INTRODUCTION THIS piece first appeared at the close of the volume containing the Sonnets, in 1609. No contemporary allusion to it is known; and Shakespeare's authorship rests largely upon its inclusion in this volume. Yet internal evidence connects it closely with the Venus, with the Lucrece, and with the Sonnets themselves. Its theme, like theirs, is derived from phases of relation between men and women which in the dramas he habitually avoided, or which he touched only incidentally, as in Bertram and Viola. The 'lover' is a less innocent Lucrece; her ravisher no Tarquin but a Don Juan, whose weapons are fascination and persuasion. The Lucrece touches the borders of historical tragedy; A Lover's Complaint belongs to the gentler world of literary Pastoral, which Shakespeare-if this be indeed his worknowhere else approached but to set it in annihilating conjunction with his own poetic realism, as in As You Like It, or to entirely transmute and transform it with a supremely beautiful Pastoral of his own, as in The Winter's Tale. A LOVER'S COMPLAINT FROM off a hill whose concave womb re-worded My spirits to attend this double voice accorded, Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain. Upon her head a platted hive of straw, Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne, 1. re-worded, re-echoed. bee-hive. 16. conceited, fanciful. ΤΟ 20 |