations of the eleven poems originally translated for the Theatre, but also translations of the four poems of Songe omitted from van der Noot’s text, sonnets 6, 8, 13, and 14.