Breton's couplet ambiguously aligns Mother Hubberds Tale in the mainstream of Western poetics by evoking what can be called the ‘poem as nut’ aesthetic. This tradition, which can be traced to Augustine, finds its classic expression in Fulgentius's commentary on The Thebaid. Fulgentius states that ‘poetic songs are seen to be comparable with nuts’: poetic fiction is like a nut, possessing an outer casing (the literal sense) and an inner ‘kernel’ (the mystical or allegorical sense). The reader must ‘Cracke the nut’ to obtain a ‘kernel’ of ‘doctrine wyse’ contained within the fiction. While this formula had been used as a defence against the accusation that poetic fiction is mendacious and morally dubious, by the sixteenth century it had become specifically associated with beast fable. Chaucer uses it in The Nun's Priest's Tale (ll. 3438–46); Henryson's Fables are prefaced with a comprehensive restatement of the commonplace. Breton's comment identifies the Tale as a beast fable that should be interpreted allegorically.

But what does Breton understand the poem's ‘shale’, or allegorical meaning, to be? The ‘Epitaph’ offers no further hints; the couplet shares the obscurity which characterizes the other contemporaneous allusions to the Tale's suppression. Like even the best reconstructions of the poem's history, Breton's comment is ambiguous and uncertain. His vocabulary does not help: ‘shale’ meaning kernel is awkward, and perhaps the result of straining for rhyme. But the difficulty of the word alerts the reader to another facet of contemporary allusions – that the Tale was considered to be ‘obscure even in the sixteenth century’. For Spenser's contemporaries, a poem which attacked Burghley was necessarily dangerous; one way of discussing such a text is to pretend, like Nashe, to find it obscure. Such a procedure raises the interest of the reading public in a ‘dangerous’ text, while explicitly establishing the writer's innocence. Yet aside from this satirical obscurity, the Tale remains complex and challenging. Breton's couplet raises the question of how – if at all – this ‘nut’ should be ‘cracked’. In this chapter, hermeneutic nut cracking inevitably raises the larger issue of how Spenser incorporates Complaints’ overarching concern with poetry into this satirical fable.