Shakespeare’s poetic depiction of a seduced and abandoned woman, the last and at 329 lines the shortest of his narrative poems, was published at the end of the Sonnets when they first appeared in quarto in 1609. Although it uses the same rhyme-royal stanza as The Rape of Lucrece (1593–4), the poem shares some imagery, phrasing, and rare vocabulary with All’s Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, and King Lear, and was probably composed when Shakespeare was revising and completing his sonnet sequence, possibly while the theatres were closed by plague in 1603–4.
Text: The whole of the 1609 volume (see Sonnets) appears to have been set from a transcript rather than from an authorial holograph. A Lover’s Complaintis at times misleadingly punctuated, but otherwise the 1609 text poses few problems. The poem reappeared in 1640 in the printer John Benson’s pirated Poems: Written by W. Shakespeare, Gent., but this text merely reprints that of the 1609 quarto and has no authority.
Sources: A Lover’s Complaint has no specific single source, but, like The Rape of Lucrece, draws on a well-established poetic tradition which goes back to *Ovid’s heroic epistles. The dramatization in verse of the sorrows of unfortunate women had more recently featured in The *Mirror for Magistrates (1559, reprinted and augmented thereafter), a collection of poems in which historical figures lament their fates, and the form had been adopted by Samuel *Daniel, whose Complaint of Rosamond (1592), the lament of Henry III’s ill-fated mistress, employs the same rhyme-royal stanza.
Synopsis: The narrator describes hearing the echoing voice of a woman lamenting in a valley, and then seeing her, wearing a straw hat, her beauty faded with time and grief. She sits beside a river, weeping, reading and tearing up love letters, throwing gifts of jewels into the water, and breaking rings (ll. 1–56). An old man grazing his cattle nearby comes and sits with her and asks what is the matter and whether he can help (ll. 57–70). The remainder of the poem, from line 71 onwards (the start of the eleventh of 47 stanzas), is given over to her reply. She first explains (ll. 71–84) that she is not as old as she looks: her beauty has in fact been damaged by sorrow as a consequence of her wooing by a young man she goes on to describe at length (85–133). Young and almost androgynously beautiful, with brown curling hair, eloquent, and a brilliant horseman, his gifts, especially of rhetoric, made him universally popular. She explains that though many women desired him and sought to own pictures of him, she did not pursue him herself, and at first was immune to his charms, recognizing that he was capable of perjury and had seduced others (ll. 134–75). She only fell when he made the speech she goes on to quote (ll. 176–280), in which he claimed that his previous amours had all been mere lusts of the flesh, while his vows to her were the first he had ever made sincerely. He showed her locks of hair different women had given him, together with gifts of jewels, which he then gave to her, tokens of conquest passed on to his conqueror: he even showed her a gift he had received from a love-struck nun. All these women were in love with him, but he only with her, he claimed, and they all share in his sorrow at her refusal and join in wishing her to accept him. At the close of this speech he wept (ll. 281–7), and the lady laments to her auditor that these dissembling tears overcame her, so that she wept too, seduced (ll. 288–301). She feels that he was such a skilled hypocrite, able even to preach chastity as part of a plot to seduce, that no one could resist him, and she is convinced that were he to repeat his attentions she would even now be persuaded to give up her repentance and be seduced again (ll. 302–29).
Artistic features: The poem shares some of the formality, as well as some of the concerns, of The Rape of Lucrece, but this poem, its central woman seduced rather than raped, deliberately eschews the dramatic and conclusive ending of its predecessor. Part of its strength lies in its vivid depiction of a psychological state from which neither the woman nor the poem seems able to imagine an escape, condemned endlessly to re-enact to herself the drama of her own undoing. The ‘complaint’ of the title may be either the inset complaint of the woman, or the complaint of her seducer which it quotes: in either case, neither the rural old man to whom she speaks nor the narrator who overhears them is able to place the woman back into a wider world outside her own self-tormenting consciousness.
Critical history: While the long-ignored Sonnets were rehabilitated at the end of the 18th century, A Lover’s Complaint had to wait until the 1960s before many scholars were willing to concede that Shakespeare had even written it. Most editors of the Sonnets, considering their publication to have been unauthorized, omitted this poem, believing it to have been an inferior work foisted on Shakespeare by Thomas Thorpe. It was only after Kenneth Muir and MacDonald P. Jackson independently vindicated the poem’s authenticity in 1964 and 1965 that more commentators began to find the poem of interest, particularly in relation to the Sonnets it follows. It was pointed out that in placing this poem after the last of the Sonnets Shakespeare might have been following the examples of Thomas *Lodge and Samuel Daniel, who had both appended poems in which seduced women lament their falls to their own sonnet sequences, and most modern criticism of A Lover’s Complaint has taken up this suggestion. Although the poem’s authorship continues to be debated, it is now usually regarded as a deliberate coda to the Sonnets, and critics have looked for ways in which it takes up their thematic concerns, particularly with the ethics of dissimulation (the seducer of A Lover’s Complaint is, among other things, a consummate actor) and the use and abuse of praise.
Michael Dobson