Poetry: Mother Hubberd's Tale

Overview
Published in 1591 as part of the Complaints, "Mother Hubberd's Tale" is Edmund Spenser's compact beast fable that blends biting satire with allegorical narrative. The poem revives the Aesopic tradition of talking animals to stage a critique of courtly corruption, using a deceptively simple story to expose the mechanics of flattery, mimicry, and self-interest at the heart of political life. Its tone mixes whimsical humour and moral outrage, shifting between comic portraiture and sharp social commentary.
Spenser deploys the fable form for pointed contemporary resonance: the animal characters double as types of courtiers and counsellors, and their antics register as both timeless moral exempla and immediate indictments of the patronage culture of late Elizabethan court. The poem's compactness tightens its satirical force, making every episode feel charged with implication.

Plot and Characters
The tale is framed by the figure of Mother Hubberd, who announces she will tell a plain folk story; the narrative then turns to a rival pair of animals whose rivalry dramatizes competing models of behaviour. The Ape, a talented mimic, gains rapid favour by copying the gestures and manners of powerful men, while the Fox, cunning and lubricious, practices deceit and double-dealing to secure influence. Their competition over status and advancement becomes a display of how appearance and craft, rather than virtue or competence, determine reward.
Various courtly types and episodes appear in miniature: ceremonies of promotion, bribery thinly disguised as counsel, and a mock-legal apparatus that punishes the weak while protecting the shrewd. The fable proceeds through a succession of clever scenes rather than a complex plot, each vignette underscoring how sycophancy and opportunism displace justice and honor. The animals' behavior reads like a gallery of contemporary caricatures, yet the narrative always returns to the central lesson about the corrosive effects of flattering power.

Themes and Significance
Central themes include the dangers of flattery, the hollowness of social mimicry, and the subversion of justice by self-interested advisers. Spenser interrogates the moral economy of patronage: when advancement depends on pleasing those above rather than on merit, the social order rewards theatricality and deceit. The beast framework allows moral distance while sharpening satire; animals reveal human foibles more nakedly than direct invective might permit.
The poem also stages a formal experiment, marrying moral fable and civic critique with Spenser's distinctive poetic diction. Its allegorical edge made it provocative at the time, and readers have long debated its contemporary targets, a debate that only underlines the poem's success as political satire. Ultimately, "Mother Hubberd's Tale" stands as a concentrated indictment of corrupt counsel and performative loyalty, a work that channels medieval fable traditions into trenchant Renaissance commentary on power and reputation.