Mother Hubberd's Tale

Mother Hubberd's Tale is a poem by English poet Edmund Spenser, written in 1578–1579. The more commonly read version of the poem is a revision of the original, created sometime in 1590, and published in 1591 as a part of Spenser's collection Complaints. "Mother Hubberd's Tale" was sold separately from the rest of the collection it was published with, though the reason why is debated among scholars. The poem follows the story of a sick, bedridden poet, who has visitors that try to entertain him with stories. The only one the poet finds worthy enough to retell is the tale told by Old Mother Hubberd about an ape and a fox. The poem is an allegorical poem, with overarching themes in search of political reform. The poem was said to have antagonized Lord Burghley, the primary secretary of Elizabeth I, and estranged Spenser from the English court, despite his success in that arena with his previous (and most famous) work, the Faerie Queene.

There is a point of contention between scholars as to where Spenser drew his inspiration from. There is evidence that Spenser could have gotten his inspiration from Geoffrey Chaucer's main work, The Canterbury Tales, as there are several similarities in the templates of the two poems. This connection extends to the subject matter of the tale, which is similar to the beast fable of the “Nun Priest’s Tale,", but the proliferate nature of beast fables makes this unlikely.

The other likely possibility is that Spenser drew inspiration from Anton Francesco Doni's work, La Moral Filosophia, which is a collection of stories akin to Aesop's Fables. There are several pieces of evidence that suggest that Spenser could have drawn inspiration from La Moral Filosophia, among them the fact that Spenser had used the book in others of his works, notably the Shepherd’s Calendar and in the Visions of the World’s Vanity, and that there are several traits from Doni’s work that have found their way into the fox, ape, and the mule of "Mother Hubberd’s Tale."

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