DATE AND TEXT

A Lover’s Complaint first appeared in Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 edition of the sonnets. It may have been printed from the same transcript as that used to print the sonnets. The poem is not mentioned on the title page of the volume but has its own head-title on sig. K^v: “A Louers complaint. BY William Shake-speare.” For the reliability of this attribution, see the Introduction to A Lover’s Complaint. Stylistic tests suggest a date around the time of Hamlet and All’s Well That Ends Well, though any such suggestion is approximate.