Thomas Thorpe published “A Lover’s Complaint” in his 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ascribing the poem to “William Shakespeare” in its title heading (sig. Kv). The ascription must not be given too much weight, for Thorpe evidently did not have Shakespeare’s authorization to publish the sonnets and may possibly have added the last two sonnets from some other source. Yet the attribution of “A Lover’s Complaint” to Shakespeare is entirely plausible and is refuted by no other claim. The poem was never assigned to any other author during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no convincing alternative candidate has come forward since then. Although some critics used to wonder if the poem was worthy of Shakespeare’s genius, its density of metaphor and energy of wordplay are stylistically and intellectually very much like that of Shakespeare’s mature work around or before the date of publication.
The poem takes as its point of departure the conventions of a familiar Elizabethan poetic genre: the “complaint.” Often choosing as their setting a stylized pastoral landscape inhabited by rustic shepherds and shepherdesses, poems in this genre generally depicted the plaintive laments of deserted or unrequited lovers. Typically, the poet might catalogue the fickle lover’s features and bewail in moralistic terms the dangerous consequences of blind passion. Elizabethans often expected this sort of didacticism in the genre and might, indeed, have been tempted to read Shakespeare’s poem as a useful and moving object lesson to young women about the honeyed tongues of young wooers.
Yet the value of Shakespeare’s poem goes far beyond the conventional demands of the genre, as did the contributions of other exceptional writers. Much as As You Like It shows us a complex, ironic vision of the pastoral, this poem explores the genre of the pastoral “complaint” with subtlety and range. Its multiple point of view is noteworthy. Beginning with the sympathetic voice of the poet-narrator, “A Lover’s Complaint” introduces us to the forlorn maiden and then to the old shepherd who becomes an audience for her tale of woe. He is a good listener, partly because he has sowed his own wild oats in his day (11. 58–60). The story he hears incorporates also the voice of the young man who has seduced the maiden; the passage in which the young man speaks directly to her, as reported to the old man and thus to us as readers, takes up much of the poem (11. 177–280).
Framed successively and concentrically by the points of view of the sad maiden, the old man, the poet, and ourselves, the male wooer is given free rein of expression in pleading for sympathy. The old man provides his own sympathy of regret and male acknowledgment of a kind of complicity, while the poet hovers in the background not simply as narrator but also as one who understands. The moralism is evident and yet is less important for us than the multiplicity of voices expressing in rich metaphorical language the tense and ultimately bitter struggle over sexuality that is so much a key to the “Dark Lady” sonnets as well. Thorpe’s inclusion of the poem in his volume of the Sonnets suggests an integrity in that publishing venture.