A Lover's Complaint

The poem, as 'A Louers complaint', was originally appended to the first complete edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which was published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. However, critics have often doubted attribution to Shakespeare. A Lover's Complaint contains many words and forms not found elsewhere in Shakespeare, including several archaisms and Latinisms, and is sometimes regarded as rhythmically and structurally awkward. Conversely, other critics have a high regard for the poem's quality—Edmond Malone called it 'beautiful'—and see thematic parallels to situations in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. The poem can, along the lines of John Kerrigan in Motives of Woe, be regarded as an appropriate coda to the sonnets, with its narrative triangle of young woman, elderly man, and seductive suitor paralleling a similar triangle in the sonnets themselves.