STANZA, the mother asks whom he met there. The
response is “my true-love” (l. 7), and again he says he
is weary and wants to lie down. When his mother asks
Lord Randal what his true love gave him to eat, he
replies “eels fried in a pan” (l. 11). (In other variations,
the meal is fi sh or snakes). Through a series of ques-
tions and answers, Lord Randal reveals that his hawks
and hunting hounds have been poisoned: “They swelle
and they died, mother” (l. 29).
After the revelation that his hawks and hounds have
been poisoned, Lord Randal’s mother says she fears he,
too, has been poisoned, which Lord Randal readily
admits. He wants to lie down, but his mother asks
what he leaves. He says he leaves her 24 cows, his sis-
ter his gold and silver, and his brother his houses and
his lands. Finally, his mother asks what Randal will
leave his true love, and he answers, “I leave her hell
and fi re” (l. 39). The poem ends with the same plain-
tive wish that ends each of its eight stanzas: “For I am
sick at heart, and I fain wad lie down” (l. 40).
Traditional scholarship links this ballad to the death
of Thomas Randall, earl of Murray, who was poisoned
in 1332 by his sweetheart, an English spy who fed him
black eel broth. It is a narrative song whose structuring
principle is incremental repetition leading up to its
fi nal, deathbed curse for the murderer. The dramatic
tension in the poem is its question-and-answer inten-
sity, where each question leads to further, more heart-
rending revelations. As a victim of fate, the young and
handsome Lord Randal must deal with betrayal and
jealousy, and the ballad’s structure adds to its impend-
ing sense of shattered illusions.
See also MIDDLE ENGLISH LYRICS AND BALLADS.
FURTHER READING
Leach, MacEdward. The Ballad Book. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1955.
“Lord Randall.” In Poetry for Students, Vol. 6, edited by Mary
K. Ruby, 104–117. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999.
Gary Kerley
LOVELY BOY (FAIR YOUTH, FAIR
LORD) The Lovely Boy—also called the Fair Youth
or Fair Lord—is the ambiguous young man to whom
the fi rst 126 of SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS are dedicated.
The term derives from the fi rst line of sonnet 126: “O
thou my lovely boy who in thy power.. .” Scholars
continue to debate the identity of the young man, with
the main two contenders being Henry Wriothesley,
earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, earl of
Pembroke. Both were WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s patrons at
one time, and Wriothesley in particular was consid-
ered good-looking. However, a host of other candi-
dates have been suggested, including William himself,
or a false persona devised solely as a publicity trick.
See also DARK LADY.LOVER’S COMPLAINT, A WILLIAM SHAKE-
SPEARE (1591?) The date of actual composition of A
Lover’s Complaint is debatable, with scholarly opinions
ranging from 1591 to 1604. Complicating the matter is
its publication date of 1609 as an appendage to SHAKE-
SPEARE’S SONNETS and the persistent belief that the poem
is only spuriously attributable to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Consequently, the poem has long been marginalized
both in the Shakespeare canon and in Shakespearean
criticism.
A Lover’s Complaint comprises 329 lines of IAMBIC
PENTAMETER verse composed in 47 STANZAs of RHYME
ROYAL. It is thought by some scholars to be stylistically
and thematically reminiscent of EDMUND SPENSER’s Pro-
thalamion (1596), which was written in honor of the
approaching double marriage of the ladies Elizabeth
and Katherine Somerset. However, A Lover’s Complaint
is a much darker tale of a woeful young woman who
has been seduced and abandoned by a charming and
ruthless male suitor, rather than a celebratory com-
memoration of marriage.
The poem employs a series of increasingly inset nar-
rators and layered narratives to tell its story. In the
opening stanza, the poet begins by explaining that this
“plaintful story” has come to him “[f]rom off a hill,” the
“concave womb” of which has “reworded” it “from a
sist’ring vale” (ll. 1–2). The natural world is thus com-
plicit in the storytelling, and the narrator stops to listen
to its “double voice,” whereupon he sees a distraught
girl—a “fi ckle maid full pale” (l. 5)—destroying love
tokens and disposing of them in a river.
Stanzas 2–8 offer a detailed description of the maid’s
appearance and behavior. She wears a “platted hive ofLOVER’S COMPLAINT, A 251