SOURCE: Scallon, Joseph D. “‘Into a Maine of Teares’: The Poetry of Reform.” In The Poetry of Robert Southwell, S.J., pp. 151-219. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1975.

In the following excerpt of an essay originally published in 1968, Scallon analyzes Saint Peters Complaint to illustrate the characteristic style of Southwell's poems on the subject of repentance.

The research by which textual scholars have established the several stages in the composition of Saint Peters Complaint is too involved to be reproduced here, but a summary of their conclusions may be helpful. Luigi Tansillo's Le Lagrime di San Pietro is the literary source of Southwell's idea for a long poem on St. Peter the penitent. The Rev. Alexander Grosart, while preparing his edition of Southwell's poems which appeared in 1872, discovered some manuscripts in the Stonyhurst Library which he believed to be the worksheets Southwell used...