Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas Thorpe printed the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets, placing A Lover's Complaint at its end. This volume appeared in London during a year when many poets sought to publish their work through private presses rather than official guilds.
Forty-seven stanzas of seven lines each make up the entire text of A Lover's Complaint and follow the rhyme scheme ABABBCC known as rhyme royal. This metrical pattern matches exactly the meter used in Shakespeare's longer narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.
Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson note that Shakespeare is widely accepted as the poems' author today. Kenneth Muir Eliot Slater and MacDonald P. Jackson wrote studies supporting Shakespeare as the poems' author despite earlier doubts raised by Hazlitt in the early 19th century.
In 2007 Brian Vickers proposed the poem was written by John Davies of Hereford an author of theological pamphlets. He details arguments for the non-Shakespearean nature of the poem listing numerous verbal parallels between the Complaint and known works of Davies.
Forty-seven stanzas of seven lines each make up the entire text of A Lover's Complaint. Each stanza follows the rhyme scheme ABABBCC known as rhyme royal which creates a musical quality that echoes through the narrative.