224
I
n the 1609 volume
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the
final item was printed with a
separate heading saying that it too
is by Shakespeare. It is a 329-line
poem called “A Lover’s Complaint,”
written, like The Rape of Lucrece,
in the seven-line stanza form
known as rhyme royal. It was
not uncommon for collections
of sonnets to conclude with
a complaint, or lament, of a
woman forsaken by her lover.
Here, a nameless young woman,
abandoned by her irresistibly
attractive but faithless young man,
also unnamed, bemoans her plight.
The poem is very different from
the sonnets. It is written in a self-
consciously old-fashioned and
artificial style and employs a series
of distancing perspectives. A
narrator merely sets the scene.
After saying that he has seen a
love-lorn lass “Tearing of papers,
breaking rings a-twain, / Storming
her world with sorrow’s winds and
rain,” he departs to let her tell her
story to “A reverend man that
grazed his cattle nigh.” But this
man also fades out of sight as the
girl tells a story of seduction and
abandonment. Her complaint
contains within itself anotherlong complaint, her lover’s
ultimately successful speech
of seduction ending with the
tears of desire that brought
about her downfall: “O father, what
a hell of witchcraft lies / In the
small orb of one particular tear!”
She fell, she says, and she
would fall again in the face of
such eloquent persuasion: “O that
infected moisture of his eye, / O
that false fire which in his cheek so
glowed, / O that forced thunder from
his heart did fly, / O that sad breath
his spongy lungs bestowed, / O
all that borrowed motion seeming
owed / Would yet again betray the
fore-betrayed, / And new pervert a
reconcilèd maid.” ■THAT FALSE FIRE
WHICH IN HIS CHEEK
SO GLOWED
A LOVER’S COMPLAINT (1609)
IN CONTEXT
THEMES
Love, betrayalLEGACY
1790 Irish Shakespearean
scholar Edmond Malone
suggests that the language
of the poem indicates that
Shakespeare may have been
attempting to emulate
Edmund Spenser, author
of The Faerie Queen.1991 In his book Motives of
Woe, John Kerrigan notes that
the poem’s narrative triangle
of a young woman, older man,
and seductive suitor mirrors a
similar triangle in the sonnets.2007 Brian Vickers argues that
“A Lover’s Complaint” was not
written by Shakespeare, but
by John Davies of Hereford.
His conclusion is based
on computer analysis of the
poem’s vocabulary. As a result,
it is omitted from the RSC’s
Complete Works. However,
Vickers’ methods have since
been questioned.What a hell of witchcraft lies
In the small orb of
one particular tear!
A Lover’s Complaint