A Lover's Complaint

"A Lover's Complaint" is a narrative poem written by William Shakespeare,

and published as part of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It was
published by Thomas Thorpe.

“A Lover’s Complaint” is an example of the female-voiced complaint, that is

frequently appended to sonnet sequences. Other examples include Samuel
Daniel’s “Complaint to Rosamund”, which follows Daniel's Delia (1592),
Thomas Lodge’s “Complaint of Elstred”, which follows Phillis (1593), Michael
Drayton’s “Matilda the Faire”, which follows Ideas Mirrour (1594), and Richard
Barnfield’s “Cassandra”, which follows The Affectionate Shepherd.[1]

Contents
Form and content
Authorship
Alternate views
The first page of "A Lover's
References
Complaint" from Shakespeare's
External links Sonnets, 1609

Form and content

The poem consists of forty-seven seven-line stanzas written in the form known as rhyme royal (rhyme scheme ABABBCC), a
metre identical to that of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece.

The poem begins with a description of a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings,
and other tokens of love. An old man nearby approaches the woman and asks the reason for her sorrow. She responds by telling
him of a former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She recounts in detail the speech her lover gave to her
which seduced her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again:

O, that infected moisture of his eye,

O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed,
O, that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly,
O, that sad breath his spungy lungs bestowed,
O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed,
Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd,
And new pervert a reconciled maid![2]

Authorship
Few have questioned the authorship of this poem. Shakespeare's authorship was
not questioned until the early 19th century, when Hazlitt expressed doubts. In
1917 Robertson suggested that the poem, and several plays, were written by
Chapman. This idea is not accepted. It has since become unacceptable to make
attributions based on general aesthetic impressions of the poem—evidence needs
to be provided.[3] "A Lover's Complaint" contains words and forms not found
elsewhere in Shakespeare, including archaisms and Latinisms. Edmond Malone
called the poem "beautiful", and suggested that Shakespeare may have been
trying to compete with Edmund Spenser.[4] Critics have seen thematic parallels
to situations in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for
Measure.[4] According to John Kerrigan in Motives of Woe, the poem may be
regarded as an appropriate coda to the sonnets, with its narrative triangle of
young woman, elderly man, and seductive suitor paralleling a similar triangle in
the sonnets themselves.[5] Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson note that:

It was not unusual for sonnets to be followed by longer poems.

Late sixteenth-century readers developed a taste for them and
would not have been surprised to find complaints at the end of
sonnet collections. Samuel Daniel's Delia is followed by The
The first known illustration to "A
Complaint of Rosamund (1592), Thomas Lodge's Phillis is Lover's Complaint", from John Bell's
followed by The Complaint of Elstred (1593), Richard 1774 edition of Shakespeare's works
Barnfield's Cassandra succeeds Cynthia, with Certain Sonnets
(1595).[6]

Shakespeare is widely accepted as the poems' author. This is supported by studies written by Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater and
MacDonald P. Jackson.[4]

Alternate views
One writer suggests that the author was an anonymous early Elizabethan poet.[7]

In 2007 Brian Vickers, suggested the poem was written by John Davies, an author of theological pamphlets.[8] He details
arguments for the non-Shakespearean nature of the poem and lists numerous verbal parallels between the "Complaint" and the
known works of Davies: – such as 'What brest so cold that is not warmed heare' and 'What heart's so cold that is not set on fire'.
On this evidence it was omitted from the 2007 RSC Complete Works, a decision that MacDonald P. Jackson calls a "mistake" in
his review of Vickers' book, which was published in the Review of English Studies. Jackson states that Vickers' evidence is "very
meagre." Jackson adds:

Had Vickers keyed in "spongy", "outwardly", and "physic"—trying the various possible original spellings and
selecting instances of "physic" as a verb—he would have found that in the whole of LION ["literature online"
database], covering more than six centuries of English poetry, drama, and prose, four separate works contain all
three words: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and "A Lover's Complaint".

Harold Love, in his The Times Literary Supplement review, has similar questions regarding Vickers' suggestion:
 Vickers was led to Davies by the number of words from the "Complaint" he found during a computer search of
the invaluable LION archive; but any such investigation is bound to favour such a voluminous author against the
less prolific or minimally preserved. In similar work on Restoration poets, I continually found parallels with the
verse of Ned Ward for works that it was chronologically impossible for him to have written. The reasons were
that, like Davies, he wrote a vast amount of verse and that his style had a chameleonlike quality that brought it
close to the poetic mean of the time.

References
1. Roche, Thomas P. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences. AMS Press. New York 1989. ISBN 978-
0404622886. p. 343
2. Evans, G. Blakemore ed., Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, p. 1880.
3. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley & Whitworth, Stephen. “Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare’s Lover’s Complaint”.
Sharon-Zisser, Shirley, editor. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy. Sharon-
Zisser, Whitworth, Stephen. “Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare’s Lover’s Complaint”. Routledge (2017)
ISBN 9781351947350. P. 1-4.
4. Shirley Sharon-Zisser & Whitworth, Stephen. "Generating Dialogue in Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint",
Critical Essays on Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Suffering Ecstasy, Ashgate Publishing, 2006, pp. 1–55.
5. John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and Female Complaint (1991)
6. Edmondson, P. & Wells, S., Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 108
7. Marina Tarlinskajam "Who Did NOT Write A Lover's Complaint", Shakespeare Yearbook 15, 2005.
8. Vickers, John, Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John Davies of Hereford, Cambridge University Press,
2007.

External links
A Lover's Complaint at Project Gutenberg
A Lover's Complaint (1609) (http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/w_lovers.html) Full text.
Annotated text. (http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xLoverComp.html#Complaint)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Lover%27s_Complaint&oldid=911876620"

This page was last edited on 21 August 2019, at 18:44 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using
this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.