A Lover's Complaint

• 1. Introduction

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  A Lover's Complaint begins with a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, tearing up letters and throwing them into the water along with rings and other tokens of love. An old man approaches and asks the reason for her grief. What follows is a story of seduction, abandonment, and something even more unsettling: the woman's confession that she would fall for the same false charms all over again. This is the poem published alongside Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, in a quarto edition brought out by Thomas Thorpe. It sits at the end of the collection, a narrative shadow cast over everything that came before it. Who wrote it, and why does it end the way it does? Those are the questions scholars have been arguing about ever since.

• 2. Form and the Female Complaint

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  Forty-seven stanzas, each containing seven lines, built in a verse form called rhyme royal. The rhyme scheme runs ABABBCC, the same metre Shakespeare used in The Rape of Lucrece. That formal choice was not accidental. A Lover's Complaint belongs to a recognized literary tradition: the female-voiced complaint, a genre frequently attached to sonnet sequences. Samuel Daniel placed his Complaint to Rosamund at the end of Delia in 1592. Thomas Lodge followed Phillis the following year with his Complaint of Elstred. Michael Drayton attached Matilda the Faire to Ideas Mirrour in 1594, and Richard Barnfield included Cassandra alongside Cynthia with certaine sonnets. By situating his poem within this tradition, Shakespeare was participating in a literary convention familiar to readers of the period, one in which a woman's lament caps off a sequence of love poetry addressed to a beloved. John Kerrigan, writing in Motives of Woe, observed that the narrative triangle at the poem's heart mirrors a similar triangle in the sonnets themselves: a young woman, an elderly man, and a seductive young suitor.

• 3. The Seducer's Speech

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  At the center of the poem is the speech the young man gave that won the woman over. She recounts it in detail to the old man who found her by the river. Her concluding stanza on the matter is perhaps the most striking passage in the poem. She admits that all the lover's expressions, his eye's infected moisture, the false fire in his cheek, the borrowed motion that only seemed genuine, would yet again betray the fore-betray'd and new pervert a reconciled maid. She is not describing past weakness; she is describing a present compulsion. The seduction worked precisely because it appeared real, and she knows, having seen through it, that she would be taken in again. Edmond Malone, one of the earliest serious commentators on the poem, called it beautiful. He also suggested Shakespeare may have been trying to compete with Edmund Spenser. Critics have since traced thematic parallels to situations found in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.

• 4. Contested Authorship

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  Shakespeare's name was not questioned in connection with this poem until the early 19th century, when the critic Hazlitt expressed doubts. In 1917, J.M. Robertson went further, suggesting the poem and several plays had actually been written by George Chapman. That argument gained little traction, and the approach of attributing authorship based on general aesthetic impressions fell out of favor among literary scholars. The poem does contain words and forms not found anywhere else in Shakespeare's writing, including archaisms and Latinisms, which gave skeptics something to point to. Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson noted that Shakespeare is widely accepted as the author, a conclusion supported by studies from Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater, and MacDonald P. Jackson. One alternative voice suggested the poem was the work of an anonymous early Elizabethan poet, though that view attracted little sustained attention.

• 5. The Vickers Argument

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  In 2007, Brian Vickers proposed that the true author was John Davies of Hereford, known primarily as a writer of theological pamphlets. Vickers listed what he described as numerous verbal parallels between the poem and Davies's known works, including the shared phrase pattern of a cold heart being warmed or set on fire. His argument carried enough weight to result in the poem's omission from the 2007 RSC Complete Works. MacDonald P. Jackson, reviewing Vickers's book in the Review of English Studies, called that omission a mistake and described Vickers's evidence as very meagre. Jackson pointed to a computer search of the LION database, which covers more than six centuries of English poetry, drama, and prose. That search found only four works in the entire database containing the words spongy, outwardly, and physic together: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and A Lover's Complaint. Harold Love, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, raised a methodological concern: any computer search of a large archive tends to favour prolific authors, because a writer who produced a vast amount of verse is more likely to share vocabulary with any given text than a less prolific one. Love drew a parallel to his own work on Restoration poets, where he continually found parallels with the verse of Ned Ward for works it was chronologically impossible for Ward to have written. The question of authorship, in other words, may be less about whose words these are and more about what a database search can and cannot prove.