Short answers, pulled from the story.
A Lover's Complaint is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare, published in 1609 as part of the quarto edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It tells the story of a young woman who recounts to an elderly man how she was pursued, seduced, and abandoned by a charming suitor. The poem consists of forty-seven stanzas in rhyme royal (ABABBCC).
A Lover's Complaint was published by Thomas Thorpe as part of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It appeared at the end of that collection.
A Lover's Complaint belongs to the female-voiced complaint tradition, in which a woman's lament is appended to a sonnet sequence. Other examples include Samuel Daniel's Complaint to Rosamund (1592), Thomas Lodge's Complaint of Elstred (1593), and Michael Drayton's Matilda the Faire (1594).
Shakespeare's authorship is widely accepted and is supported by studies from Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater, and MacDonald P. Jackson. Doubts were first raised in the early 19th century by Hazlitt, and in 2007 Brian Vickers argued the poem was written by John Davies of Hereford, but that claim was disputed by Jackson and Harold Love on methodological grounds.
Brian Vickers's 2007 argument that the poem was written by John Davies of Hereford led to its omission from the 2007 RSC Complete Works. MacDonald P. Jackson called this omission a mistake and described Vickers's evidence as very meagre.
A Lover's Complaint is written in rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza form with the rhyme scheme ABABBCC. This is the same metre Shakespeare used in The Rape of Lucrece.