Critical Essays on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy 0754603458, 9780754603450, 2005021327, 9781315258874

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
A Note on the Text
Introduction: Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint
1 'Deep-brained Sonnets' and 'Tragic Shows': Shakespeare's Late Ovidian Art in A Lover's Complaint
2 A Reconciled Maid: A Lover's Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England
3 Shakespeare's Exculpatory Complaint
4 Unfinished Business: A Lover's Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of Lucrece
5 'He had the dialect and different skill': Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover's Complaint and Othello
6 'Honey Words': A Lover's Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction
7 Rhetoric and Perverse Desire in A Lover's Complaint
8 'Where Excess Begs All': Shakespeare, Freud, and the Diacritics of Melancholy
9 'True to Bondage': the Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover's Complaint
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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CRITICAL ESSAYS ON SHAKESPEARE’S A LOVER’S COMPLAINT

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~ Taylor & Francis ~-

Taylor & Francis Group http://taylo randfra n cis.com

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Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint Suffering Ecstasy

Edited by SHIRLEY SHARON-ZISSER Tel Aviv University, Israel

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First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Shirley Sharon-Zisser 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

The Editor has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Critical essays on Shakespeare’s A lover’s complaint : suffering ecstasy 1.Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Lover’s complaint 2.Complaint poetry, English – History and criticism 3.Love poetry, English – History and criticism 4.Suffering in literature I. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley, 1962822.3'3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical essays on Shakespeare’s A lover’s complaint : suffering ecstasy / edited by Shirley Sharon-Zisser. p. cm. ISBN 0-7546-0345-8 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Lover’s complaint. 2. Complaint poetry, English—History and criticism. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616— Authorship. 4. Love poetry, English—History and criticism. 5. Suffering in literature. I. Sharon-Zisser, Shirley, 1962PR2873.L63C75 2006 822.3'3—dc22

ISBN 9780754603450 (hbk)

2005021327

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Contents vi

Acknowledgments

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List of Contributors A Note on the Text

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Introduction: Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint Shirley-Sharon Zisser and Stephen Whitworth

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1 ‘Deep-brained Sonnets’ and ‘Tragic Shows’: Shakespeare’s Late Ovidian Art in A Lover’s Complaint Patrick Cheney

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A Reconciled Maid: A Lover’s Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England Paul Stegner

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Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint Ilona Bell

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4 Unfinished Business: A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of Lucrece John Roe

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5 ‘He had the dialect and different skill’: Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover’s Complaint and Othello Heather Dubrow

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6 ‘Honey Words’: A Lover’s Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction James Schiffer

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7 Rhetoric and Perverse Desire in A Lover’s Complaint Jon Harned

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8 ‘Where Excess Begs All’: Shakespeare, Freud, and the Diacritics of Melancholy Stephen Whitworth

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‘True to Bondage’: the Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover’s Complaint Shirley Sharon-Zisser

179 191 201

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments This book has taken long to conceive and execute, in no small measure because of the profound personal significance Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint has had in my life, and because of the sense of intellectual and responsibility that editing a collection on this most neglected of Shakespeare’s poetic works entailed for me. How could one ever, I would ask myself, appropriately respond to the imperative to articulate that the poem poses and that had so rarely been heeded across the centuries? Now this imperative has been followed, I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to all the individuals that have helped make this work an object of writing that might resonate. Sincere thanks are extended to all contributors for their readiness to participate in this project, their good will, and their patience throughout its many stages, Erika Gaffney, Senior Editor at Ashgate, showed consistent enthusiasm for this project from its inception, and saw it through many hardships. I am deeply grateful to her for her support, her compassion, her perseverance, and her impeccable professionalism. Ashgate’s readers, who have remained anonymous, provided extensive commentary on various parts of this project which has certainly improved its quality. John Kerrigan, whose groundbreaking work on A Lover’s Complaint resonates in each and every one of the essays in this volume, was supportive of this project from the outset and provided helpful advice at various stages. His exemplary work in Motives of Woe and the Penguin edition of The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint was a predecessor I am privileged to acknowledge and pay tribute to. Corey Werner of Bloomsburg University was indispensable in helping with the research for the introduction and compiling the bibliography. Gratitude beyond the expressible goes to my husband, Eyal Zisser, for qualities that for many years have proven indispensable to me for fulfilling the imperative for not ceding on my desire for articulation: his pragmatism, determined optimism, and wise perseverance through the many real ordeals of everyday life. Liron and Lilach Zisser played no small part in enabling me to fulfil this imperative when they suffered my long absences, whether in libraries and archives across the seas or at home in front of my computer, and survived. Toam Zisser has now beautifully proven that, as had been the case with the critical response to A Lover’s Complaint, there can be speech and language even where, for what seems too long, there was enigmatic but palpitating silence. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for granting permission to reprint a slightly modified verson of ‘“Deep-brain’d sonnets” and “tragic shows”: Shakespeare’s Late Ovidian Art in A Lover’s Complaint’ from Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 9. Stephen Whitworth has been my companion de route and source of inspiration for many years now. I wish to thank him not only for co-authoring the introduction to this book, for taking on the painstaking tasks of preparing the typescript for press and compiling the index, and performing them so meticulously and impeccably, but vi

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Acknowledgments

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for having been, in many ways, and from the moment of origin, this book’s most brilliant of muses. For reasons more numerous and significant than can be expressed, it is at once inevitable and necessary that I dedicate this book to him. Tel Aviv, May 2005

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List of Contributors Ilona Bell is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge, 1999) and has authored numerous articles on rhetoric, gender, early modern women, Shakespeare, and Donne. Patrick Cheney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is the author of the Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge, 2004), Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession (University of Toronto Press, 1997), and Spenser’s Famous Flight (University of Toronto Press, 1997). He has also authored articles and edited volumes of essays on Spenser and Marlowe, and has been a recipient of research fellowships from Oxford, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Mellon Foundation. Heather Dubrow is the Tighe-Evans and John Basscom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Cornell, 1987), A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Cambridge, 1999), Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Cornell, 1995), and Shakespeare’s and Dramatic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge, 1999). She has also authored numerous articles on form and socio-cultural history, and was co-editor of The Historical Renaissance (Chicago, 1988). Jon Harned is Professor of English at the University of Houston, Downtown. His research interests include Renaissance literature and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and he edited Queer Studies and the Job Market: Three Perspectives in Profession 96, published by the Modern Language Association in 1996. John Roe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York (Canada). He edited Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge, 1992), and authored Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Boydell and Brewer, 2002). James Schiffer is Professor of English and Department Head at Northern Michigan University. He edited Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (Garland, 1999), and authored Foul Deeds (St. Martin’s, 1989). He has also published several articles on Shakespeare’s poems and plays, and is currently acting as editor for the New Variorum edition of Twelfth Night. Paul Stegner is a graduate student in English at Penn State University, University Park. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Rites of Authorship: Early Modern Ritual in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne.’ viii

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Shirley Sharon-Zisser is Senior Lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University (Israel). She is the author of The Risks of Simile and Renaissance Rhetoric (Lang, 2000), and has published numerous articles and edited essay collections on Renaissance rhetoric and poetics and psychoanalysis. She has been the recipient of research fellowships from the University of London, the Renaissance Society of America, the Fulbright Foundation, the British Council, as well as the Folger Institute. Stephen Whitworth is Assistant Professor of English at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles on Renaissance pastoral, homoeroticism, and psychoanalysis.

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A Note on the Text As tribute to John Kerrigan’s pioneering work on A Lover’s Complaint, all quotations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint in this book rely on Kerrigan’s Penguin edition of The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Quotations from Shakespeare’s other poems and plays rely on Hallett Smith’s Riverside Shakespeare.

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Introduction:

Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint Shirley Sharon-Zisser and Stephen Whitworth

Prologue What is the nature of the links between the forms of language and desire, melancholy, seduction, suffering, ecstasy? How might one conceptualize the relations between performativity and the poetic voice, and what have those to do with authority and authorization? What is at stake in the human practice of the complaint and in what ways is it related to the act of confession? Such questions are at the forefront of contemporary discussions in the fields of literary criticism, literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis. And yet these questions have an ancient legacy, one of whose peaks is in Renaissance England. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, these questions inform the most neglected of Shakespeare’s texts: A Lover’s Complaint, originally published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 in the same volume as the Sonnets. A Lover’s Complaint is a narrative poem of 329 lines in rhyme royal (ababbcc), written as an amalgam of pastoral and female complaint, modes which enjoyed a vogue in late sixteenth-century England. The history of critical response to this poem is almost the diametrical opposite of the history of the critical reception of the Sonnets. While the Sonnets have generated voluminous amounts of criticism and have been recurrently reprinted, A Lover’s Complaint has often been denigrated or ignored. Many editions of the Sonnets exclude A Lover’s Complaint. This editorial procedure has meant that fewer readers are exposed to A Lover’s Complaint than to the Sonnets and that many readers are denied a full picture of what most critics now agree was conceived as a single volume. Although the poem does have a reception history whose trends we will evaluate below, the volume of work on the poem is sparse if compared to that generated by Shakespeare’s other works. Most commentary on the poem has appeared in editions of Shakespeare’s complete works or poems. A few monographs devoted to the poem have appeared over the years. In 1965, Macdonald P. Jackson published Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint: Its Date and Authenticity, a meticulous stylistic analysis of the poem attempting to establish Shakespeare’s authorship. In 1985, Richard Underwood published Shakespeare on Love: Prolegomena to a Variorum Edition of A Lover’s Complaint, which, building upon Jackson’s work, placed the poem in the literary complaint tradition harking back to Ovid’s Heroides (see below) as well as in the thematic context of several Shakespearean plays. Most significantly, John Kerrigan’s Motives of Woe: 1

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Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (1991) explored the literary-historical, rhetorical, and psychological complexities of the poem as well as the tradition in which it is framed, and examined its unique and subtle treatment of gender and voice. Despite these scholarly calls for more attention to A Lover’s Complaint, only a handful of critical articles on the poem have appeared, most of them over the past five years. The critical history of A Lovers’ Complaint, then, is first and foremost a history of a lacuna in Shakespeare criticism and in the study of Renaissance narrative poetry. The few critics who have written on the poem are usually self-conscious about working in relative isolation. Katherine Duncan-Jones speaks of the poem as ‘often bypassed as an embarrassing irrelevance’ (‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 155). Underwood laments that ‘A Lover’s Complaint … has not received the respect it deserves as a work of Shakespeare’s’ (xv). In his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (1985), Kerrigan complains that the poem has not ‘become part of a larger debate about the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement,’ to an extent that its editor finds himself ‘with no real tradition to draw on’ (389). This largely absent tradition comes into further relief when considered against the backdrop of the recent surge of interest in Shakespeare’s other narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The Rape of Lucrece has generated essays by prominent Shakespeareans such as Joel Fineman (‘The Temporality of Rape’), David Willbern (‘Hyperbolic Desire’), and Heather Dubrow (in her Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets). Venus and Adonis, a favorite since its publication, is the subject of another chapter in Dubrow’s important monograph on Shakespeare’s poetry and of two essay collections published in recent years (edited by Anthony Mortimer and Charles Whitworth). In July 2000, an international conference on Shakespeare’s narrative poems, organized by Roy Booth and Martin Dzelzainis, took place at the University of London. Yet even this conference, whose agenda was to generate critical attention to Shakespeare’s narrative poems, devoted but one session to A Lover’s Complaint—the conference’s only parallel session. Such marginalization even within an event designed to displace the narrative poems’ marginality in the Shakespearean canon is indicative of A Lover’s Complaint’s fate in the expanding volume of criticism on the narrative poems. Even in this most marginal strain in Shakespeare criticism, A Lover’s Complaint is a sort of outcast. It is the purpose of this volume of essays to focus critical attention on A Lover’s Complaint as one of Shakespeare’s narrative poems and as a significant companion piece to the Sonnets. The aesthetic, psychological, and conceptual complexities of A Lover’s Complaint and its representativeness of its cultural moment deserve more critical reflection and unfolding than has hitherto been granted. The poem’s richness and centrality to the complaint and pastoral traditions make it fitting that it should become not only the subject of works produced in isolation, but the center of a critical dialogue. Situating the poem in its historical, cultural, generic, rhetorical, and psychological contexts, the volume seeks to generate further discussion of this important Shakespearean text. Examining the poem through several theoretical prisms, the volume works to provide a complex outlook on the complaint’s formal intricacies

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and cultural resonances—of interest at once to critics working on the early modern period and to scholars invested in literary and psychoanalytical theory. A Lover’s Complaint and the 1609 Quarto: Attribution and Authorization Although the early reception history of A Lover’s Complaint is not the story of public enthusiasm such as elicited by Venus and Adonis, the poem did have its early admirers, Edmund Malone and Algernon Swinburne not least among them, and until the early nineteenth century Shakespeare’s authorship was generally accepted. First to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship were critics adhering to aesthetic ideals the poem seemed to undermine. In his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), William Hazlitt claims that while Shakespeare’s plays amply demonstrate his genius, in his poems Shakespeare was cramped ‘by all the petty intricacies of thought and language, which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon of the schools’ (116). Within what he thought of as the lesser part of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, Hazlitt believed A Lover’s Complaint distinctly inferior to The Passionate Pilgrim, proclaiming his doubt that the poem had been authored by Shakespeare (116). Hazlitt’s slight was serious but limited in scope, a fragment in a general study of Shakespeare’s verbal art. Even more fragmentary and insisting on the poem’s fragmentary nature is George Saintsbury’s reference to A Lover’s Complaint in his Elizabethan Literature of 1896 as one of a ‘few and uncertain … scraps’ of what he classifies as Shakespeare’s minor poems (160). Not until 1912 would a scholar devote an entire essay to challenging the poem’s attribution to Shakespeare. In 1912, J.W. Mackail published an essay which questions more thoroughly than anyone before him whether A Lover’s Complaint was really by Shakespeare. Mackail’s essay, which set the tone in the attribution debate at least until the mid-1960’s, challenges Shakespeare’s authorship on aesthetic grounds. To Mackail, the poem’s opening seemed fumbling in contrast to the strong opening lines of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (64-65). In general, Mackail found the poem’s style tortuous, cumbersome, laden with archaisms and neologisms and altogether too artificial to merit the Shakespeare attribution. Mackail’s influential conclusion was that A Lover’s Complaint had found its way by accident into the blank book from which Thomas Thorpe had printed what came to be known as the 1609 Quarto. In 1917, J.M. Robertson took this hypothesis one step further, arguing that A Lover’s Complaint had been composed by Chapman. Like Mackail’s, Robertson’s argument did not go unheeded. In 1930, Sir Edmund Chambers wrote that Robertson’s arguments for Chapman’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint were ‘more plausible than some of his ascriptions to that writer’ (William Shakespeare I 550). Other critics, found Robertson’s claims less compelling. Kenneth Muir points out in his ‘A Lover’s Complaint: A Reconsideration’ (1964) that Robertson deduces Chapman’s authorship by using the same methods he uses to ‘bring himself to believe that Chapman collaborated with Shakespeare in at least thirteen of his acknowledged plays.’ ‘If we refuse to accept the argument that Chapman had a hand in Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar,’ Muir concludes, we cannot ‘acquiesce in Robertson’s ascription of the poem to Chapman’ (159).

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Muir’s observation is indicative of the change that had occurred in the theoretical apparatuses summoned to determine the poem’s authorship. From the early nineteenth century to the 1960’s, critics had contested Shakespeare’s authorship on aesthetic grounds. A standard of what Shakespeare’s poetic genius consisted of was formulated and adhered to. Hazlitt, for example, celebrates the ability of Shakespeare’s imagination to ‘identify itself with the strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grapple … at once with nature, and trample … the littleness of art under his feet’ (116). Measured against this general standard, A Lover’s Complaint (and in Hazlitt’s eyes, Shakespeare’s poetry in general) seems to be wanting. ‘The case against Shakespearean authorship,’ J.C. Maxwell writes in a summary of Hazlitt and Mackail’s arguments in the introduction to his 1969 Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s poems, ‘is basically, the general impression that the poem is neither good enough nor characteristic enough’ when measured against the ‘fluency,’ ‘ease,’ and ‘sureness of touch’ assumed for Shakespeare’s work generally (xxxiv). If the aesthetic measure for Shakespeare’s genius is to be retained, Hazlitt and Mackail implicitly argue, A Lover’s Complaint cannot be accepted as part of the set (Shakespeare’s art) for which this measure functions as a standard. By the time Muir gave the poem his attention, it was no longer as acceptable to make or contest literary attributions on the basis of general impressions. To prove or disprove authorship, a literary scholar was expected not to rely on taste but to provide evidence. The influence of formalism and New Criticism in the 1950’s and 1960’s weighted the demand for evidence to a demand for formal evidence, internal to the poem or to the work of the assumed author in general, and detached from the scholar’s evaluation of its aesthetic merit. Muir provided such evidence. Closely reading the poem and examining its diction and plot structure, Muir noted ‘internal links’ of style and characterization between A Lover’s Complaint and such major plays as King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and in particular Hamlet. Nor could Muir be content with arguments that the poem deviates from an imagined Shakespearean standard. Muir pointed out that the number of words in A Lover’s Complaint which do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare (and in some cases, anywhere else at all) is not particularly striking. Some of the poem’s purported neologisms, Muir added, are simply Latinisms. Nevertheless, Muir thought no better of A Lover’s Complaint as a work of art than did Hazlitt and Mackail. He had a ‘low estimation’ of the poem (166). But even if Muir’s aesthetic judgment coincided with that of earlier critics, unlike them he did not make his standard the determinant of attribution. On the critical scene, careful and precise attention to the poem’s verbal make-up had replaced impressionistic judgments of taste as the means by which to determine authorship. The result was a split between attribution and aesthetic judgment, evident in Muir as in Maxwell, who, relying on Muir’s work, wrote that he believes the poem to be by Shakespeare, yet ‘of very little merit’ (xxxv). The formal methods summoned to settle the attribution issue at a time when New Criticism prevailed did not always yield such a split between authorship and aesthetic value. William Empson, one of the most influential New Critics, concluded the poem must be by Shakespeare because formally, it functions as ‘a kind of echo of the Sonnets’ in the 1609 quarto (‘The Narrative Poems’ 15). Empson’s attribution of the poem to Shakespeare rested also on his reading of the poem’s last segment as

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an admirable example of the paradoxical tensions pervading Shakespeare’s verbal art. ‘No other author would do this;’ Empson exclaims when speaking about the last stanza of A Lover’s Complaint; ‘one man would bewail the seduction and another treat it jovially, but not both at once’ (16). Other formalists admired the poem and attributed it to Shakespeare. In 1938, Edgar Fripp published the two-volume Shakespeare: Man and Artist, which included a close reading of the poem’s legal and economic language, characteristic, Fripp argued, of Shakespeare’s vocabulary throughout his oeuvre. Pointing out what recent new economic criticism might call the incessant transcodings of amatory language with the language of law and money, Fripp argues that in A Lover’s Complaint ‘Shakespeare’s hand shows itself … in legal terms and metaphors’ such as ‘sealed, witness, verdict, fee-simple, precedent, audit, parcels, sums, bond, and troth,’ all of which echo other Shakespearean texts, such as the Sonnets, The Rape of Lucrece, and King Lear (345-46). Evidently, for Fripp the poem was an example of Shakespeare’s art, and a good example. For all its meticulous attention to language, and its anticipation of what would become concerns of Shakespeare and Renaissance criticism half a century later, Fripp’s was not the most extensive close reading to argue for Shakespeare’s authorship. In 1965, MacDonald Pairman Jackson published what is still the most comprehensive contribution to the attribution debate surrounding A Lover’s Complaint: Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint: Its Date and Authenticity. Jackson’s methodology, like Muir’s and Fripp’s, is New Critical, attentive to the poem’s style, phraseology, and diction. His conclusion concerning Shakespeare’s authorship echoes Muir’s, yet he does not share Muir and Maxwell’s distaste for the poem. Performing more nuanced close reading than Muir, Jackson argues against Mackail’s denial of Shakespeare’s authorship, which had been so influential that Rollins divides his review of criticism in the Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s poems to before and after 1912, the year when Mackail’s essay appeared. The task Jackson set himself was to determine, through comparative stylistic analysis, how characteristic it was of Shakespeare to use coinages and neologisms, whose frequency in A Lover’s Complaint had given more than a few critics occasion to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. In pursuing this task, Jackson compiles a list of forty-nine words not used by Shakespeare in any other text (8-12). The high incidence of once-used words Jackson documents in the poem strengthens his hypothesis that the poem is by Shakespeare. Applying his close-reading methods to the Shakespearean canon in general, Jackson notes that in some of the plays, including King Lear and Hamlet, there is ‘on an average one once-used word … to every ten lines’ (12) Once-used words, Jackson concludes, are by no means an anomaly in Shakespeare’s drama. Jackson makes the further observation that onceused words are even more common in the narrative poems than in the plays. The conclusion that ‘Shakespeare was more apt to use such rare words in his narrative poems than in his plays’ (12) makes A Lover’s Complaint, a narrative poem in which rare words seem the norm, not uncharacteristic but ‘in fact as characteristic of [Shakespeare] as they could be’ (14). Jackson’s monograph was a turning point in the attribution debate. In the 1970’s, it was followed by two statistical surveys of the poem’s language by Eliot Slater, which concluded that ‘A Lover’s Complaint is an authentic work of Shakespeare’

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(‘Word Links Between Poems and Plays’ 163). A.C. Patridge’s independent study of substantive grammar, published in 1975, the year Slater’s second article appeared, reached a similar conclusion. Assessing vocabulary and syntax and comparing the poem to Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, The Puritan, and Hero and Leander III-VI (so as to dispel Robertson’s ascription of the poem to Chapman), Partridge concluded that the poem was a belated experiment in Spenserian pastoral written solely by Shakespeare. Stylistics and statistics continued to bolster the case for Shaksepare’s authorship in Bishop, Hieatt, and Nicholson’s ‘Shakespeare’s Rare Words: A Lover’s Complaint, Cymbeline, and the Sonnets.’ Supplementing close reading with the tools made available by the development of computer technology and linguistics, such studies seemed to provide empirical grounds for the stylistic argument made by Empson, Fripp, Muir, Maxwell, and Jackson. ‘As a result of all these studies,’ John Roe writes in the introduction to his New Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s poems, ‘the case in favor of Shakespeare seems more or less assured’ (62). Yet new critical trends raised new doubts that could not be dispelled by stylistics, statistical analysis, or humanist enthusiasm. The more Marxists such as Fredric Jameson and Foucauldian New Historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt insisted that literary criticism ‘historicize,’ the more it became necessary to base attributions on contextual as well as textual evidence. In the absence of period documents connecting A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare, and with the rising interest in print culture and the history of the book, attention turned to the circumstances surrounding the poem’s publication in the 1609 Quarto (Q). Doubts concerning the authorization of Q had been voiced since the late nineteenth century (Rollins The Sonnets 2 42) on aesthetic and biographical grounds. As far as Q is concerned, speculation and debate included the relative merits of Q’s printer, Thomas Thorpe, whose publication of Q was his first recorded business venture. Doubts concerning Thorpe’s reliability had been voiced in Sir Sidney Lee’s unsympathetic portrayal of him in the 1905 DNB which ‘built up a picture of systematic roguery’ and suggested that Thorpe specialized in handling ‘neglected copy,’ and was unscrupulous even by standards of the day (Duncan-Jones ‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 152, 155). Such moralistic questioning of the character of Q’s printer was subsequently expanded on largely speculative grounds by other critics such as Brent Stirling and Leona Rostenberg in the 1960’s. Defenses of Thorpe were heard as early as the 1970’s. In his introduction to A Lover’s Complaint in The Riverside Shakespeare, Hallett Smith noted the tendency to question Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem because of the suspicion that Thorpe’s edition was unauthorized, but pointed out that ‘Thorpe’s only attribution to Shakespeare, other than A Lover’s Complaint, was the Sonnets, and in that attribution he was right’ (1781). Smith’s contextual argument is indicative of a shift towards historicization in literary studies. Yet it is local in nature and based on only one type of evidence. Similar in spirit is Craig’s and Bevington’s introduction to the poem in their edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Like Hallett Smith, Craig and Bevington acknowledge the doubts concerning Shakespeare’s authorization of Q, yet point out that ‘Thorpe’s edition remains the only objective evidence we have … its authority has never been convincingly refuted [and] the poem was never ascribed to anyone else during Shakespeare’s lifetime.’ They conclude that on

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balance ‘the evidence is in favor of [Shakespeare’s] authorship’ (458). It took the movement of bibliographical studies away from biographical speculation and into a literary criticism that seeks to interrogate the text’s complex interrelations with the culture in which it was produced for systematic reevaluation of Q’s authorization to emerge. In 1982, Katherine Duncan-Jones published an important article that did much to restore Thorpe’s credibility. On the basis of carefully documented archival evidence concerning Thorpe’s career, including an examination of the original texts of other sonnet sequences and complaints published at the time, manuscript indexes, historical documents concerning the plague in London in the winter of 1608-1609, and manuscripts of other Elizabethan men of letters, Duncan-Jones argued that ‘Thorpe was a publisher of some deserved status and prestige, handling work by close associates of Shakespeare [such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Chapman] and producing, in many cases, highly authoritative texts (‘Was Shakespeares Sonnets’ 155-157). Duncan-Jones’s rehabilitation of Thorpe led her to conclude that Q had been conceived as an integral volume and authorized as such, and that therefore Shakespeare had written both the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Duncan-Jones’s historicist claim in favor of Q’s authorization took root in a literary-critical culture which recognizes the importance of context and demands empirical verifiability for claims of authorship. It is often cited, along with Jackson’s more New Critical, textbased study, as an authoritative resolution to debates concerning the poem’s authorship. Yet some doubts remain. New Historicist Arthur Marrotti has taken issue with Duncan-Jones’s influential argument in favor of Q’s authorization on grounds pertaining to patronage and cultural economics. Marrotti argues that Shakespeare was ‘undoubtedly more prosperous in 1609 than he was in 1592-94, that the publisher’s payment for the text would not have been very great and that there is no evidence in the presentation of the text that the author was appealing to a patron for economic assistance’ (171 n. 34). Marrotti concludes that given what we know of Shakespeare’s economic and career circumstances in 1609 and of early modern print culture, it is not reasonable to assume that Shakespeare would have found it necessary to authorize the Q version. He concludes that Thorpe may have ‘followed a quite ordinary practice of printers in publishing a valuable and interesting manuscript without seeking authorial permission’ (171 n. 34). Marrotti deduces that ‘if Thorpe published Shakespeare’s Sonnets without the cooperation of their author, there is a strong possibility that the arrangement of the poems is, to some extent, his’ (156). To Marrotti, this means that the anacreontic tailpieces and A Lover’s Complaint were added to the Shakespeare-authored sonnets that had come into Thorpe’s hands by someone who had made the effort ‘to bring the edition in line with some of the sonnet collections of the 1590’s’ (156). Marrotti does not say whether or not he considers these added pieces Shakespearean, but his reference to A Lover’s Complaint as ‘appended’ (156) suggests he does not. A few expressions of skepticism concerning Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint are still heard from other quarters of the contemporary critical scene. Recent attention to the category of authorship has brought the poem under the scrutiny of scholars such as Brian Vickers, who lists it as ‘anonymous’ in the index to his 2002 book ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John

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Ford’s Funerall Elegye (568). Vickers’s interest is less in the poem itself than in establishing firm, even absolute principles for attribution claims. For Vickers, a poem whose style seems to diverge from that of its purported author cannot be ‘easily acceptable’ as by that author (568). The case in favor of Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint, for Vickers, is not definitive. Vickers has continued to contest Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint in a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, a prelude to a forthcoming monograph on the subject. In his TLS article, Vickers supplements the doubts he had already raised about the poem’s diction and what he calls its confused narrative line by arguing that the poem is ‘uncharacteristic of Shakespeare’ especially because of its unsympathetic portrayal of the complaint’s heroine (15). Vickers concludes that the author of the poem must have been an imitator of Spenser, and a poor one at that. He identifies John Davies of Hereford (1564-1618) as this imitator. ‘In an age of intense copying and circulating of poetry,’ Vickers concludes, ‘manuscripts of Davies’s work could easily have become mixed up with Shakespeare’s,’ and Thomas Thorpe was probably ‘the honest victim of a misunderstanding’ when he published the complaint with Shakespeare’s sonnets in the 1609 quarto (15). According to Vickers, A Lover’s Complaint cannot be listed as a Shakespeare poem because the case in favor of Shakespeare’s authorship is less than decisive. Once the Shakespeare attribution is removed, conceptual space is cleared for other possibilities of attribution, which take the material conditions of early modern print culture into account. Vickers’s position, which requires verifiable hard evidence for or against the Shakespeare attribution, adduces another type of argument against Shakespeare’s authorship heard in the contemporary critical scene: that of statistical computer surveys. Statistical studies of the poem’s style had been ventured as early as the 1970’s by Eliot Slater and Partridge, and these supported the argument in favor of Shakespeare’s authorship. In the late 1990’s, such studies were undertaken anew, taking advantage of the far more advanced programming that had developed in the intervening two decades, by Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza. Critically re-examining Donald Foster’s 1995 computer-aided claim that A Funeral Elegy by W.S. was Shakespeare’s ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza contend that Foster’s claim ‘is overstated and underproved, since his inclusion tests have not been shown to be immune to “false positives’’’ (‘C-Prompted Doubts’ 177). They suggest that such inclusion tests can only ever establish possible authorship, whereas the results of exclusion tests are much more reliable. In conducting their own exclusion tests—which involve detailed stylometric comparison of both poems to ‘core Shakespeare’ baselines designed to ‘exclude as mismatches works that lack a trait ubiquitous to Shakespeare’ (182)—Elliott and Valenza argue that both A Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint fall ‘far outside of Shakespeare’s range’ (177). The data found by Elliott and Valenza is not substantively different from that found by Slater and Partridge two decades before, despite enormous developments in computer technology. Yet in a culture far more technologically advanced than it had been in the 1970’s and a literary-critical climate demanding hard evidence, it seems to Vickers to ‘significantly weaken’ the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint (‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare 218).

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Vickers’s ultra-cautious position demands that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we regard A Lover’s Complaint as an anonymous poem and consider alternative attribution. Yet at present, his position (and that of Elliott and Valenza, on whose computer studies he bases some of his claims), is a minority. The majority opinion among critics writing about A Lover’s Complaint and Shakespeare’s poetry more generally, including editors of the major editions (Burrow in the Oxford edition, Walter Cohen in Stephen Greenblatt’s Norton edition, Duncan-Jones in the Arden edition, Kerrigan in the Penguin edition, and Roe in the New Cambridge edition) is that Shakespeare was the author of A Lover’s Complaint. Jonathan Crewe remains a dissenting voice among recent editors. In his 1999 introduction to The Pelican Shakespeare volume of the narrative poems, he states that ‘Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem remains doubtful’ (xix). To him, what A Lover’s Complaint manifests is above all a resistance to our desire ‘to resolve which poems are finally and definitively Shakespearean’ (lii). The poem may well remain a kernel of resistance in Shakespeare attribution debates, and it may not be so certain after all that, as Burrow claims, the work done by Muir and Jackson ‘definitively ended discussion about the poem’s attribution’ (139). We consider the poem to be Shakespeare’s, primarily because of its rhetorical and psychological complexity, which we believe exceeds even that of the Sonnets. On this matter, we find ourselves agreeing with critics such as Empson and Kerrigan, yet acknowledge the absence of documents that would conclusively establish Shakespeare’s authorship and satisfy scholars such as Vickers. The issue will probably remain unresolved unless new evidence comes to light. Whether or not this happens, given the critical history it has already amassed, the poem will remain a strong example of attribution problems, in Renaissance literature and more generally. But if we cannot make as definitive an attribution of the poem as demanded by Vickers’s exacting standards, nor can we ignore the poem’s having first been published alongside the Sonnets and the strong appeal it has had for a small but significant number of Shakespeare scholars. We cannot refuse the critical engagement this poem demands, whoever its author. Date of Composition The issue of the poem’s date of composition has been less debated than its authorship, but here too, there is no definitive answer. The volume in which A Lover’s Complaint was first published was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 May, 1609 as ‘a Booke called SHAKESPEARES sonnettes.’ Estimates concerning the date of composition of the Sonnets go as early as the mid-1580’s, when the sonnet-writing vogue was at its height (Schiffer ‘Reading New Life’ 7). Commentators on A Lover’s Complaint have not ventured a date earlier than the mid-1590’s (Roe The Poems 2). Significant sonnet sequences were published in the mid-1590’s, including Richard Lynch’s Diella (1595), Henry Constable’s Diana (1594), and William Percy’s Coelia (1594), but these were probably composed a number of years earlier and were privately circulated in manuscript before their publication. It has made sense to critics to believe that Shakespeare participated in the sonnet tradition at its absolute peak. But where narrative poems are concerned,

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critics have been reluctant to opt for a date earlier than that of Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The poem’s belonging to the Renaissance complaint tradition (see below) has further weighted commentaries toward a later date of composition. The vogue of this poetic form was slightly later than of the sonnet sequence. As Underwood points out, ‘there are scores of complaints in the poetical miscellanies of the sixteenth century (50-52). Some of these miscellanies, including Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1566), or A Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) have a relatively early publication date (49). But whatever analogues to A Lover’s Complaint one may find in the miscellanies of the 1550’s-1570’s, not before the 1590’s did the complaint flourish as a separate literary form which gave its name to an entire work. One of the more influential full-scale complaint works of this kind was Edmund Spenser’s Complaints (1591). Later examples of longer works entitled ‘complaints,’ usually in the pastoral mode, include John Dickenson’s undated Shepheardes Complaint, Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard: The Complaint of Daphnis for the Loue of Ganymede (1594), William Smith’s Chloris: The Complaint of the Passionate Despis’d Shepheard (1595), and the anonymous Loue’s Complaint with The Legend of Orpheus and Euridice (1597). Nicholas Breton, in The Arbor of Amorous Devices, includes several short lyrics under the title ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’ Separately-published female-voiced complaints of the time includes P. Coles’s Penelope’s Complaint or a Mirrour for Minions (1596) and the anonymous Love’s Martyr or Rosalin’s Complaint (1601). If A Lover’s Complaint is part of this complaint-writing vogue, as it seems to be, its date of composition is probably not earlier than 1590. The vogue of the pastoral complaint in Renaissance England was accompanied by the fashion of prefacing a complaint with a sonnet sequence. Here too there was an early example: George Gascoigne published a woman’s complaint, The Complaynt of Philomene to his sonnet sequence, The Steele Glas in 1576. Later sixteenthcentury poets published volumes which added the third generic form of anacreontic lyric as an intermediary between sonnets and female complaint. The paradigmatic example is Samuel Daniel’s Delia, published in 1592, which ends with the Complaint of Rosamond, with an anacreontic ode as a bridge between the two. Parallels between Daniel’s 1593 volume and Shakespeare’s, published fourteen years later, are numerous, cutting across prosody (the rhyme royal metrical scheme), the tri-partite generic structure, and the familiar complaint themes. They have been commented on by a number of critics, first among whom is Malone, who declared that Daniel’s sonnets provided the model Shakespeare followed. Later critics to remark upon the Delian echoes in Q include Craun in his study of the de casibus complaint tradition (186-197), Underwood (28-38), Hallett Smith in the Riverside edition (1781), Duncan-Jones in ‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’ (169-170), Ilona Bell in the chapter on Daniel in her Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship and ‘That which thou hast done’ (156-157), and Kerrigan in the introduction to his Penguin edition (13-15). Kerrigan makes the strongest case for Q’s Delian legacy, claiming that ‘Malone’s insight, the corollary of which he never grasped, has far-reaching critical as well as editorial implications’ (66). Roe, however, cautions that in Shakespeare’s case, ‘in the absence of a clear reference by one poem to another, and given the omission of the narrative poem from the Sonnets’

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title page, the case for parallelism or counter-pointing in the manner of Daniel is less certain than may at first appear’ (The Poems 63). Even granted such cautions, what are we to make of these parallels between Daniel’s text and Shakespeare’s? Duncan-Jones speaks of such parallels as confirming Daniel’s having established a multi-generic pattern comprising sonnets, anacreontic, and complaint (‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 170). Kerrigan writes that an assumption of this tradition was that ‘the sonnets, the anacreontic interlude, and the concluding complaint should be, however, diverse in content, mutually illuminating’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 14). Bell goes as far as to argue that since Daniel’s volume seems to have been part of a courtship scenario, Shakespeare’s volume was involved in a similar ‘ongoing private lyric dialogue’ (‘That which thou hast done’ 457). But whatever else one makes of the parallels between Daniel’s volume and Shakespeare’s, pointing them out indicates something about A Lover’s Complaint’s date of composition. It appears to have been no earlier than 1592, the year Delia was published, or perhaps slightly earlier if one takes into account the possibility that the volume circulated in manuscript. If one notes similarities in the rhyme royal verse pattern, vocabulary, and metaphor not only between Daniel’s Rosamond and Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint but between both these complaints and The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, one may conclude, as Underwood does, that ‘Shakespeare knew and was influenced by Rosamond as he wrote The Rape of Lucrece, and that he had both in mind as he wrote A Lover’s Complaint some years later’ (37-38). Such deduction places the date of composition of A Lover’s Complaint no earlier than 1594. Shakespeare may have been following not Daniel’s model directly but an entire poetic tradition established by Daniel. The 1609 Quarto was not the only volume of the period to follow what Kerrigan calls the Delian tri-partite structure. Kerrigan, Duncan-Jones, Hallett Smith and others note that this structure was used also by Thomas Lodge. Annexed to Lodge’s sonnet sequence Phillis, published in 1593, is the Tragicall Complaynt of Elstred. Another example of the same tri-generic form is Richard Lynch’s Diella (1596), where the final sonnet of the sequence invites Diella to contemplate the love story which follows: The Love of Don Diego and Ginevra. Walter Cohen notes that between 1593 and 1596, five poets other than Shakespeare and Daniel published works consisting of a sonnet sequence, a brief intermediate piece, usually anacreontic, and a concluding complaint (562). Cohen concludes that the 1609 Quarto which follows this structure ‘is less miscellaneous collection than well-established multi-generic form’ (562). He thus echoes Duncan-Jones’s pronouncement that ‘to readers of Daniel’s Delia and Rosamond, or of Lodge’s Phillis amd Elstred volume, the overall look of the 1609 Sonnets volume would have been by no means strange’ (‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 170), as well as Kerrigan’s confident assertion: ‘Shakespeare’s first readers would have come to the quarto with a strong expectation of connectedness. I think they would have found it’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 15). Other critics who have commented on the connectedness between Renaissance complaints and sonnet sequences include Carol Thomas Neely and Thomas P. Roche, who note the tripartite form of Q. If Shakespeare was participating in this vibrant tradition established by Daniel more than he was directly emulating the Delian tri-partite model, the date of composition of A Lover’s Complaint could be even later, though not much later, than 1596.

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Another consideration, linked with evidence internal to Shakespeare’s work instead of to parallels between Shakespeare’s poetic output and that of his peers, weights the argument in favor of an even later date of composition. This is the consideration of the poem’s style. Many commentators have remarked upon the difficulty of the poem’s language. Mackail famously complained the poem’s language was ‘cramped, gritty, discontinuous’ (63-64), and his negative aesethetic judgment finds an echo as recently as in Burrow’s introduction to the Oxford edition of the poems, which says that the poem includes ‘passages that are crabbed rather than simply beautiful’ (‘Introduction’ 146). The poem’s language, to be sure, is extremely complex, no less complex than the psychological, literary, and ideological issues the poem interrogates. And the range of critical opinion demonstrates that the aesthetic stance towards the poem deduced from the recognition of the challenge its language poses shifts from displeasure to enthusiasm. Some early commentators, including Mackail, saw linguistic complexity as the mark of a puerile style, accordingly ascribing the poem to Shakespeare’s youth. As with the attribution issue, the turning point in relation to the question of the poem’s composition came with the work of Muir and Jackson, and its statistical follow-up in the work of Slater. Jackson’s list of words used only once in the poem, compiled with the aid of Bartlett’s Concordance and Schmidt’s Lexicon, showed the proportion of these words in the poem to be ‘what we should expect to find in a Shakespearean poem written at about the time of Hamlet or King Lear’ (32). Muir, working less meticulously and systematically, yet reading no less closely, finds parallels between passages in A Lover’s Complaint and passages in King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and especially Hamlet. When Slater ran the conclusions Muir and Jackson had reached through statistical tests he found ‘statistically highly significant associations with the vocabulary of the third quarter [of Shakespeare’s dramatic work] (Hamlet, Troilus, All’s Well, and possibly Lear), and also very definitely with Cymbeline’ (‘Word Links Between poems and Plays’ 162). Further studies carried out a decade and a half later by Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson also found significant word links between A Lover’s Complaint and Cymbeline. In 1990, Jackson published another study of verbal and stylistic parallels, this time between A Lover’s Complaint and Spenser’s Prothalamion (published 1596) arguing against an early date of composition for Shakespeare’s poem. Craig and Bevington also seem convinced the poem does ‘not read like an effusion of Shakespeare’s youth’ (458). Together, stylistic and statistical surveys of the poem’s language point to a date of composition parallel to that of the later tragedies and romances: around the turn of the seventeenth century. The findings of these studies have been borne out by readings of the poem, including that of Underwood, who devotes an entire chapter to thematic parallels between A Lover’s Complaint and All’s Well (117-69). Roe too notes parallels with All’s Well, more psychological than thematic. In his two pieces on the poem, Roe explores psychological parallels between it and Hamlet, as does Jon Harned. Both are preceded by Kerrigan’s observation that in ‘its source material or founding imagery, [A Lover’s Complaint] recalls the secondary Ophelia plot in Hamlet, while connecting also with Desdemona’s ‘song of willow’ in Othello (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 12, 394). In short, close attention to the poem’s language suggests links between it and works of Shakespeare’s late period.

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Most commentators favor the beginning of the 1600’s as A Lover’s Complaint’s date of composition. Among these, Cohen gives more precise numbers, stating that Shakespeare had ‘apparently begun [A Lover’s Complaint] in 1602-1605 and substantially revised or augmented [the poem] for the 1609 edition’ (568). Burrow too surmises that ‘the poem may have had the same kind of extended genesis as the Sonnets’ (140). Along with the majority of contemporary commentators on the poem, we believe the poem’s rhetorical, prosodic, and psychological complexity marks it as the work of a mature intellect and poetic sensibility. At the same time, we see the importance of the intertextual links between A Lover’s Complaint and the Renaissance traditions of pastoral, complaint, and in particular the tri-partite Delian volume. Since the vogue of these forms was around the mid-1590’s, and since there is increasing evidence that Shakespeare revised his texts (Kerrigan Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 432), we do not rule out the possibility that the poem was begun around the time Shakespeare was composing his two other narrative poems, and that the poem continued to mature until its date of publication. Title Page and Title A Lover’s Complaint occupies the last eleven pages of Thorpe’s Quarto, where it follows the 154 sonnets (sigs. K1v-L2v). The title pages of the thirteen extant original copies of Thorpe’s text read: ‘SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS. | Neuer before Imprinted.’ Thorpe’s title page does not mention A Lover’s Complaint, nor does Thorpe’s 20 May, 1609 entry in the Stationers’ Register, which lists Q as ‘a Booke called SHAKESPEARES sonnettes.’ The first readers of the poem in its printed form would have read up to sig. K1v before they encountered the drop-title ‘A Louer’s complaint. | BY | WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE.’ The effacement of the poem’s title from Q’s title page and the entry in the Stationers’ Register comes into further relief when one considers that the poem is never explicitly referred to by a contemporary (Smith 1781, Roe The Poems 62)—in marked contrast to the Sonnets. The most frequently cited contemporary reference to the Sonnets is that of Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury of 1598. Meres writes ‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends etc.’ Commentators have interpreted the absence of an explicit reference to A Lover’s Complaint in Meres, on top of the lack of reference to the poem in Q’s title page and the Stationers’ Register as evidence of the poem’s low merit, dubious authorship, or both. Yet such commentaries overlook at once Q’s textual history and the peculiar role that anonymity and effacement play in its poetics at large. As Burrow points out, in Q A Lover’s Complaint ‘begins on the verso of a leaf (K1) and so can never have been sold separately from the sonnet sequence which it concludes’ (92). A Lover’s Complaint was an integral part of Q not only as part of a tri-generic Delian tradition, but materially too. But what is the reference of the title ‘Sonnets,’ on Thorpe’s title page, and in the entry in the Stationers’ Register and Meres’s praise of Shakespeare? The ‘certayne | Sonnets’ mentioned on the title page of Daniel’s 1592 volume have a reference and a name: ‘Delia.’ And this name, the name of the sonnets’ dedicatee, itself forms part

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of a poetic tradition. Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella had first been published one year before. Between 1592, the date of publication of Delia, and 1609, the year Q was published, at least ten volumes of sonnets whose title was the name of a woman appeared. When Shakespeare published his volume of sonnets in 1609, he was speaking in the context of these inter-resonating titles of women’s names. And yet he chose not to add another name to the list, but to comment on the title’s generic nature by emptying and limiting it to the name of a poetic form (sonnets) whose etymological resonance is the name of sound (from Italian suono). Nor was Shakespeare’s choice determined by the homoerotic nature of his sonnets, whose ‘begetter’ and dedicatee is explicitly identified as a man. Barnfield’s sonnets, though homoerotic, were nevertheless collected under the title Cynthia. In giving a title to the complaint that followed the sonnets (the last of which were anacreontic), Shakespeare performed a similar emptying out with respect to the literary tradition in relation to which he was writing. The complaint following the sonnets in Daniel’s volume was ascribed to a woman, Rosamond. In Lodge’s Delian volume, the plainant was Elstred. Pastoral complaints published as separate works also typically identify their plainants. Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepheard (1594) is subtitled The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede, identifying the speaker at once as a shepherd and a homoerotic lover, and giving him a pastoral name harkening to the ancient texts of Theocritus and Longus. Other pastoral titles identify their plainants in terms dictated by the literary genre. With this context, the title of Shakespeare’s poem stands out as emptied of any identity conferred by name or occupation. As Kerrigan notes, ‘the title ‘doubles’ in significance, because the Danielesque maiden recounts, within the complaint, the plaint which had wrought her own downfall,’ so that ‘Louer’ receives the sense of a woman as well as the ‘primary Jacobean sense’ of ‘male lover’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 16). The effacement of names and identities extends from the titles of the poems in Shakespeare’s 1609 volume to the characters. As Duncan-Jones notes, ‘the namelessness of the poet, the friend, and the mistress, as well as the seducer and the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint, is one of the most distinctive features of Shakespeare’s sequence’ (‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 152). Effacement and the emptying out of reference are a feature of Q’s poetics, cutting across the (radically limited) titles of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint and the namelessness of their protagonists. At least in the case of A Lover’s Complaint, effacement and the emptying out of reference extend to the poem’s rhetoric and the psychological issues this rhetoric opens up (see Stephen Whitworth’s essay, this volume). If this is so, perhaps the effacement of the title of A Lover’s Complaint from Q’s title page is a marker of the integrity of Q’s poetics, rather than an indication of the complaint’s low aesthetic merit or of the anonymity of its author. If A Lover’s Complaint is a study in the rhetorical and psychological specifics of effacement, the erasure of its title from Q’s title page is as much a part of this study as is the effacement of the plainant’s sex, name, and occupation from the title of the poem itself. What this means is that the radically limited title ‘Sonnets’ on Q’s title-page referred to the entire tripartite volume. The absence of contemporary references to A Lover’s Complaint may simply mean that Shakespeare’s contemporaries (including Thorpe and Meres) implicitly included it in their references to the Sonnets. The fact that by

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1609, the Delian tri-partite structure was well-established made it culturally possible to encode complaint and possibly anacreontics within the generic title Sonnets. That for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the generic boundary between sonnets and complaint was not as rigid as it seems today is suggested also by the title of the work of another W.S.: William Smith, whose pastoral, most of it a compilation of sonnets, is entitled Chloris: The Complaint of the Passionate Despis’d Shepheard. The generic categories of sonnet and complaint could flow into one another, as they do in Shakespeare’s volume. And the effacement of names which is such a distinctive feature of A Lover’s Complaint begins on Q’s title-page. Alongside its function as a rhetorical means for exploring psychological questions, this effacement of complaint (emptied of nominal reference) under the title of sonnets (emptied of nominal reference) may have a meta-poetic function. This effacement suggests that underlying every complaint is the inherent musicality that resonates in the sonnet’s generic name. Relationship to Shakespeare’s Life In the introduction to his edited volume of critical essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, James Schiffer remarks that ‘more has been written’ on the issue of the Sonnets’ relation to Shakespeare’s life than on the biographical dimension of any other Shakespearean text (14). Much less has been written on A Lover’s Complaint and biography. Much of what has been written assumes that the young man in the poem who ‘sexes both enchanted’ has the same biographical reference as the ‘mastermistress’ of the Sonnets, who is presumably the same ‘Mr W.H.’ identified as the sonnets’ dedicatee. In trying to determine who Mr. W.H. was, critics have proposed many candidates, including William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke, known for personal beauty, patronage of poets, and unruly behavior), William Harte (Shakespeare’s nephew), and William Hathaway (Shakespeare’s brother-in-law). The various autobiographical theories are summarized in detail in Rollins’s Variorum of the Sonnets (2 177-230) and more recently in Schiffer’s ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (25-27). The most popular theory is that ‘Mr. W.H.’ refers to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, although of course, his initials are H.W., not W.H. Biographical theories concerning the young man of the Sonnets flourished from the time of Malone’s 1780 edition of Shakespeare’s work throughout the nineteenth century, but their line of thinking is apparent as late as G.P.V. Akrigg’s Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (1968) and even Jonathan Bates’ The Genius of Shakespeare (1997, 46). Biographical theories about the poem flourished in the nineteenth century, starting with Massey’s 1866 book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Massey identifies the youth and the maid in the poem as ‘none other than William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’ (Rollins The Poems 2 587). Only a few of the biographical theories make the link between ‘Mr. W.H.’ and the androgynous young man in A Lover’s Complaint. Notable among these is the work of German scholar Gregor Sarrazin, later the editor of the third edition of Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon, who in 1899 and 1902 published essays identifying the youth of A Lover’s Complaint as Southampton and claiming the poem was a veiled account of the seduction of Elizabeth Vernon by her future husband. The reverend man,

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according to Sarrazin, is ‘Shakespeare himself’ (Rollins The Poems 2 592). In the context of what Rollins calls ‘incursions into the realm of imaginative biography,’ Shakespeare himself has been identified in the ‘portrait of the female lover’ by Alden Brooks, in his 1937 book William Shakespeare Factotum (Rollins The Poems 2 692) Samuel Butler too regarded A Lover’s Complaint as a sidelight on Mr. W.H in his 1899 Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (Rollins The Poems 2 593). In a 1890 book on God in Shakespeare, Downing identified the youth as ‘none other than the friend of the sonnets,’ but believed the friend to have been not Southampton but Pembroke (Rollins The Poems 2 590). Frank Harris agreed, in a 1911 book on women in Shakespeare, where he proceeded to identify the maiden in the poem as Mary Fitton and the poem as a whole as an allegory of Fitton’s seduction by Herbert (Rollins The Poems 2 595). Sarazzin’s identification of the youth as the Earl of Southampton was seconded in Sidney Kent’s People in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1915). Kent claims the poem ‘contains an exact description of Lord Wriothesley, describing his horsemanship, his beardless face, and his well-known custom of wearing his hair in long locks’ (Rollins The Poems 2 600). The same identification appears in Arthur Acheson’s Mistress Davenant and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1913) and Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story (1922). Acheson saw the poem as portraying phases ‘in the life of the Earl of Southampton.’ ‘The description of Southampton’s personality,’ Acheson argues, ‘is most palpable and the facts of the story … match the actual circumstances in the relations subsisting between Southampton and Elizabeth Verson’ (Rollins The Poems 2 600). Speculations concerning the youth as Earl of Southampton were developed most extensively by Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, in studies published 1916-1936. Chambrun’s identification of the youth in A Lover’s Complaint as Southampton was accepted by J.A. Fort in 1927 (Rollins The Poems 2 601) and is quoted by Akrigg despite his general dislike of the poem. Such biographical commentaries may seem antiquated and quaint. However, as recent scholars of A Lover’s Complaint including Duncan-Jones, Bell, Katherine Craik, and Paul Stegner (this volume) have observed, conceptual, thematic, and imagistic links between the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint are manifold. Such links support the critical position assumed by Kerrigan, Duncan-Jones, Bell, Cohen, and the authors of this introduction, according to which Q was designed as a complete and coherent volume. If Q is a coherent volume, it is necessary to be aware of the biographical debates concerning the young man and take a position with respect to them. The only modern critic to write extensively on A Lover’s Complaint in connection with Shakespeare’s biography is Underwood, who devotes a full chapter of his monograph to parallels between the seducer and the Earl of Southampton (alongside the young man of the Sonnets and the character of Bertram in All’s Well) (104-69). Underwood concludes that ‘Chambrun is correct in identifying Southampton as the young man in A Lover’s Complaint’ (143). To him, A Lover’s Complaint ‘seems to have been the interim point [between the Sonnets and All’s Well] in Shakespeare’s attempt to embody Southampton as a character’ (143), an attempt which was motivated by an obsession with Southampton ‘or some notion of him’ (143) and which resulted in ‘unfavorable’ portraits because of the ‘rejection’ involved in Shakespeare’s relations with that most ‘central or formative’ figure in his life (144).

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Underwood offers a great deal of biographical speculation on the subject of Southampton as the youth of A Lover’s Complaint, including a fancy of ‘a social gathering or two, where some great poets are speaking of Southampton and their past relations with him … remark ironically on his present persona and tell some stories of his sexual excesses’ (167). He believes that ‘Shakespeare later writes, over a few days … A Lover’s Complaint and begins All’s Well … determined to delineate Southampton … as a profligate and willful youth skilled in seduction, yet giving him his due … as horseman’ (168). The credibility of Underwood’s speculations is compromised by the fact that, as Burrow observes, ‘there is no evidence that Shakespeare had any contact with Southampton after 1594’ (100). Burrow concedes, though, that this does not preclude the possibility that at least some of the Sonnets ‘might at one point have been addressed to Southampton’ (100). A similar argument may be made with respect to the historical reference of the young man in A Lover’s Complaint. The more important question seems to us not who the historical reference for the young man may have been but whether this matters, and why. Kerrigan is categorical in stating that ‘none of this matters much’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 11). The biographical approach exemplified by Underwood, Schiffer notes, is underpinned by a romantic aesthetic according to which all good poetry is an effusion of strong emotional experience (‘Reading New Life’ 14). This approach is well-tempered by the caution of Robert Bell, one of the early critics of Shakespeare’s poetry, whose 1855 articles are quoted by Rollins in the Variorum edition of the Sonnets: ‘all poetry is autobiographical. But the particle of actual life out of which verse is wrought may be, and almost always is, wholly incommensurate to the emotion depicted, and remote from the forms into which it is ultimately shaped’ (2 139). George Wyndham’s 1898 edition of The Poems of Shakespeare echoes this sentiment in proclaiming that ‘The wonder of them [Shakespeare’s texts] lies in the art of his poetry, not in the accidents of his life’ (cx1vii). Kerrigan’s pronouncement that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint ‘are not biographical in a psychological mode’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 11) sounds a similar note. So does his insistence that ‘there is no sense that the literary value of the text in hand flows through that text from the author. The text is sufficient; its literary value is inherent; and the author is largely subsumed into the order of his Life’ (12). Interest in the circumstances of production of Shakespeare’s poems has not disappeared; it has taken on different forms. In this post-Romantic era, when so much scholarly work is being done on print culture, patronage, the history of textuality, anonymity and authorship, interest in the particularities of the production of Shakespeare’s poetry has turned from details of the poet’s personal life to his relations with literary institutions and practices as these exemplify modes of cultural production and the negotiation of ideology and power. Marrotti’s important work from 1990 on Shakespeare’s Sonnets as property, which focuses on ‘the ways literature was being institutionalized in the early modern era as print technology gradually redefined authorship, the role of readers, and the character of texts’ (144) is a case in point. Like the biographical critics, Marrotti takes note of Shakespeare’s relation with his patron, Sir William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (149), but his

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interest is not in determining whether or not William Herbert is the historical referent of the young man in the sonnets or the youth in A Lover’s Complaint. Instead, he is interested in the role Shakespeare’s relation to his patron played in the socio-cultural matrix of literary transmission in Renaissance England, where poetry had a ‘complex status as literary property,’ belonging ‘to the poet, to the patron, and as well to anyone into whose hands the poems fell’ (150). Marrotti concludes that in examining Shakespeare’s poetry as ‘property passing through the different, but overlapping, systems of manuscript and print, we can not only rediscover some of the unusual ways literary texts were treated by readers and collectors in the early modern era, but we can also begin to understand how literature itself was being redefined socio-culturally, a process that shaped and was shaped by these texts’ (166). Cultural materialist studies following Marrotti’s cue but focussing on A Lover’s Complaint rather than on the Sonnets have yet to be undertaken. It may be that readers will remain interested in the earlier form of biographical linking: seeking to establish the historical referents for the poem’s personages, even if this mode of exploration is currently devalued in the scholarly community. One published piece on A Lover’s Complaint has already bridged earlier and contemporary modes of inquiry into links between poem and the poet’s circumstances, whether private or socio-cultural. This is Bell’s essay ‘That which thou hast done’ which looks at A Lover’s Complaint, alongside the Sonnets, in the context of the period’s poetry of courtship. According to Bell, English love poetry from the 1590’s and early 1600’s is … primarily private poetry, written not for publication but for a particular lyric audience known to the poet’ (457). She sees Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint as such lyric poetry initially written for private consumption. Bell assumes, thus, that A Lover’s Complaint contains references to ‘real-world’ people and events. In assuming at least an initial personal, private reference for Shakespeare’s poetry, Bell is in a minority position in contemporary criticism. Unlike earlier biographical critics, however, Bell does not set about to decipher the personal references in the poem. Nor does she think this possible. Bell argues that when the lyrical poetry of the period was made public—and in the case of Shakespeare, she believes it possible that the poet ‘(unlike Daniel) was conscious of a potential public lyric audience from the outset’ (457)—changes were made to the original version so as to preclude the identification and exposure of the people and events referenced. Like Spenser and Donne, she says, Shakespeare wrote poems which ‘do not conceal the courtships their poems enact; instead they veil allusions to actual persons or events in ambiguity or secrecy’ (457). In the case of A Lover’s Complaint, Bell argues, such veiling was particularly necessary, since the poem ‘makes the young man’s shame and disgrace so much clearer’ than the Sonnets (470). To hide that disgrace, Shakespeare had to do more than omit the name of the young man from the poetry that promises to eternize it. He had to make the language of his public poetry allusive, enigmatic, and obscure. For Bell, then, the poems’ connections to Shakespeare’s life are not an occasion for embarking on a quest for elucidation and identification. Instead, these connections function as a productive critical category that makes it possible to locate one of the sources for the obscure and enigmatic nature of the poems’ language.

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A Lover’s Complaint and the Tradition of Female Lament One of the reasons Shakespeare’s complaint has had such a vexed reception history is that it has not typically been read against the backdrop of the tradition to which it belongs: the mode of male-authored female complaint, which stretches as far back as Ovid and the biblical Book of Lamentations. A Lover’s Complaint is heavily indebted to this tradition and must be understood in relation to it. At the same time, Shakespeare’s poem, far from being a mere exercise in this literary form, is an intervention that significantly nuances it. Biblical, Classical, and Medieval Roots Though the term ‘complaint’ was not a classificatory category for female laments in England until the fourteenth century, much of the generic content of complaint is present in the Bible and Ovid. The first chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah gives complaint its classic topos when personifying Jerusalem as a ‘bereft’ and ‘ruined’ maiden weeping after the expulsion of its inhabitants. In Lamentations, Jerusalem is overheard telling the tale of her ‘fall’ by an implicitly male auditor. Jerusalem then confesses the sins that brought about her ruin (1: 8-9, 18-19) and ultimately recognizes the need to repent (2: 21-26). The biblical lament of Jerusalem manifests some of the essential components of what will come to be called de casibus complaint. The prototype for de casibus complaints was Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (‘On the Falls of Famous Men’) published in 1363. In the 1430’s, Lydgate produced an English translation of Boccaccio’s text as The Fall of Princes. In the de casibus complaint, a voice— usually female—rues the fickleness of fortune and the loss of greatness. Because de casibus consistently metaphorizes pride, power and prominence as evils caused by unregulated female sexuality, its often vain female protagonist wavers between making excuses for herself and confessing her guilt. Lamentations 1: 9-10 establishes this trend; it states that Jerusalem’s ‘filthiness is in her skirts’ and that ‘the heathen entered into her sanctuary.’ What the metaphorizing tendencies of Lamentations and the de casibus tradition produce over time as a narrative structure is the ventiloquism of a female voice by a male auditor/poet for didactic and frequently patriarchal purposes. Finally, the elegiac topos bequeathed to medieval poets by Lamentations conveys the sense that the female complaint has a necessarily dramatic dimension to it. Jerusalem is overheard, and her speech consequently becomes a performance. Most major medieval laments, therefore, stage themselves as a scene in which an unseen male poet comes across a forsaken maiden in a pastoral setting connoting the loss of innocence (these are the celebrated chansons d’aventure). The poet listens attentively to the wailing song of this fallen woman, and then publicizes her woe framed by his editorial commentary, which typically makes a moral judgment on the maiden. This moralism has caused some scholars of early modern culture such as Elizabeth Harvey to argue that the complaint is almost always ‘the vehicle of a patriarchal didacticism, a way of controlling female desire and promulgating a particular version of female sexuality, one that relies on or responds to a forceful, sometimes violent male sexuality’ (141). Complaint’s ‘passionately static nature,’ Harvey continues, ‘and its repetitive, often formulaic

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rhetoric depict a kind of cultural imprisonment of feminine erotic experience’ (141). By the time female laments started to come together under the general category of ‘complaint’ towards the high and late Middle Ages, another significant influence contributed to shaping their form and ethos: that of Ovid. Ovid’s importance to Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate cannot be overstated. This is especially true of his Heroides. In eighteen of the twenty-one verse epistles of Heroides, Ovid manages to take the female lament, which, up until the first century A.D., had been confined to dramatic dialogue, and give it the psychological force of an extended lyric. In giving to female complaint a lyrical dimension, Ovid provides the mode with greater psychological realism, he introduces eroticism as valid subject-matter, and he emphasizes ‘that public morality and private behavior are frequently at odds’ (Isbell ix). He thus complicates the didactic nature of complaint by foregrounding feminine sexuality and suffering as subjective as well as objective. Hence, to some extent, he invites sympathetic readerly response. Ovid’s assumption of the female voice in the Heroides, his refiguring of the female lament as a narratively cross-dressed, first-person lyrical outpouring enables the male-authored female complaint to claim for itself a certain degree of authority. In a sense, Ovid closes the distance between male author/narrator and female complainant that is characteristic of the epic verse of poets such as Virgil. In Book IV of The Aeneid, Virgil describes and reports on Dido’s sorrows after the departure of Aeneas. In the Heroides, Ovid speaks in the voice of Dido herself. He may thus seem to establish a legitimizing proximity to the source of his complaint. In many of the medieval imitations of Ovidian complaint, such as Chaucer’s Compleynte of Queene Annelida and False Arcite (c. 1372-80), the distance between male author and female complainant is further minimized by the poet’s (disingenuous) claim to be drawing the words of the lament he is reporting from a source-text actually written by a woman. ‘To imply that you are,’ Kerrigan explains, ‘though male, working from female sources is a recurrent means by which plaintful ventriloquism claims authenticity’ (Motives of Woe 5). Such claims to authenticity are by no means simple exercises of patriarchal power or untroubled expressions of a desire to regulate female eroticism. Inevitably, when a male poet gives voice to feminine complaint, he must ‘sing absence,’ and his ‘safe’ position as observer or viewer of a female object is ‘hollowed out’ in the melopoeia or harmonious song of lament. In other words, the male narrator of female complaint is at least partially transformed by his material, caught up in what Kerrigan has identified in his discussion of late medieval and Renaissance lament as the ‘imaginary acoustics of the age’ (Motives of Woe 23). The poet therefore occupies more than usurps the stereotypically feminine position. This is why, after Ovid, caves, grottoes, valleys, hollowed-out trees, proximity to bodies of water, or, in Shakespeare’s case, ‘concave wombes’ (A Lover’s Complaint line 1) are so very often the sites within which the encounter between complaining maiden and ‘framing’ poetic narrator occurs. It is also why the accounts male poets give of the ‘sad-tuned tales’ (A Lover’s Complaint line 4) they overhear are frequently called ‘echoes’ or even ‘rewordings’ (A Lover’s Complaint line 1). Patriarchal didacticism does, that is, play an undeniable role in male-authored female complaint, but often it can do so only at the cost of destabilizing the

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conventions of gender informing it. Reliance on Ovid as a model to imitate, therefore, can potentially jeopardize a poet’s ability to achieve the distance necessary for the didactic drawing up of moral judgments required by de casibus convention. Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate were all significantly influenced by Ovid. All but one of the exemplary ladies in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (c. 1385-86) came from Ovid, and in several of the books corresponding to the seven deadly sins into which Gower divides his Confessio Amantis (c. 1390), Gower retells plaintive stories from the Heroides. Similarly, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes imitates the ‘conventional manner of the Heroides,’ although Lydgate, unlike Chaucer and Gower, is less interested in ‘the accuracy of the emotions displayed’ than in ‘delight in the ordering of those emotions into a formal pattern’ (Pearsall, qtd. Underwood 11). Ovidian influence on these three major authors does not manage to affect their de casibus didacticism. Hence the content of medieval female complaint still has a largely exemplary function. The major innovations the medieval period offers to the mode are formal. Borrowing the stanza form from Boccaccio’s Teseida (c. 1339-40), Chaucer writes his Compleynte of Annelida in decasyllabic rhyme royal (ababbcc) stanzas. Rhyme royal henceforth becomes the most widely employed stanzaic and metrical form for complaint poetry. Rhyme royal is the perfect vehicle for the complaint’s urge toward confessional completeness, since, as Kerrigan notes, ‘accoustically [its] enclosed chime and final couplet … rising to a moment of fullness within the stanza before furthering the voice to a pointed or elegiac conclusion, give definition to what is declared’ (Motives of Woe 46). Chaucer made one other significant intervention into the lament tradition. Despite his obvious debt to Ovid’s psychological realism, Chaucer ultimately discards the Ovidian form of the epistolary lament. Instead, he reasserts a complex narrative frame that—as either dream vision or supernatural visitation—distances narrator from complainant. Whether Chaucer does this because of a desire to preserve moralizing distance or to suggest the poet’s complicity with the wrong done to the woman in the first place is unclear. But after Chaucer, the lyrical content of complaint moves away from epistolary formality back towards a foregrounding of individual drama. The Sixteenth Century In the sixteenth century, Petrarchan sonneteering, de casibus female complaint, and Ovidianism become closely associated. The wide dissemination of Golding’s and Turberville’s 1596-97 translations of the Metamorphoses and Heroicall Epistles testifies to Ovid’s pervasive influence on sixteenth-century literary culture. And the traditions of Petrarchism and female complaint counterpoint one another, as language of male seduction and poetic expression of what happens when a woman succumbs to such seduction. By the end of the sixteenth century, this counterpointing is formalized in the structure of poetry volumes. Typically, a sixteenth-century sonnet cycle explores a male lover’s attempts to win the affection of a seemingly unattainable lady. After his love-sickness reaches an impasse, a

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narrative complaint in the voice of a fallen and/or abandoned woman helps to make sense of the conflicted emotions that have been the subject of his sonnets. Sometimes the female complainant functions as a foil to the unattainable lady of the sonnets’ erotic address. At other times, the female complainant’s dejection identifies her predicament with that of the love-sick male poet and invites readers to sympathize with him. At still other times, the female lament acts as a warning of what would happen to the unattainable Petrarchan lady were she to give in to her lover’s wooing, throwing into question the sincerity of the panegyric of the poetlover’s preceding sonnets. The presence of patriarchal didacticism is still an important component of complaint in the sixteenth century. The fact that one of the first major female complaints of the period—Thomas Churchyard’s Shores Wife—appears in the 1563 edition of Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates is telling. In keeping with the de casibus tradition, the female speaker in this poem—the ghost of the married mistress of Edward IV—realizes, after the death of her king and her subsequent fall from power, that she has ‘spent so yll her dayes’ and encourages readers not to make a ‘myrrour’ of her ‘great overthrowe’ (lines 390, 392). Churchyard’s female complaint, with its ruined, penitent, exemplary speaker, does not seem to offer anything new to the tradition. But even in Churchyard’s early poem, some of the tensions implicit in the material of male-authored female lament are operative. For one thing, ‘there are contradictions on almost every level of the poem’ (Schmitz 119). Though Shore’s Wife purports to be condemning her past behavior, she actually begins to give the term ‘complaint’ something of the legal sense that gains importance in the Renaissance; in the ‘courtroom’ of this poem, she ‘plead[s] her … case at large’ and ‘blame[s] her persecutor’ (lines 113, 118). She proceeds to explain that she bears precious little responsibility for what has happened to her, and that the world actually has treated her quite unfairly. If Shore’s Wife were the vain figure found in many laments, the poem could take a moralizing step back and judge her pleading as the unwillingness of a sinner to assume responsibility. Yet the poem depicts her as neither vain nor proud. It goes out of its way to emphasize her virtues. ‘… Bent of kinde to do some good,’ she says, ‘I ever did upholde the common weale/I had delight to save the gylteles bloud/… And helpt them up, that might have bene orethrowne’ (lines 198-203). Passages such as this weight the poem towards a positive judgment of Shore’s Wife, so that the poem’s moralism is undercut. Something more than male ventriloquism of a female voice begins to speak in Churchyard’s poem, an important influence on subsequent complaints. Tension between sympathy for a fallen woman and patriarchal moralizing resonates in later complaints, foremost among them Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond and Lodge’s Tragicall Complaint of Elstred. In Elstred, the poet-lover Damon (who has in the preceding forty sonnets been wooing an unresponsive Phillis) encounters ‘A dolefull Queene’ (lines 5-7) who proceeds to ‘weepe her wretched state’ so that her story ‘May teache successions to avoyde [her] fall’ (lines 21, 24). This frame immediately identifies the poem as de casibus complaint, and Elstred, like Shore’s Wife, recognizes she has wasted her life in ‘worldly’ pursuits. As Elstred tells her tale, she is revealed as the helpless victim of violent kings who gain and lose her as a possession in the vicissitudes of war. Elstred genuinely falls

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in love with Locrinus, the last king who possesses her, and though for political reasons he marries another woman (Guendolen), she listens to the king’s ‘sweet chaines of honny speech,’ and agrees to be hidden from the queen in a labyrinth. There she eventually bears Locrinus a daughter, Sabrina. After a few years of relative happiness, the wrath and jealousy of the queen cause an uprising that overthrows Locrinus, and Elstred and her daughter are left at the mercy of Guendolen, who becomes the moralizing figure in the poem, ultimately ordering the daughter’s drowning. Elstred casts herself into the river to save her daughter. The innocent Sabrina’s pleas for mercy and the image of Elstred as self-sacrificing mother problematize the moral mission of this de casibus lament, which invites sympathy for the plaintive speaker, and stages moral judgment (in the figure of Queen Guendolen) as little more than barely concealed rage and violence. Since the male poet-narrator as voice of judgement has been pre-empted by a figure in the complaint itself, he has little to do at the end of the poem other than equivocate. ‘I gotte home,’ he concludes, ‘and weepingly thus pend it/Careless of those that scorne and cannot mend it.’ It is unclear whether the ‘mend[ing]’ is of Elstred’s conduct as represented in the poem, or of his artistic talent, which is insufficient for the conveying of so beautiful and sad a tale. Lodge’s Elstred further questions of the requirements of the de casibus tradition, marking the beginnings of a tendency for the feminine content of complaint to appropriate the position of the male auditor. Lodge’s complaint could be interpreted as offering closure to the preceding sonnet sequence to Phillis by pointing out what Phillis has to lose if she gives in to wooing. But Elstred never explicitly refers to Phillis, and the precise relationship between the complaint and sonnets remains uncertain. Such is not the case in Daniel’s Delia and the Complaint of Rosamond, published the year before Elstred (1592), perhaps the most influential volume of its kind. In the fifty sonnets comprising Delia, Daniel’s poet-lover praises his object as an earthly manifestation of the Platonic ideal of beauty anagramatized in her name. In standard Petrarchan fashion, his love remains unrequited, and in two short, anacreontic odes following the sonnet sequence, he claims he shall die of love for Delia. Subsequently, The Complaint of Rosamond begins. In this complaint, the ghost of Rosamond appears to the poet-lover. Because of her sins—she was mistress of King Henry II, and was poisoned by the King’s jealous wife—her spirit ‘is nowe denied/Her transport to the sweet Elisean rest’ (lines 8-9). As a result of Charon’s refusal to allow her entry into paradise, her ‘poore afflicted ghost’ has come ‘heere to plaine it’ (line 2), and to ask a favor. Rosamond’s ghost is indignant that the ‘legend’ of ‘Shores Wife,’ a commoner, ‘did such compassion finde’ (line 27), while her own story ‘Time hath long since worne out’ (line 17). She thus asks the poet-lover ‘To forme my case, and register my wrong’ (line 35). Doing so, she hints, might help his ‘owne distresse’ (line 37), for ‘Delia may happe to deygne to read our story’ (line 44) and subsequently ‘blesse us with one happy breath’ (line 53). The deal proves irresistible and the narrator wills Rosamond to ‘boldly tell her minde’ (line 60). In the case of this elaborate narrative frame there can be no question about the relationship between sonnets and complaint. The complaint explicitly presents itself as a double appeal to the lady whose ideal beauty occasioned the preceding sonnets. The frame insists on simultaneous distance and proximity between male poet-lover

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and female complainant. Singing Rosamond’s story and pleasing Delia serves the ends of both. Yet once contrasted with Rosamond’s loss, the poet-lover’s complaints of amatory woe ring hollow. Thus though Rosamond shares with Elstred and Shores Wife the de casibus tendency to ‘exemplifie’ the ‘frailtie’ of its female speaker and ‘to teach to others’ what she ‘learnt too late’ (lines 67-68), it also effects a hollowing out of its male frame and a critique of the Petrarchan language of seduction and suffering. The characterization of the poem’s victim/heroine is consonant with this critique. Though Rosamond condemns ‘the indiscretion of [her] feeble wayes’ (line 86), she is, for the most part, unrepentant. She is concerned primarily with ensuring a record of the beauty she once possessed and accusing those responsible for her fall. She remembers proudly how as a young noblewoman she drew ‘all mens eyes with wonder’ (line 114). She then explains that though she attracted the attentions of King Henry, she was determined to resist his advances, since there was a large age difference between them (line 189). ‘Safe mine honor stoode,’ she says, ‘till that in truth/One of my Sex, of place, and nature bad/Was set in ambush to intrap my youth (lines 211-13). This is an old ‘seeming Matrone, yet a sinfull monster’ (line 215). In the course of eleven stanzas, the Matrone urges the ‘poore unskillful mayde’ (line 308) to give in to the king’s wishes. These are followed by a gift from the king, ‘a casket richly wrought’ (line 373) whose engravings represent the mythological stories of young women who suffered because of the love of a god. Though this casket should act as a warning, Rosamond succumbs to temptation without assuming responsibility, saying she could not deny a king’s wishes. As in Elstred, in Daniel’s poem the female complainant is finally hidden in a labyrinth to protect her from the jealous eyes of the Queen. There she is visited nightly by the king. This ‘imprisonment’ in love culminates in the Queen’s eventually discovering Rosamond and forcing her to consume poison. The poem then somewhat oddly digresses. King Henry discovers Rosamond’s body and laments for eight stanzas. At the end of this male lament framed by the female voice of the complainant, the king swears to build a monument to immortalize Rosamond’s name. Yet the monument never materializes. ‘Where my body was interred,’ Rosamond claims, ‘… scarce any note descries/Unto these times, the memory of me’ (lines 703-707). Rosamond urges the poet-narrator to create the equivalent of this monument in verses he would sing to Delia, whose ‘sigh,’ she says, ‘may do me good’ (line 732). The Complaint of Rosamond is not a feminist poem, and its tone is sometimes patriarchal and didactic. Like Elstred and Shores Wife, it may seem to treat female chastity as a metaphor for social order. Yet this complaint unsettles many of the conventions of the de casibus lament. Rosamond’s refusal to read the moral engraved on the casket the king sends to her questions the effectiveness of exemplarity. The complaint’s critique of the language of male seduction unsettles the comfortable polarities of male framing subject and woeful female object. Rosamond puts conventional arguments of male Petrarchism into the speech of a Matrone who is a bawd. It contrasts female suffering with the affectation of the male poet-lover’s anacreontic odes and sonnets. And it frames an obviously narcissistic and disingenuous male complaint (King Henry’s) within a song about a female life tragically corrupted and wasted. All these poetic strategies reveal fissures in the

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reliability of male narrative authority, hinting at the possibility that female sexuality is inadequately represented by men. Daniel’s sonnets, odes, and complaint never explore the dimension of female sexuality that men’s words cannot represent. But by creating a structure in which female complaint and male Petrarchanism interact with and transform one another, they do indicate directions such an exploration might take. Shakespeare’s 1609 volume takes up the Delian pattern established by Daniel and dares to undertake just such an exploration. Shakespeare’s ‘fickle maid’ (line 5) is not a ghost or spirit like her literary predecessors. She does not regret having lost political power. And she does not apologize. She is a living, passionate woman whose ventriloquism of the young man who seduced her and the memory of her fall lead not to repentance, but to a desire to repeat an apparently sexually fulfilling experience. Once the maiden has uttered her desire to be ‘new pervert[ed]’ (line 329), the poem comes abruptly to an end. Neither the poet-narrator nor the reverend man who appears to listen to the maiden’s story, inscribing a male audience within the poem itself, reappears or speaks. Because the poem’s male frame is left incomplete, there is no opportunity for moralizing commentary on the maiden’s rhapsodic celebration of female sexual pleasure. The poem’s open-ended frame has led critics to speculate that it is unfinished. D.J. Snider’s 1922 biography of Shakespeare includes a comparison of the poem to the incomplete torsos of Michelangelo. To Snider, this is not necessarily a fault. ‘The imperfect sketch,’ he says, ‘may show the artists struggling in his workshop, which biographic revelation the perfect work tends to eliminate or smooth away’ (qtd. Rollins The Poems 2 600). But though it could be argued that this omission of the second half of the poem’s frame suggests that the poem is unfinished, it is far more likely that, as Kerrigan has noted, …the heroine grows beyond the conventions which enclose her, developing an intense and human inconsistency which might be called dramatic. If the poem starts in the territory of Spenser and Daniel, it ends, like the problem plays, with the incorrigibility of passion (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 425 n. 329)

A Lover’s Complaint in Shakespeare’s Work A Lover’s Complaint is a major Renaissance poem significantly nuancing the complaint tradition and opening that tradition to the articulation of female sexuality. It is also an important component of the Shakespearean canon. Not only is the poem Shakespeare’s own most sophisticated exercise in narrative and complaint poetry. A Lover’s Complaint also enriches the poetics of the Sonnets it follows in Q. And the poem adds its own poeticization of female sexuality to the portrayals of female passion in Shakespeare’s late plays. While as recent an editor as Jonathan Crewe has treated A Lover’s Complaint as marginal in Shakespeare’s creation, if it is at all by Shakespeare, we see the poem as central to understanding Shakespeare because of its manifold links to Shakespeare’s works in all genres.

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Connections with other Narrative Poems Shakespeare’s concluding A Lover’s Complaint with what seems a celebration of female sexuality might not have been possible had Shakespeare not been working with the elements of Ovidian eroticism and exemplary female lament for some time before its composition. In the erotic epyllion Venus and Adonis (1593) and in The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Shakespeare tackles the problem of female eroticism and its representation. Venus and Adonis includes passages luxuriating in the expression of female desire and foregrounding the active side of female sexuality. Venus is not the static object whose body parts are trapped in the conventional blazons of the Petrarchan male look. She produces her own blazon in order to gain power and allure. ‘Like a bold-faced suitor’ (line 6), she ‘hems’ Adonis in ‘Within the circuit’ of her ivory-white arms, and invites him to be the ‘deer’ roaming in and ‘feeding’ on the park, hills, fountains, and ‘sweet bottom grass’ of her body (lines 231-240). Venus is a frankly sexual woman, like the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint. Yet, unlike A Lover’s Complaint, Venus and Adonis ultimately seems to judge its female heroine negatively. Venus’s assumption of the role of wooer is treated as a curiosity, as are the tricks she devises to procure kisses from Adonis. Venus’s desire for Adonis is described ominously as a ‘vulture thought’ feeding ‘gluttonously’ (lines 555, 548) on the young, innocent man. The words of Venus herself represent active female sexuality as monstrous. When the goddess discovers Adonis’s dead body, she compares the boar’s goring of the boy to her kisses. ‘Had I been toothed like [the boar],’ she confesses, ‘With kissing him [Adonis] I should have killed him first’ (lines 1117-1118). In Venus and Adonis, then, Shakespeare begins to develop a language of active female seduction, but one limited by the prejudices of the age or the constraints of form. When Shakespeare returns to a consideration of female sexuality in The Rape of Lucrece, he immerses himself in the de casibus tradition of considering it as aligned with chastity and self-sacrifice. In this first attempt at complaint per se, Shakespeare is following in the footsteps of Livy—whose History of Rome uses the story of Lucrece as a political allegory—and Chaucer, whose Legende of Good Women treats Lucrece as an exemplar of the ideal virtues of wifely chastity or fidelity. Unlike these precursors, Shakespeare’s poem focuses on the psychological reality of rape as experienced by Lucrece. In the poem, Lucrece is raped by Tarquin whose lust had been aroused by her husband’s boasting of his wife’s beauty and chastity. Her complaint begins after the rape, as she contemplates the coming of the morning and tries to determine who is most at fault in her violation. The complaint goes on for a repetitive 268 lines (lines 747-1015), during which Lucrece blames her fate on Night, Opportunity, and ‘Misshapen Time’ (line 925), but eventually realizes that ‘speaking’ or lamenting her predicament is useless. ‘Out idle words, servants to shallow fools,’ she exclaims, ‘… This helpless smoke of words doth me no right’ (lines 1016, 1027). After this refusal of the complaint form, Lucrece decides the only ‘language’ available to her is that of her body, and stabs herself. This undoes her previous critique of female complaint. In her final act, Lucrece insists on being read as exemplum, reinscribing herself into the tradition the poem shows up as inaccurately expressing female suffering and limiting female eroticism to married chastity.

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Lucrece is ultimately a rejection of its literary mode, a self-consuming artifact testing the limits of male-authored female complaint and staging its own failures. If the Ovidian Venus and Adonis reveals the difficulties of representing without grotesque or comic distortion an active female sexuality, The Rape of Lucrece reveals the serious shortcomings of conventional representations of women as passive and chaste. Both poems seem to ask what Ovidian eroticism and the female complaint form would be like if they were freed from the refracting lens of a didactic, male, and patriarchal frame. A Lover’s Complaint, with its open frame and emphasis on female sexuality, is an attempt to answer this question. Connections with the Plays Drama may be another genre that questions the limits of representation for female sexuality, especially when this sexuality is confronted with the inevitability of loss. How can female sexuality find a voice even at the extremes of suffering entailed by amatory rejection? Shakespeare explores female passion in quite a number of his plays, and critics who have commented on A Lover’s Complaint have pointed to parallels between its love-struck female protagonist and the women in some of the plays of Shakespeare’s maturity. These include Cleopatra, a woman of raging passions whose emotion for the man she loves is of such intensity that ‘the sides of nature / Will not sustain it’ (I.xiii.22-23). Much like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint is a woman of exuberant feeling for the man she is attracted to; and when he is in question, she appears ‘all melting’ (line 300), her tears phenomenalizing the affects that overwhelm her as they do the Egyptian queen. Cleopatra speaks of her ‘size of sorrow’ as a size which must be ‘as great / As that which makes it’ (IV.xv.5-7). And since to Cleopatra, her beloved Antony is the measure of her world (even her ‘oblivion,’ she says, is ‘a very Antony’ [I.iii.114]) his loss must be ‘Proportioned’ to the sorrow of which it is a ‘cause’ (IV.xv.6). Like her, the woman of A Lover’s Complaint experiences such emotional devastation that her entire ‘world’ becomes a place stormed ‘with sorrow’s wind and rain’ (line 7). Yet there are marked differences between the poem’s maiden and Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a queen, the maiden of unknown class. Cleopatra’s love for Antony is reciprocated and consummated, whereas the maiden’s liaison with the youth may have culminated in a sexual liaison, but the relationship is certainly not reciprocal. The most marked differences between the two texts may be the result less of detail of portraiture than of literary form. The form of tragedy opens up possibilities of staging and showing the extremities of female passion in circumstances exceeding those in which, as Cleopatra puts it, there is ‘time for words’ (1.3.46-47). For Cleopatra, sublimation is impossible. The language in which she believes the most is that of the speaking body, of the amorous moments wherein, she says of herself and Antony, ‘Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows bent’ (I.iii.48-49). When the language of sex is made impossible by Antony’s absence, words cannot offer consolation. Antony’s departure from the scene, whether for war, another woman, or death, is cause for passion enacted more than spoken. When he

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dies, making their amorous reunion permanently impossible, Cleopatra’s response is not a complaint but an act: suicide ‘after the high Roman fashion’ (IV.xv.92). Cleopatra’s speech at the beginning of V.ii lasts for a brief ten lines in which she does not ‘complain’ and put her desolation into words, but expresses a wish to make ‘desolation’ itself a ‘better life’ (V.ii.1-2), which at the end of the scene is revealed to be death itself (V.ii.336-37). With Cleopatra Shakespeare tests the limits of drama and tragedy as he strives to fictionalize female passion in its extreme passage to the act, whether this act be sexual or suicidal. But what of female passion which cannot enjoy the same kind of enactment as Cleopatra’s, since it is directed at a man who, like the youth in A Lover’s Complaint, is as untrustworthy as he is charming? Such is Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well (1606). Several critics, most notably Roger Warren, John Roe, and Richard Underwood, have noted similarities between Helena and the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint, and between this late problem play and the poem in general. Similarities between All’s Well and A Lover’s Complaint are structural as well as characterological. In both texts (as in Troilus and Cressida) relations between man and woman are not dyadic but mediated, whether practically or psychologcially, by a male go-between (Parolles in All’s Well, Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, and the Reverend Man in the poem). But the parallel between the female characters is the most illuminating where the relationship of female sexuality to literary form is at stake. Like Cleopatra, like the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint, Helena makes the man she loves the pivot of her life, stating that her ‘imagination / Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s’ and that for her ‘there is no living, none / If Bertram be away’ (I.i.83). But the comic form, which offers only the plot devices of trickery and disguise, limits the staging of Helena’s passion just as in the play’s plot Bertram’s unreliability thwarts this passion itself. The resulting incommensurability between literary form and the emotion it seeks to stage produces a crippled portrayal of female suffering ecstasy. All’s Well nevertheless gives a glimpse of the female passion its form truncates in lines reminiscent of the female complaint mode such as Helena’s ‘In his radiance and collateral light /Must I be comforted, not in his sphere’ (I.i.86-87). Cymbeline continues Shakespeare’s study of the relationship of female affect and the constraints and possibilities of a literary mode, in this case, romance, with its combination of comedy’s disguises and mistaken identities, sinister turns of fate such as characterize tragedy, and resolutions replete with wonder. Into this complex mode Shakespeare inserts a female character (Imogen) whose feelings for the man she loves are as intense and absolute as Cleopatra’s, Helena’s, or those of the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint. Her ‘long[ing]’ for her ‘lord’ is ‘beyond beyond’ (II.ii.57). Like Cleopatra, Imogen is confident she ‘must die’ when she believes she has lost the fulcrum of her world (in her case, because she is told her husband has been unfaithful to her) (III.iv.75). In this, Imogen is also like Lucrece, whose response to loss (in her case, of her chastity) and grief is contemplating the taking of her own life. Unlike Lucrece and Cleopatra, Imogen does not die by her own hand. The romance form forecloses such a tragic outcome, yet is expansive enough to include a literary form to which Helena does not have access because of the constraints of comedy, however complexified: female lament. When Imogen is confronted not with words bespeaking loss—the news of her husband’s imputed infidelity to her

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bed (III.iv.45)—but with what looks like embodied loss—the headless dead body of Cloten, which she believes to be her husband—she neither acts nor contemplates a passage to the act. Instead, she laments: … O Posthumus, alas, Where is thy head? where’s that? Ay me! … … O, ’tis pregnant, pregnant! The drug he gave me, which he said was precious And cordial to me, have I not found it Murd’rous to the senses? That confirms it home: This is Pisanio’s deed, and Cloten—O! Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood, That we the horrider may seem to those Which chance to find us. O, my lord! my lord! (IV.ii.320-32)

Ironically, a text signifying a loss (of her husband’s fidelity) leads Imogen to the verge of an act wherein the body’s annihilation would bespeak lament, whereas a dead body leads her to proclaim the ineffectuality of textuality (‘To write, and read,’ she says, ‘be henceforth treacherous!’ [IV.ii.315-16])—even as she speaks effusively. The rhetoric of Imogen’s lament, with its multiple O’s, exclamations, and ‘Ay me!’ is closely reminiscent of that of the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint, especially in the poem’s concluding statement, which begins with ‘Ay me! I fell’ (line 321) and continues with a succession of anaphoric O’s (lines 322-27). And yet the irony of Imogen’s dramatic situation makes the very same rhetoric, so characteristic of the complaint mode, less effective. This irony deflates Imogen’s lament, makes it seem a pastiche of the form of female complaint whose rhetoric it adopts. The amalgamation of tragedy, comedy, and irony with which Shakespeare experiments as he constructs his complex romance seems to be as incompatible with the form of female complaint as Imogen’s response to the reality of the dramatic situation. The complex form of Shakespeare’s late romance makes female complaint a truncated structure, a rhetorical analogue of the headless body of Cloten, and no less grotesque. The case of Cymbeline suggests that the conflicting generic tensions constituting Shakespearean romance radically limit the possibility of female complaint’s functioning as an effective vehicle within that genre for the expression of female passion. Tragedy does not always show up female complaint as ineffective where the poetization of a woman’s intense sexuality is concerned. If in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare suggests that female passion at its tragic extreme passes into the bodily act, as it does also at the end of The Rape of Lucrece, in both Othello and Hamlet he demonstrates the possibility of female complaint’s inclusion in the tragic form, preluding a tragic moment of death as it does in Lucrece’s long lament. Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ towards the end of Othello (in the Folio version) may be the clearest instance of the inclusion of female lament which may be considered a literary analogue to A Lover’s Complaint in a dramatized tragedy. As Kerrigan notes, ‘this lament—widely circulated and set to music in the period—is entitled, in early black-letter printings … ‘A Lover’s Complaint, being forsaken of his Love’ and ‘The Complaint of a Lover forsaken of his Love.’ From this ‘double

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and direct testimony from the first half of the seventeenth century,’ Kerrigan deduces that Shakespeare knew what scholars now call the ‘Willow Song’ under a similar title, and ‘echoed or appropriated’ this title when writing A Lover’s Complaint (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 393). Analogues between the two texts extend to setting and situation. The Folio Othello presents a dejected woman lamenting her renunciation, sitting on the banks of a river: The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, Sing all a green willow; Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, Sing willow, willow, willow; The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans; Sing willow, willow, willow; Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones … (IV.iii.38-44)

The maiden in A Lover’s Complaint also articulates her lament while ‘set’ (probably seated) on the ‘margin’ or bank of a ‘river’ (lines 39-40), in accordance with a topos of the female complaint tradition (see above). The river’s ‘margin’ being described as ‘weeping’ may indicate, as Kerrigan suggests, that it is lined with willows, ‘trees traditionally associated with weeping and lost love’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 400). The ‘salt tears’ of the maiden in the ‘Willow Song’ find their counterpart in the ‘brine … pelleted in tears’ attributed to the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint (lines 7-8). Desdemona’s song of moan is not far from A Lover’s Complaint rhetorically too. The ‘sound of O’ which Joel Fineman diagnosed in Othello as a marker of subjectivity and desire extends to Desdemona’s ‘Will-ow Song,’ (46). The repetition of the sound of O in Desdemona’s ballad is reminiscent of the anaphoric O’s that mark the end of A Lover’s Complaint. One may imagine with Kerrigan that Shakespeare was ‘haunted by the ballad,’ adopted it as the basis for the ‘Willow Song’ in Othello, and then ‘recreat[ed] it—elaborated with a related narrative—in the poem A Lover’s Complaint (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 394). Echoes of the doleful ballad reverberate in Shakespeare’s other great late tragedy, Hamlet (1601). As Katherine Craik points out, ‘Ophelia’s … distracted lament in the face of Hamlet’s rejection closely resembles the young maiden’s’ (445). And the setting of Ophelia’s suicide is that described in Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ and encountered in the beginning of A Lover’s Complaint: beside a ‘willow’ which ‘grows askant the brook / That shows his hoary leaves in the glossy stream’ (IV.vii.165-66). A similar setting appears in Act IV of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), which Shakespeare probably co-authored with John Fletcher. In the subplot of the play, the daughter of a jailer, who remains unnamed and prototypical just as the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint, loses her sanity over unrequited love. The narrative of her madness, as told to her father by the man who hopes to woo her, closely resembles at once Desdemona’s ballad, the scene of Ophelia’s suicide, and the beginning of A Lover’s Complaint. Much like Desdemona, the jailer’s daughter is said to have sung ‘Nothing / but Willow, willow, willow’ (IV.i.79-80). Like Ophelia, who is said to have made ‘fantastic garlands’ of ‘crow-feathers, nettles, daisies, and long

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purples’ (Hamlet IV.vii. 167-68), the jailer’s daughter is said to have made ‘Rings’ out ‘Of rushes that grew by’ and to lament her lost love while ‘about her stucke / Thousand fresh water flowers of severall cullors’ (IV.i.88-93). Like the reported scene of Ophelia’s suicide, and like the opening of A Lover’s Complaint, the scene of the love-lorn jailer’s daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen takes place at a waterside (in the case of the latter play, a ‘great Lake that lies behind the Pallace’ [IV.i.54]). Like the speaker of A Lover’s Complaint, who hears a lamenting ‘voice’ (line 3), the jailer’s daughter auditor describes himself having ‘heard a voyce, a shrill one … that sung’ (IV.i.58). Much like the speaker of A Lover’s Complaint, who reports ‘down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale’ (line 3), the auditor of the jailer’s daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen reports ‘I laide me downe, / And listned to the words she song’ (IV.i.62-63). The situation of a forlorn woman lamenting on a waterfront or in the waters recurs in a cluster of Shakespeare’s late works: the ‘Willow Song’ in Othello, the story of the jailer’s daughter deranged for love of Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen, A Lover’s Complaint and the scene of Ophelia’s suicide. Of these, the Hamlet scene has become the most famous, the one from The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play plagued by authorship debates, the most obscure. The clear parallels in language and setting between the beginning of A Lover’s Complaint and the reported scene of the jailer’s daughter’s love lament have hardly been remarked upon. At the same time, most critics who have commented on A Lover’s Complaint’s connection to other Shakespearean works have noted the Hamlet connection. Kerrigan, who alerts his readers to the female complaint scene in The Two Noble Kinsmen, also points out that ‘Ophelia could easily be the ‘fickle maid’ deflowered, and the ‘fickle maid,’ without assistance, the drowned Ophelia’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 394). Roe similarly states in his essay in this volume that for the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint, the possibility of suicide by drowning is by no means remote. Underwood has remarked how ‘insofar as A Lover’s Complaint depicts an irreversible rejection of a pathetic lover, it resembles Hamlet,’ where Ophelia undergoes just this fate (45). Other critics have noted parallels between Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint which exceed the similarity between the love-stricken female characters and the topoi of female complaint. Muir finds that ‘the most interesting parallels’ between A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet have to do not with Ophelia but with the prince, ‘whose attentions,’ Polonius and Laertes assume ‘are as dishonorable as those of the handsome seducer of A Lover’s Complaint’ (161). Craik notices that ‘like the young seducer’s false promises, Hamlet’s vows are described by Polonius as false brokers’ (444). In his essay in this volume, Jon Harned notes a parallel between the ‘young aristocrat’ in the poem, whom Shakespeare’s narrator ‘alternately idealizes … [and] blames …for infidelity’ and Hamlet, who has lost the way of his desire, ‘still living in the alienating, imaginary world of his infantile attachment to Gertrude.’ Character parallels between Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint are certainly rich, straddling gender divisions. Yet where literary form is concerned, what links these two Shakespearean texts is the interest in female complaint, especially its confessional aspect. As Craik notes in ‘A Lover’s Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession,’ both ‘Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint … explore what happens to confessional laments when they are received by multiple listeners (439).

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In this, Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint have a conceptual proximity to another late Shakespearean play, Measure for Measure (1604). Statistical and stylistic studies such as those of Slater, Partridge, and Jackson have shown an affinity between the vocabulary and diction of A Lover’s Complaint and those of Measure for Measure (see above). Kerrigan suggests the two texts are also thematically and conceptually linked in their interest in ‘sexual irregularity, confessional utterance, problematic judgment, the cloistered life, worldly grace, and fiend as angel’ (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 394). Certainly, the play’s staging of ‘a kind of incest’ (III.i.138) finds its counterpart in the incestuous innuendoes of the relationship between the maiden and the Reverend Man (lines 62-68). The staging of Isabella’s cloistered life in the first scenes of Measure for Measure as subject to Angelo’s seduction has its parallel in A Lover’s Complaint, when the poem’s own ‘fiend’ cloaked in a rhetorical ‘garment of grace’ (lines 316-317) boasts about the attempt ‘to charm a sacred nun’ (line 160). But what A Lover’s Complaint and Measure for Measure share most explicitly is the interest in a woman’s confessional testimony. Isabella’s confessional utterance in Act 5 scene 1 of Measure for Measure is that of a woman who, subjected to the attempts at seduction, manages not only to withstand them but also to dupe and consequently accuse her seducer. A Lover’s Complaint, on the contrary, presents us with the confession of a woman who succumbs to her fiend as angel, and has no one to blame but herself. Both Isabella in Measure for Measure and the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint confess before the figure of an older man (the Duke in the case of the play, the Reverend Man in the case in the case of the poem). But Isabella’s confession is articulated from a strong moral position, and with a sense of dignity and psychological composure. Hence it has the potential to turn, as it does, into legal accusation. On the contrary, the confession of the morally fallen and emotionally distracted maiden in the poem can only be a ‘shrieking’ of ‘woe’ (line 20), to which the Reverend Man can listen (with all the therapeutic effects that the act of listening carries) but with respect to which no legal action can be undertaken. In being the confessional lament of a psychologically distracted woman instead of a woman whose virginity, equanimity, and morality are all intact, A Lover’s Complaint is closer to Hamlet than to Measure for Measure. The ‘undistinguished woe’ and ‘clamor of all size’ the speaker hears from the maiden at the beginning of A Lover’s Complaint (lines 20-21) are perhaps more extreme yet are not far from the disjointed snatches of ballad Ophelia sings in Act IV sc. v of Hamlet, an paindistorted echo of the story of her lost love for the Prince. The emotional disarray of the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint and of Ophelia as she sings of a dead or unfaithful lover (4.5.21-34) have led Craik to argue that both Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint ‘account for’ the failure of women to ‘confess properly’ ‘by proposing that incomplete confessions are the consequence of distraction’ (446). Ophelia’s pre-suicide fragments and the ‘Willow Song’ Desdemona sings shortly after her murder, then, are the closest instances to A Lover’s Complaint in Shakespeare’s late drama. In the two cases, Shakespeare explores the limits of the possibility for a linguistic expression of female passion at the extremes of grief. If Cleopatra’s is a case of female sexuality afflicted by loss whose only outlet is dramatic and corporeal, in Desdemona and in Ophelia Shakespeare considers the possibility of a poetic rather than dramatized expression of troubled sexuality, at the

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very limit separating it from the dramatized moment of imposed or desired death. A consideration of the links between A Lover’s Complaint and Shakespeare’s plays in all genres suggests that it is in tragedy that Shakespeare feels most comfortable exploring female sexuality at its limits. Yet in tragedy, this exploration is restricted. For all the parallels between the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint and Ophelia and Desdemona, the laments of the latter two occupy but a fraction of a dramatic frame whose focus is elsewhere, on the psychological and moral trials of a male tragic hero. When a woman ascends to the degree of tragic heroine, as is the case with Cleopatra, she does not lament when faced with the irrevocable loss of a love object. She acts: decisively, beyond words. If female sexuality at its extreme can be given literary expression of any sort, Shakespeare seems to be suggesting with A Lover’s Complaint, it is in the form of female complaint, hitherto reserved for the conventional representations of women as chaste and passive. Female complaint freed from the refracting lens of a didactic, patriarchal frame seems to be the most consummate literary vehicle Shakespeare perfected for the exploration of the furthest reaches of female sexuality. In doing so, Shakespeare redefined the form of female complaint and the conceptual ends for which it could be employed. Breaking the formal frame of the complaint, Shakespeare breaks new ground at once in literary genre and its use for the exploration of the interrelations of sex and language. Connections with the Sonnets If A Lover’s Complaint is Shakespeare’s consummate exploration of the links between female sexuality and literary form, it is best read intertextually, alongside plays and narrative poems engaged in similar exploration. Yet what are the intertextual links between this poem and the text alongside which it was originally printed, the Sonnets? Some scholars have believed the two poetic texts sufficiently far apart to merit separate critical discussion and editing. In 1794, Malone placed A Lover’s Complaint after The Passionate Pilgrim. Recent editions of the narrative poems featuring A Lover’s Complaint but not the Sonnets include Roe’s New Cambridge and Crewe’s Pelican. Booth’s exemplary Yale edition of the Sonnets omits A Lover’s Complaint. Influential studies such as Booth’s Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye consider the Sonnets a self-contained literary unit. But the work of Kerrigan and Duncan-Jones, followed by Bell’s and Roberts’, has argued for the coherence of the 1609 Quarto as an interpretive object ‘with particular resonances … and idiosyncracies’ (Roberts 6). Such work entails the necessity of reading the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint alongside each other. Links between the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint are not limited to the details of publication history and early modern generic conventions. Thematic and imagistic links are also plentiful, as suggested in Empson’s observation that A Lover’s Complaint is ‘a kind of echo of the Sonnets’ (15). The parallelism noted by several critics between the young man of the Sonnets and the poem’s youth (e.g. Duncan-Jones ‘Was Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ 171, Bell ‘That which thou hast done’ 466) is another link between the two texts. In A Lover’s Complaint, the youth’s

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beauty captivates his admirers (lines 89-91). The young man of the Sonnets enchants the speaker and others in a similar way: ‘But heaven in thy creation did decree /That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell’ (93.9-10). Both works are concerned with sex and gender instabilities. The young man in A Lover’s Complaint woos the maiden by reviewing his successful seduction of other women, yet we know he is able to enchant people of ‘sexes both.’ A similar uncertainty about the gender to which the young man may direct his sexual attention manifests itself in the Sonnets. Whereas sonnets such as 20 or 126 are markedly homosocial if not homosexual, a large number of sonnets do not address themselves to a specific gender (as de Grazia, Dubrow, and others note), the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets speak of a woman beloved, and in some sonnets, markedly 134 and 135, it is impossible to determine the gender of the speaker’s lover (or lovers). Parallels between A Lover’s Complaint and the Sonnets are not limited to characters or to their treatment of sex/gender instabilities but extend to recurrent images, such as tears. Bell notes how the dissolution of the maiden’s resistance to seduction when confronted with the ‘sheer joy of the male lover’s tears’ bespeaks an emotional process similar to that poeticized in sonnet 34, where Shakespeare speaks of the ‘pearl’ tears shed by his love, which ‘are rich and ransom all ill deeds’ (13-14) (That which thou hast done’ 467). Much later in the sequence, in sonnet 148, the speaker again reflects on the effect which his beloved’s tears have upon him, calling those tears ‘eyes’ which ‘Love’ has ‘put into [his] head’ but which have ‘no correspondence with true sight’ (1-2). Similarly, the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint speaks of her beloved’s tears as ‘infected moisture’ (line 309) which ‘poisoned’ her capacity for judgment (line 301). In A Lover’s Complaint as the Sonnets, tears are the currency of love. The language of economy in the two poems extends beyond the imagery of tears. In A Lover’s Complaint, the woman’s tears, shed by a river, are likened to ‘usury, applying wet to wet’ (line 40). In the Sonnets, the speaker enjoins the young man not to ‘have traffic with [him]self alone’ lest he become a ‘Profitless usurer’ (4.6, 9, 14). The youth’s reference to the economy of love in terms of lack, when he speaks of the necessity ‘to leave / The thing we have not, mastr’ring what not strives’ (lines 139-40), recalls sonnet 87’s ‘Farewell’ to what had been ‘too dear for … possessing’ in the first place, and whose ‘cause’ in the speaker is ‘wanting’ (lines 1, 7). The economic idiom of both texts might be seen as linked to a broader interest in legal categories. The ‘determinate’ bonds mentioned in sonnet 87 (line 4) are a legal as much as an economic category, and the famous ‘will’ of sonnets 135 and 136, which resonates in the reference to the youth’s ‘craft of will’ in line 126 of A Lover’s Complaint, straddles the registers of economy and the law in its reference to property bequeathed and legal document. And ‘will’ references the futurity of desire and the carnal dimension of sexuality too. Regarding the economic vocabulary of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint as part of a symbolic nexus where language meets the law was part of Fripp’s project in the 1930’s. Much more recently, Craik has pointed out that the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint alike exploit the ‘vocabulary of legal confession’ as a means to ‘explore the complex relation between literary voice and literary selfhood’ (458). The economic language shared by the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint opens up onto dimensions of early modern literature explored by cultural materialism.

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Economic terms in the Sonnets and in A Lover’s Complaint are used in conjunction with the depiction and characterization of cultural artifacts. Such are the ‘letters sadly penned in blood / With sleided silk feat and affectedly / Enswathed and sealed to curious secrecy’ the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint cries over (lines 47-49), or the ‘talents of … hair / With twisted metal amorously empleached’ the youth boasts his suitors had given him (lines 204-205), or the ‘picture’ of the youth his many admirers are said to have acquired ‘To serve their eyes’ and put in their minds (lines 134-35). In the sonnet sequence, the speaker alludes to such miniature pictures in sonnet 24, where his ‘eyes’ are said to have ‘drawn’ the beloved’s shape and ‘stelled’ it ‘in table of [his] heart’ (lines 1-2, 9), or in sonnet 62, where the speaker’s reflection in the mirror becomes a picture in which he ‘paint[s]’ his ‘age with beauty’ of the young man’s ‘days’ (line 14). Finally, the ‘riches’ the speaker says his beloved bestowed on him in sonnet 87 (line 6) resonate with the love tokens described in more detail in A Lover’s Complaint. Such parallels have led Roberts to note how ‘the complaint is furnished by the personal possessions that stock the sonnet sequence (lockets, jewels, pictures, papers) (147). In addition to shared image patterns (which support the claim that Q is coherently designed), the sonnets and complaint are linked in their characterization of male poet and female plainant. In her introduction to the 1999 Arden edition of Shakespeare’s poems, Duncan-Jones notes that both are captivated by their poetic fictions: the sonnet-speaker in celebrating a Dark Lady, the maiden in A Lover’s Complaint in rehearsing the ‘wooing’ of the young man. Both the Sonnets’ speaker and the complaint’s maiden are ‘compulsively faithful to an unfaithful love object’ (94). And both ultimately underscore that ‘neither emotionally nor physically’ may ‘desire be escaped’ (95). Besides parallels between sonnet speaker and female complainant, there are, as Roberts notes, ‘resonances…between the Dark Lady and the Complaint’s young man’ (149). Whereas the male speaker of the Sonnets ‘falls victim to the predatory and promiscuous desires of a destructive woman’ (the Dark Lady), in A Lover’s Complaint the female plainant falls prey to a false young man’ (Roberts 149). Thus, A Lover’s Complaint ‘repeatedly undermines the [misogynist] assumptions … so vehemently … voiced in the sonnet sequence,’ although these assumptions are ultimately framed as much as ruptured (151). Jennifer Laws similarly notices how the complaint ‘challenges the misogynist attitude in the sonnets by removing the chief blame for treachery from the female sex to the male’ (92). If the complaint displaces the Sonnets’ misogynist assumptions, as Laws and Roberts suggest, to what extent does it also, as Roberts suggests, present a ‘different version … of female desire’ (149)? If the Dark Lady is portrayed as sexually promiscuous, to what extent is she a foil, not a counterpart, of the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint, who iterates her desire to be ‘new pervert[ed]’ (line 329)? To us, the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint appear to present a similar version of (active) female desire and sexuality, although generic form refracts this version in different ways. Active female sexuality is reported in the sonnets in which the speaker is conventionally male, but granted a voice in the ensuing female complaint. A Lover’s Complaint offers a generically unusual positioning of a woman in the place of an active speaking subject of desire and sexuality. Counterpointing the complaint’s generically unusual positioning of a woman as subject uncontained by a

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didactic and misogynist frame, in the Sonnets a man is not only, as is the case in the panegyric sonnet tradition going back to Petrarch, the speaking subject. Throughout most of the Sonnets, a man is also the object of desire. In the composite Delian volume published by Thorpe in 1609, Shakespeare pushes the conventions of sonnet and female complaint to their limits in order to explore areas of human sexuality these genres usually leave in the shade. Within this singular literary enterprise, A Lover’s Complaint stands out as a work that reflects on possible generic media for the expression of female passion at its extreme in order to redefine its own genre as the most adequate medium for such poeticization. The Critical Heritage—Early Responses: From Benson’s 1640 Edition to Victorian Aestheticism How was A Lover’s Complaint received after its 1609 publication? There is no record of contemporary responses directly addressing A Lover’s Complaint. But if the 1609 Quarto was considered by its immediate audience as a unit—and we agree that it was—it may be that early references to the Sonnets such as Meres’ referred not only to the sequence of 154 sonnets at the beginning of the volume, but to the ensuing complaint as well. If so, there is reason to believe that the poem was favorably received by its first readers, perhaps while in manuscript form. However the poem was received, no second edition was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, nor for the entire time Thorpe remained an active publisher (until 1625). This contrasts markedly with the popularity of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which went through several editions in the seventeenth century. There are no records of allusions to the poem before John Benson’s 1640 edition. The silence about Q in the time between its publication and Benson’s edition may be the result of the waning of the complaint vogue in England. As Schiffer argues, this may also be the result of the general unavailability of volumes such as Q (‘Reading New Life’ 16). Marrotti has emphasized that in early modern culture, small quarto volumes of poetry, unlike more durable folio or octavo works, functioned as ‘self-destructive artifacts’ literally read out of existence (158). Thirteen of Thorpe’s original 1609 Quartos have survived. This is a surprisingly large number, and may indicate an unusual will among the volume’s first readers to preserve the poetry contained in it. John Benson’s 1640 edition, entitled POEMS | WRITTEN | BY | WIL. SHAKESPEARE. | Gent. was probably the form in which most seventeenth-century readers encountered A Lover’s Complaint. The edition has been down-rated by most scholars, especially because of its seemingly indiscriminate critical procedures. Benson did not include eight of the sonnets in his edition, and printed the 146 that he did include in an order different from Q’s. Sometimes, he amalgamated two to five sonnets into one poem to which he affixed a title of his own invention, such as ‘the glory of beautie’ (sonnets 67, 68, 69), ‘Injurious Time’ (sonnets 60, 63, 64, 65, 66), or ‘The benefit of friendship’ (Sonnets 30, 31, 32). Sometimes, Benson emended Shakespeare’s wording, most notably heterosexualizing some sonnets to the young man. The sonnets in Benson’s edition are intermingled with ‘The Phoenix and Turtle,’ poems from The Passionate Pilgrim, and poems by other authors such

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as Herrick, Fletcher, Jonson, Beaumont, Carew, and Milton. In the introduction to the new Arden edition of Shakespeare’s poems, Duncan-Jones accuses Benson’s edition of being ‘outrageously piratical and misleading’ and of ‘muddying the textual waters’ for ‘well over a century,’ until 1780, when it was displaced as an authoritative text by the publication of Malone’s edition (42-43). But the mixture that Benson’s editorial procedure produced did include A Lover’s Complaint, and for the first time in print since 1609. When Benson published his edition, the First (1623) and Second (1632) Folios of Shakespeare’s plays were already in circulation. Continuing editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece would have made that portion of Shakespeare’s narrative poetry available to a general reading public. The thrust of Benson’s editorial project was to ‘bring forth to the view of all men’ that portion of Shakespeare’s poetic enterprise that was not yet circulating in durable, material form that might ‘be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved Author in these his poems (preface). As Marrotti puts it, Benson offered his volume ‘as the completion of The Complete Works of Shakespeare’ (159). Benson’s presentation of Shakespeare’s poetry in his preface is similar in idiom to Meres’ praise of the ‘sugr’d sonnets’ of half a century before. Benson describes Shakespeare’s poems as ‘sweetely composed’ (‘preface’). In marked contrast to later critics who criticized the Complaint’s grammatical complexity, Benson described the poems in his volume, of which the Complaint was a part, as ‘Seren, cleere, and eligantly plaine’ (‘preface’). Benson’s reference to the ‘perfect eloquence’ of Shakespeare’s poems suggests that he regarded the poems, including A Lover’s Complaint, as exemplary exercises in literary conventions. Such has also been the argument of recent critics such as Margreta de Grazia and Arthur Marrotti. Marrotti stresses Benson’s treatment of the poems as ‘conventional … utterances within the context of the usual literary depiction of amorous experience’ (161). Benson’s arrangement of the poems in his volume, Marrotti implies, is not as haphazard as critics such as Duncan-Jones believe. Instead, Benson’s editorial project was to create a ‘new literary artifact’ out of the poems he included in his collection (161). Benson’s preface, with its emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of Shakespeare’s poetry, suggests he wished not only to ensure the availability of Shakespeare’s poetry in durable form but to emphasize its literary excellence in conventional modes. That Benson regarded the complaint tradition as one of these modes is strongly suggested by his amalgamating three of the sonnets (97, 98, 99) into a poem to which he gave the generic title ‘Complaint for his Loves absence,’ which resonates with the generalized, generic title A Lover’s Complaint. For Benson, that is, at least a portion of the sonnets as well as the longer narrative poem which concludes the 1609 Quarto which he used as copy-text were virtuoso performances in the complaint mode that provided what de Grazia calls ‘an expansive, generalized understanding of love’ (441). Benson’s volume set aesthetic taste with regard to Shakespeare’s poetry other than Lucrece and Venus and Adonis throughout the eighteenth century. The 1609 Quarto was reprinted in 1711 by Bernard Lintott and in 1766 by Steevens, publishing enterprises which increased the availability of A Lover’s Complaint to the growing reading public. But Benson’s volume, in which A Lover’s Complaint is granted equal weight as Shakespeare’s other poetic production, provided the basis for

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eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s poetry, including Gildon (1710, 1714), Sewell (1725, 1728), Ewing (1717), and Evans (1775). It was used as a basis for an edition of Shakespeare’s poetry as late as Durrell’s New York edition of 1817-1818 (Schiffer ‘Reading New Life’ 58). Throughout most of the eighteenth century, that is, response to A Lover’s Complaint probably drew on Benson’s judgment of it as part of Shakespeare’s ‘sweetely composed’ exercises in literary conventions. Judgment of the aesthetic merit of A Lover’s Complaint did not change with the landmark appearance of Malone’s 1780 edition of Shakespeare’s poetry, the first to provide Q with textual notes and critical commentary. Indeed, this favorable aesthetic judgment became more explicit. Malone introduces A Lover’s Complaint with undisguised admiration. ‘In this beautiful poem,’ he writes, ‘Shakespeare perhaps meant to break a lance with Spenser.’ He adds: ‘I wonder that it has not attracted the attention of some English painter, the opening being uncommonly picturesque. The figures, of the lady and the old man should be standing, not sitting, by the riverside, Shakespeare reclining on a hill’ (371). Like Benson, who regarded A Lover’s Complaint as part of the ‘gentle straines’ comprising the ‘perfect eloquence of Shakespeare’s poetry’, Malone presents the poem as meriting the highest aesthetic judgment, that of the ‘beautiful.’ The marked difference between Benson’s response to the poem and Malone’s is not aesthetic but critical. If for Benson, Shakespeare’s poetry was primarily a virtuoso performance in literary convention, Malone, whose editing of this poetry coincided with his biographical work on Shakespeare and the wave of bardolatry that had commenced with the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, regarded this poetry as a poetization of Shakespeare’s self. As de Grazia puts it, Malone’s driving assumption was that the ‘I’ of the Sonnets and Shakespeare were identical (145). For Malone, then, the avowed beauty of A Lover’s Complaint lay less in its virtuoso use of the complaint convention than in its ‘picturesque’ portrayal of a witnessed experience. Malone’s admiration of the poem’s emotionally-charged landscape is consonant with his appreciation of its ‘pathetick tenderness.’ In his sensitivity to the emotional dimension of poetry, Malone may be said to share the aesthetic and critical tendencies of the romantic poets and theorists who began to flourish in his day. His understanding of the ‘I’ of Shakespeare’s poetry as the poet himself certainly seems to be informed by a romantic aesthetic which it also influenced. As Schiffer points out, this understanding, evident also in Malone’s introduction of A Lover’s Complaint in his edition, informed Wordsworth’s insistence in 1815 that Shakespeare’s poetry ‘expresses his own feelings in his own person’ (‘Reading New Life’ 23). For the most part, the English romantics did not express enthusiasm for A Lover’s Complaint. Keats did copy his ‘Bright Star’ sonnet in his volume of Shakespeare’s poem on a blank page facing A Lover’s Complaint during the last night he spent in English waters’ (Rollins The Poems 2:586). This may be a testament to his aesthetic appreciation of a poem by a predecessor whose poetic achievement he considered a bright star for his own talent. Coleridge, on the other hand, does not mention A Lover’s Complaint in his Biographia Literaria, where a full chapter is devoted to an analysis—even if a disparaging one—of Shakespeare’s two other narrative poems. William Hazlitt pronounced the poem distinctly inferior even to the poems in A Passionate Pilgrim (116). To Hazlitt’s romantic sensibility, the poem’s

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rhetorical sprezzatura, probably the very reason for Benson’s including it in his edition as an example of Shakespeare’s ‘perfect eloquence,’ was a fault which detracted from its ability to convey human emotion. In this, Hazlitt’s denunciation of A Lover’s Complaint (along with all of Shakespeare’s poetry) is similar in spirit to Coleridge’s denunciation of The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis for ‘icehouses.’ Not until the nineteenth century and the critical work of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne would another major figure in English literary speak well of A Lover’s Complaint. Swinburne wrote that the poem ‘contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouschafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man’ (Rollins The Poems 2 589). Swinburne’s appreciation of the poem’s versification and its partaking of the Euphuistic vogue in English Renaissance poetics, which involves the foregrounding of the formal features of poetry (especially symmetry and proportion) over content, marks another turn in literary critical trends—this time from a romantic privileging of pathos and individual expression to aestheticism. Such aestheticism is manifest also in F.T. Palgrave’s 1865 eulogizing of the ‘sad and musical intensity’ with which it portrays ‘passion as a law to itself’ (Rollins The Poems 2 587). The anonymous Fraser’s Magazine article on the poem which appeared a decade earlier had already described the ‘melody of the numbers’ in the poem as ‘marvellous’ and as confirming Shakespeare’s having been ‘the first Englishman born with the faculty of musical speech’ (Rollins The Poems 2 586). In 1857, Alexander Dyce likewise foregrounded the aesthetic effects of the poem’s form when speaking of it as ‘a poem of considerable beauty’ (Rollins The Poems 2 586). Verity, another editor of the period, proclaimed a similar aesthetic sensibility to style and prosody as enhancers of the effect of beauty when speaking of the poem as ‘a beautiful piece of narrative verse which makes us wish … that Shakespeare had given the world a larger body of such poetry.’ Like Palgrave, he especially admires the poem for its ‘exquisite verbal melody’ (Rollins The Poems 2 590). In a book from 1897, E.J. Dunning speaks of A Lover’s Complaint as the ‘crowning feature’ of a poetic triptych which he believes included also Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets (Rollins The Poems 2 592). An aestheticist sensibility also informs George Wyndham’s reference to Shakespeare’s poetry (which in his edition includes A Lover’s Complaint), as ‘concerned chiefly with the delight … of Beauty’ and reflecting ‘this inspiration in their form’ (xiii). All else but the dedication to beauty through form, Wyndham writes, ‘whether of personal experience or contemporary art’ is ‘mere raw material and conventional trick’ (xiii). With the rise of Victorian aestheticism, admiration of the poem’s rhetorical sophistication as contributing to its beauty, such as had been manifest in Benson’s edition, had returned. There is another, perhaps related, reason for the resurgence of the aesthetic appreciation for A Lover’s Complaint. Late nineteenth century England witnessed an influx of scholarly interest in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English poetry. This interest was manifest in the project of the Reverend Alexander Grosart, who edited a large number of volumes of the poetry (and prose) of Shakespeare’s contemporaries for a list of fifty-two subscribers, which included Swinburne, himself the author of several studies on Renaissance poetry. Grosart’s volumes, in

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which the poetry of many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries was reprinted with editorial commentary, both reflected a growing interest in Renaissance poetic artistry in late Victorian England, and helped perpetuate this interest. The aesthetic appreciation for the euphuistic artistry of Renaissance poetry manifest in Swinburne’s commentary on A Lover’s Complaint and editorial ventures such as Grosart’s resonates in other nineteenth-century responses to Shakespeare’s poem, most of which stress its formal properties as accounting for its aesthetic achievements. Samuel Butler considered it a ‘beautiful’ poem (Rollins The Poems 2 587). George Rylands speaks of it as an ‘Elizabethan masterpiece,’ declaring it ‘shows an advance on the lyrical Venus and Adonis and the rhetorical Lucrece’ (Rollins The Poems 2 586). Charles Knight wrote in 1841 that A Lover’s Complaint is ‘distinguished by that condensation of thought and outpouring of imagery which are the characteristics of Shakespeare’s poems’ (Rollins The Poems 2 586). J.S. Hart wrote in 1850 that A Lover’s Complaint tells a well-known love story, but with ‘perfection and beauty’ unequalled before or since (Rollins The Poems 2 586). These favorable responses to the poem bespeak an appreciation of its artistry as a ‘masterpiece’ or a ‘distinguished’ manifestation of attributes characteristic of Shakespeare’s poetics (e.g. ‘condensation of thought’ and profuse imagery). They also evince a shade of critical response which had not been apparent before in the poem’s reception history: a sense of its place in the linear, evolutionary progression of Shakespeare’s poetry to increasing excellence. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century responses to the poem show another distinctive feature other than admiration for the beauty of the poem’s artistry: appreciation of its psychological profundity. Written at a time when in France, the poet Paul Valery embarked upon theoretical speculations designed to formalize psychic structure, when in Vienna, Sigmund Freud was beginning to theorize the deep reaches of the psyche, responses to A Lover’s Complaint at the turn of the twentieth century evince a fascination not with its display but with its exploration of passion. German critic M.J. Wolff writes in 1907 that the value of A Lover’s Complaint lies not only in the richness of its stylistic elaboration’ but especially ‘in its analysis of a human soul’ which yields ‘psychological truth’ (Rollins The Poems 2 594). R.M. Alden voices a similar sensitivity to the combination of verbal artistry and emotional depth in his 1913 edition of Shakespeare’s poems when praising Shakespeare for a style ‘so fluent and so compact, so sensuous and yet so psychologically penetrating’ (Rollins The Poems 2 597). Half a century earlier, Victor Hugo, a writer much concerned with the portrayal of the deep reaches of the psyche, had found the poem worthy of comment, and no less significantly, of translation (Rollins The Poems 2 585, 587). For all their sense of the aesthetic, and growing interest in psychological depth, nineteenth and early twentieth century responses to A Lover’s Complaint are marred by the effects of the romantic disparagement of the poem. These effects included doubts about authorship that continue to plague the poem’s reception and a related tendency to critical silence about the poem and its omission from editions of the poetry. Thus, while George Rylands celebrates the poem as a ‘masterpiece,’ he also notes that it is ‘little appreciated’ (Rollins The Poems 2 587). George Sainstbury, another late Victorian admirer of Renaissance poetic artistry, calls the poem ‘exquisite’ (160), yet already notes its ‘uncertain’ authorship and lists it among

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Shakespeare’s ‘minor poems,’ alongside The Passionate Pilgrim (160). Nine of the scholars and critics cited by Rollins who wrote about the poem before 1912 considered Shakespeare’s authorship dubious, and these include, besides Hazlitt and Sainstbury, as significant a figure in the history of Shakespeare criticism as Sir Sidney Lee, author of A Life of William Shakespeare (1898). In 1927, when John Dover Wilson, a towering figure in twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism, dismissed the poem as ‘an elaborate jest’ (Rollins The Poems 2 599), he was already writing in a tradition in which appreciation of the poem’s formal beauty and psychological depth were regularly undermined by gestures of dismissal, whether these took the form of doubts concerning Shakespeare’s authorship or complaints about stylistic difficulty and psychological incredibility. A Lover’s Complaint had acquired its pride of place as, in Rollins’ words, ‘a poem which stimulates admiration or contempt to a marked degree’ (The Poems 2 585). Contemporary Criticism: The Twentieth Century and Beyond Late Victorian responses to the poem are already plagued by romantic distaste for its abstruse rhetoric and highly structured nature, yet still fascinated with its aesthetic complexity. Only after the turn of the twentieth century and the publication of Mackail’s essay did the poem’s fate take a marked turn for the worse. The following review of this criticism will focus on commentary relating to formal and conceptual issues other than authorship and intertextuality explored above. After Mackail’s essay, even as ardent an admirer of sixteenth-century poetry as C.S. Lewis found nothing to admire in A Lover’s Complaint. Whereas the euphuistic work of John Dickenson, known only through Grosart’s editorial enterprise, elicits Lewis’ reverence as being ‘perfect in [its] kind’ (426), the euphuism of A Lover’s Complaint, which Swinburne had celebrated a few decades earlier, elicits only Lewis’ contempt. Lewis considers the poem ‘a still-born chanson d’aventure … corrupt in text … and dialectically unlike Shakespeare’ (503). Over the following three decades, critics continued to decry the poem’s diction, with the exception of William Empson’s abovementioned New Critical admiration of the artistic ambiguity of the poem’s ending (16). Maxwell describes the poem as plagued by stylistic ‘defects’ (xxxiv). Hallett Smith complains the poem’s language is ‘too mannered’ (1781). Kenneth Muir diagnoses the poem as marred by ‘weak lines and clumsy expressions,’ possibly the effect of generic choice (156). From the 1930’s through the 1960’s, denunciations of the poem’s diction went hand in hand with negative evaluations of its artistic merit. Lewis’s judgment of the poem as ‘poetically inconsiderable’ was followed by Maxwell’s declaration of A Lover’s Complaint ‘a poem of very little merit’ (xxxiv). Muir too pronounces the complaint ‘inferior in most ways to Shakespeare’s other narrative poems’ and to the Sonnets (166). Hallett Smith makes a similar leap from pointing to the difficulty of the poem’s language to proclaiming the poem’s aesthetic inferiority. Smith declares that A Lover’s Complaint ‘is not a major work in any sense,’ and sees it as no more than ‘an exercise in a popular literary form’ which ‘neither detracts from [Shakespeare’s] achievement nor adds anything to it (1781).

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Commentaries from the 1970’s to the present continue to point to the difficulty and complexity of the poem’s language, yet for the most part do not treat this difficulty as a fault. Kerrigan acknowledges A Lover’s Complaint’s strange diction, convoluted syntax, and ‘opaque’ imagery (Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 389), yet his work remains among the most enthusiastic defenses of a poem. More recently, Bell has sought to establish what she regards as ‘abstruse and virtually unexplicated poetry’ (‘That Which Thou Hast Done’ 456) as a key to the drama unfolding in the Sonnets. Other commentators have tended not to be judgmental about the difficulty of the poem’s language, striving instead to ponder the strategic ends for which this difficult style was selected. Walter Cohen conventionally points out the poem’s ’archaic’ diction as a cause of its opacity, but historicizes this diction as what makes the poem characteristic of the female complaint genre, whose concern with memory dictates the attempt ‘to evoke bygone days’ (568). Most recently, Colin Burrow has identified ‘archaism’ as an attribute of the challenge to interpretation and even understanding posed by the poem’s language (139, 140, 146). For Burrow as for Cohen, recognizing the poem’s linguistic difficulty occasions reflection on this difficulty’s literary function. In Burrow’s analysis, the poem’s difficulty is inseparable from its general fascination with ‘enigmas’ (146), manifest also in the ‘controlled uncertainty’ it creates ‘about who is speaking’ (142) and the way in which it makes ‘gender divisions blur’ (143). Burrow’s consideration of linguistic complexity as instrumental in the creation of ambiguity is reminiscent of Empson’s New Critical appreciation of the poem’s intermingling of the jovial with the plaintful. Yet while Empson regards the ambiguity created by the poem’s language an indication of aesthetic merit, Burrow, in a post-structuralist vein, sees it as a mark of aporias. From Burrow’s poststructuralist perspective, the function of ambiguities is not artistic balance, but cognitive disorientation. The poem, he says, ‘wants the ground to move under its readers’ (143). The poem’s ambiguity is also intimately related to political contexts such as those underscored by feminist criticism and other socio-culturally informed approaches to literature, which understand it as interrogating assumptions about gender. In underscoring A Lover’s Complaint’s opacity, Burrow’s work invites further post-structuralist (Derridean, Foucualdian, other postmodernist) explorations of the poem. In using observations about the poem’s diction as a point of departure for reflection about the poem’s connection to the cultural conditions of its production (norms of genre or of gender), Burrow’s line of argument coincides with Cohen’s. And in its view of the poem’s diction as inextricable from its treatment of gender, Burrow’s analysis is in tune with recent studies of the poem by Rees, Laws, Bell, and Sharon-Zisser (see below). Recent treatments of the linguistic complexity of A Lover’s Complaint open up the poem to critical scrutiny from multiple perspectives, including those of new historicism, gender and queer theory, deconstruction, and post-structuralism. At the same time, a few commentators on the contemporary scene still forge connections between the poem’s linguistic difficulties and its putatively low aesthetic value. Roe notes the poem’s many ‘nonce-words and neologisms which analyzed out of their context look grammatically or syntactically recalcitrant,’ and argues that the poem’s ‘lack of narrative flow or forcefulness’ only exposes those as ‘ill-digested or infelicitous.’ The combination of grammatical recalcitrance and ‘imperfect …

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narrative expression,’ Roe concludes, ‘leaves it a good deal less readable, and artistically less assured, than Shakespeare’s other verse narratives’ (The Poems 73). For Roe, then, linguistic difficulty is directly linked with low aesthetic merit, the way it had been for C.S. Lewis and later for Muir and Maxwell. Brian Vickers’s recent work, the last echo of the attribution debate concerning A Lover’s Complaint, uses the same structure of argumentation. Vickers diagnoses the difficulty of the poem’s language, which he decries as involving archaisms noted also by Roe, Kerrigan, Cohen, Burrow, and others, but serving, he argues, to ‘rescue a rhyme’ (‘A rum-do’ 15). In addition, Vickers notes ‘unmotivated changes between the past and present tense,’ and ‘frequent inversions of subject and object’ (15). In addition, like Roe, Vickers regards the poem’s narrative structure as ‘confused’(15). In moving from diagnosing stylistic difficulties to the question of artistic merit, Vickers repeats an argumentative move of critical responses to A Lover’s Complaint since Hazlitt. In another respect, Vickers’s criticism shares a major concern of recent commentary on the poem: the concern with gender. Part of Vickers’s antipathy to the poem is related to what he calls the misogynist portrayal of its female heroine. Vickers speaks here in a way similar to Ilona Bell’s. For Bell, in the Sonnets ‘antifeminism is … unexamined,’ whereas A Lover’s Complaint, in emphasizing the youth’s guilt, retroactively qualifies the Sonnets’ misogyny (‘That which thou hast done’ 458, 466). Sensitivity to images of women evident in the critical responses of Vickers and Bell (and in those of Laws and Roberts described above) is absent from much of the earlier criticism on the poem, including Underwood’s monograph, published in the 1980’s. Unlike Vickers, who believes the poet, whoever he was, was unsympathetic towards the poem’s heroine, Underwood has no sympathy for her himself. ‘She is cruelly rejected,’ he writes, ‘but as she complains one gets the feeling that she is trying to make tragedy of an episode that is little more than that, a brief affair that she bitterly laments’ (38). And yet even Underwood’s dislike of what he regards as the maiden’s psychological weakness would not have been expressible were it not for the impact of feminist thinking. After the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970’s and 1980’s, it was no longer possible to respond to the devastation of the female complaint’s standard heroine with the same aesthetic detachment and indifference as had characterized the New Critical responses of Empson and Muir. Underwood’s description of the maiden’s plight is not ‘feminist,’ yet the very awareness of a woman’s amorous plight arguably rests on terms of discussion feminist thinking opened up. Given the impact of feminist theory on literary criticism of the past few decades, it is hardly surprising that so much of the recent criticism on this female-voiced poem has focused on gender. Jonathan Crewe, one of the poem’s most recent editors, has remarked that ‘the poem remains something of a challenge to gendered (and other) reading’ (li). The critical work devoted specifically to the poem, of which there has been a steady trickle since Kerrigan’s 1986 Penguin edition, bears out Crewe’s observation. One of the earliest gender-oriented studies of the poem was Joan Rees’s ‘Sidney and A Lover’s Complaint’ (1991). Rees examines the structural similarities between the Dido-Pamphilus episode in the revised Arcadia and the central relationship between youth and maiden in Shakespeare’s poem. Noting that Sidney’s deceitful Pamphilus is irresistible to women who ‘continue to allow themselves to be

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deceived’ by him (157), she contends that A Lover’s Complaint’s ‘reversal of the conventional love situation’ and its characterization of ‘women as the pursuers who … write “deep-brained sonnets”’ (158) may have had Sidney’s pastoral romance as a pretext. In Rees’ moralistic reading, both Sidney’s Dido-Pamphilus episode and A Lover’s Complaint are negative exempla meant to critically represent misogynist ‘exploitative sex’ (167) in which women are nevertheless partly complicit. Rees combines her gender-oriented reading of the poem with a formal observation. Like Roe, Vickers, and Burrow, she remarks upon A Lover’s Complaint’s open-ended frame, which, for her, marks Shakespeare’s departure from the Arcadia episode. Despite Rees’ moralistic reading of the poem, her position regarding its formal lack of closure is not far from the emphases of the subversive potential of this lack of closure noted by critics such as Harned and Whitworth (in this volume). Unlike Roe, who insists that with so many details of the narrative left hanging, the poem’s lack of closure cannot be considered ‘formally satisfying’ (The Poems 72), and unlike Burrow, who contends that ‘the failure to close the initial frame makes it tempting to believe … the work is not quite finished’ (146), Rees points out how A Lover’s Complaint’s open-ended structure leaves the complaint ‘hovering somewhere between dramatic realization and narrative’ (167). Katherine Craik similarly reads the poem’s lack of closure as impacting its representation of gender. Craik’s work is strongly grounded in new historicist reading practices, in the context of which early modern fictionalizations of gender are seen as embedded within historically particular discursive networks. In the case of Craik’s analysis of A Lover’s Complaint, the discursive network in question is that of early modern women’s repentance narratives. Like Rees, Craik regards the maiden in the poem a woman who has succumbed to seduction and consequently engaged in what she calls ‘sexual transgression’ (459). Like Rees, Craik believes Shakespeare’s choice of an open-ended narrative frame signals his holding back from a wholesale condemnation of such transgression. But whereas Rees sees the poem’s unusual ending as a formal departure from a familiar literary model embodied by a literary intertext, for Craik, this ending is the inevitable product of Shakespeare’s engagement with the non-literary genre of female repentance narratives. Examining a number of early modern women’s confessions, Craik contends that women’s act of reporting ‘sexual indiscretion’ generates ‘narrative instabilities’ of the kind the end of A Lover’s Complaint exemplifies (443). Hence, to her, Shakespeare’s choice not to close the narrative frame is not a mark of aesthetic or ethical ambiguity. Viewed through a new historicist as well as a feminist lens, ‘the young maiden’s unrepentant, unfinished testimony’ appears to Craik to reveal ‘Shakespeare’s interest in both the elusiveness of confession and the narrative instabilities involved in recording it’ (459). Not all gender-inflected commentaries on A Lover’s Complaint share Craik’s and Rees’ tendency to regard the poem’s ruptured narrative frame as a kind of formal echo of the moral ambiguities or instabilities accompanying women’s sexual transgression. In ‘That which thou hast done,’ Ilona Bell reads the absence of Shakespeare’s male narrator’s reappearance ‘to provide an authoritative final judgment’ as overturning significant generic conventions. Whereas ‘the male narrative conventionally frames and judges the female complainant,’ Bell points out that in the absence of the final frame in A Lover’s Complaint, the ‘female complaint

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frames and judges the male lover’s speech’ (470). In her essay in this volume, Bell takes this thesis further, showing how the ruptured narrative frame of Shakespeare’s poem, read in conjunction with topical poetic intertexts, reveals female passion. Like Craik, she sees Shakespeare’s literary text as inextricably linked with discursive practices of the period. For Craik the discursive practices most relevant for reading A Lover’s Complaint are female repentance narratives that straddle class divisions. Bell, on the other hand, focuses on the upper-class poetry of courtship. Bell regards such poetry a social as much as a literary practice, whose constituents materially function in historically actual amatory scenarios. For all the congruence of their feminist and new historicist assumptions and their awareness of the significance of the poem’s collapsed frame vis-à-vis gender, Bell and Craik arrive at remarkably different conclusions concerning the poem’s gender politics. While to Craik it is clear that in its historic context, the sexuality of the maiden would have been considered as transgressive as that of the women tried for their sexual liaisons whose confessions she analyses, Bell, who reads A Lover’s Complaint against the backdrop of court intrigues in which active female sexuality was not that unusual (as the example of Anne Vavasour well demonstrates), emphasizes the subversive potential of the poem’s staging of female sexuality. In underscoring the poem’s possible affirmation of female sexuality and desire, Bell’s reading is close to another recent feminist interpretation of the poem, that of Jennifer Laws. Like Bell, Laws argues that the poem ‘accepts without flinching the existence of female desire’ (89) and treats the woman’s amorous plight ‘without didactic moralizing’ (89). Like Bell, Laws regards the poem’s affirmation of female desire as the effect of manipulation of generic conventions. For her, these are the conventions of the intersection of Ovidian complaint narratives and pastoral lyrics (89). Unlike Bell, Laws does not regard the generic conventions whose manipulation enables the sympathetic staging of female desire as socio-culturally encoded. Taking a more humanistic approach to genre, Laws regards generic conventions as universal structures capable of conveying psychologically convincing depictions of human behavior (80). The generic manipulation she diagnoses in the poem is not the rupturing of the complaint’s conventional patriarchal frame noted by Bell, Craik, and Rees, as well as in a less directly feminist context by Burrow, Roe, and Vickers. Instead, it is the complaint genre’s complex intermingling with pastoral, whose rescuing from restrictive political readings and re-signification as a mode of representation of fundamental psychological structures she advocates. The attenuation of the female complaint by pastoral conventions, Laws argues, makes it possible for the poem to construct a female voice that has an intentional ‘lack of particularity’ about it (86). Hence, for Laws, the maiden in the poem, the figure through which the poem stages female desire, becomes ‘not so much [an] egregious example … but [a] representative … of humanity with whom we can sympathize or identify’ (86). Attention to interrelations between Shakespeare’s interest in desire and sexuality in the poem and the formal strategies used to stage desire and sexuality informs Shirley Sharon-Zisser’s work on the poem too. In her first essay on the poem, ‘Similes Hollowed With Sighs’: The Transferential Erotics of the Similaic Copula in A Lover’s Complaint,’ Sharon-Zisser produces a psycho-rhetorical reading of the absent copula associated with the ‘undistinguished woe’ of Shakespeare’s maiden.

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According to Sharon-Zisser, A Lover’s Complaint ‘begins by speaking an incorporation of a desire [and] … a woman’s refusal to … mourn the loss of her seducer/lover’ (197). Because the maiden has refused to accept the loss of this ‘fusional’ bond, she has become melancholic, and her many tears indicate a ‘dissolution of the subject…and signification’ (202). The maiden is saved from this ‘chaotic and engulfing state of semiosis’ (200) by her interaction with the poem’s ‘reverend man,’ a proto-psychoanalytic figure, who, ‘sliding down upon his grained bat,’ represents the de-erected, non-phallic desire of the father (207). By engaging this non-phallic father in the transference, the maiden manages to make a ‘transition from the melancholic incorporation of her absent object of desire to an introjection of the libidinal energies that he occasions in her’ (208). This is because the copula effected by transference, like the rhetorical figure of simile, links together subjectivities while also maintaining ‘the condition of separation’ necessary for one’s ‘com-paring and adornment of one’s self … with the Other’ in desire (210). As a result, Sharon-Zisser sees a sort of therapeutic evolution in A Lover’s Complaint, which ultimately enables the maiden to celebrate the ‘open-ended feminine desire whose articulation constitutes the (non)end of the poem’ (210). Recent critical work on the poem attentive to intersections between form and psychology is methodologically indebted to the precedent of Heather Dubrow’s work on the interrelations of the formal and psychological dimensions of Shakespeare’s poetry, most notably in her Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets, where she forcefully asserts that ‘it is above all by experimenting with a range of literary strategies, especially tropes and the patterns of genres and modes, that Shakespeare explores human character and human behavior’ (286). In this early work, Dubrow does not extend her explorations of formal pattern and psychology to A Lover’s Complaint, to which she turns in this volume. But another important methodological precedent to explorations linking literary form, gender, and subjectivity takes A Lover’s Complaint as its only focus. This is John Kerrigan’s Motives of Woe (1991), which contributors to this volume recurrently acknowledge as the most important monograph devoted to the poem. Kerrigan’s volume positions the poem in the literary-historical tradition of female complaint, while providing consistent analysis of the linguistic forms characteristic of female complaint and enabling it ‘to involve us, as men and as women (even as men and women), with their “motiues of … woe”’ (83). ‘Rhetoric,’ Kerrigan affirms ‘is part of the “question” as well as the vehicle of this poem’ (45). Kerrigan points out how the primary metrical and rhetorical features of the female complaint genre, including ‘apostrophe and antistrophe, epimone, ecphonesis—schemes of repetition and outburst—and above all, echo and anaphora— precipitates a ‘realm of caves and hollows,’ and with it an acoustics at once of the bounded and of the feminine (2122). Within this realm, Kerrigan shows, the ‘plaintful subject becomes an object, the narrators’ “I” a refracting medium’ (11), so that the poem bodies forth a ‘rhetoric of abandonment [which] seems feminine,’ a rhetoric wherein women give shape to absence (8). At the same time as he foregrounds the poem’s feminine rhetoric, Kerrigan points out the ‘sexual ambivalence in A Lover’s Complaint,’ manifest in the androgynous images of the youth but especially grounded ‘in the poem’s enfolding masculine and feminine love plaints in a common language’ (21). In this, Kerrigan has pointed the way also to postmodern approaches to the poem’s inscription of

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gender, such as Colin Burrow’s claim that the poem ‘makes gender divisions blur’ (142-43). As the above survey makes clear, significant criticism on A Lover’s Complaint during the past three decades spans all areas of contemporary critical inquiry, in the field of early modern literature, Shakespeare studies, and literary studies more generally. Such criticism ranges from stylistic studies such as Jackson’s to inquiries engaged with questions of material culture and the history of the book such as Roberts’, from authorship studies such as Vickers’ to psychoanalytical and rhetorical inquiries such as Sharon-Zisser’s, from computer surveys such as those of Elliott and Valenza to post-structuralist exposures of aporias such as Burrow’s, from new historicist scrutinies of texts in topical discursive contexts such as Craik’s, to more formal comparative genre studies such as Laws’, from considerations of the poem’s relation to Shakespeare’s life and the life of the court (Underwood, Bell) to extensive literary historical considerations such as Kerrigan’s. Much of the criticism of the last three decades is engaged with questions of gender, an attribute which registers the impact of feminism, but also of queer theory, a way of thinking which may have contributed to the alertness of critics such as Kerrigan, Sharon-Zisser, and Burrow to the poem’s sex and gender instabilities. Many recent works on the poem, whatever their critical assumptions and however far apart their conceptual conclusions, evince an engagement with questions of form, whether on the level of genre (Bell, Laws, Roberts), narrative structure (Roe, Burrow, Vickers), or rhetoric (Kerrigan, SharonZisser). This repeated engagement confirms the challenge the poem’s linguistic complexity continues to pose its readers. A Lover’s Complaint is already a site of productive contemporary discussions of forms of subjectivity, of representations of gender and sexuality, of Elizabethan and Jacobean composing and printing practices, of connections between aesthetic form and psychology. Not all critical approaches represented in recent criticism on A Lover’s Complaint are conceptually compatible. Sharon-Zisser’s tendency to view the poem as a self-contained unit and emphasis on its linguistic structure owes much to New Critical modes of thinking as much as to post-structuralist concerns with the interrelations between subjectivity and language, and exposes a point of intersection between formalism and post-structuralism. At the same time, such work, with its emphasis on interiority, runs counter to the historicizing practice of many other varieties of postmodern interpretation manifest in recent work on the poem. Roberts’ work, for example, reveals the poem to be deeply embedded in the sociopolitical and intertextual dynamics of early modern literary culture, including ‘the marketing of books and the effects of the printed page to the marginalia of readers and the vagaries of manuscript culture’ (3). The same historicizing tendency informs Craik’s work on the poem’s embedding in the discursive practice of early modern repentance and Bell’s work on the poem as part of early modern practices of courtship. Kerrigan’s work on the poem does not relate it to social discourses and practices of the period and in this respect is not ‘new’ historicist, but it certainly does historicize the poem in its literary and generic contexts. And like Craik, Bell, Roe, Underwood, Rees, and Duncan-Jones, Kerrigan is careful to read the poem not in isolation but intertextually, bringing out its resonances with other texts by Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors. In this, the work of all these scholars is dialectically opposed to that of Sharon-Zisser, whose formalist and psychoanalytical treatment of

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A Lover’s Complaint remains focused on psychic interiority. Sharon-Zisser’s work on the poem, and the work of Jennifer Laws, whose discussion of the poem is based on an attempt to de-politicize and de-historicize genre, conceptually counterpoint most other recent studies of the poem, which seek to reveal the cultural life in the literary, sexual, social, economic, and historical discourses that shaped Shakespeare and that Shakespeare shaped into his poems. A Lover’s Complaint, that is, has begun to generate critical responses resting on sometimes incompatible theoretical assumptions. But the scholarly disagreement to which these critical responses bear witness only confirms the richness of the poem’s linguistic and conceptual texture. In view of the range and liveliness of recent discussions of A Lover’s Complaint, and of the richness and complexity of the poem of which these discussions are the trace, it is surprising that such discussions are still so relatively few, especially in comparison to the unwieldy amount of criticism generated by the Sonnets. The scarcity of criticism on A Lover’s Complaint may in part be a result of the authorship debates plaguing the history of its reception. Nevertheless, if as James Schiffer argues in the wake of claims made by Gary Taylor and David Schalkwyk, one source of the Sonnets’ appeal at this time is their complexity (‘Reading New Life’ 39) it is puzzling that the Sonnets’ no less complex companion piece has failed to exercise a similar appeal. Significant work remains to be done before A Lover’s Complaint assumes its rightful place in the contemporary critical scene as an important part of the Shakespearean canon, alongside the Sonnets and the other narrative poems. But the variety of the work being done already makes A Lover’s Complaint a site of intellectual debate, whose implications range beyond the poem to the principles of theoretical perspectives of reading. ‘Suffering Ecstasy’: Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint The essays in this collection confirm the variety and high quality of work finally being done on A Lover’s Complaint. The volume has striven to include the widest possible range of critical approaches to the poem, so as to demonstrate the multiplicity and complexity of critical response. The essays it includes sometimes even clash in methodology, ranging from work that positions the poem in relation to political debates of the time, through work that puts the poem in connection with other texts by Shakespeare, to work that offers psycho-rhetorical interpretations of the poem, to work that uses the poem to explore issues in psychoanalytic theory itself and the connection between psychic categories and linguistic form that can productively be made through the poem’s rich texture. At the same time, the collection does not claim to represent every approach to the poem or to have exhausted all that might be said from any single perspective. In its variety, the collection hopes to contribute to the excited and multifaceted discussion of the poem already under way, and to make way for the creation of new knowledge by means of thoughtful disagreement. A Lover’s Complaint offers fertile ground for scholarly exploration. This is not only because it constitutes the most neglected portion of Shakespeare’s poetic artistry. It is because, as John Kerrigan suggests, it is a radical example of a literary mode—the female complaint—whose components ‘are miniature devices for

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generating interpretive instability’ (Motives of Woe 12). Interpretive instability is what the essays in this volume demonstrate, and it is the contention of this volume that such instability is critically and intellectually productive, both in what it makes it possible to expose about the poem, and in the critical reflection into which it leads readers. When the text in question generates interpretive instability, even avowedly historicist accounts find themselves attentive to questions of literary form, and formal accounts find themselves affirming the importance of rhetorical forms that are culturally produced and historically saturated. Patrick Cheney’s essay amply demonstrates the instabilities A Lover’s Complaint generates in its readings. Cheney’s position is avowedly historicist, seeking to position the complaint within the context of competing early modern concepts of nationhood. And yet Cheney’s title, ‘Deep Brained Sonnets and Tragic Shows’ reveals the profound engagement with questions of literary form the poem dictates. For Cheney, A Lover’s Complaint is a meta-critical reflection on poetry and drama, timely for early modern England and biographically poignant as a personal reflection on Shakespeare’s (Ovidian) allegiance to both poetry and drama, a doubleness reflected in the double voicing of the poem itself. Drawing on his important earlier work, which reclassifies major Renaissance writers vis-à-vis early modern nationalism, Cheney contends that in A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare stages a ‘literary collision’ and ‘professional dilemma’ wherein the Virgilian (nationalist) Spenser and the Ovidian (counter-nationalist) Marlowe confront one another. Paul D. Stegner’s ‘A Reconciled Maid: A Lover’s Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England’ adopts a similar historicist approach to the poem in order to shed light on the social trauma caused in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English religious life by the de-sacramentalizing of auricular confession. Stegner focuses on the relationship between reverend man and maiden in the complaint to demonstrate that the poem functions as an allegory for the limitations of confession, penance, and absolution as these practices were reformed by Protestantism. The maiden’s paradoxical status as both ‘reconciled’ and as willing to be ‘new pervert[ed]’ at the end of the poem, Stegner argues, questions the Protestant belief that individual conscience or subjective interiority, rather than sacramental ritual, is sufficient to gain divine absolution for sin. To Stegner, it is the female complaint mode that makes the questioning of interiority possible. Like Stegner, Ilona Bell treats the relationship between the reverend man and maiden as the pivot of the complaint. In ‘Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint,’ an example of feminist historicism, she rejects the view of the reverend man as confessor-figure. According to Bell, the reverend man’s sympathetic presence in the poem functions as a model for how readers should respond to the maiden’s lament. It identifies the poem, Bell argues, as an example of exculpatory complaint, and, thus, as a challenge to the misogynist didacticism of de casibus complaints such as Churchyard’s Shore’s Wife. Like the reverend man, readers are encouraged to view the maiden’s grievance as justified, not as the wailing of a woman who has deservedly brought ruin down upon herself by being sexually ‘free.’ Working on this premise, Bell links Shakespeare’s poem to immediate predecessors in the exculpatory form, such as Sir Henry Lee’s ‘Sitting Alone Upon my Thought’ and Anne Vavasour’s ‘Though I Seeme Strange.’ Her exploration of these links enable

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her to reveal (through the recounting of an actual amorous, aristocratic intrigue at the Elizabethan court) that the exculpatory complaint sometimes had the function of defending a woman’s honor and reputation, while also serving as a type of subtle courtship. This leads her to conclude that A Lover’s Complaint ‘reexamine[s] the moral assumptions perpetuated by more conventional male-authored female complaints,’ and celebrates female passion and sexuality. John Roe’s ‘Unfinished Business, A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Lucrece’ shares Bell’s concern with literary history, but makes Shakespeare’s own work the focus of this concern. Rather than focusing on what A Lover’s Complaint can reveal about its socio-historical and/or political context, John Roe reads the poem against the backdrop of Shakespeare’s plays, thus showing an important affinity with Cheney’s essay and Dubrow’s, both of which provide a rich intertextual Shakespearean context for their claims. Noting that in some of Shakespeare’s plays, certain passages or situations constitute ethical problems that cannot be resolved within the plays themselves, Roe demonstrates that the narrative poems are generated as intertexts that work through and resolve these problems. In Hamlet, for example, the momentum of the plot does not allow for a full exploration of the precise nature of the prince’s relationship to Ophelia, and Ophelia herself remains a marginal figure until after her death, when she can no longer speak or explain how she feels about Hamlet. According to Roe, it is possible to read the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint as a figure who gives Ophelia ‘extra life’ and allows her ‘a more extended hearing.’ The maiden’s simultaneous indictment and obsession with the seductive young man gives reader more insight into Ophelia’s eventual madness and demise. In proposing such a reading strategy, Roe claims, one is not merely looking for intertextual ‘echoes.’ One is paying attention to the essential ‘strange harmony’ that links Shakespeare’s texts to one another as supplements. Sharing Roe’s interest in the intertextual relations between A Lover’s Complaint and the plays, Heather Dubrow’s ‘The Tip of His Subduing Tongue’: Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover’s Complaint, and Othello orients intertextual analysis toward an examination of ‘authorizers … forms of communication … that initiate a process aimed at establishing the authority of the speaker.’ The maiden of Shakespeare’s complaint, Dubrow explains, gains some measure of power and authority by appropriating and retelling the story of her seduction by the young man; she makes his words her own, thus demonstrating that the power of authority is frequently the consequence of, not the precondition for, authorship. Attention to the intricacies of narrative framing in the poem is, thus, for Dubrow, crucial to contemporary critical debates. It can challenge the assumption of some cultural materialists that attention to form is politically ‘retrogressive.’ It can also nuance the Foucauldian insistence that ‘agency’ can be nothing more than an Enlightenment myth, and problematize the feminist tendency to binarize speech and agency as male and silence and powerlessness as female. Finally, Dubrow claims that the use of authorizers in A Lover’s Complaint calls into question speech-act theory’s tendency to treat speech acts as emanating from subject positions ‘determined prior to the act in question.’ Dubrow’s new formalist approach bridges the methodological gap between the first group of essays in this volume and the second. Her interest in treating the complaint within the context of Shakespeare’s plays and in understanding how the poem’s rhetorical structure can provide insight into power relations in the early

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modern era link her work with that of Cheney, Stegner, Roe, and Bell. Her detailed attention to rhetorical form and her awareness that speech-acts are intimately bound up with the constitution of desiring subjects has an affinity with the psychorhetorical and psychoanalytic accounts of the poem that follow. James Schiffer’s ‘Honey Words: A Lover’s Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction,’ for example, would share Dubrow’s view that A Lover’s Complaint has many characteristics in common with riddles, since for him ‘seduction is not just a theme … it is also a structure, a kind of game with its own rules.’ Within this game, subjectivity is bound up with the retrospective subjective predicament of desire, which seeks what it is lacking in the Other yet only ever finds in the Other ‘the endless repetitive substitution of language for presence.’ In A Lover’s Complaint, the maiden is ‘deceive[d] … into projecting onto [the youth] her lost sense of unity and wholeness,’ which the young wooer encourages her to do by consistently associating himself with or employing the imagery of ‘sameness,’ the feminine, liquid imagery of tears, melting, bodies of water. Consequently, what readers discover in A Lover’s Complaint is not tragedy, but the unsettling of fixed notions of gender boundaries effected by seduction and the eternal cycling of desire from ‘remorse, to grief, to renewed desire.’ The poem lacks closure, Schiffer claims, because the structure it mimics—that of desire and seduction—can never be complete. Jon Harned’s ‘Rhetoric and Perverse Desire in Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ similarly exposes a facet of the poem’s rhetoric that pushes towards the psychically unexpected. Observing that A Lover’s Complaint shares the Sonnets’ moral critique of epideictic rhetoric, Harned argues that rhetoric and desire in this poem are ‘essentially wayward’ and ask readers to experience what cannot be thought. Like Schiffer, Harned’s understanding of the structure of (normative) desire is Lacanian, in that he perceives the ‘vagaries of desire … as the metonymic movement of the signifier, an exchange governed by cultural codes’ in which ‘desire slips further and further away from its origin into alienating displacements’ and ‘empty speech.’ Harned does not share Stegner’s and Bell’s sense that the central relationship within which desire comes to be articulated is that between the reverend man and maiden. He argues, by contrast, that in the complaint, the young man ‘perform[s] a perverse function akin to that of the analyst in the therapeutic encounter.’ In this analytic encounter, the young man moves the maiden toward ‘true speech’ at ‘the vanishing point of signification.’ That is to say, Harned sees the maiden’s speech and the lack of a totalizing narrator at the end of the poem as gesturing towards or conveying a sense of jouissance, ecstatic pleasure/pain or ‘suffering ecstasy’ beyond what can ever be spoken. Stephen Whitworth’s ‘Where Excess Begs All’: A Lover’s Complaint and the Diacritics of Melancholy’ shares Harned’s Lacanian orientation and agrees with Harned’s diagnosis of the poem as gesturing towards a jouissance that cannot be spoken. But Whitworth provides a very different account of the conceptual stakes involved in the poem’s engagement with jouissance, examining this engagement in terms not of the logic of perversion but of the relationship between psychic cause, phantasy and recollection. Invoking Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man, Whitworth stresses that in psychoanalytic thinking, both phantasy and recollection are screens veiling a real, unrepresentable object-hole that is cast forth into the future in symptomatic repetitions. Whitworth shows how the maiden in the poem glosses

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over this hole of the real with the narcissistic phantasy of love as fullness. Trapped in this phantasy, the maiden is unable to recognize the truth involved in the philosophy of love the youth transmits to her, the philosophy of love whose center is the ‘nun/None,’ the lost object or hole of the real as cause of desire. Challenging Sharon-Zisser’s earlier reading of the poem as a transferential scenario in which the maiden traverses her phantasy, tracing a trajectory from melancholic incorporation to jouissante introjection, Whitworth argues that the maiden’s insistence on the phantasy of fulfillment in love would preclude such traversal. Instead, Whitworth diagnoses a persistence of the melancholic and incorporative in the poem. Melancholic incorporation is rhetorically registered in the poem’s diacritical structure, wherein the absence of quotation marks communicates the youth’s words as swallowed by those of the maiden, which in turn are nested within the words of the anonymous narrator. At the center of this diacritical structure whose borders cannot be marked, Whitworth shows, one reaches a ‘point of absolute (and paradoxically split) singularity, a psychic ‘black hole’ which in psychoanalytic terms is the place of jouissance. Reading the diacritics of melancholy in the poem in tandem with psychoanalysts’ Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s revision of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholy,’ Whitworth argues that A Lover’s Complaint invites its readers to ‘conceptualize two melancholias, which are perhaps an omnipresent component of human psychic life.’ These are ‘the familiar melancholy of simple incorporation, and the melancholy that incorporates mourning or introjection and turns it into masochistic jouissance.’ The poem, Whitworth points out, not only invites its readers to conceptualize melancholic jouissance but, because of its open-ended frame, it also situates its readers within this psychic structure. This unconventional conclusion disrupts the reader’s comfortable and self-privileging position of regarding the maid and ‘looks back at our seeing,’ placing readers in a radically de-faced and dis-figured crisis of the psyche in which melancholic jouissance emerges as insufferably real. Shirley Sharon-Zisser’s ‘“True to Bondage”: The Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover’s Complaint,’ shares Whitworth’s concern with melancholy in the poem in its relation to rhetoric, and Whitworth’s and Harned’s view of the poem as a site of jouissance. Combining these two psychoanalytical concerns, in this psycho-rhetorical study Sharon-Zisser returns to the poem to consider it as a ‘poetic theorization of the psychic condition which psychoanalysis came to call female masochism.’ In this essay, rather than considering herself as ‘applying’ psychoanalysis to literature to produce a conventional ‘reading,’ Sharon-Zisser finds in the text a staging and ‘working through’ of problems that have not been entirely explored in psychoanalysis. Hence, the essay proposes a different way of approaching literary texts through psychoanalysis: one that considers semantic content as a veil and searches for points of opacity where the real emerges as form. According to Sharon-Zisser, in A Lover’s Complaint, ‘the formal mode of operation deploys the drive’ to ‘orificialize’ the poem and allow the ‘irruption of jouissance’ in ‘orgasmic’ language. Prior to this ‘irruption,’ two sexualized signifying chains (the woman’s avowed passion, the youth’s seductive enunciation) coalesce to produce a pleasurably painful ‘unsustainable connection.’ As a result of the collision of these two signifying chains, ‘the Other, a function within the symbolic, is ruptured by the effect of too much sense.’ This permits, Sharon-Zisser argues, an ‘elemental

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signifier’ to emerge or ‘leap from the archaic’ in all its opacity. This is a fragment that ‘barely conceals a more primal mode of representation which means nothing in itself but functions as the condition of signification.’ This archaic fragment unfolds in the poem’s imaginary register as female masochism, and functions as the poem’s fundamental phantasm thinly veiling the ‘real.’ This phantasm manifests itself in the poem’s ‘circular narrativity;’ its ‘orificial graphism;’ its deployment of the ‘hollowed’ and ‘hollowing out’ rhetorical figures of apostrophe, syncope, apocope, synaloepha and aphaeresis; and, finally, in its phonemic and prosodic structure. Being attentive to these structures is important, Sharon-Zisser claims, because being able to recognize them can complexify metapsychology’s understanding of masochistic eroticism as being based on the ‘solidity of musculature,’ and reveal the ‘wound’ as a possible center of the female masochist’s libidinal cathexes. Beginning with a strongly historicist essay, ending with an essay positioned within psychoanalytic theory, this volume brings together divergent and even contending voices. In doing so, the volume does not purport to steer its readers in any particular critical direction or to provide definitive answers to the questions the divergence between the approaches it includes open up. Each critical approach exemplified in the volume contributes to an overdue appreciation of Shakespeare’s poem. And the thoughtful disagreement between critical approaches may well be a means to generating new knowledge. As philosopher Marcelo Dascal explains, controversies ‘are the locus where critical activity is exercised, where the meaning of theories is dialogically shaped’ (165). It is in such a spirit of dialogue which might lead to an improved understanding that the following essays are offered.

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~ Taylor & Francis ~-

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‘Deep-brained Sonnets’ and ‘Tragic Shows’: Shakespeare’s Late Ovidian Art in A Lover’s Complaint Patrick Cheney

In A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare offers his most concentrated fiction about the relation between poetry and theater.1 Among Shakespeare’s poems—and even among his plays—his third and last narrative poem is valuable for its lucid narration of a story directly about the cultural function and social interchange between ‘deepbrained sonnets’ (209) and ‘tragic shows’ (308). Since recent scholarship concludes that Shakespeare composed this poem in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it joins its companion piece in the famed 1609 quarto, the Sonnets, in calling into question the dominant models regarding the presence of the poems within a predominantly theatrical career.2 By recalling what recent editors of Shakespeare’s poems emphasize, that Shakespeare was working on A Lover’s Complaint at the time that he was composing such ‘mature’ plays as Hamlet, Measure for Measure, All’s Well, and Cymbeline—that indeed he was redeploying the very discourse from the plays—we might come to find his fiction about the professional relation between poetry and theater late in his career of considerable value.3 As with the Sonnets, admittedly here we do not know what Shakespeare’s intentions were. We do not know why he composed this poem or whether he authorized its publication. In other words, A Lover’s Complaint is another work situated on the ‘borderline between the published and the privately concealed’: ‘What makes the volume of Shake-speares Sonnets unique is the extent to which its every element can be seen [to] … invite from its readers a deliberate interplay between reading the collection for the life as a private manuscript record of a secret love, and reading it as a monumental printed work’ (Burrow, ‘Life’ 38, 42). While some readers will be more comfortable operating on the manuscript side of the border, in this essay we might acknowledge the question but attend to what does appear in print. Precisely because of the question over the poem as a work of the print poet, we might find the direct representation of poetry and theater here all the more noteworthy.4 The Fiction of Sonnet and Show Briefly, the fiction in A Lover’s Complaint tells of a male narrator hearing and seeing a ‘fickle maid full pale’ (5). She reaches into her ‘maund’ or basket (36), pulls out 55

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‘folded schedules’ and ‘many a ring of posied gold and bone’ (43, 45), ‘[t]ear[s]’ the ‘papers’, and ‘break[s] … rings a-twain’ (6), throwing both sets of artifacts into ‘a river … / Upon whose weeping margent she was set’ (38-39). The narrator then sees a ‘reverend man’ (57), once ‘Of court, of city’ (59) but now a cowherd ‘graz[ing] … his cattle nigh’ (57), draw near ‘this afflicted fancy’ (61) to inquire ‘the grounds and motives of her woe’ (63). The country maid tells the cowherd a story that takes us through the final word of the poem. In her story, the maid narrates how a young man with the sophistication of a courtier seduces her with an exquisite physical beauty and a compelling internal character that are served by two modes of literary art: the ‘deep-brained sonnets’ that the maid receives from the young man; and the ‘tragic shows’ that he performs to win her sympathy. At the core of her story, the maid quotes the young man’s own rhetoric of courtship (177-280), including his haunting tale about seducing a nun (232-66), in what constitutes one of Shakespeare’s most spectacular versifications of a dangerous sexual theater. The story about sonnets and shows—situated in ‘the familiar Shakespearean territory of sexual betrayal’ (Roe, ed. 73)—is even more complex. As part of his seductive performance, the young courtier tells the maid that the sonnets he has given her are compositions he has received from girls he has seduced previously (204-10), leading most critics to assume that these compositions are the ones the maid throws in the river (e.g., Kerrigan, Motives 46). Yet Colin Burrow rightly complicates this assumption: ‘they are a little less transparent than that’ (‘Life’ 28). Burrow goes on to emphasize that, [s]eeing these objects does not give access to the emotions behind a love affair in material form … Shakespeare’s poems objects do not reveal emotions; they encrypt them intriguingly, and start his readers on a quest for mind. An object is held up as something which offers a point of access to an experience, but the experience which it signifies, and whatever those mysterious ‘deep-brained sonnets’ actually relate, is withheld from us (28)

If Burrow rightly emphasizes the closed contents of the ‘sonnets’, he simultaneously opens Shakespeare’s own text to the possibility that the young courtier might well have composed the ‘papers’ himself. Certainly, the reader is invited to make this inference up to the moment of his bold declaration to the maid (218-24), but perhaps even afterwards, given the youth’s notorious falsehood. In short, we are not certain just who has composed the ‘papers’ or ‘sonnets,’ or whether these different words represent even the same documents, and it is reasonable to see that the ambiguity of both their form and their authorship might be part of the representation. The ambiguity extends to the gender of the author(s), which could include both men and women. Is it possible that the country maid is even tearing up documents she has herself composed, furious that the young man has sent as his own the very documents she once sent to him? In short, A Lover’s Complaint’s representation of the first half of the literary compound, the sonnets, is itself of ‘double voice’ (3)— and on two counts: both double-authored and double-gendered. However we construe the literary economy here, men and women are implicated in both the writing and the reading of the paper forms. We may extend this principle to the second half of the literary compound, ‘shows.’ The maid describes the youth as a tragic playwright when she accuses him

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of performing ‘a plenitude of subtle matter,’ which, ‘Applied to cautels [deceits], all strange forms receives,’ Of burning blushes, or of weeping water, Or sounding paleness; and he takes and leaves, In either’s aptness as it best deceives, To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes, Or to turn white and sound at tragic shows. (A Lover’s Complaint 302-308)

To ‘turn white and sound at tragic shows’ evidently means to stage a dangerously chaste theater empty of artistic and moral integrity. As we shall see, this is not the only theatrical discourse in the poem but rather part of a larger network from the place of the stage. If in a simple reading Shakespeare genders the author of the sonnets female, in an equally simple reading he genders the author of tragedy male. While readers might feel inclined to sympathize with the maid, and thereby to blame the youth for his theatricality, John Kerrigan has encouraged us to press the verity of the maid herself: ‘Shakespeare indicates that the “context” of the maid’s “utterance” [the opening echo that the narrator hears resounding through the hills] pre-emptively endangers what is said. The received landscape of complaint (realm of Spenser, William Browne) takes a “voice” and makes it “doble”’ (Motives 44). While Kerrigan warns that we ‘should resist the prompting of ‘“doble” either wholly to credit what she says or to judge her account mendacious’ (44), he nonetheless opens the maid to further scrutiny. For instance, she is the one to unleash theater into the discourse of the poem as a site of sexual falsehood, prompting us to wonder how she knows about this particular domain. Like the dyer’s hand in Shakespeare’s famous sonnet on the theater (111), perhaps her nature is subdued to what it works in. In short, in A Lover’s Complaint both poetry and theater are potentially doublevoiced and double-gendered. As the phrases for these twin forms of production suggest—‘deep-brained sonnets’ and ‘tragic shows’—Shakespeare presents the forms authored and gendered as themselves in opposition, even in conflict. The genre of Petrarchan poetry in which men and women are complicit is fundamentally a subjective, mental, and internal art (‘deep-brained’), while the Senecan tragedic genre in which men and women are also complicit is fundamentally a material, performative, and external one (‘show’).5 Despite the poem’s phrases for the two arts, however, we can extend the principle of doubleness to their status in the narrative. Since we are not privy to the contents of the ‘deep-brained sonnets’, as Burrow observes, they appear paradoxically as materialized texts; similarly, the ‘tragic shows’, for all their superficiality, penetrate the brain deeply, as the narrative reveals. Critical Contexts The workings and implications of the opposing doubleness of content, form, gender, and authorship for poetry and theater require some patience to sort out, but that shall be our goal in this essay. Surprisingly, critics have neglected the topic. They have, however, touched its perimeters. Most comment on the presence of ‘deep-brained

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sonnets’ in a collection of verse titled Shake-speares Sonnets (as does Burrow), prompting fruitful detail about the connections between the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (see Bell; Laws): both poems present narratives of sexual infidelity that feature three erotically related principals in a tragedic triangle, consisting of two men and a woman. By contrast, while most critics discuss the theater through comparisons with the plays, and occasionally identify the young man as an ‘actor,’ only Kerrigan has probed more deeply.6 Discussing the commonplace intertextuality with Spenser’s complaints, both The Ruines of Time (which opens in similar terms) and Spenser’s contributions to Jan Ver der Noot’s Theatre for Wordlings, Kerrigan observes: ‘Like Spenser’s Rome, … [the maid] inhabits a “theatre for worldlings”’ (Motives 42), to the extent that ‘early readers, attuned to the theatricality of the [complaint] genre, might have thought in terms of a well-known playwright writing for the paper-stage’ (43). Later, Kerrigan notes ‘the impact of the larger [complaint] genre upon drama’—for instance, The Mirror for Magistrates upon ‘Renaissance tragedy’—even raising the question ‘about the stage worthiness of grief’: ‘complaint is problematic because stagey before it is staged’ (55-56). What is left to do is to locate theater, along with poetry, in the discourse of the poem itself and to speculate more fully what it might mean for this ‘well-known playwright’ to be ‘writing for th[is particular] … paper-stage.’7 Shakespearean Authorship: Ovid and Marlowe We may contextualize Shakespeare’s double-voiced fiction in terms of the new figure of the Ovidian poet-playwright. One way to read Shakespeare’s fiction is as a self-conscious narrative about the arts of poetry and theater in his own Ovidian career.8 Even more directly than in his two early experiments in narrative poetry, in this late one Shakespeare makes his fiction about the incompatibility of the sexes and the deadly nature of desire obtain to his writing career.9 Moreover, as in Venus and Lucrece, in A Lover’s Complaint Shakespeare presents Ovidianism as distinctly Marlovian. Although recent scholarship and criticism neglect Marlowe’s presence in the poem, we know too much about Shakespeare’s ongoing struggle with Marlowe’s ghost to follow suit.10 Critics can observe that ‘Thomas Whythorne and George Gascoigne both wrote poems of courtship and seduction to numerous Elizabethan women’ (Bell 463), but we might also recall that this mode is virtually Marlowe’s signature, especially in his poetry, from Ovid’s Elegies to ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ to Hero and Leander. The country maid’s voice at times sounds Marlovian, recalling the narrator’s voice in Hero and Leander: ‘For when we rage, advice is often seen / By blunting us to make our wits more keen’ (160-61). More particularly, the young courtier’s seduction of ‘a nun, / Or sister sanctified, of holiest note’ (232-33), echoes Leander’s elaborate seduction of ‘Venus’ nun’ in Marlowe’s Ovidian narrative (1.45); indeed, the stories are remarkably similar in outline. But it is the young courtier himself, an Ovidian figure of desire deploying both poetry and theater, who most compellingly conjures up the perturbed spirit of Christopher Marlowe, his Ovidian career, and what it serves: a counter-Virgilian nationhood—that is, a nonpatriotic form of nationalism that subverts royal power with libertas (Amores 3.15.9; Ovid’s Elegies 3.14.9).11

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If we wonder how Shakespeare’s portrait of a heterosexual male bent on female seduction could conjure up a self-avowed writer of homoeroticism, we might recall that Kerrigan traces the complaint in the early modern period to a ‘common language’ (one that we are historicizing in terms of Marlowe), and he speaks of ‘the sexual ambivalence in A Lover’s Complaint, citing ‘the youth’s face, a bower for Venus, his voice “maiden tongued”’ (ed. 20-21). Moreover, the young courtier is not merely androgynous; he attracts both men and women: ‘he did in the general bosom reign / Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted’ (127-28). If this figure’s artistic forms are both double-voiced, so is their author. By attending to the conjunction of poetry and theater in A Lover’s Complaint, we can see Shakespeare plotting his characters’ aesthetic and subjective struggle for identity amid a love affair in Marlowe’s terms, drawn along an Ovidian path of amorous poetry and tragedic theater. While acknowledging Shakespeare’s representation of doubleness in the agent of authorship for both literary forms, we can nonetheless discern a critique of literary production in which both men and women are complicit in an economy not merely of cultural shame but also of artistic sham. The Virgilian Path Re-taken: Spenserian Authorship As we should expect from the author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare once more plots his Ovidian narrative about Marlovian poetry and theater in a Virgilian landscape.12 Amid hills and riverbanks, cattle graze and two conventional pastoral figures preside, the country maid and the cowherd.13 A third figure, the male narrator, has entered the pastoral domain, evidently for retreat, while the fourth figure, the seductive young man, appears to have made a sojourn to the pastoral world at some point in the past, but hardly for retreat. Yet each of these ‘pastoral’ figures can also be connected to the ‘court’ or ‘city.’ Shakespeare makes this principle of dual cultural affiliation explicit in the figure of the ‘reverend man,’ who grazed his cattle nigh, Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew Of court, of city, and had let go by The swiftest hours observed as they flew. (A Lover’s Complaint 57-60)

Kerrigan notes how rare the reverend man’s life-pattern is in Elizabethan literature, comparing it to the career of old Melibee in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene (cantos 9-12), since both pastoral figures have engaged in what Isabel G. MacCaffrey calls the ‘formula of out-and-back,’ which begins in the country, moves to the court, and comes home again.14 The life-pattern of the Spenserian character is applicable to the poet who pens it. Indeed, Spenser was famous among his contemporaries for being a shepherd who began his literary career by writing pastoral and then moving on to epic (Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Pastorals’). While the three-part life-pattern of the reverend man may be rare for Elizabethans, the figure of the shepherd-king, present in a narrative evoking the generic grid of pastoral and epic, is among the most dominant fictions of the

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period, from Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Faerie Queene, and Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe, to Sidney’s Arcadia, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It.15 While various writers use the Virgilian fiction for complex and diverse reasons, including to process their middle-class obsession with social mobility, they also process its literary form, a self-reflexive fiction about an author’s literary career, especially one structured on a maturational, developmental model.16 Thus, just as we may label Shakespeare’s Ovidian conjunction of poetry and theater Marlovian, so we may label his Virgilian conjunction of pastoral and epic Spenserian. In 1790, Edmond Malone was the first to observe of Shakespeare that ‘in this beautiful poem, … he perhaps meant to break a lance with Spenser. It appears to me to have more of the simplicity and pathetick tenderness of the elder poet, in his smaller pieces, than any other poem of that time’ (Rollins, ed. 586; see 590, 591, 592, 594, 601). The judgment has held steady for over 200 years: ‘Spenser [is] … a poet to whom A Lover’s Complaint is more deeply indebted than to any other’ (Burrow, ed. 708; see 140, 695, 699, 707).17 While the opening of A Lover’s Complaint has long been understood to imitate the opening of The Ruines of Time— and more recently of Prothalamion—we might take Kerrigan’s cue to see the reverend man (in particular) not simply as indebted to Spenser’s Melibee but as a fictionalized type of Spenserian figure—an anticipation, if you will, of Milton’s ‘sage and serious poet Spenser, … a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’ (Aereopagitica 728-29). Kerrigan is on the verge of voicing this idea: ‘Shakespeare clearly enjoys … the “reverend” man’s Spenserian trappings’—adding, ‘somewhat arch even in 1609’ (Motives 66). Indeed, the reverend man voices one of the recurrent beliefs of The Faerie Queene: that articulation of a problem can bring consolation, especially through counseling. Thus, Prince Arthur counsels Una in Book 1: ‘wofull Ladie let me you intrete, / For to unfold the anguish of your hart: / Mishaps are maistred by advice discrete, / And counsell mittigates the greatest smart’ (7.40). Yet part of Shakespeare’s enjoyment of the reverend man likely derives from his shading of the portrait into parody. The word ‘blusterer’ arouses immediate suspicion; the Oxford English Dictionary cites Shakespeare’s usage as its first example for its first definition: ‘One who utters loud empty boasts or menaces; a loud or violent inflated talker, a braggart.’ That last word takes us where we need to go: to Spenser’s great figure of bluster in The Faerie Queene: Braggadocchio. It is as if Shakespeare conjoins Braggadocchio with the gentle shepherd Melibee, the foster-father of Pastorella and future father-in-law of Calidore, Knight of Courtesy, in order to parody Spenserian pastoral retreat, wisdom, and authority. If so, the reverend man recalls Archimago, the magician in disguise as a hermit who uses his smooth tongue to bring the Redcrosse Knight and Una home to his hermitage in the opening canto of The Faerie Queene—with unholy consequences. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s reverend man even conceals the sexuality that Florimell discovers in the old fisher in Book 3, canto 8—an impotent old man who, like Archimago, derives from a figure in Ariosto. Indeed, not merely has Shakespeare’s old cowherd been ‘Sometime a blusterer,’ but he moves a little too ‘fastly’ to the maid, wishing to ‘know’ only ‘in brief’ the ‘origin of her woe,’ while his mode of operation is itself tinged with erotic desire: ‘So slides he down upon his grained bat, / And comely

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distant sits he by her side, / When he again desires her, being sat, / Her grievance with his hearing to divide’ (64-66). That last word is ominous, and is a favorite of Spenser’s, recalling Archimago’s pleasure at seeing Redcrosse and Una ‘divided into double parts’ (1.2.9). Apparently, Shakespeare turns Spenser against himself, conflating several of his figures of virtue and vice into an ambiguous old man who blurs the boundary between caring wisdom and sexual hypocrisy.18 Like the other two narrative poems, A Lover’s Complaint is not an allegory about an artistic confrontation between Spenser and Marlowe over the question of female chastity, but Shakespeare does appear to evoke precisely such a confrontation. Thus he tells a fiction in which Spenserian and Marlovian figures function in oppositional relationship with the country maid. The Marlovian figure of the young courtier uses Ovidian poetry and theater to take female chastity away, while the Spenserian figure of the reverend man uses his Virgilian life pattern of pastoral and epic counsel to bring (more than) solace to her suffering. By recognizing Shakespeare’s penning of such a fiction during the first decade of the seventeenth century, we can revise the received wisdom that Shakespeare passed beyond Spenser back in 1593-94 (Paglia 194). In the 1609 quarto, Shakespeare treats the Spenserian/Virgilian characters with the unsettling doubleness of an arch-magus. Usually, critics identify the maid as a figure from the country, citing her hat, ‘a platted hive of straw’ (8). Editors, however, suggest that even though such a hat was worn in the country, it was also worn by women from the court, including Queen Elizabeth (Duncan-Jones, ed. 432). Like the reverend man, the maid could either be a country girl (who has even perhaps sojourned to the court) or a court girl (who has retreated to the country). The identity of the narrator is even more enigmatic: while his voice and poetic art mark him as courtly, he appears first as a visitor to the pastoral world. Thus he has performed a telescoped version of the pattern outlined for the reverend man: he has left the city for the country. Finally, we may extend this Virgilian narrative pattern to the young man, who, as we have said, appears to join the narrator in being a courtier who has made a visit to the pastoral world. In short, we may plot all of the fictional principals moving along a Virgilian path. In trying to determine what Shakespeare might be up to here, we need to recall that Marlowe’s ghost was still in competition with Spenser’s over the writing of the nation, his art grounded in a ‘counter-nationhood.’ In A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare removes the action from the obvious site of nationhood, the court and city, but he does follow Spenser and Marlowe in linking the pastoral domain with the political one. The maid is not a figure for Rome, as Spenser’s complaining female is in The Ruines of Rome, or Verlame, as in The Ruines of Time, but nonetheless Shakespeare’s ‘woman is a city (176)’ (Kay 145), as the woman herself laments: ‘And long upon these terms I held my city, / Till thus he ’gan besiege me’ (176-77). Long ago, J.M. Robertson observed that A Lover’s Complaint ‘employs no Greek Mythus (like Venus and Adonis), no Roman Tale (like Lucrece)’ (Rollins, ed. 600). Unlike both earlier narrative poems, too, A Lover’s Complaint contains no concrete reference to a ‘queen’ or in other ways evokes Elizabeth (cf. ‘monarch’ at line 41). Nonetheless, the straw hat preserved in the historical record just happens to have been worn by Shakespeare’s former monarch, and readers have occasionally identified the maid with his recently deceased queen (Rollins, ed. 592, 602).

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Moreover, as an ‘Elizabethan minor epic’ (Hulse) composed around the time of the queen’s death in 1603, A Lover’s Complaint contains other epic topoi: the canon imagery describing the maid’s ‘levelled eyes’ (22); the young man’s chivalric excellence in riding his horse (106-12; cf. FQ 1.1.1); and the young man’s reference to the female as an androgynous warrior (like Britomart, a well-known Elizabeth figure) who escapes the ‘scars of battle’ with her ‘flight, / And makes her absence valiant’ (244-45). Yet, as to be expected in an Ovidian minor epic, Virgilian ‘arms’ are eroticized through verbal play, as voiced by the duplicitous rider of chivalric romance himself: ‘Love’s arms are peace, ’gainst rule, ’gainst sense, ’gainst shame’ (271). Such details are sustained enough to suggest an Ovidian form of nationhood.19 In the clear opposition between the young man who has seduced the maid with ‘sonnets’ and ‘shows’ and the old man who has left the epic world of the court for the pastoral world of the country, Shakespeare appears to represent a struggle between Marlowe’s counter-nationalism—the writer’s narcissistic service of his own art—and Spenser’s royal nationhood in communal service to the Virgilian state. Intriguingly, in the middle of this dispute over the body politic is the body of female chastity itself. From this more detailed review of the fiction, A Lover’s Complaint can be seen to present a complexly nuanced fiction in which Marlovian and Spenserian characters write and read Ovidian poems and perform Ovidian dramatic roles along the Virgilian path of court and country, epic and pastoral, in a competition between two forms of nationhood: Ovidian liberty and Virgilian monarchy. While A Lover’s Complaint may not be either an allegory of art or a biography of the artist, it does represent a literary collision important to early modern England and a professional dilemma at the heart of Shakespeare’s own professional career.20 Art of Craft Indeed, A Lover’s Complaint tells a disturbing, tragic story of a male and a female who enter a cultural economy in which poetry and theater conjoin to ‘daff’ the era’s most treasured ideal: the ‘white stole of chastity.’ In the maid’s haunting narration: For lo, his passion, but an art of craft, Even there resolved my reason into tears, There my white stole of chastity I daffed, Shook off my sober guards and civil fears, Appear to him as he to me appears— All melting; though our drops this diff’rence bore: His poisoned me, and mine did him restore. (A Lover’s Complaint 295-301)

Through the young man’s performance of ‘passion,’ his ‘art of craft,’ the young maid ‘melt[s]’ into sympathy for and with the suffering youth. The moment of sympathy reduces the maid’s physical frame to ‘tears,’ shakes off her protective rational armor—‘sober guards and civil fears’—creates the psychological ‘Appear[ance]’ of mutuality, and leads swiftly to a moment of undressing, the final consequence of

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which is an exchange of (coital) ‘drops’—an exchange that, as Sonnet 129 more famously laments, swiftly separates the sexes, in all their ‘diff’rence’: ‘His poisoned me, and mine did him restore.’ As if in parody of Cordelia with ‘holy water’ in her ‘heavenly eyes’ (King Lear IV.iii.30), the maid has become a martyr to the male cause. In this astonishing depiction of the loss of female virginity, Shakespeare apprises himself, and certainly his reader, of what is finally at stake in the use and abuse of the twin arts he himself produces—especially in his role as the heir of Spenser and Marlowe. Not surprisingly, then, the ‘passion’ that is an art of craft has both poetic and theatrical associations, as Burrow’s gloss indicates; ‘emotion; but also “A poem, literary composition, or passage marked by deep or strong emotion; a passionate speech or outburst” (OED 6d), with potentially a theatrical edge to it, as when in Dream V.i.310 Theseus says of Flute playing Thisbe, “Here she comes, and her passion ends the play”’ (ed. 715). That A Lover’s Complaint is about the discourse of poetry and theater is clear from the outset, where poetry appears in the opening stanza, in more ways than one: From off a hill whose concave womb reworded A plaintful story from a sist’ring vale, My spirits t’attend this double voice accorded, And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale; Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale, Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain, Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain. (A Lover’s Complaint 1-7)

Not merely does the maid tear ‘papers’ that likely include ‘deep-brained sonnets’, and not merely does the narrator lie down to hear her ‘sad-tuned tale,’ but also the landscape in which these literary events occur is humanized as a type of poet—a female poet. Thus a ‘hill’ (or displaced mons veneris) bears a ‘concave womb’ that rewords a ‘plaintful story’ from the ‘sist’ring vale’. Like Lavinia in Virgil’s imperial epic, the Aeneid, or Shakespeare’s own Ovidian tragedy Titus Andronicus, the female is identified with the land. She sings her sad-tuned tale, and the hills echo it harmoniously, making the tempest of her private grief available to a listening audience. As Kerrigan and others note, echo is an ancient trope of poetic fame, and whether the author of the tale wishes it or not, we are witnessing here a process of poetic succession and thus of poetic immortality, the precise import of which we cannot sort out here at the beginning (we shall return to it at the end). What we can say now is that the opening stanza invites us to read into the gender mythos a literary representation about the author and his (or her) art.21 While listening to the maid’s tale, the narrator also sees her tearing ‘papers,’ breaking ‘rings,’ and throwing them into the river, in a concerted effort to consign them to oblivion: Of folded schedules had she many a one, Which she perused, sighed, tore, and gave the flood, Cracked many a ring of posied gold and bone, Bidding them find their sepulchers in mud. (A Lover’s Complaint 43-46)

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Here we see more fully a process of literary reception: from initial reading, to subjective or internal response, to physical violence of the papers’ material form, to their final burial in the watery earth. While Burrow is right to emphasize the closed contents of the papers—indeed, they are ‘sealed to curious secrecy’ (49)—we are nonetheless privy to their effect on the intended reader: ‘in top of rage the lines she rents, / Big discontent so breaking their contents’ (55-56). Whatever the specific ‘contents’ of these documents, they produce a Senecan ‘rage’ in the female who inherits them. Recalling Lucrece with the Trojan painting of Sinon in the 1594 narrative poem, the maid here seeks revenge on the author by attacking his artifact. This time the artifact is poetry itself. Of Time and the River To grasp this representation more fully, we might glance briefly at one story that resembles Shakespeare’s: Ariosto’s story of Father Time, his literary plaques, and the river Lethe in the Orlando Furioso. In Canto 35, Ariosto narrates how St. John helps Astolpho recover Orlando’s lost wits on the moon, pausing to insert his most famous verse treatise on the art of poetry and its telos. The two travelers see an old man filling his lap with a ‘precious load of plaques’ and throwing them ‘in the stream, named Lethe,’ (11) yet ‘Out of a hundred thousand thus obscured / Beneath the silt, scarce one, he saw, endured’ (35.12). Suddenly, the travelers see a ‘flock of vultures’ and other birds of prey swoop down and bear away ‘These shining tokens of renown’ (35.13); however, ‘when such birds attempt to soar on high, / They lack the stamina to bear the weight, / And of the names they choose, howe’er they try, / Oblivion in Lethe is their fate’ (35.14). Ariosto contrasts these birds with ‘Two silver swans’ that ‘can sing the praises of the great: / … ; in their mouths fame is secure’ (14: 7-8). Accordingly, the travelers witness the swans bearing certain plaques to ‘a noble temple crowned. … / Sacred it is to immortality’, and presided over by a ‘fair nymph’: ‘These plaques the nymph so consecrates and tends / That their renown will shine for evermore / In poetry and legendary lore’ (35.15-16). Soon St. John interprets the allegorical sight to the wondering knight: the old man is Father Time; the river, Lethe; the plaques the man seeks to throw into the river and the birds of preys’ futile effort to recover them, the temporal process of poetic oblivion; the swans who succeed in carrying the plaques to the temple of the nymph, the great poets who can render their poems immortal in the Temple of Lady Fame.22 We need not determine whether Shakespeare knew this story or had it in mind in order to see its significance for the opening action of A Lover’s Complaint: like Father Time with the plaques in the River Lethe, the maid is reversing the process of poetic fame by burying the documents in the ‘sepulchers of mud.’ In an astonishing way, the telos of these ‘deep-brained sonnets’ reverses the fiction of fame so renowned in Shakespeare’s Sonnets themselves. The subjectivity of the author dooms his documents unwittingly, precisely because he has misused them. Only as the story unfolds do we understand what has compelled the maid to become involved in this complex process of literary entombment.23 If, as critics believe, Shakespeare’s river is the Thames, the great English symbol of poetic fame, we may witness here more than simple imitation of the opening of Spenser’s Prothalamion

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(see Jackson); we may find instead a concerted critique of Spenser’s (pastoral) claims to poetic immortality.24 Here, then, we can discover Shakespeare’s historic revision of the Spenserian erotic project: whereas the New Poet had foregrounded the masculine representation of virgin consciousness, turning this fascination into a new genre, the betrothal poem (Cheney and Prescott), Shakespeare takes us into the ‘territory of sexual betrayal,’ representing the feminine consciousness of betrayed virginity. Shakespeare’s Ovidian critique of pastoral in general—and of Spenserian pastoral in particular—is evident in his use of the ‘maund’ or basket holding the ‘deepbrained sonnets.’ In the opening to Prothalamion, Spenser presents himself leaving ‘Princes Court’ in a state of ‘discontent’ after ‘long fruitlesse stay’ (6-7) and walking down to the Thames, where he espies a vision: ‘A Flocke of Nymphes’ with ‘greenish locks’ gather ‘flowers,’ each to fill ‘a little wicker basket,’ in order to ‘decke their Bridegromes posies’ (20-34). Usually, editors gloss the baskets with Ovid’s Fasti—either 4.435 on the baskets Proserpina’s girls use for gathering flowers before her abduction or Fasti 5.217-18 on the similar baskets the Hours use for flower-gathering.25 No doubt Shakespeare’s basket has these Ovidian baskets as its intertexts, but for a basket literally associated with the art of poetry and the genre of pastoral we probably need to recall the most famous basket of all: that which Virgil twines in the concluding lines of his Eclogues: ‘These strains, Muses divine, it will be enough for your poet to have sung, while he sits idle and twines a basket of slender hibiscus. These ye shall make of highest worth in Gallus’ eyes’ (10.70-72). Effectively, Shakespeare’s country maid empties out the baskets of Virgil, Ovid, and Spenser, discarding their pastoral contents in the (Ariostan) river of oblivion. Craft of Will As in Ariosto, so in Shakespeare an old man appears, but Shakespeare’s interest is not in the discarded documents so much as in the maid herself, whose ‘suffering ecstasy’ the reverend man seeks to ‘assuage,’ for ‘’Tis promised in the charity of age’ (69-70). The reverend man convinces the maid to tell him her story, and it is here that we learn of the young man’s use of theater, as she herself narrates: Small show of man was yet upon his chin; His phoenix down began but to appear, Like unshorn velvet, on that termless skin, Whose bare out-bragged the web it seemed to wear; Yet showed his visage by that cost more dear, And nice affections wavering stood in doubt If best were as it was, or best without. (A Lover’s Complaint 92-98)

From the outset, the maid theatricalizes the youth’s body in terms of the actor’s falsifying costume.26 Introducing a subtle strand of stage discourse that she will consolidate later in the phrase ‘tragic shows,’ she imagines the emergence of manliness on the youth’s face as itself a ‘Small show of man,’ his budding beard a

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‘web’ that he has put on as a kind of ‘visage’—or mask—simply to ‘wear’ for the sake of appearance (see Roe, ed. 269). Yet it is precisely such a ‘show’ that affects the maid, since he appears ‘by that cost more dear’—the word ‘cost’, as J.W. Mackail long ago observed, picking up the costume imagery (see Kerrigan, ed. 405), punning on the French word ‘coste, côte = “coat”’ (Roe, ed. 269). Significantly, the young man’s physiognomial theater of the chin affects his audience’s ‘nice affections,’ creating ‘wavering’ and doubt’ whether ‘his visage was better with its cost … or better without’ (Kerrigan, ed. 406). The young man’s physiognomial theater is particularly effective, though, because it extends to a more internalized, materialized locale within his body: So on the tip of his subduing tongue All kind of arguments and question deep, All replication prompt and reason strong, For his advantage still did wake and sleep. To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep, He had the dialect and different skill, Catching all passions in his craft of will. (A Lover’s Complaint 120-26)

Craft of will: the phrase is indeed a catching one. According to John Roe, it is ‘a dense phrase meaning “shrewd application of appetite”’ (ed. 271). Supplying more detail, Kerrigian observes, Craft simultaneously suggests the young man’s accomplishment in general (as in ‘the shoemaker’s craft’) and his ‘skilful exercise’ of this (‘the shoe was a work of craft’). As so often in Shakespeare, will operates across a range of senses from ‘purpose, powerful expression of volition’ on the one handto ‘desire’ in the sense of ‘affective emotion, lust’ on the other. Enriched still further by its collocation with the ambiguous phrase Catching all passions, craft of will compromises several shades of significance, from ‘cunning lust’ to the ‘crafting of language into persuasion’ and ‘verbal power’ or ‘discourse, the articulation of volition’ (ed. 408-409).

The maid’s phrase craft of will is a perfect one for describing the young man’s use of both poetry and theater to seduce her. It anticipates the word ‘craft’ in ‘an art of craft’ (already discussed). Art of craft, craft of will: these phrases echo throughout the maid’s story, drawing attention to the young man’s use of a deceptive art that both originates in the will and targets it: What with his art in youth, and youth in art, Threw my affections in his charmed power, Reserved the stalk and gave him all my flower. (A Lover’s Complaint 145-47)

The word ‘charmed’ derives from carmen, meaning song, and during the period magic and witchcraft are indeed a recurrent metaphor—not simply a cultural practice—for the literary arts (see Cheney and Klemp). As the ‘flower’ reference further suggests, the young man’s magic art does double duty as a form of pastoral gardening—an idea soon amplified:

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For further I could say this man’s untrue, And knew the patterns of his foul beguiling, Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew, Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling, Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling, Thought characters and words merely but art, And bastards of his foul adulterate heart. (A Lover’s Complaint 169-75)

The conceit of the orchard as the female womb is conventional, but it may glance at the climactic moment in Marlowe’s Ovidian narrative poem: ‘Leander now, like Theban Hercules, / Entered the orchard of th’ Hesperides, / Whose fruit none rightly can describe but he / That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree’ (2.297-300). Spenser had foregrounded virgin consciousness, while here Marlowe poignantly maps the violent consensual loss of female virginity, yet Shakespeare overgoes both by charting the masculine betrayal of the female. His young man’s gardening skills turn out to be prodigious, and what this stanza carefully traces is a process of reception for his ‘art’—a process that moves ever inward toward the fruit of subjective revelation: she ‘Heard … Saw … Knew … Thought.’ And what she finally realizes is indeed haunting: that ‘characters and words’ are ‘merely but art,’ the ultimate breakers of (marital) faith, the illegitimate children of his ‘foul adulterate heart.’ Among readers, George Steevens was the first to catch the authorial significance of ‘craft of will’ (Rollins, ed. 345), but more recently Ilona Bell has discovered Will Shakespeare making a ‘punning allusion to [his] … own “craft of will”’ (465). This idea encourages us to see Shakespeare’s portrait of the maid—a female who, on the one hand, has lost her chastity through Marlovian subjection to Ovidian poetry and theater, and, on the other, is receiving an ambiguously reverend courtesy from a Spenserian pastoral-epicist—as a kind of authorial stamp grimly afflicted with a literary crisis. Such an authorial portrait is available today through Wendy Wall’s superb work on Elizabethan authors, from Gascoigne and Spenser to Daniel and Shakespeare himself, all of whom precisely use the genre of the female complaint to ‘cross-dress’ their authorial voices, literally ‘taking on the voice of a fallen woman’ (260): ‘The female respondent becomes one of the doubles that the writer uses … to introduce his own authority through masquerade. The fallen woman’s critique becomes a central part of the architecture of poetic authority, as it establishes an acceptable idiom through which the new poet can be presented and formally contained’ (260).27 Wall briefly suggests that in A Lover’s Complaint ‘Petrarchan poet and female auditor are associated and disassociated as complaining publishers. And again this complaint adds a layer of voices to the sonnet book that renders the work more plural and multivocal’ (259). The Compositor’s Eye To this line of thought, we can add a corresponding discourse about the theater, as the cross-dressed ‘Petrarchan poet’ finds him/herself subjected to a penetrating androgynous theatrical show. Interestingly enough, the primary textual crux of

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A Lover’s Complaint occurs over just this discourse, as the compositor for the 1609 quarto repeated one of Shakespeare’s theatrical terms; in her cross-dressed voice, the maid repeats the young courtier’s dramatic voice to the reverend man: ‘But, O my sweet, what labor is’t to leave The thing we have not, mast’ring what not strives, Playing the place which did no form receive, Playing patient sports in unconstrained gives!’ (A Lover’s Complaint 239-42; emphasis added)

In that repetition of ‘Playing’ in the two initial line positions, all editors see a compositorial slip. Back in the eighteenth century, Malone observed, ‘the compositor’s eye after he had printed the former line, I suppose glanced again upon it, and caught the first word of it instead of the first word of the line [242] he was then composing’ (Rollins, ed. 357). Yet we might pause here a bit longer than conventional bibliography has done, to discern how the poem’s most famous textual crux fixes and elongates the theatrical discourse during an extremely intense poetic moment, as if the compositor himself were caught in an authorial craft of will. Shakespeare’s original readers would no doubt have read—and most likely breezed through—the doubleness of ‘Playing.’ Significantly, as Malone also noted, Shakespeare’s theatrical trope imitates Spenser’s versification of theater in The Faerie Queene: ‘Playing their sportes, that joyd her to behold’ (1.10.31; see also 5.1.6; qtd. Rollins, ed. 358). The playing here is ‘double’—not just textually but intertextually—and it presents the compositor’s slip as a testament to the Craft of Will. The Theology of Epic Theater At the end of the poem, the theatrical discourse intensifies. In fact, each of the last four stanzas contains a theatrical term or image. In addition to ‘tragic shows’ in the fourth to last stanza, in the third to last we see a fusion of tragedy and epic, theater and poetry: That not a heart which in his level came Could ’scape the hail of his all-hurting aim, Showing fair nature is both kind and tame; And, veiled in them, did win whom he would maim. Against the thing he sought he would exclaim; When he most burnt in heart-wished luxury, He preached pure maid and praised cold chastity. (A Lover’s Complaint 309-15)

The presence of theatrical imagery in this stanza is important, because the maid lucidly articulates what readers find so intriguing and original about the young man’s theater of seduction: ‘Against the thing he sought he would exclaim.’28 In an image that picks up the confessional or theological profession from the figure of the ‘reverend man,’ the young man preaches ‘pure maid’ and praises ‘cold chastity.’29 In

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his theologically epic theater of the hunting marksman, the young man successfully ‘level[s)’ against every ‘heart’ coming within military sight of his ‘all-hurting aim,’ successfully staging a ‘show’ in which ‘a good disposition (‘fair nature’) is generous and acquiescent’ (Roe, ed. 281). As Roe points out, the word ‘veiled’ means ‘disguised,’ while the phrase ‘in them’ refers back to the ‘strange forms’ of line 303 that the young man adopts as his disguises (ed. 282). Not merely does the youth preach the purity of maidenhood and praise chastity in this ‘tragic show,’ but as an actor ‘veiled’ in his costume he cross-dresses himself by speaking ‘like a chaste or virginal young girl’ (Roe, ed. 282). Finally, then, the youth’s theater manages to hold a mirror up to the maid’s natural character, creating perfect sympathy between feminine subject and masculine object, their androgynous discourse being the tragic point of identification. The next or penultimate stanza continues the theatrical imagery of disguise and costume but moves it more formally into the theological domain: Thus merely with the garment of a grace The naked and concealed fiend he covered, That th’unexperient gave the tempter place, Which, like a cherubin, above them hovered. Who, young and simple, would not be so lovered? Ay me, I fell; and yet do question make What I should do again for such a sake. (A Lover’s Complaint 316-22)

Playing the role of actor on the stage of sexual seduction, the young man covers the ‘naked and concealed fiend’ with the ‘garment of a grace.’ In this Ovidian theater, he uses the costume of character to metamorphose from demon to angel. The metaphysical metaphors confuse the boundaries of the Christian cosmos (as in Shakespeare’s Marlovian Sonnet 144), so that in the mind of the ‘unexperient’ the ‘tempter’ appears a ‘cherubin.’ As the earlier floral imagery anticipates, the maid’s simple utterance ‘I fell’ transplants the local loss of virginity into the re-productive site of the Edenic Fall.30 The word ‘grace’ appears several times earlier—six to be precise (79, 114, 119 [twice], 261, 285). In its first appearance, the word pertains to female body space, meaning maiden virginity or the concave womb itself: ‘I attended / A youthful suit— it was to gain my grace’ (78-79). Despite neglect in modern editions, the word ‘suit’ is exquisite; in the context of the poem’s theatrical discourse, are we not invited to read the word doubly: not merely as ‘the request of a youthful suitor’ (DuncanJones, ed. 436) but also as the performance of a youthful suitor, as the theatrical ring in ‘attended’ would seem to confirm? For a young woman to attend a ‘youthful suit’ is thus to audit a theater of young masculinity; at center stage is a concept that, for Spenser as for Shakespeare, is not merely sexual but theological, as the last word of this stanza, ‘deified,’ makes plain: ‘gain my grace’ (see, e.g., Spenser, Hymne of Beautie 27, 277). As in Sonnet 146 famously, Shakespeare economizes the high stakes of salvation with business ‘terms divine’ (146.11). The young man’s theater is a ‘Small show of man’ oufitted in ‘youthful suit,’ economized to purchase the white stole of chastity. As the maid laments, she ‘attended’ this Satanic theater of dis-grace ‘too early,’ even though she would ‘do [so] again for such a sake.’

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In the second, third, and fourth uses of grace, all of which appear in the same stanza, Shakespeare again dresses the word in theatrical guise, in a remarkable interlacing with the theological: But quickly on this side the verdict went: His real habitude gave life and grace To appertainings and to ornament, Accomplished in himself, not in his case; All aids, themselves made fairer by their place, Came for additions; yet their purposed trim Pieced not his grace, but were all graced by him. (A Lover’s Complaint 113-19)

While the word grace and its cognates appear three times in seven lines, six other terms pertain to clothing, costume, and thus theatrical disguise, as modern annotation confirms. Katherine Duncan-Jones glosses ‘case’ as ‘container, outward clothing,’ and ‘trim’ as ‘adornment, trappings’ (ed. 439), while Roe glosses ‘real habitude’ as ‘regal bearing’ and ‘appertainings’ as ‘appurtenances (trimmings, costume)’ (ed. 270). Kerrigan catches ‘Pieced’ as ‘patched, mended’ (ed. 407). Editors do not gloss ‘ornament,’ because it so obviously contributes to this dressing of the young man in outward garb. Among these terms, however, ‘habitude’ is the most engaging, because it means both inward ‘character or disposition’ (DuncanJones, ed. 439) and outward habit or attire. The drift is clear when we recall that such a remarkable portrait of a young man results from the ‘verdict’ of those beholding him. In the young man’s theater, the audience is to judge his character—both his inward and outward person—in order to become complicit in his role as a contradictory figure of grace: ‘Pieced not his grace, but were all graced by him.’31 The fifth use of grace also includes an intriguing theatrical linkage: ‘My parts had power to charm a sacred nun, / Who disciplined, ay, dieted in grace, / Believed her eyes’ (260-62). Editors usually miss the pun on ‘parts,’ glossing it merely as both ‘limbs, parts of the body’ and ‘accomplishments, good qualities’ (Kerrigan, ed. 418), but Duncan-Jones prepares us to see a theatrical pun: ‘talents, attractions’ (ed. 448). One of the youth’s ‘talents’ is his ‘attraction’: his ability to perform a ‘part,’ to put his body parts and his accomplishments to play on the maid’s interiority, working here as a form of magic, with ‘power to charm’ even ‘a sacred nun.’ This second young woman is not merely institutionally protected by the sanctity of the holy cloister, but she is morally trained (‘disciplined’) and physiologically regulated (‘dieted’) in the order of divine ‘grace.’ Here the work of Michael C. Schoenfeldt on the early modern regime of self-regulation amplifies the absolute danger of the young man’s power to seduce both the nun and the maid. For, unlike Spenser in the Castle of Alma in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare himself in Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt’), in A Lover’s Complaint only men have access to self-regulation, and they use it to imperil the ‘physiology and inwardness’ of their tragic victims—those women who have regulated themselves successfully, whether in the cloister or in the country.32 The youth’s inset story, of a nun who believed in God’s grace but then haplessly sold it for the sexual grace of a young courtier, is among the most stunning parts of the poem. Like Hero and Leander, the story calls into question the entire project of

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Christian humanism, including that in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity, the dream of which is to fulfill the ‘generall end’ of The Faerie Queene: ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (Letter to Ralegh). Specifically, Shakespeare’s young man appears to be modeled not only on the Marlovian author but on Spenser’s Paridell in Book 3, who similarly specializes in the Ovidian art of love, as the famous imitation of the spilt wine at Faerie Queene 3.9.30—from Amores 2.5.17-18 and Heroides 17.75-90—makes patently clear (cf. Hamilton, ed. 374-75; Maclean and Prescott, eds. 354). A descendent of Paris of Troy fame, Paridell woos the ominously named Hellenore, who is no nun: when apart (if ever her apart) He found, then his false engins fast he plyde, And all the sleights unbosomd in his hart; He sighed, he sobd, he swownd, he perdy dyde, And cast himselfe on ground her fast besyde: Tho when againe he him bethought to live, He wept, and wayld, and false laments belyde, Saying, but if she Mercie would him give That he mote algates dye, yet did his death forgive. (Faerie Queene 3.10.7)

Paridell’s theatrical strategy of seduction does not merely anticipate that of Shakespeare’s young man; so does the literary art of Spenser’s ‘learned lover’ (FQ 3.10.6): ‘And otherwhiles with … / … pleasing toyes he would her entertaine, / Now singing sweetly, to surprise her sprights, / Now making layes of love and lovers paine, / Bransles, Ballads, virelayes, and verses vaine’ (3.10.8). If here Paridell functions as a dangerous Ovidian (and Petrarchan) poet of courtly love, earlier he functions as a false Virgilian epic poet when he narrates the story of the fall of Troy to Britomart (3.9.33-37)—not just as Aeneas did in Virgil’s Aeneid but more importantly as Ovid attenuated Virgilian epic in the Metamorphoses. Spenser overgoes both classical epicists by having his learned lover contain the epic story in five nine-line stanzas. Just as Spenser makes Paridell falsify his own Virgilian and Ovidian art—‘Fashioning worlds of fancies evermore / In her fraile wit’ (3.9.52)— so Shakespeare makes his young man falsify his own Ovidian art of poetry and theater. The young man’s story also recalls that of Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece, when Shakespeare writes that ‘hot burning will’ has the power to freeze ‘conscience’ (247). In the case of the nun, sexual love for the young courtier blinds her to God’s grace: ‘Religious love put out religion’s eye’ (250). Deftly, Shakespeare suggests how sexual desire evaporates Christian faith. This is a haunting idea, and must have been especially so to readers during the Reformation. In the context of Spenser’s poetry of grace, the haunting acquires a literary force: Christian grace is subject to (Marlovian) poetry and theater; human art is more powerful than the grace of God.33 Among Shakespeare’s seven uses of the word grace, the last is the only one not cohabiting with theatricality; it does, however, occur at a climactic point in the maid’s narration, when the youth breaks into tears, the very moment when speech gives way to emotion, staged in terms of chivalric epic: ‘This said, his wat’ry eyes he did dismount, / Whose sights till then were levelled on my face, … / O, how the

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channel to the stream gave grace!’ (281-85). His tears of grace prove to be the final seduction in the maid’s fall, leading to the crucial stanza declaring his ‘passion’ to be ‘but an art of craft.’ If A Lover’s Complaint begins with poetry, it ends with theater: 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 reconciled maid! (A Lover’s Complaint 323-29)

Roe glosses ‘borrowed motion’ in line 5 above as ‘imitated or feigned show of feeling,’ but adds, ‘A “motion” was a puppet-show or mime, as in WT IV.iii.96-7’ (ed. 282). The reference to The Winter’s Tale points to a neglected link between A Lover’s Complaint and Shakespeare’s late plays: the young man joins one of Shakespeare’s greatest poet-playwright figures, Autolycus, who reports that his art is able to ‘compass … a motion of the Prodigal Son.’ This trickster joins a whole host of Shakespearean dramatic characters in putting poetry and theater to use, whether like Edgar for benevolent purposes or like Iago for that of pure malevolence (Cheney, Shakespeare, chapters 1-2 and Epilogue). Rhetorically, the theatrical phrase ‘borrowed motion’ occurs as the center of the poem’s final stanza, functioning as both the summarizing idea for the incredible initial anaphora of lines 1-4—the ‘succession of disjointed exclamations’ that becomes a ‘collective rhetoric which betrays the maid even as she re-invokes it in her attempt at self-purgation’ (Duncan-Jones, ed. 452)—and the closing idea in lines 6-7 that haunts the poem’s final utterance: the youth’s theater is so real that the maid would entertain it again if she could. Perhaps critical attention to the word ‘reconciled’ has interfered with our interest in the theatrical form of the poem’s conclusion. Critics rightly understand the theological and doctrinal significance of the larger utterance (Kerrigan ed. 425). Kerrigan nicely compares the structural frame with that of both Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond and Spenser’s Ruines of Time, wherein (especially in the latter) ‘the poet’s reaction provides a measure for our own’, noting that ‘Shakespeare, characteristically, unsettles our sense of the ending by omitting both the maid’s departure and the poet’s re-emergence’ (ed. 425; his emphasis). Kerrigan’s final comment leads us to our own ‘dramatic’ conclusion: ‘In A Lover’s Complaint, the opening cannot close the text; line 5 remains intractable; and the heroine grows beyond the conventions which enclose her, developing an intense and human inconsistency which might be called dramatic. If the poem starts in the territory of Spenser and Daniel, it ends, like the problem plays, with the incorrigibility of passion’ (ed. 425; emphasis added). Let us take Kerrigan—and Shakespeare—at his word. In their terms, A Lover’s Complaint literally migrates from the ‘territory’ of Spenserian poetry to the dramatic landscape of Shakespeare’s own problem plays, from the poetic ‘papers’ of the opening stanza to the ‘borrowed motion’ of the last:

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effectively, from ‘deep-brained sonnets’ to ‘tragic shows.’ What is especially disturbing—or heroic—about the conclusion to A Lover’s Complaint is the way it uses poetry to challenge one of the dominant projects of Shakespeare’s plays—from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest: we become fully human only through compassion for the other. ‘[I]f you behold them,’ Ariel says to Prospero of the inhabitants shipwrecked on the island, ‘your affections / Would become tender;’ and Prospero agrees: ‘The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance’ (5.1.18-19, 27-28). Perhaps the fickle maid knows about Shakespearean poetry and theater because she has become not merely their greatest auditor but also their purest author. The Sistering Vale The ending of A Lover’s Complaint remains the most baffling denouement in the canon. We are baffled because Shakespeare does not complete the narrative with which he began. We know that both the narrator and the reverend man have listened to the maid’s story, and we know that the reverend man has wanted to hear the story in order to offer ‘charity.’ We expect some narrative resolution, but we do not receive it.34 Yet critics remain divided over just how to interpret this baffling event. Kerrigan argues that ‘Shakespeare refuses to disentangle self-justification … from the intractable problem of honesty’: ‘To be true to her experience (seeking spiritual “reconciliation”), the “fickle maid” must recoil into a rapt subjectivity which excludes us. … In place of articulate “example,” Shakespeare writes towards perplexity’ (Motives of Woe 50). By contrast, Shirley Sharon-Zisser believes that Shakespeare writes toward fulfillment, even (feminine) ‘orgasm,’ as the maid voices her complaint against the young man—and to the reverend man—in order to experience the ‘jouissance’ of psychological ‘transference’—a process that ‘transforms the poem as a whole from “complaint” to an epithalamium’ (218-19; see also Sharon-Zisser in this volume). While acknowledging the difficulty here, we might observe how effectively Shakespeare’s narrative technique manages to transfer the landscape of the poem to the mindscape of the reader: it is we who read the story and are left with it; it is not just the maid who is left in a state of ‘rapt subjectivity’—and it does not exclude us. We, too, have overheard the Shakespearean maid’s story about the abuse of poetry and theater as active agents in the losing of chastity. The author makes her story available to us; it has applicability to our experience. Indeed, of all the works in the Shakespeare canon, A Lover’s Complaint is singular for its power to perform cultural work, today as well as yesterday: in living through the maid’s tragic choice—to daft her white stole of chastity in order to grace masculine charisma—male and female reader alike discover the strongest grounds and motives to protect their own chastity. For his part, Shakespeare’s combined engagement with the works of Spenser and Marlowe in a narrative poem late in his career helps us to redraw our profile of the world’s most famed man of the theater. In A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare’s simultaneous rivalry with Spenser and Marlowe as late as 1609, together with his exceptional intertwining of a discourse of theater with a discourse of poetry, compels us to see Shakespeare as more than a Marlovian man of the theater or simply an

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immature rival of Spenser. Within just a few years of his retirement, he is working vigorously to reconcile the Virgilian poetry of Spenser with the Ovidian poetry and theater of Marlowe, and to fictionalize a culture besieged by these twin literary powers. It is as if our greatest English poet-playwright were making one final plea for court and country to use both ‘sonnet’ and ‘show’ with care. Above all, he appears to be making that plea to himself. Through the criticism of Kerrigan and Duncan-Jones in particular, readers today have come to see Shakespeare’s 1609 volume of sonnet sequence and narrative poem as part of a larger literary practice, best known through volumes by Daniel and Spenser. What criticism has not registered, however, are two follow-up points. The first is that both Daniel and Spenser published their volumes as distinct points along the continuum of their ‘laureate’ careers (see Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates). Daniel understood Delia and Rosamond as preparation for his higher flight to national epic, while Spenser understood Amoretti and Epithalamion as a regenerative bridge between pastoral and epic.35 Second, Shakespeare may have followed Daniel and Spenser in understanding his 1609 volume to be more than simply an isolated publication gotten up during yet another closing of the theaters; it, too, could be an announcement for a distinct phase of a career—a late version of the kind of announcements he had made in his prose dedications to Venus and Lucrece—as when (most famously) he promises Southampton that after his ‘idle houres’ spent in writing Venus he will go on to pen ‘some graver labour’ (Riverside 1799).36 Unlike both Daniel and Spenser, however, Shakespeare did not bequeath an epic in verse, or, like Jonson, an (unfulfilled) plan to write one.37 Nonetheless, like Marlowe in Hero and Leander and Lucan’s First Book, Shakespeare did bequeath an ‘Ovidian’ pre-figuration for such a national art—one that subsequent ages have been content to locate elsewhere in his canon. Yet A Lover’s Complaint is important in the Shakespeare canon because it maps out a sad, complex model of national literary production. In this model, Marlowe’s Ovidian, counter-national art ‘takes’ chastity away and ‘leaves’ the victim a complaining lover, while Spenser’s national art hypocritically fails to provide the advertised counsel and consolation. Shakespeare’s own art, a formal fusion of the two, becomes complicit in the shame and sham of psychic female ‘reconciliation.’ To read through A Lover’s Complaint is to witness the failure of Elizabethan masculine literature’s greatest art to achieve its intended cultural goal: the theological protection of the ‘concave womb’ within the ‘sist’ring vale.’ And yet, as often in Shakespearean tragedy, perhaps we find ourselves wondering at the marvel created—wondering whether the river with which the poem opens is not simply Ariosto’s Lethe but Spenser’s Thames, English literature’s great river not of oblivion but of immortality: ‘Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song’ (Prothalamion 18). As the sustained praise for A Lover’s Complaint between Malone and Kerrigan suggests, within the poet’s opaque fiction of artistic failure, we may witness a supreme art of unperverted reconciliation.

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Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

This essay comes from chapter 8 in Cheney, Shakespeare; for background on poetry and theater as the twin matrices of Shakespeare’s art, see esp. chapters 1 and 2. All quotations from A Lover’s Complaint and the Sonnets come from Kerrigan, ed. Quotations from other Shakespeare works come from the Riverside Shakespeare. See Cheney, Shakespeare, on the two dominant models: 1) Shakespeare is a man of the theater who wrote poetry only during the plague years; 2) Shakespeare began his career as a poet but abandoned poetry in favor of theater after 1593-94 (21-24). On A Lover’s Complaint and the plays, see Kerrigan, ed. 393-94; Roe, ed. 70-72; Burrow, ed. 139-40; Underwood 117-69. On the special link with Hamlet, see John Roe in this volume; Craik 439, 444-46. Shakespeare’s predecessors in the complaint form (rpt. Kerrigan, Motives) do not include a sustained discourse of poetry and theater. Daniel’s Rosamond includes a discourse of ‘show’ (173, 279, 280, 300, 398, 623, 657, 692), with a vague theatrical ring (173, 278-80, 300, 657), but such discourse is detached from the commercial theater (rpt. Kerrigan, Motives). By contrast, Daniel includes an important and sustained discourse of poetry: ‘Thames had Swannes as well as ever Po’ (728). Critics discussing ‘Shakespeare’s Petrarchism’ (Braden), tend to neglect A Lover’s Complaint. On the European development of Petrarchan authorship, including in England, see Kennedy. On Seneca in the plays, see Miola; Helms. On complaint, Seneca, and Renaissance tragedy in A Lover’s Complaint, see Kerrigan, Motives 55-59. On the young man as an actor, see Rollins, ed. 588-89; Underwood 83; Rees 159; Craik 442. The songs and shows are not quite of the same representational economy, but they are close: the sonnets are material artifacts, but the shows tend be more metaphorical, a term for the young courtier’s deception. Nonetheless, Kerrigan and Burrow allow us to see how A Lover’s Complaint complicates the distinction, to see that this is exactly how Shakespeare’s mind represents the two forms at this point in his career. Cf. Craik: Shakespeare ‘raises questions we can call theatrical since they concern performativity and audience’ (443). On Ovid as the author of such poems as the Amores, Ars amatoria, Fasti, and Metamorphoses and the lost tragedy Medea (extant in two lines), see Cheney, Shakespeare, chapters 1 and 2, including on the Renaissance interest in this Ovid (e.g., Jonson’s Poetaster). Unlike modern editions of Venus and Lucrece, those of A Lover’s Complaint contain little annotation on Ovid: Duncan-Jones and Burrow record no intertextuality, while Kerrigan mentions Ovid only once (ed. 400). Among critics, Rees, Kay, and Sharon-Zisser do not mention Ovid; among those who do, see Rollins, ed. 589; Underwood 2, 3-9, 15-16, 47, 50, 55-56, 59; Roe, ed. 64, 66n1; Kerrigan, Motives 55-57, 67; Craik 438. On the centrality of desire, see the psychoanalytical (Lacanian) essays in this volume by Shirley Sharon-Zisser, James Schiffer, Jon Harned, and Stephen Whitworth. On Marlowe and Shakespeare, see, e.g., Shapiro. Editions that provide no annotation on Marlowe include Kerrigan, Roe, Duncan-Jones, and Burrow. The considerable annotation collected in Rollins’ Variorum: Poems includes only one reference to Marlowe, by Theobald in 1929 (601). Like editors, critics more often mention Sidney and Daniel (e.g., Rees; Bell; Laws). On Marlowe as a poet-playwright writing a counter-nationhood, see Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession esp. 19-25, responding to Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. On the young courtier as an Orphic rhetorician, see Harned in this volume. For Marlowe as an Orphic poet, see Hulse. All quotations from Marlowe’s poems come from Orgel, ed.

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12 On Spenser and Marlowe in Venus and Lucrece, see Cheney, Shakespeare, chapters 3 and 4. All quotations from Spenser come from Smith and De Sélincourt, eds. 13 Rollins reports that ‘An anonymous reviewer in Fraser’s Magazine (Oct., 1855, p. 411) characterized the poem as “one of the most successful pastorals in the English language”’ (ed. 586; see 593, 594). Late twentieth-century commentators follow suit: see Underwood 61; Kerrigan, ed. 403-04, Motives 13-14, 21, 46; Roe, ed. 264; Rees 165; Sharon-Zisser 206-09; Laws 81, 86-89. 14 Kerrigan, ed. 402. Qt. MacCaffrey 366, who emphasizes that ‘Spenser evidently attached important meanings to this pattern, for it occurs at least four times in his poetry.’ 15 In The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout may well be the first important figure to leave the pastoral world for the ‘walled townes’ (August 157-62) and then to return to the country in lamentation over sexual betrayal. The biographical pattern pertains not merely to Spenser but also to Shakespeare (see Rollins, ed. 587). 16 Critics also neglect Virgil; the only commentary comes from Underwood, who traces Shakespeare’s use of the female complaint through Ovid’s Heroides to Dido in the Aeneid (xiv, 3-4). Cf. Rees 161. 17 Following Malone, modern critics routinely find Spenser. See Underwood 39-42; Kerrigan, ed. 15, 390-92; Rees 157; Roe, ed. 61-65; Duncan-Jones, ed. 436, 441; Kerrigan, Motives 21, 30, 32-34, 41-42, 53; Jackson; Kay 145, 147-49; Laws 88. 18 Editors usually gloss the reverend man’s ‘grained bat’ with the ‘handsome bat’ of the false Ape in Mother Hubberds Tale (217; see Duncan-Jones, ed. 436). On the reverend man as ‘the incestuous, non-erectional desire of a feminized Father,’ see Sharon-Zisser 208. In this volume, Ilona Bell provides a radically different interpretation specifically of the reverend man. 19 Muir observes, ‘The largest group of images … is taken from war, and these express the battle between the sexes’ (164). 20 In this volume, see the essay by Heather Dubrow for a focus on a different model of rival authors. 21 Cf. Kerrigan, Motives 43; D. Kay 148; Sharon-Zisser 196. 22 On this episode, see Cheney, Flight 123-24, 276n17. 23 As such, the maid appears to reverse the project of Renaissance humanism itself, as excavated by Greene: ‘The Renaissance … chose to open a polemic against the Dark Ages. The ubiquitous imagery of disinterment, resurrection, and renascence needed a death and burial to justify itself’ (3). See also 30-31, 92-93, and esp. 220-41: ‘At the core of humanism lies this instinct to reach out into chaos, oblivion, mystery, the alien, the subterranean, the dead, even the demonic, to reach out and in the act of reaching out already to be reviving and restoring’ (235). 24 On the river in A Lover’s Complaint as the Thames, see Kay 149. On Prothalamion, see Cheney, Flight 225-45; Cheney and Prescott. 25 McCabe cites Fasti 4.435 (ed. 730); Brooks-Davies, Fasti 5.217-18 (ed. 392). 26 Cf. Muir: ‘clothing imagery’ expresses the ‘underlying theme … the difficulty of distinguishing between appearance and reality’ (164). 27 Wall also relates this authorial strategy to the Virgilian idea of a literary career, mapped onto the transition from a manuscript to a print culture (230). Kay says of the maid’s straw hat and river-site complaint: ‘As the Globe’s wooden structure took shape, with “upon her head a platted hive of straw” (8), there could have been no better place in England than the “weeping margent” of the Thames from which to contemplate the broad shapes of history and meditate on the relationship between the gilded monuments of princes and the powerful rhymes of poets’ (149). 28 Roe calls the young man’s strategy ‘the most interesting thing in the entire poem’ (ed. 69): ‘firstly, he presents himself as a sinner in need of redemption: secondly, he presents himself as emotionally untouched and therefore chaste, a male virgin, no less; and lastly

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he presents her as a redeemer—not only of himself but of all those wounded hearts who have suffered through him’ (ed. 70; his emphasis). See Kay 148. On this topic, see Paul D. Stegner in this volume. Cf. Underwood 101: ‘The hovering “cherubin” finally reminds one of Doctor Faustus;’ see 102 on ‘Marlovian resemblances.’ On the Reformation context of A Lover’s Complaint, see Kerrigan, Motives 39-41. On the theater and the ‘livery guilds’ in ways that inform A Lover’s Complaint, see Stallybrass. As Kerrigan adds, the wording here ‘was often applied to those who had, sometimes fiercely, mortified the flesh’ (ed. 419). For a recent book-length study of Spenser’s ‘biblical poetics,’ see Kaske. As Kerrigan reminds us, the complaint tradition sets up the expectation that we will receive a gifted lesson for having endured so much woe. Yet no such gift is forthcoming (Motives 50). Lukas Erne reminds me that the baffling denouement is ‘mirrored … in the ending of The Taming of the Shrew, which has an induction but does not have a frame’ (personal communication, May 9, 2003). On Daniel’s volume in his laureate career, see his dedicatory poem to Mary Sidney prefacing his Works. On Spenser’s 1595 marriage volume, see Cheney, Flight 149-94. Critics follow Heminge and Condel in speculating that Shakespeare had plans for an edition of his plays: Wells; Duncan-Jones, Ungentle 264; Erne 109-13. We might further speculate that such an edition would have included the poems, like Jonson’s Works. On Jonson’s plan to write ‘an epic poem entitled Heroloqia, of the worthies of his country,’ see ‘Conversations with William Drummond’ (Parfitt, ed. 461).

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A Reconciled Maid: A Lover’s Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England Paul Stegner

In A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare registers concerns about a penitent’s inability to overcome the effects of sin and emphasizes the importance of private or auricular confession. By representing what amounts to be the confession of a ‘fickle maid’(5) to a ‘reverend man’(57), Shakespeare underscores the paradox of the Protestant confessional model: if a penitent can be forgiven of sins without priestly intervention, what happens when he or she does not experience consolation?1 By modeling the poem on the conventional rite of penance, Shakespeare creates a poetic space in which to explore the intense effects of seduction and desire (as James Schiffer, Stephen Whitworth, and Jon Harned indicate in their respective essays in this volume), but also to demonstrate the limitations of individual subjectivity in overcoming the Christian economy of shame and guilt. Critics have long recognized that the poem resembles a ‘would-be confession’but often diminish the significance of this representation by arguing that the fickle maid overreacts to her situation, or that she comes to terms with the young man’s sexual betrayal (Rollins 595).2 Even John Kerrigan, who provides an exceptional study of the poem’s religious and confessional context, minimizes its theological dimension: ‘As the title insists A Louer’s Complaint is amorous. Whatever the importance of “confessioun” and repentance elsewhere, this poem is about love’(Kerrigan, Motives of Woe 41). Nevertheless, by using charged theological language throughout the poem, Shakespeare makes no distinction between sexual or romantic desire and the religious context in which the fickle maid operates. On the contrary, he connects desire to ritual to emphasize their intertwined and problematic relationship. From the numerous ‘maimed rites’in Hamlet (5.2.219) to the anxiety over ‘the priest in surplice white’completing the requiem in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’(13), Shakespeare grounds the assurance of consolation in the fulfillment of ecclesiastical rituals. Shakespeare’s engagement with what David Cressy describes as the ‘profoundly traumatic’repercussions stemming from the Church of England’s disruption of various ritual practices has become the subject of much attention (477). Most notably, critics such as Robert Watson, Michael Neill, Stephen Greenblatt, and John Klause have examined the fallout from the English Church’s rejection of the prayers for the dead and the doctrine of Purgatory. Nevertheless, the connection between Shakespeare’s representations of private confession and the Established Church’s attack on sacramental penance and its reorientation of 79

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confessional practices remains largely overlooked. This critical neglect is notable given Shakespeare’s repeated depictions of the rite, such as Claudius’ failed confession in Hamlet and Duke Vicentio’s problematic role as a confessor in Measure for Measure. In many ways, this oversight results from the assumption that the issue of confession was easily resolved and remained unchanged after Elizabeth’s accession.3 Instead of passing away quietly or being consolidated, though, auricular penance remained a contentious issue in the Church of England throughout the early modern period. Moreover, the changes to confessional practices, especially auricular confession, radically altered an individual’s relationship to God and to self. A Lover’s Complaint is indeed Shakespeare’s most sustained treatment of the trauma caused by the transformation of penance in Tudor England. As part of the Reformation, the Church of England rejected the sacramental quality and necessity of confession and decentered its place in the lives of the faithful. No longer required to confess sins to a priest annually, individuals were expected to seek forgiveness directly from God. Penitents could not rely upon a priest’s absolution to effect grace, the conventional Catholic teaching on private confession, but had to depend on their individual subjectivity and self-knowledge. A minister’s ‘private absolution’, as Richard Hooker explains, ‘can be noe more then a declaration of what God hath done’(3: 82). The elevation of interior subjectivity in the Established Church provided those with an assurance of faith the ability to confess to God without ecclesiastical mediation, but it offered only nominal assistance to those incapable of negotiating sin and overcoming self-doubts. As a result, the Church of England’s effective abandonment of auricular confession disrupted the established ritual practices of many of the faithful. By offering a concentrated representation of confession in A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare foregrounds the estrangement resulting from this reconfigured model of auricular penance. His depiction of a ‘fickle maid’who cannot experience consolation even though she is ‘reconciled’reflects the renewed discourses on confession at the beginning of the seventeenth century (329). Shakespeare’s advancement of the need for ritualized confession to achieve consolation corresponds to the position of Lancelot Andrewes, whose 1600 sermon entitled Of the Power of Absolution intimates the necessity of priestly absolution. Indeed, in A Lover’s Complaint, without the fulfillment of the rite of penance, namely, the reverend man’s absolution, the fickle maid remains infected by the seductive rhetoric of the young man regardless of her spiritual reconciliation. Shakespeare depicts an interrupted confessional rite to illustrate not only the necessary intersection between ritual and self, but also the limitations of individual subjectivity separated from ritual practices. To explore in more detail Shakespeare’s representation of auricular confession in the poem, I first outline the development of confessional practices during the English Reformation. I then examine how the penitential form of A Lover’s Complaint underscores what Thomas Tentler has identified as the central question of confession: ‘[H]ow does the sinner know that he is forgiven?’(14). Finally, I demonstrate the significance of the poem’s confessional structure in relation to Shakespeare’s construction of interior subjectivity in Shakespeares Sonnets, the 1609 quarto that prints A Lover’s Complaint as a complementary female complaint to Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence.4

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I. The Reformation attack on sacramental confession rested on two primary, often interlinked, objections: (1) reformers like Calvin and Zwingli rejected the sacramental status of confession outright because they denied it had been explicitly instituted by Christ; and (2) reformers like Luther critiqued auricular confession because of the close association of mandatory confession with ecclesiastical authority embodied in the ‘power of the keys’which Christ imparts to St. Peter: ‘And I will give unto thee the keyes of the kingdome of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven’(Matt. 16:19, Geneva Bible). The medieval church traditionally used the keys to justify papal and clerical authority and jurisdiction. This connection between confession and ecclesiastical authority led Luther, who had found scriptural authorization for confession in James 5:16, ‘confitemini ergo alterutrum vestra’[confess your sins to one another], to attempt to reform the practice. By critiquing the Church’s abuse of sacerdotal authority over auricular confession, then, sixteenth-century reformers intended, on a general level, to rectify the perceived failings of the medieval church and, on a particular level, to obviate the penitential practices instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Before the council, Christians confessed their sins irregularly if at all, but, as a result of the Omnia utriusque sexus, the twenty-first canon of the council, all Christians who had reached the age of reason—between fourteen and seventeen years old—were required to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year. These reforms dramatically transformed the penitential landscape of Latin Christianity.5 Since, as Ronald Rittgers observes, ‘confession and communion went together in the minds of both Church officials and the laity,’the power vested in a confessor was considerable because he possessed authority over not only a Christian’s outward relationship with the church, but also his or her inward, spiritual relationship with Christ (26). In the person of the confessor, the faithful literally experienced the clergy’s fulfillment of Christ’s words to St. Peter to bind and loose sins. While the reformers certainly had no intention of returning to the pre-Lateran state of Christian penance and discipline, their solutions for the fate of confession varied widely. For reformers who wanted to maintain sacramental confession, the answer was to reform the institution. Emphasizing the consolatory power of confession, Luther, for instance, praised the benefits of confession: ‘I will allow no man to take private confession away from me, and I would not give it up for all the treasures of the world, since I know what comfort and strength it has given me’(51: 98). Despite Luther’s praises, he attacked the corruption of the rite of penance under the medieval clergy: ‘Thus the most salutary sacrament of penance has become nothing but sheer tyranny … a disease and a means to increase sins’(qtd. in Ozment 50). Luther’s condemnation of sacerdotal abuses thus outweighed his commendation of penitential acts, and ultimately his reorientation of private confession radically altered its place in Christian life. Reformers like Calvin who completely abolished sacramental confession and who shifted their emphasis to the general confession in religious services nevertheless continued to practice a form of private confession. For those reformers who retained some form of private confession, it became secondary to public confession in a religious setting and reserved as an exceptional

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means for comforting the faithful. Calvin’s comment that it should be used for those ‘so agonized and afflicted by a sense of [their] sins that [they] cannot obtain relief without the aid of others’reflects the relegation of auricular confession to such extraordinary circumstances (1: 544). Along with the reformers’transformation of the medieval church’s practice of auricular confession, they denied the sacerdotal authority over the power of the keys. Luther asserted the power of the keys had been granted to all Christians; as such, forgiveness could be accomplished by ‘a brother or a neighbor … in the house or the fields,’ but, more preferably, by a penitent’s faith in God’s mercy (qtd. in Kerrigan, Motives of Woe 40). In contrast with the medieval church’s emphasis on the priest’s power to absolve sins, Luther stressed that the authority to remit sins belonged only to God. Luther summarizes this view in the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520): ‘Once faith is possessed, contrition and consolation will come as the inevitable and spontaneous consequence’(qtd. in Tentler 369). Likewise, Calvin, declaring that sacerdotal jurisdiction over confession was one of the many ‘frivolous absurdities’of Roman Catholicism, explained: ‘[W]e are to deposit our infirmities in the breasts of each other, with the view of receiving mutual counsel, sympathy, and comfort’(1: 539). Instead of relying upon a ghostly confessor to remit sins, Luther and Calvin concentrated on the penitent’s faith in God’s forgiveness. Drawing upon earlier moderate reformers’models of private confession, the Church of England retained a reformed model of auricular confession that emphasized an individual’s direct confession to God. William Tyndale’s comments in The Exposition of the Fyrste Epistle of Seynt Jhon (1531) illustrate the position of many of the early English reformers toward a reformed model of auricular confession: ‘If we confess our sins, not in the priest’s ear (though that tradition, restored to the right use, were not damnable), but in our hearts to God, with true repentance and fast belief; then is he faithful to forgive and to purge us, because of his merciful truth and promise’(qtd. in T.T. Parker 110). Furthermore, with the publication of The Order of Communion (1548), the Established Church affirmed that auricular confession was no longer necessary for the faithful and thereby allied itself with the Calvinist understanding of penance. Yet, unlike Calvin’s and Luther’s abolishment of sacerdotal control of auricular confession, the Church of England maintained the medieval church’s restriction of its administration to the clergy. In The Order of Communion the jurisdiction of priests is clearly outlined: ‘And if there be any of you whose conscience is troubled and grieved in any thing, lacking comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Priest taught in the law of God, and confess and open his sin and grief secretly’(Ketley 61-62).6 Taking the media via, the Church of England stressed the importance of an individual conscience in confession, but preserved the ecclesiastical authority of the clergy. In the Elizabethan Church, auricular confession became an exceptional means under sacerdotal authority for reconciling and comforting those faithful who could not achieve a quiet conscience on their own. The Book of Common Prayer (1559) instructs the priest, if he perceives an individual who ‘cannot quiet his own conscience, but requireth further comfort of counsel,’to declare: ‘[T]hen let him come to me, or some other discrete and learned minister of God’s Word, and open his grief, that he may receive such ghostly counsel, advice, and comfort, as his

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conscience may be relieved’(Booty 257). After the institution of the 1559 Prayer Book, the doctrinal issues surrounding confession and absolution remained dormant and private confession all but disappeared in the religious life of the Established Church. In practice, those who privately confessed were generally limited, as Kenneth Parker notes, to ‘a self-selected clientele: the godly’(70). The neglect of private confession resulted in part from the church’s doctrinal leanings toward Calvinism. Private confession thus existed as an extraordinary means to console scrupulous penitents by leading them to recognize that they have received divine absolution. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, the issue of auricular confession reemerged at Cambridge. At the center of this controversy was John Overall, Regius Professor of Divinity, who faced criticism in 1600 over his teaching on auricular confession.7 In opposition to the Cambridge Calvinists, Overall commended the use of private confession and defended its administration, a position shared by Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, and fatherconfessor at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and at St. Paul’s. Indeed, Andrewes focused on priestly absolution in his sermon Of the Power of Absolution, which elicited a widespread reaction at court after he delivered it at Whitehall in March 1600.8 In many ways, though, Andrewes’sermon reinforces the Church of England’s established teachings on the doctrinal place of confession and absolution. He supports, for example, its position that only ordained clergy (‘Ecclesiastical persons’) have the ability to absolve sins, but that, in special circumstances, God can ‘bestow it on whom or when Him pleaseth’(5: 92). Moreover, he follows the Established Church’s rejection of the sacramental quality of confession.9 While Andrewes’evocation of ‘the power of the keys’in this sermon corresponds to the doctrine of the Church of England, his emphasis on the necessity of private confession and the power of absolution opposes the Calvinistic elements in the church. Instead of relegating auricular penance to extraordinary circumstance, as the Elizabethan Prayer Book instructs, he states that ‘there are divers acts instituted by God and executed by us, which all tend to the remission of sins … and in all and every of these is the person of the minister required, they cannot be dispatched without him’(5: 94-95). Andrewes’eschewing of the opinion that the selfexamination involved in private confession was an undue burden to an individual’s conscience, as Luther and Calvin maintained, supports this anti-Calvinist interpretation, as does his accentuation on the limitations of an individual’s faith due to scrupulousness and doubts: ‘Sometimes men have good minds, but know not which way to turn them or set themselves about it … For most usual it is for men at their ends to doubt, not of the power of remitting of sins, but of their disposition to receive it’(5: 101). In order to overcome these obstacles, Andrewes stresses the ability of auricular confession to effect immediately ‘strong consolation and perfect assurance, [and] not waver in the hope which is set before them’(5: 102). Rather than elevate the individual’s ability to overcome sin, then, he addresses the necessary intervention of a priest and intimates the sacramental quality of the rite of penance. In his later sermons, Andrewes further emphasizes the centrality of auricular confession in Christian life. In Of the Sending of the Holy Ghost, which he delivered before King James at Whitehall in 1612, he describes the priest’s ‘second imposition of hands’in the rite of absolution as the ‘third necessity’following baptism and

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confirmation in the lives of the faithful (3: 191). For Andrewes, an individual’s interior disposition is inadequate to reconcile with God and requires auricular confession. Andrewes’views on the sacramental quality of the rite of penance, though they never drew extensive criticism or reprobation, mark a shift away from the Calvinist and Puritan inflected teachings of the sixteenth-century Established Church. Yet, as Maurice Reidy observes, his desire to return to ‘the full devotional life of the old Church’intimates that his teachings on confession were indicative of a larger tension between the Calvinist and avant-garde strands that threatened to destabilize the media via of the Church of England (142). This division regarding the place of confessional practices would only intensify and become even more divisive in the Caroline church.10 II In A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare directly engages with the emerging controversy regarding auricular confession in the Church of England. He establishes the poem’s confessional form in the opening narrative frame, and his description of the reverend man and his interaction with the fickle maid indicates the poem’s confessional substructure in three ways. First, the epithet ‘reverend’had been used to describe clergymen in England since the late fourteenth century.11 Second, Shakespeare’s presentation of the reverend man as ‘[s]ometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew/ Of court, of city, and had let go by/ The swiftest hours, observed as they flew’suggests a minister who journeyed for a temporary ecclesiastical position and had returned to the country (58-60).12 Third, the specific identification of the reverend man as a ‘blusterer’(a braggart) also reinforces his occupation as a clergyman, for the verb ‘to bluster’often had negative religious connotations in the sixteenth century.13 The reverend man therefore began his time in the court and the city as a braggart, but he ‘observed’the ‘swiftest hours’and learned from the experience.14 As ‘Sometime’in line 58 illustrates, the reverend man was formerly a blusterer in the court and town; now he is ‘privledg’d by age’ (62).15 Following the tradition of the shepherd-priest depicted most famously in Spenserian poetics, which Patrick Cheney outlines in his essay in this collection, Shakespeare presents a reformed clergymen who has retired to the country to ‘graz[e] his cattle’as well as to care for his spiritual flock (57).16 The reverend man’s actions towards the fickle maid further evince his role as a priestly figure. This identification is not meant to suggest that the reverend man represents either a minister in the Church of England or a recusant Catholic priest. In contrast to Shakespeare’s other religious figures, such as Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet or Isabella in Measure for Measure, the reverend man’s religious denomination is not identified. Nevertheless, his reaction to the maid’s lamentations simultaneously advances his role as a confessor capable of exercising the power of absolution and distinguishes him from the Calvinist and Puritan positions regarding individual penitence. As such, upon finding the maiden ‘shriking undistinguish’d woe, / In clamor high and low’(21-21) he approaches her ‘fastly’(61) and ‘desires to know / In brief the grounds and motives of her woe’(62-63). After this first entreaty, he proceeds to initiate the traditional form of private confession by ‘comely

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distant sit[ting] by her side’(65). The etiquette of confession dictated ‘that when a woman comes to confess, the priest should place her at his side so that he cannot look into her face’.17 Once the reverend man is seated, he again ‘desires her … / Her grievance with his hearing to divide’(67). The technical language of ‘to divide’ underscores his role as a confessor who will distinguish and classify her woes.18 Moreover, the conditional nature of his assistance highlights the fact that the reverend man possesses the ability to loosen or bind the fickle maid’s sins: ‘If that from him there may be aught applied / Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage, / ‘Tis promis’d in the charity of age’ (68-69). In other words, he cannot absolve her before determining the cause of her ‘grievance’and her present spiritual condition. ‘For it is not enough,’reminds Andrewes in Of the Power of Absolution, ‘to be sorry for sin past, or to seek repentance, no though it be “with tears” … if there be in our purpose to retain and hold fast our old sin still’(5: 100). The reverend man must be certain about the fickle maid’s contrition and sincere repentance to God before he can ‘assuage’her ‘suffering ecstasy.’ The reverend man does not intentionally withhold spiritual comfort from the fickle maid; on the contrary, ‘in the charity of age’he wants to assist her, but he cannot determine whether he should absolve her or, if she remains unrepentant, exhort her to be contrite (70). The fickle maid’s responses to the reverend man’s entreaties demonstrate her entrance into the confessional rite. For instance, she refers to him as ‘Father’(71) and she explains that ‘[n]ot age, but sorrow, over me yet hath power’attest (75).19 Her revelation of her ‘too early’(78) relationship with ‘a youthful suit’similarly follows a penitent’s naming of grave sins (79). Instead of justifying her actions, she admits that unlike ‘the general bosom … / Of young, of old, of sexes both enchanted’(127-28), she remained ‘in freedom’(144). And her admission that she ‘was my own fee-simple’illustrates that she recognizes her culpability (144); she freely ‘threw [her] affections in [the young man’s] charmed power’ and ‘gave’ him ‘all [her] flower’(146-48). After briefly revealing ‘the grounds and motives of her woe,’expressing through her sorrow and self-accusations her contrition, and indicating her desire for God’s forgiveness, the fickle maid’s confession seems to have reached its culmination. In short, she has fulfilled the reverend man’s initial requests. Instead of ending, though, the fickle maid’s confession doubles back on itself and is complicated by her doubts and self-justifications. Shakespeare underscores this regressive movement syntagmatically in lines 148-49: ‘Yet did I not as some my equals did/ Demand of him, nor myself being desired yielded’(148-49, emphasis added). Now the fickle maid returns to the difference between herself and ‘proofs new bleeding which remained the foil/ Of this false jewel’(153-54), a graphic description of the other virgins deflowered by the young man, not to emphasize her responsibility, but to evince how she her ‘honor shielded’(151). This contradictory movement between contrition and self-justification causes her confession to waver and apparently collapse when she transfers the motive of her transgression from her free will to the young man’s ‘subduing tongue’ (120): ‘And long these terms I held my city,/ Till thus he began to besiege me’(176-77). While the fickle maid condemns the young man’s ‘foul adulterous heart,’ her rewording of his seductive rhetoric emphasizes her shift from repentance to exculpation (175).20 By repeating the young man’s ‘art of craft,’ she offers a justification for her capitulation to his seductive rhetoric (295). Rather than acting

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freely, she outlines her participation in a duplicitous religious economy in which grace stems not from God, but from the young man. In this false system of devotion, the young man resignifies grace and recenters it on himself. In short, he substitutes himself for God as an object of religious devotion: ‘Religious love put out religion’s eye’(250). He thus receives ‘tributes’and redistributes them, for, as he explains, ‘Nature hath charged me that I hoard them not, / But yield them up where I myself must render’(220-21). Because the young man elevates the fickle maid to the role as the ‘origin and ender’(222) in this theological system, her refusal of the young man—her ‘minister’(229)—would deleteriously affect the other women—‘broken bosoms’—who rely upon him (254).21 She would not only reject his ‘holy vows,’but also those of the women who ‘[h]ave emptied all their fountains in [the young man’s] well’ (255). They, too, will feel his heartache: ‘Feeling it break, with pleading groans they pine, / And supplicant to your sighs extend / To leave that batt’ry that you make ‘gainst mine’(275-77). The fickle maid’s decision to ‘sh[ake] off my sober guards and civil fears’did not result from selfishness, but rather out of sympathy (298). Therefore, even though she condemns the young man’s dissimulation—that ‘hell of witchcraft lies / In the small orb of one particular tear’ (288-89)—she explains her inability to resist his request: ‘But what with the inundation of the eyes / What rocky heart to water will not wear?’(290-91). Since ‘not a heart which in his level came / Could ’scape the fail of his all hurting aim,’ she intimates that she cannot be entirely to blame for her transgression (309-10). The fickle maid cannot, however, completely excuse her actions, for she admits the hollowness and theatricality of the young man’s seductive rhetoric. Once she finishes rewording his speech, she clearly recognizes that she is no longer ‘mighty’ (253) and ‘o’er [him] strong being’ (257). She details his insincerity and laments her fallen state: ‘When he most burnt in heart-wish’d luxury,/ He preach’d pure maid, and prais’d cold chastity’ (314-15). Moreover, she associates herself with Eve— stating, ‘I fell’(321)—and then compares the young man to Satan: ‘merely with the garment of a Grace/ The naked and concealed fiend … cover’d’ (316-17).22 Yet any resolution or contrition remains impossible because of the fickle maid’s appropriation and internalization of the young man’s seductive rhetoric. Her continued use of the young man’s reoriented concept of grace illustrates that despite her proclamation of ‘O father, what a hell of witchcraft of lies/ In the small orb of one particular tear!’she remains situated within his false religious economy (288-89).23 Just as the ‘sacred nun’forsook her ‘die[t] in grace’(260) for the young man, so too does the fickle maid place herself into this system in which ‘all these hearts … on [his] depend’(274). For both women, as Patrick Cheney observes, ‘[s]exual desire evaporates Christian faith, instantly. This is a haunting idea, and must have been specially so to readers during the Reformation’( Shakespeare, National PoetPlaywright). Indeed, when the fickle maid begins to retell her sorrows to the reverend man, she identifies her seducer as the source and depository of grace—not Christ. She explains that others ‘[p]iec’d not his grace but were all grac’d by him’ instead of attributing any sin to him (118-19). This description reiterates the young man’s explanation that his former loves did not affect him: ‘Harm have I done to them, but never was harmed/ Kept hearts in liveries, but in mine own was free,/ And reign’d commanding in his monarchy’ (194-96). The fickle maid accepts that his ‘offenses …/ Are errors of the blood, none of the mind’(184-85) and also applies

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this reasoning to her own transgression: ‘His poisn’d me, and mine did him restore’ (301). In so doing, she unknowingly furthers the young man’s deceptive theological system even as she uncovers the ‘fiend’beneath ‘the garment of a Grace.’24 At the conclusion of A Lover’s Complaint, moreover, the fickle maid remains infected by the young man’s seductive theological rhetoric. Her final instance of self-justification—‘Who, young and simple, would not be so lover’d?’—is undercut by her subsequent lament: ‘Ay, me, I fell, and yet do question make/ What I should do again for such a sake’(320-22, emphasis added). Neither capable of unequivocally confessing her transgression nor rejecting the shame of her fall, she continues to languish in the young man’s deceptive rhetoric (see Heather Dubrow’s essay in this volume). After cataloguing the young man’s tempting attributes, however, Shakespeare reveals that despite the fickle maid’s seemingly failed confession and continual attempts to rationalize her actions, she has been ‘reconciled’: ‘Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d/ And new pervert a reconciled maid’(327-28, emphasis added). The meaning of ‘reconciled’in this context could range from a formal reentry into the church to a feeling of consolation.25 Yet Shakespeare’s decision to conclude the poem before closing the narrative frame extinguishes the possibility that the fickle maid achieves consolation. This ending, as John Kerrigan notes, ‘raises as many problems as it solves. … Are we to think that the maid’s finding an audience has helped purge her lapse, or should we conclude that in line 329 she is merely salving herself?’( The Sonnets 425, emphasis in original). If the young maid’s reconciliation is not a ‘self projection,’but a genuine reconciliation to God, then Shakespeare offers A Lover’s Complaint as an interrupted, maimed rite (Kerrigan, The Sonnets 425). The fickle maid’s confession accomplishes its spiritual purpose—it allows her to articulate her sorrows and experience contrition—but it leaves her in a state of uncertainty because her withdrawal into ‘rapt subjectivity’precludes the reverend man’s completion of the confessional rite (Kerrigan, Motives of Woe 51). III By collapsing the rite of penance, Shakespeare advances that the fickle maid’s interiority cannot provide any distance from which to separate herself from the taint of sin. At the start of the poem, her ‘plaintive story’(2) is ‘reworded from a sist’ring vale’(1), and the narrator describes her tears as ‘Laund’ring the silken figures in the brine / That seasoned woe had pelleted in tears’(17-18). The fickle maid first appears as locked within melancholic repetition—a state representative of her interior subjectivity. Consequently, as Shirley Sharon-Zisser explains, ‘[T]he melancholic lover’s ‘fluxive eyes’ are indeed synecdochic of the dissolution of the subject, a state in which ‘mind and sight’become ‘distractedly commix’d’(202). Further, the fickle maid’s subsequent recourse to interiority merely causes her to vacillate between self-doubt and guilt, and, in the process, to reinscribe herself within the young man’s seductive rhetoric. When compared with the Sonnets the fickle maid’s position at the conclusion of the poem recalls that of Will, who explains in Sonnet 62: ‘And for this sin there is no remedy,/ It is so grounded inward in my heart’(3-4). Moreover, both figures repeatedly express a willingness to lie to

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themselves and to accept their self-deceptions as truth.26 As Katherine Duncan-Jones observes: ‘The Sonnets-speaker finds himself ultimately trapped in a web of his own poetic fabrication … The maid, analogously, in attempting both to justify her sexual fault and to purge herself of the weakness that led to it, discovers that in rewording the youth’s wooing speeches she is captivated by them all over again’ (Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94). In Sonnet 138, for instance, Will explains in the couplet: ‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be’(13-14). 27 Likewise, the fickle maid remains attracted to the young man’s ‘false fire’ (324) and ‘borrowed motion’(327) even though she knows he is a ‘fiend’and a ‘tempter’ (317-18). Will and the fickle maid are thus connected by similarly deceptive objects of desire as well as by their repeated attempts to process the shame and guilt stemming from their sexual transgressions. However, whereas in the Sonnets Will transforms the various anxieties and sufferings stemming from his relationship with the young man and dark lady into an opportunity for poetic introspection, the fickle maid is paralyzed by her sexual transgression. To use Lars Engel’s terminology, she fails to establish a ‘resistant interiority’that uses shame ‘to clear evaluative space’(195-96). Unlike the interior monologues of the sonnet speaker, moreover, she requires external intervention to move beyond the ‘concave womb [that] reworded/ A plaintive story’and to negotiate Christian sin and guilt (1-2). Finally, her retreat into interior subjectivity at the conclusion of the poem causes her to come full circle and leaves her in a paralyzed, circular desire. Therefore, if Joel Fineman is correct in contending that Shakespeare presents in the Sonnets a ‘fracture of identity … [that] justifies and warrants poetic introspection,’in A Lover’s Complaint this ‘insufficiency’leads only to anxious, unproductive self-examination (77). The fickle maid’s ‘undistinguish’d woe’ evaporates any productive, explorative poetic space created in the Sonnets.28 Similarly, her destruction of the young man’s ‘folded schedules’ (43) and ‘deep brain’d sonnets’ (208) exposes the fundamental instability underlying Will’s confidence in Sonnet 55 about his ‘pow’rful rhyme’ (2). By effacing Will’s interior development in A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare indicates the inherent limitations of the mode of individual subjectivity and poetic expression established in the Sonnets. In A Lover’s Complaint Shakespeare thus intensifies the connection between the destructive ‘errors of the blood’(184) and the ‘mind’(184) introduced in Sonnet 147: ‘Desire is death’(8). 29 In so doing, he indicates little confidence in the ability of individuals to extricate themselves from this fatal system of desire and deception. Yet the intrusion of the reverend man into the fickle maid’s plaintive landscape and his reorientation of her sorrows into confessional space intimate the possibility of reprieve from ‘heaven’s fell rage’ through ritual. This movement responds not only to the plight of the fickle maid, but also to Will’s sickness and madness, which results from his broken bed-vows and perjured oaths. And although the fickle maid’s and reverend man’s failure to complete the rite of penitence causes her to regress into self-doubt, her ability to articulate the ‘motives of her woe’after the reverend man’s entreaties nevertheless suggests the productiveness of ritual in Shakespeare’s conception of individual subjectivity. Moving beyond the Protestant assurance of faith and self-discipline, he signals that an individual cannot overcome sin or experience consolation without external intervention—such as the outside voices of

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the reverend man and female speaker in Sonnet 145 that ‘sav’d my life’ (14). In the end, Shakespeare reveals that ritual offers a way out from the world of the young man, that it can restore a ‘more perjur’d eye,’ that it can even make whole a ‘reconciled maid’( Sonnets 152.13). Shakespeare’s positive representation of the rite of confession therefore indicates his support of ceremonialism, the position advocated by Andrewes and other early Jacobean avant-garde preachers, and his distance from the Calvinist majority in the Church of England.30 Notes 1 All quotations from A Lover’s Complaint and the Sonnets are taken from John Kerrigan’s The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Quotations from Shakespeare’s other works are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare 2nd Ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2 For critics who suggest that the fickle maid exaggerates her complaint, see Underwood 38; Kerrigan, Motives of Woe 51; and Mehl 138. Critics who posit that the fickle maid resolves her conflict include Underwood 101; Laws 85; Craik 457; and Roberts 150. 3 Kerrigan describes confessional practices in Reformation England as being constant throughout the period; see Motives of Woe 40. 4 In this essay, I accept Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint as well as Katherine Duncan-Jones’ar gument in ‘Was the 1609 Shakes-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’for his authorization of the 1609 quarto. The question of Shakespearean authorship has recently been reopened; see Elliott 196-201; and Vickers. 5 On the significance of the Lateran reform of confession, see Payer 126. 6 For an overview of The Order of Communion, see Cuming 61-62. 7 On the particulars of the controversy surrounding Overall, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists 110-11. 8 See Rowland White’s letter to Robert Sidney, rpt. in Andrewes 11: lxii. 9 On Andrewes’support of the general position of the Church of England, see Gibbs. 10 See Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists 221-22. 11 The OED (def. 2.a) defines reverend as ‘a respectful epithet applied to members of the clergy’and cites Shakespeare’s Henry VIII IV.ii.1—‘The reuerend Abbot With all his Couent honourably received him’—as a representative usage of the word in the early seventeenth century. 12 The economic difficulties facing the lower clergy in the late Elizabethan period were substantial and often caused ministers to seek various types of employment, such as university fellowship, assistant curate, or reader. See O’Day 50-102. 13 All of the examples given in the OED (def. 4) of the verb bluster—‘To utter with a blast, or with stormy violence or noise’in the sixteenth century have a religious connotation. The citation from Thomas Cranmer’s Catechism illustrates this clearly: ‘These more then deullish swerers … do blowe & bluster oute of theyr ungodly mouthes such blasphemies.’The OED cites A Lover’s Complaint as the first example of blusterer, which is defined as ‘One who utters loud empty boasts or menaces; a loud or inflated talker, a braggart’. This definition does not undercut the reverend man’s religious occupation; rather, it indicates his previous shortcomings as a minister. 14 As Colin Burrow notes in his gloss to lines 59-60: the reverend man is one ‘who had allowed the rapidly passing days of youth to slip away, but who had drawn instruction from them (observed)’(699). 15 The primary meaning of age is, of course, elderly; see OED def. 6. But it also corresponds to OED def. 3: ‘Such duration of life as ordinarily brings body and mind to

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Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint Ilona Bell

A Lover’s Complaint brilliantly transforms the male-authored female complaint by incorporating and transcending a wide variety of sources and analogues.1 This essay explores the complex, multi-layered, continually receding narrative structure of A Lover’s Complaint in relation to what I term the exculpatory complaint—a subgenre that interrogates the social and ethical codes that didactic de casibus complaints such as Churchyard’s ‘Shore’s Wife’ promulgate.2 Written by both men and women and often doubling as veiled poems of courtship, exculpatory complaints invite sympathy and support for a woman who has been, or is in danger of being, seduced and betrayed by a man whose callousness and dishonesty the poem exposes. While a number of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors, Isabella Whitney, Sir Henry Lee, Anne Vavasour, George Gascoigne, and Samuel Daniel,3 wrote exculpatory complaints that are likely models for A Lover’s Complaint, this essay focuses on Lee’s ‘Sitting alone upon my thought’ and Vavasour’s ‘Though I seem strange’ because they provide particularly illuminating analogues to and commentaries upon Shakespeare’s mysteriously complex narrative structure.4 Male-authored female complaints typically begin with a poet/narrator who observes a desolate young lady and recounts her sad song or tale. Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint begins when the poet/narrator overhears a ‘double voice’ that is ‘reworded’ as it echoes off the surrounding hills and valleys. After lying down to immerse himself in the melancholy tune, the poet/narrator discerns a female complainant hysterically bemoaning her fate. He seems wary, describing her as ‘fickle’ and implying that she is responsible for magnifying and perpetuating her own suffering. His ten-stanza description comes to a close as a ‘reverend man’ approaches the female complainant and urges her to tell him her story. The reverend man who becomes the female complainant’s internal lyric audience is Shakespeare’s innovation and the focus of this essay. How does the reverend man’s unconventional presence influence the female complainant’s narrative, and how does his intervention in turn affect our response, first, to her tale and then, in retrospect, to the poet/narrator’s introductory description? Should we be suspicious of the female complainant’s words as the poet/narrator seems to be, or should we believe her account, assuming, as the reverend man does, that ‘her grievance’ is justified? We can best understand the role the reverend man plays in the poem, I think, not through the Catholic confessional, as John Kerrigan suggests, but through the Elizabethan literary tradition of the exculpatory complaint, as epitomized by Sir Henry Lee’s ‘Sitting alone upon my thought.’ Like A Lover’s Complaint, ‘Sitting alone upon my thought’ begins with the poet/narrator watching from a distance as a dejected young lady weeps and bemoans her fate. Though still beautiful, she has lost 91

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the flower of virginity and no longer blooms with innocent abandon; Lee ‘descerne[s] her face, / As one mighte see a damaske rose thoughe hid with cristall glasse.’5 Shakespeare’s female complainant has aged more visibly as a result of her suffering, but the poet/narrator nonetheless catches glimpses of a ‘beauty’ that ‘peeped through lattice of seared age,’ and the female complainant herself says, ‘I might as yet have been a spreading flower, / Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied / Love to myself, and to no love beside.’ Together the images of the lattice and the spreading flower (like Lee’s image of the veil) depict the female complainant’s rosy beauty as shadowed but not corrupted like the ‘[l]ilies that fester’ and ‘smell far worse than weeds’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. Churchyard and other authors of de casibus complaints present the female complainant as a sinful, fallen woman who has been justly punished for her sexual license and moral failing. At moments, Shakespeare’s poet/narrator seems to fall into this traditional position. Upon catching sight of the female complainant, he immediately dubs her a ‘fickle maid full pale.’ The artfully constructed epithet—the inverted syntax, the alliteration and recognizably poetic diction—all suggest that this is a carefully considered and symbolically charged description of the female complainant. Paleness is a conventional sign of a jilted lover, but why does the poet/narrator call her ‘fickle,’ meaning changeable and perhaps also inconstant or deceitful? Having presented himself as a detached and objective observer, is he warning us that she is an unreliable narrator? Although it is hard to know exactly what the poet/narrator means by this initial judgment, he seems to hold the female complainant responsible for her plight. Not only does he suggest that she is being punished for her sinful behavior by ‘heaven’s fell rage,’ but he implies that she has magnified and protracted her suffering by ‘[s]torming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain.’ By contrast to the de casibus complaints that Shakespeare echoes in lines like these, Lee represents his female complainant as a lovable, soft-hearted woman who naturally deserves ‘mercy’ not because she is repentant but because she is so sad and so vulnerable: ‘Three tymes with her softe hande full harde upon her heart she knockes, / And sighte soe sore as mighte have moved some mercy in the rocks.’ Shakespeare’s narrative introduction also describes nature responding to the female complainant’s woe, the valley resounding in sisterly sympathy: From off a hill whose concave womb reworded A plaintful story from a sist’ring vale, My spirits t’attend this double voice accorded.

At the same time, however, Shakespeare’s echo, resounding from a hollow cave amidst the surrounding hills, produces ‘this double voice,’ signaling ambiguity and uncertainty, perhaps even hinting at duplicity as Kerrigan suggests. While Lee expects even the most stony-hearted reader to respond with sympathy and ‘mercy,’ Shakespeare’s poet/narrator is torn or undecided about what to think—or at least enigmatic about what he wants us to think. Both Lee’s and Shakespeare’s poets/narrators speak in the first person, and both remain distant silent observers, concealing their presence in order to overhear and observe the female complainant without impinging on her solitary complaint. Lee’s

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physical distance does not translate into emotional distance, since he openly solicits our compassion. By contrast, Shakespeare spends fifty-six lines describing the female complainant’s distraction and woe without offering a single expression of direct, unambiguous sympathy. It is the reverend man in Shakespeare’s poem who adopts the empathetic role of Lee’s poet/narrator. As soon as the reverend man appears on the scene, he hastens to the female complainant’s side (‘Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew’) and immediately, without so much as a moment’s hesitation, ‘desires to know / In brief the grounds and motives of her woe.’ ‘In brief’ may at first seem to suggest that the reverend man is not really interested in hearing all the painful details of her story, but that proves not to be the case. Rather, he encourages her to calm her down so that she can focus on the ‘grounds’ of her suffering (‘grounds’ means a valid reason or justifying motive, or what is alleged as such). The poet/narrator who observes and reports the encounter may have chosen the word ‘grounds’ because its ironic, secondary meaning continues to raise doubts about whether the ‘fickle maid’ is trustworthy, but the reverend man himself clearly believes that her grievance is justified. Because the female complainant is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, and because the word ‘maid’ could refer to a serving maid, a number of commentators have assumed that she is a simple country lass who was seduced and abandoned by a sophisticated courtier; however, that initial impression is countered by the accoutrements of her grief.6 Just before the reverend man approaches her, she is reading, tearing, and discarding love letters ‘enswathed and sealed to curious secrecy,’ breaking ‘posied rings’ with little love poems inscribed on them,7 wiping her eyes on ‘her napkin’ which ‘on it had conceited characters’ (meaning both carefully formed letters and intricate or abstruse writing), ‘often reading what contents it bears.’ These objects provide important evidence. Since only privileged early modern women were taught to read, we can infer that the female complainant is a well-educated gentlewoman, prominent enough to be wooed in great secrecy and sophisticated enough to decipher the encoded love letters and love tokens she has received from her inconstant lover. Although she is now alienated from and probably ostracized by society as her unkempt appearance suggests, the female complainant, like the reverend man, once moved comfortably amidst fashionable society. She has attended court tournaments where she observed her lover’s martial triumphs. She knows what people were saying about his horsemanship. She knows other women from their social circle who threw themselves upon him, courting him with jewels and ‘deep-brained sonnets.’ Most important, she is an heiress, free to marry according to her own desires: ‘My woeful self, that did in freedom stand, / And was my own fee-simple, not in part.’ In ‘fee simple, not in part’ means that she was in absolute possession of an estate of land belonging to the owner and her heirs without any restriction; presumably she is now residing in the country on that estate, not far from where the reverend man, who has also retired from court and city, is now living the pastoral life of a Virgilian cowherd (Cheney).8 The poet/narrator watches from the distant hillside, having come upon the female complainant during a walking tour of the hills and valleys; the reverend man is close at hand, grazing his cattle by the riverbank. Although there is no indication that the reverend man knows the female complainant, he has presumably heard reports of her

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tragic life story because even before hearing her complaint, he (like Lee’s poet/narrator) assumes that she has a legitimate grievance. The reverend man has probably also heard her cry out, ‘O false blood, thou register of lies, / What unapprovèd witness dost thou bear! / Ink would have seemed more black and damnèd here,’ and seen her cast her lover’s tokens into the river—material evidence that she was lavishly wooed and cruelly betrayed. By lowering himself to her level, he demonstrates that he is prepared to take her side, not only literally but morally: ‘So slides he down upon his grainèd bat, / And comely distant sits he by her side.’ By remaining ‘comely distant,’ he treats her with the respect her social position deserves, not the contempt her distracted, unkempt appearance might have provoked.9 When we read Shakespeare’s poem in the context of exculpatory complaints rather than de casibus complaints, the reverend man becomes the fulcrum upon which the poem’s narrative structure pivots: he invites us, even as he prompts the poet/narrator, to sympathize with the female complainant’s plight, to try to find out what caused her decline, and to ask what can be done to assuage her current and future suffering. The reverend man twice asks the female complainant to tell him her story, when he first approaches her and then again when, seated by her side, he offers to do everything in his power to assuage her suffering and redress her injuries: If that from him there may be aught applied Which may her suffering ecstasy assauge, ’Tis promised in the charity of age.

This second, more openly magnanimous expression of concern, coupled with an explicit offer of support, has a transformative effect: the female complainant stops ‘shrieking’ and begins to tell the reverend man her story. Since the bulk of the poem comprises two lengthy speeches that are recorded by the poet/narrator, it is notable that the reverend man’s remarks are related through indirect discourse: ‘When he again desires her, being sat, / Her grievance with his hearing to divide.’ Because the reverend man’s words are not available for scrutiny, and because we hear nothing more about him after stanzas 9-10 even though he remains present throughout, we can only assume that his motives are as disinterested and generous as he claims and the poet/narrator attests.10 Following the introductory description examined above, Lee’s complaint consists of a series of questions, posed by the female complainant, followed by an echo of her final words: Yet who dothe moste adore this wighte? O hollow caves tell true; What nimphe deserves his likinge beste? yet doth in sorrowe rue?

yowe yowe

Clearly, Lee’s female complainant still adores and yearns for her inconstant lover, even though she has been abandoned and betrayed by him. The echo affirms her love and her lovableness, declaring that she deserves his love more than anyone. Lee describes the female complainant, ‘her secreate teares to wayle, / Clad all in colour of a vowe,’ implying that a secret lovers’ vow explains her feeling that she has been unjustly abandoned.11 Shakespeare’s female complainant is also still very much in

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love, pining for her inconstant lover. Furthermore, she also preserved her virginity until the male lover wooed her with ‘holy vows,’ vows that precede and precipitate their sexual intimacy. Lee’s poet/narrator does not condemn the male lover; rather, we learn about his faults from the female complainant’s questions and the echo’s answers: What makes him not regarde good will with some remorse or ruthe? What makes him shewe besides his birthe such pride and such untruthe?

youthe youthe

These lines blame the male lover for being so full of youthful pride and arrogant self-absorption that he is incapable of ‘ruthe,’ meaning both compassion and remorse. By voicing the charges against him through the female complainant’s questions and the echo’s response, Lee avoids criticizing the male lover directly.12 In A Lover’s Complaint Shakespeare’s poet/narrator also maintains a discreet silence about the male lover; again, we learn about his misdeeds from the female complainant’s description, a description that is remarkably similar to Lee’s: ‘so with his authorized youth / Did livery falseness in a pride of truth.’ Shakespeare’s complainant elaborates what Lee’s asserts: the male lover’s aristocratic sense of entitlement—his pride and youth—seem (wrongly) to authorize or excuse his untruth. Lee’s complainant bemoans the disparity between herself and her highborn lover: ‘May I his beautye matche with love if he my love will trye? I / May I requite his birthe with faythe? then faythfull will I dye.’ Lee’s echo (‘I’ or aye) endorses the female complainant’s desire, acknowledging that her lover’s aristocratic stature and physical beauty are irresistible persuasions to love. Shakespeare’s complainant makes the point even more forcefully, explaining that she is only one of many who have been seduced by the male lover’s beauty, charm, and rhetorical power. Like Lee’s, Shakespeare’s female complainant hoped to match her lover’s beauty and status with her love and devotion. Lee’s proud young man, ‘the firste that bred in me this fevere,’ resembles the male lover in Shakespeare’s poem who is also the first to arouse the female complainant’s passion and the first to penetrate her ‘city,’ or chastity. At the end of Lee’s complaint, the poet/narrator returns to reiterate the echo’s affirmation of her ‘truthe’ and to reveal the surprising fact that he himself is well-acquainted with the lady: And I that knewe this ladye well said lorde, how great a myracle, To heare the eccho tell her truthe as ‘twere Apollo’s oracle.

This unexpected revelation that their relationship extends beyond the dramatic situation of the poem erodes the boundaries between poet and narrator, poetry and life, suggesting that the poem has a role to play in the real world of Elizabethan high society—and so it did. Lee’s exculpatory complaint, unlike conventional de casibus complaints, does not describe her fall from fortune as a punishment for her sins. Rather, Lee’s complaint arouses sympathy for the female complainant even as it informs the court that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, seduced, impregnated, and abandoned her: O heavenes, quoth she, who was the firste that bred in me this fevere? Who was the firste that gave the wounde whose scarre I we[a]re forever?

vere vere

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Vere could not have married the female complainant because he was already married to Lord Burghley’s daughter, Elizabeth Cecil de Vere. Still, Vere was estranged from his wife, and the poem implies that he had vowed to love and protect the female complainant if she would become his mistress. By reneging on his vow, he left her scarred forever. While naming Vere, Lee graciously protects the female complainant’s identity. Yet, as Lee’s lyric continued to echo ‘Vere,’ ‘Vere,’ through court and city, it soon became clear that ‘she’ was Anne Vavasour, a gentlewoman of the Queen’s bedchamber, who gave birth to an illegitimate son in the maiden’s chamber, before being taken to the Tower of London along with others who were party to the cause. ‘The E. of Oxford is avowed to be the father,’ Walsingham reported; ‘Her Majesty is greatly grieved with the accident’ (Chambers 156). Oxford tried to flee the country, but was intercepted at the border and briefly imprisoned. When Vavasour first came to London to serve as a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Bedchamber, Sir Henry Lee was employed at court as Master of the Armory where he master-minded the Accession Day Tournaments in Elizabeth’s honor. Though older and less dashing than the Earl of Oxford, Lee fell deeply in love with Vavasour, as a set of armor, engraved with the initials AV, worn by him while he was Master of the Armoury and still on display in Armorers’ and Stationers’ Hall in London, testifies (Chambers 132, Strong 163). Lee was also married, but upon discovering that Vavasour had been impregnated and deserted by Vere, Lee offered to love and protect her for the rest of his life, as the poem’s private subtext hints: ‘May I requite his birthe with faythe? then faythfull will I dye. I.’ At the time, Vavasour was still too smitten with the beautiful, arrogant Earl to accept Lee’s proposal. Knowing the biographical circumstances underlying Lee’s complaint doesn’t change the poem per se, but it does help explain the multiple purposes the poem served. First, Lee’s complaint invited its courtly lyric audience to affirm her love and truth while condemning Vere’s ‘pride’ and ‘untruth.’ Second, it tried to convince Lee’s private female lyric audience to accept the ‘truth’ that although she was still passionately in love with Vere, he was not only too high and mighty to care about her plight but also too cold-hearted and self-absorbed to return her love. Third, it encouraged her to solve her predicament by accepting Lee’s own offer to love and protect her for the rest of his life. We do not know whether or not there is a veiled biographical subtext concealed within A Lover’s Complaint, although the continual, intricate allusions to Shakespeare’s Sonnets suggest that there probably was.13 Yet even when A Lover’s Complaint is read in isolation, its narrative structure serves many of the same rhetorical purposes as Lee’s. It explains that the female complainant was courted, seduced, and deceived by a ‘fiend’ incapable of love or compassion. It seeks to assuage her suffering by informing those who knew her and the reverend man, those who ‘the ruffle knew / Of court, of city,’ that her male lover made, consummated, and then broke ‘holy vows’ of love. Finally, it records the story she tells, providing a written reminder, should the female complainant continue to yearn for her inconstant lover or should she ever be tempted by him again, that he is a selfish cad who uses his androgynous beauty, social grace, and eloquence to conceal his utter lack of moral scruples and to justify his contemptuous disregard for her (and all his lovers’) feelings and fate.

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The narrative form of Shakespeare’s complaint invites us to take the comparison to Lee’s complaint one step further. Although the poet/narrator tells us virtually nothing about himself or his interest in the female complainant, he makes a point of summarizing the reverend man’s past; in so doing, he suggests that the reverend man’s personal experience not only shapes but somehow explains his response to the female complainant.14 Because he is described as a ‘reverend man,’ and because the female complainant begins her tale by addressing him as ‘Father,’ Kerrigan concludes that the reverend man is a priestly, father-confessor figure; however, the poem describes the reverend man as a distinctly secular figure who, before retiring to a pastoral life, enjoyed an active, martial life at court and in the city: A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh, Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew Of court, of city, and had let go by The swiftest hours observèd as they flew, Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew …

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘blusterer’ as one who utters loud, empty boasts; a loud and violent, inflated talker, a braggart.15 Perhaps that is what Shakespeare meant, but I doubt it because the reverend man listens silently and respectfully as she tells her protracted story. Since the OED lists A Lover’s Complaint as the first known use of the word, its meaning needs to be decided not by consulting the dictionary but by examining its meaning in the context of the poem. The reverend man treats the female complainant with such gentlemanly solicitude and empathy that it is hard to imagine him as a swaggering, insolent fellow given to empty boasts. The participle, ‘blustering,’ which was already in use and most likely the inspiration for Shakespeare’s coinage, had three distinct meanings. The last one—loud swaggering insolence; noisy and windy talk—is the source of the OED definition cited by modern editors (Kerrigan, Bevington, Duncan-Jones, and Burrow); however, the primary meaning, ‘stormy,’ ‘tempestuous,’ suits the context much better. Modern editors usually gloss ‘ruffle’ as ‘clamorous ostentation, hectic bustle,’ thereby supporting the OED definition of a blusterer as someone engaged in pretentious or fruitless action; however, ‘ruffle’ had a number of other meanings that are also better suited to the situation at hand: ‘riotous disturbance or tumult; hostile encounter or skirmish; a contentious dispute, attack, or defeat.’ These meanings, especially the last, suggest that the reverend man was once a blusterer who took part in contentious disputes that shook the court and city with all the blustery violence of a storm. Having himself engaged in a stormy dispute, and having retreated to the countryside to live in peace, he feels an instinctive empathy for the female complainant whom he has just seen ‘Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain,’ ‘shrieking undistinguished woe.’ Although ‘reverend’ can indicate piety or holiness, its primary meaning is worthy of deep respect on account of age or character. The reverend man presents himself not as the female complainant’s confessor but as her advocate and champion. He offers not absolution but solace and support. He volunteers ‘in the charity of age’ to do everything in his power as a man well respected at court and in the city to support her cause.16 In short, he offers to do

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for her what Sir Henry Lee did for Anne Vavasour by writing his exculpatory complaint. It is difficult to determine whether the similarities between ‘Sittinge alone’ and A Lover’s Complaint are conscious allusions or fortuitous parallels derived from a common literary heritage. Yet I cannot help but wonder whether the unconventional presence of the reverend man is a clue that Lee’s exculpatory complaint provided an inspiration and model for Shakespeare’s, especially since Shakespeare’s brief description of the reverend man’s past reads like a thumbnail sketch of Lee’s own life story. Like the reverend man, Lee was a well-known ‘blusterer that the ruffle knew / Of court, of city, and had let go by / The swiftest hours observèd as they flew.’ As Master of the Armory, it was Lee’s professional responsibility to plan, stage, and play a leading role in courtly entertainments and tournaments where courtiers, dressed in shining armor, enacted the ‘ruffle,’ the hostile encounters and skirmishes of medieval knights. Lee himself became a ‘blusterer,’ a tempestuous, stormy figure, when he initiated a ‘ruffle’ or contentious dispute by circulating ‘Sitting alone upon my thought’ to attack and expose Edward de Vere’s ‘untruthe.’ Moreover, as Kerrigan brilliantly discerned, Shakespeare’s description of the reverend man who ‘had let go by / The swiftest hours observèd as they flew’ echoes the opening stanza of another poem, written by Sir Henry Lee when he retired from court in 1590, a poem that is closely connected to the earlier lyric intervention by Lee that we have been examining: His golden locks time hath to silver turned, O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing: His youth ‘gainst time and age hath ever spurned But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing. Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers, but fading seen; Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green.17

Lee’s courtly lyric, addressed to the Queen and performed at the annual Accession Day celebration, explains that he was leaving his official position as ‘your knight’ because he was no longer as young or strong as he once was. But Lee was actually leaving court to live a secluded pastoral life with the love of his life, Anne Vavasour. As the poem’s veiled subtext hints, once upon a time Edward de Vere had captured Vavasour’s love with his ‘beauty, strength, and youth,’ destroying hers in the process. Now, ten years later, Vere’s ‘beauty, strength, and youth’ have faded, while Lee’s love for Vavasour has remained as deeply rooted and vital as his love for the Queen: ‘Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green.’ For Lee the intervening years have passed quickly: ‘O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing.’ Once Vavasour disappeared from court, Lee, like Shakespeare’s reverend man, ‘had let go by / The swiftest hours observèd as they flew.’ When his wife died, Lee tracked Vavasour down and begged her to come live with him and be his love. Once again marriage was out of the question, this time because Vavasour had married someone else in the interim. Unhappy with her marriage, she was at long last ready to accept Lee’s proposal. By writing his original complaint, Henry Lee had offerred Anne Vavasour words to justify herself when she was a young, defenseless, unwed mother. Now, ten years later, strengthened by the passage of time and educated by adversity, Vavasour wrote

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her own coded poem of courtship, ‘Though I seem strange,’ in which she assured Lee that she was ready to leave her husband as soon as Lee had finished constructing a cottage where they could live together, safe from society’s disapproval and away from her husband’s violent jealousy, ‘the Lynxes eyes / That pryes into the priuy thoughte of mynde.’ As evidence of her willingness to defy conventional standards of morality and to live with Lee without the sanction of holy matrimony, Vavasour reminded Lee that (as he well knew) she had taken an oath and given her love to a married man once before. Vavasour’s lyric pledges her troth to Lee on the condition that he defend her honor now as he did in the past: Contente thy selfe that once I made an othe To sheylde my self in shrowde of honest shame And when thou lyste make tryall of my trouthe So that thou save the honoure of my name.

By maintaining that she is ‘honest’ and that it is still possible to defend ‘the honoure of [her] name’ even though society has shrouded her in ‘shame,’ Vavasour challenges the conventional code of ethics which equated female honor with virginity before marriage and chastity or fidelity after marriage. In response, in the poem Shakespeare echoes and Kerrigan cites, Lee announced his decision to retire from the court in order to live with Vavasour in the country. Lee’s retirement lyric, performed at the annual Accession day festivities of 1590, assured the Queen that he would remain her ‘beadsman,’ or devoted servant, as long as he lived: ‘And so from Court to Cottage I depart, / My Saint is sure of mine unspotted hart.’18 To the court and queen, these words were a pledge that Lee would continue to seek Queen Elizabeth’s well-being and favor by uttering hymns of praise in her honor. To Anne Vavasour, the lyric contained a secret subtext, a response to Vavasour’s own lyric, which assured her that Lee would not only love and protect her for the rest of his life, but that he would also be ‘your knight,’ Vavasour’s knight, and that he was prepared to do everything in his power to defend the honor of her name: ‘But though from Court to Cottage he depart, / His Saint is sure of his unspotted hart … Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong.’19 Needless to say, Queen Elizabeth was furious when Lee’s secret came to light, but two years later she relented and visited Lee and Vavasour at Lee’s country estate, thereby giving her regal sanction to their unholy union. Lee celebrated the joyous and remarkably unconventional occasion in the Entertainment at Ditchley, which dramatized the entire story for the assembled courtly audience, complete with numerous veiled allusions to Lee’s original complaint and Vavasour’s more recent lyric response. Lee’s and Vavasour’s poems celebrate female passion and defend female honor without the sanction of marriage, and it is this challenge to poetic and social convention that Shakespeare’s complaint takes up. Like the young Anne Vavasour, Shakespeare’s unnamed female complainant found herself greatly attracted to a dashing courtier whose aristocratic bearing, physical beauty, and charm were widely admired. She encouraged his suit, even though she distrusted his motives, having heard rumors of vows he had broken (‘Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling’)

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and illegitimate children he had fathered (‘Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew’). For a long time she eagerly encouraged the male lover’s attentions (‘Threw my affections in his charmèd power’) but preserved her virginity (‘And long upon these terms I held my city’), knowing that her reputation and social standing depended on it. Without exactly dispelling her doubts about his character, the male lover finally convinced her to have intercourse. The first step in his seduction was a long, intricately argued speech which claimed that he had never loved or wooed anyone before: Gentle maid, Have of my suffering youth some feeling pity, And be not of my holy vows afraid. That’s to ye sworn to none was ever said; For feasts of love I have been called unto, Till now did ne’er invite nor never woo.20

The term of address, ‘Gentle maid,’ confirms earlier indications that the female complainant was both a marriageable virgin and a gentlewoman. To a woman in her position the words, ‘holy vows,’ ‘to ye sworn,’ and ‘woo’ would have suggested a solemn trothplight.21 Lee’s original lyric defended Vavasour’s honor by citing Vere’s vow; Vavasour’s later lyric defends her honor by citing her oath to Vere and pledging her ‘troth’ to Lee. Shakespeare’s male lover asks the female complainant to lend her ‘credent soul to that strong-bonded oath / That shall prefer and undertake my troth’; the resounding rhymes, ‘oath’ and ‘troth,’ are invoked (as they are in Vavasour’s lyric) to give moral weight to his proposal. When Shakespeare’s male lover then proceeds to dramatize his love with a display of tears, he quells the female complainant’s doubts and melts her resistance: There my white stole of chastity I daffed, Shook off my sober guards and civil fears, Appear to him as he to me appears— All melting …

It was only afterwards that the female complainant realized it was all an act: ‘For lo, his passion, but an art of craft.’ The conventional de casibus complaint tells a story of a young woman’s seduction, betrayal, and fall from fortune in order to warn other women to guard their chastity lest fortune punish them with a similar loss of honor, happiness, and social standing. At the end of ‘Shore’s Wife,’ for example, the female complainant spells out the moral of her tale: Thus long I lyved all weary of my life, Tyl death approcht and rid me from that woe: Example take by me both maide and wyfe, Beware, take heede, fall not to follie so.22

Significantly, in A Lover’s Complaint it is neither the female complainant nor the poet/narrator but the male lover who utters the conventional moral lesson, and in his

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mouth the sermonizing sounds sanctimonious, hypocritical, and self-serving: ‘When he most burned in heart-wished luxury, / He preached pure maid and praised cold chastity.’ After all, he has deflowered the female complainant after making a solemn trothplight. To ‘preach’ maidenly purity and chastity is morally offensive. By also allowing the female complainant to point out his hypocrisy, Shakespeare calls into question the ethical code upon which lyric and social convention rest. Shakespeare’s female complainant regrets her fall from fortune’s favor (‘Aye me! I fell’), and accepts responsibility for her action (‘my white stole of chastity I daffed’), but she refuses to accept the shame the male lover tries to lay on her, the shame he has so coolly projected onto all his previous lovers: ‘They sought their shame that so their shame did find; / And so much less of shame in me remains / By how much of me their reproach contains.’ This ‘nasty piece of sexism’ (Kerrigan 16) epitomizes the male lover’s modus operandi: by blaming the women he seduces and abandons, he makes them bear the shame he himself deserves. As Sandra Bartky explains, shame is the archetypal sign of female subordination; by refusing to feel shamed and repentant Shakespeare’s female complainant adds her voice to other exculpatory complaints like Henry Lee’s, Anne Vavasour’s, Isabella Whitney’s, or Samuel Daniel’s which protest the injustice of a double standard that equates female honor with chastity even as it condones male promiscuity. Unlike conventional male-authored female complaints, Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint is not a didactic poem; on the contrary, it challenges the very notion that didactic poetry has an efficacious impact on social behavior: ‘But ah, who ever shunned by precedent / The destined ill she must herself assay … For when we rage, advice is often seen / By blunting us to make our wits more keen.’23 What the female complainant has learned from her experience is that exemplary stories of other’s woes (‘advice,’ ‘Counsel,’ and ‘forced examples’) have little or no power to control behavior. In more traditional male-authored female complaints the poet/narrator’s remarks frame and shape our response to the female complaint; the poet/narrator often, though certainly not always, reappears at the end of the poem to summarize what he has heard, to render judgment on the female complainant, and to explain the lesson that we as readers should take away from the story we have just overheard, in short, to subject female license to male disciplinary authority. Some commentators have deemed Shakespeare’s poem unfinished or unsuccessful because the poet/narrator does not return to complete the frame.24 If Shakespeare had wanted to undercut the female complainant’s credibility or to criticize her behavior, he could easily have brought the poet/narrator back to do just that. Shakespeare chose not to do so. The reverend man does not return at the end of the poem either—for a very good reason. He does not need to reappear to pronounce judgment because he has already declared from the outset that he knows her ‘grievance’ is justified. That is what the reverend man, having lived amidst the bustle of court and city, already knows in ‘the charity of age,’ and it is, I believe, what the poet/narrator comes to understand as a result of the reverend man’s intercession. Significantly, it is not until the reverend man enters the scene that the poet/narrator expresses sympathy for her ‘afflicted fancy;’ these words hint ever so delicately that the poet/narrator’s original suspicions have been tempered by the reverend man’s more compassionate point of view. By getting the female complainant to tell her side of the story, the reverend man enables

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the poet/narrator to see that his initial distrust was misguided or misplaced. Still, if Shakespeare had wanted to make this point absolutely clear, he could have brought the poet/narrator back, not to condemn her but to affirm ‘her truthe,’ as Sidney Lee does at the end of his exculpatory complaint. Shakespeare doesn’t do that either, for it would have made A Lover’s Complaint much more pat, much less interesting to read and ponder, and decidedly less Shakespearean.25 Like the constantly shifting perspectives and murky moral judgments that make Shakespeare’s sonnets so unsettling and so ceaselessly fascinating, the complaint’s unfolding narrative structure erodes the ground upon which the poem initially stands, inviting the reader to share the process of misperception and retrospective reconsideration that the poet/narrator and the female complainant themselves undergo.26 Upon first reading the introductory narrative, the poet/narrator seems to be describing the female complainant as she looks to him when he catches sight of her from the distant hillside. The prevalence of present participles, combined with frequent shifts to the present tense, create the impression that he is observing her even as he describes her, making us feel that we are right there, watching the female complainant, sizing her up, trying to infer her character and situation from her demeanor. But the description is enormously artful, the style carefully crafted, densely ‘reworded,’ and highly symbolic. Although it seems as if the whole scene is taking place as we peer curiously over the poet/narrator’s shoulder, the narrative is actually a retrospective recreation of a past event, reworded by the echoing hills and recorded by the poet/narrator himself. ‘This double voice’ suggests not only that our initial impression of her as a ‘fickle maid’ needs to be reexamined but also that the poet/narrator’s own impression has changed as a result of hearing her response to the reverend man’s sympathetic inquiry. When the poet/narrator sat down to write her story, he already knew what the female complainant is about to tell the reverend man. He recreated his initial view of her as a ‘fickle maid’ punished by ‘heaven’s fell rage’ so that we can experience the process of reevaluation as he himself experienced it when the reverend man stepped into the picture and offered to do everything in his power to assuage the female complainant’s suffering and to defend the honor of her name, just as Sir Henry Lee valiantly stepped forward, sending his echoing lyric off into the court to defend and protect Anne Vavasour. The female complainant is certainly ‘fickle’ in the sense of ‘changeable’ as her distracted appearance at the beginning of the poem attests. Yet it is not she but the male lover who is ‘fickle’ in the sense of ‘inconstant.’ After hearing her tale, there is little reason to think she is also ‘fickle’ in the by then archaic sense of ‘deceitful’ or ‘unreliable’ because she has given a remarkably detailed and forthright account of her behavior.27 Her introductory narrative acknowledges that she allowed herself to be deceived against her better judgment. Her active verbs accept full responsibility for her decision, and her concluding remarks acknowledge that she might be tempted to do it all over again: ‘Ay me! I fell; and yet do question make / What I should do again for such a sake.’ She may have tried to deceive herself when she momentarily allowed herself to believe the male lover’s holy vows and tears, but she is not deceiving herself or anyone else at this point. A number of critics have been skeptical or even critical of the female complainant because she neither expresses remorse nor renounces her former passion, but I trust

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her precisely because she tells the reverend man what she actually feels rather than what the conventional code of ethics and the male authors of so many female complaints tell her she ought to feel and think. Like Lee’s female complainant, she speaks not as a penitent confessing her sins, but as a woman who has finally been given an opportunity to explain ‘the grounds and motives of her woe,’ and as a woman who is still yearning for the man she loves even though she knows that he has deceived and mistreated her. Much as the poet/narrator’s introductory description, capped by the reverend man’s empathetic reassurances, prepare us for the female complainant’s speech (as quoted and ‘reworded’ by the poem), the female complainant’s fifteen stanza description of the male lover prepares us for his speech which (as repeated by her and reported by the poet/narrator) occupies another fifteen stanzas. Instead of bringing the male poet/narrator back to judge the female complainant, Shakespeare brings the female complainant herself back to expose the male lover’s hypocrisy and cruelty. By giving the female complainant the last word, Shakespeare made her seven stanza coda the frame that encircles and shapes our response to the male lover’s specious rhetoric, fake tears, and invidious disregard for her or any one else’s feelings. If we trust the formal structure of the poem as it is written rather than criticizing it for not being written in some other, more formulaic way (after all, no one condemns Shakespeare for not using Aristotle’s Poetics as a formula to write Hamlet), her narrative frame exposes the hypocrisy of the social, ethical, and literary codes that allow an aristocratic male lover to deceive, betray, and calumniate any number of women, enhancing his own reputation by his innumerable conquests while destroying any number of women’s honor and lives in the process. When we return to the beginning of the poem with the female complainant’s tale in mind, the poet/narrator’s introductory description looks less definitive or judgmental than uncertain or torn in two: ‘My spirits t’attend this double voice accorded.’ In retrospect, ‘heaven’s fell rage,’ sounds less like a fundamental or conclusive moral judgment than like a parenthetical observation relegated to a subordinate clause because it describes a stage in her life: ‘Time had not scythèd all that youth begun, / Nor youth all quit, but spite of heaven’s fell rage / Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age.’ The qualification, ‘but despite of,’ implies that the female complainant could still recover much of her youthful beauty and admirable independence if only she would stop tormenting herself by continuously ‘Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain.’ At the end of ‘Sitting alone,’ Lee’s poet/narrator returns not only to assert that ‘the echo tell[s] her truthe,’ but also to explain that he himself has a prior, private relationship with the female complainant: ‘I that knewe this ladye well.’ In Shakespeare’s complaint the poet/narrator and the reverend man are both present throughout, listening to the female complainant’s account, but they recede, slipping into silence, once she begins to speak. When we read A Lover’s Complaint alongside other exculpatory complaints that double as veiled poems of courtship, the poet/narrator’s cryptic silence raises questions not about the female complainant’s veracity but about the poet/narrator’s own interest in the female complainant.28 As soon as Shakespeare begins to describe the female complainant’s physical appearance, his language becomes contorted, evasive, and weirdly disembodied, as if he were struggling to remove himself from a perception that he is unable to resist

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but loathe to acknowledge as his own: ‘Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw …/ Time had not scythèd all that youth begun, / Nor youth all quit, but spite of heaven’s fell rage / Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age.’ Does Shakespeare avail himself of the reverend man’s proximity in order to overcome the distance that has separated the poet/narrator and the female complainant? Does the poet/narrator see half-hidden signs of ‘youth’ and ‘beauty’ he recognizes from the past? Is he all too ready to dub her a ‘fickle maid’ because that is what he thought of her earlier, before hearing her side of the story? Has he (like the speaker in sonnet 20) been too quick to condemn her ‘with shifting change, as is false women’s fashion’? Does his newfound understanding of her make him want to reestablish an earlier relationship that went awry? Is the allusion to the lyric Sir Henry Lee wrote upon retiring from court to live with Anne Vavasour a hint that A Lover’s Complaint is an exculpatory complaint that also doubles as a veiled poem of courtship? Is the poet/narrator’s rewording of the female complainant’s account just the beginning of his own attempt to convince her to renounce the male lover once and for all—to make her question what she ‘should do again for such a sake’ (my emphasis)?29 A Lover’s Complaint dramatizes the clash of two literary and social codes: the de casibus complaint’s condemnation of female sexuality, represented by the poet/narrator’s initial view of the female complainant as a ‘fickle maid’ punished by ‘heaven’s fell rage,’ vs. the exculpatory complaint’s defense of female sexuality and female self-expression. When read alongside Sir Henry Lee’s and Anne Vavasour’s lyric dialogue, A Lover’s Complaint illustrates the radical ways in which the complaint genre could be redefined to defend female desire and to challenge social and ethical codes. As Vavasour wrote to Lee, ‘And when thou lyste make tryall of my trouthe / So that thou save the honoure of my name.’ Shakespeare’s unusual, multi-layered, open-ended narrative structure is not a flaw but an important sign that the apparatus used by conventional male-authored female complaints is not adequate to represent the moral complexity of love affairs gone awry. For my own part, the more I think about A Lover’s Complaint the more I believe it is a brilliant and surprisingly daring poem, an esthetically, ethically, and historically, because its archaic diction and old-fashioned tale contain not only the patriarchal male perspective of the conventional de casibus complaint but also an unabashed and unexpected defense of female passion, female speech, and women’s lawful liberty. Notes 1These include classical, biblical, medieval, pastoral, and de casibus complaints. John Kerrigan’s introduction to Motives of Woe offers a valuable literary history of the maleauthored female complaint, tracing its roots back to Ovid’s Heroides. Cheney further complicates Kerrigan’s source study. Jennifer Laws (81) argues that Shakespeare’s poem, ‘combines complaint not with Ovidian narrative but with pastoral lyric,’ and ‘forms a hybrid genre of its own which enables Shakespeare implicitly to criticize the values of both these kinds, substituting a much more realistic view of human life.’ 2 Kerrigan notes but does not explore the fact that the male-authored female complaint was sometimes used as a persuasion to love. Motives of Woe does not include the exculpatory complaints by Lee and Vavasour examined in this essay.

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3 For studies of Whitney’s Copy of a letter to her Unconstant Lover and Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond as exculpatory complaints that function as poems of courtship, see Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, 113-51. 4 The two poems circulated in manuscript and survived for almost 500 years before being printed by E.K. Chambers in his biography of Sir Henry Lee, 152-54. Chambers uncovered Vavasour’s ill-fated love affair with Oxford and Lee’s love for Vavasour, but he was unable to determine who wrote the poems or what purpose they served. The first poem is quoted here from May’s edition of de Vere’s poems (38) where it appears among a group of ‘Poems Possibly by Oxford.’ For a more complete account of my own reasons for attributing the poem to Lee, see Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, chapter 5. 5 For a discussion of the Renaissance literary tradition which represents virginity as an unplucked flower, and which uses the rose as a symbol for female genitalia, see Carroll, ‘Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare.’ 6 Kerrigan (394) describes her as a ‘socially lowly maid.’ Underwood (68) concludes that she ‘is of gentle birth, but probably not of high estate.’ He mistakenly assumes (23) that she ‘never leaves her country home; the court, in the person of a local gallant, comes to her.’ Laws (87) also thinks ‘the maid is just a country girl.’ 7 For an account ‘Of short Epigrames called posies’ see Puttenham (72). 8 Both Underwood (85) and Duncan-Jones (127) read the line metaphorically, to mean that she was her own possession. Given the matrimonial customs of the day, however, the literal meaning is crucial since it informs us that the female complainant is financially independent and therefore free to choose her own husband. According to ecclesiastical law any woman over the age of twelve and any man over the age of fourteen could marry without parental consent. In practice, however, in the middling and upper ranks conjugal choice was often limited by the need for parental approval and financial support. For a survey of the history and practice of courtship, see Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, chapter 3. For additional information on the history of marriage, see Amussen, An Ordered Society, Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife, Gillis, For Better, For Worse, Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700, Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage, MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin and Marriage and Love in England, O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint, Ozment, When Fathers Ruled. 9 Stephen Whitworth’s suggestion that the reverend man ‘seems curiously analogous to the castrated father-figure of the silent psychoanalyst who can mysteriously give form to affect’ provides an intriguing contemporary analogue for the role the reverend man plays in the poem. In ‘Similes hollow’d with Sighs’ (206, 208) Shirley Sharon-Zisser describes the Reverend Man as the Father whose phallus is ‘literally de-erected’ so that ‘interdictions against libidinal satisfactions are lifted.’ Citing Sharon-Zisser’s intriguing symbolic reading of the ‘bat,’ Patrick Cheney argues that Shakespeare uses the reverend man to conflate several of Spenser’s ‘figures of vice into an ambiguous old man blurring the boundary between caring wisdom and sexual hypocrisy’; however, Shakespeare, like Spenser, is very skilled at providing evidence of evil, and there is no such evidence in A Lover’s Complaint. 10 Whereas Laws likens the narrator ‘who is remarkably distanced from the story’ to ‘the old man (and he too is equally silent and uninvolved),’ this essay distinguishes the poet/narrator from the reverend man, and argues that the reverend man’s silence is an expression of sympathy and support. 11 Some manuscripts, including the one published by Chambers, have the variant ‘her secret feare to wayle, / Cladd all in colour of a Nun.’ 12 For a more comprehensive account of Oxford’s position in the Elizabethan aristocracy, see Ward, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604.

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Burrow (141) explores the ways in which A Lover’s Complaint ‘intensifies the impression of eavesdropping on a private affair which the Sonnets had cultivated,’ and concludes: ‘This effect of excluded intimacy with a love affair goes several steps further than the Sonnets.’ The debate over the autobiographical nature of the sonnets is too extensive and complex to recount here; for a valuable summary of the issues at stake, see Schiffer, ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism,’ Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Kerrigan’s notes to A Lover’s Complaint cite numerous allusions to Shakespeare’s sonnets. For a more detailed study of connections between Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker and the female complainant, the young man of the sonnets and the male lover of A Lover’s Complaint, see Bell, ‘”That which thou hast done”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint.’ For additional links between the two works, see Laws. 14 Roe, The Poems (66, 72-73) also notes the apparent importance of the reverend man’s past history. Since the reverend man never returns to close the frame, Roe concludes, first, that the reverend man plays no significant role and, second, that the poem is unfinished and in need of revision. Rather than finding fault with Shakespeare’s design and execution, this essay argues, first, that the reverend man’s role must be significant since his presence in the poem is so unconventional, and second, that there is a clear reason why he does not reappear at the end of the poem. 15 Kerrigan’s notes, which made the poem legible and comprehensible, as it had not been before, have influenced subsequent editions. Bevington, Burrow, and Duncan-Jones cite much the same definition. Cheney also cites the OED definition when he writes, ‘the word “blusterer” arouses immediate suspicion.’ Underwood develops the point even further, arguing that the poem uses ‘the word “reuerend” somewhat ironically also, in that he calls him a “blusterer” … The older man is windy, one full of sound and fury, and the connotations are of boasting, swaggering, bullying’; however, there is nothing in the reverend man’s behavior to support these connotations. Roe, The Poems, softens the definition to ‘boisterous type,’ as does Cohen who glosses the line: ‘Once a man of the world who was accustomed to the busier life.’ 16 The words ‘charity of age’ could support Kerrigan’s religious view of the reverend man as acting out of Christian love, but it need not, since ‘charity’ means not only Christian love but also without any specifically Christian associations, ‘spontaneous goodness; a disposition to judge leniently of the character, aims, and destinies of others; fairness, equity.’ 17 As Kerrigan notes, Lee’s language is also echoed in Sonnet 126, Shakespeare’s final and most sobering sonnet to the young man. The verbal parallel provides another important link between the male lover of the complaint and the young man of the sonnets. 18 A beadsman was either a holy man who prayed for the soul and welfare of another or a humble servant, seeking patronage and favor. Lee’s beadsman provides another striking analogue to Shakespeare’s reverend man. Like Lee, Shakespeare uses a word with religious connotations in order to elevate the role played by the reverend man. 19 The third person pronouns in this version, quoted in Kerrigan’s footnotes from Polyhymnia (1590), reflect the fact that the lyric, though written by Lee, was sung to the queen by M. Hales who was celebrated for his singing voice. Another version, quoted by Chambers from William Segar, Honor, Military and Civil, contains first person pronouns; presumably it was the first person version that Lee recited or sent to Anne Vavasour. 20 As Duncan-Jones observes (92) A Lover’s Complaint ‘offers dizzyingly complex layers of reported speech.’ 21John Roe’s fascinating reading of this speech as a gloss on Hamlet’s seduction of Ophelia helps explain how much was at stake when an aristocratic man secretly wooed a socially prominent maiden.

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22 Quoted from Motives of Woe (124). In Drayton’s ‘Epistle of Shore’s Wife to King Edward the Fourth,’ Motives of Woe (206), the female complainant wins our sympathy, but the poet/narrator’s notes impose a stern moral judgment, as if to deny the passionate energy that he himself created: ‘for though Shores wife wantonly plead for liberty, which is the true humor of a Curtizan, yet much more is the prayse of modesty then of such liberty.’ 23 Dubrow makes a related but much larger point when she argues that A Lover’s Complaint, like the Sonnets, ‘challenges the practices of exemplarity, calling into question whether a cautionary tale like that of the ‘fickle maid’ is really stable enough in its meanings to fill the didactic functions so long associated with language.’ 24 For a compelling explanation of the sexual anxieties underlying these criticisms of the female complainant’s sexuality, see the introduction to Jon Harned’s essay in this volume. 25 Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint has been both questioned and defended by the statistical studies of his lexicon, but it is the poem’s complexity and the countless links to the sonnets and plays that convince me, as they do Patrick Cheney, of Shakespeare’s authorship. 26 Cheney also suggests that we share the female complainant’s dilemma: ‘it is not just the maid who is left in a state of ‘rapt subjectivity’ … the author makes her story available to us; thus it has applicability to us—and to him.’ Schiffer concludes that ‘a process of transference is enacted that leaves us in the position of the reverend father, the auditor and silent judge’ who, by failing to speak at the end of the poem, cinches the ‘irresolution of the ending’; Schiffer overlooks the fact that the reverend man has already cast his vote for the legitimacy of the female complainant’s grievance. 27 Kerrigan’s edition cites this older, obsolete meaning of ‘fickle,’ last used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1533, in order to raise the possibility that the female complainant is deceitful. By contrast Duncan-Jones (94) suggests that she is ‘fickle’ ‘in this paradoxical sense … Like the Sonnets-speaker, she is compulsively faithful to an unfaithful love-object.’ 28 Noting that ‘[t]he double audience seems strangely unnecessary,’ Rees (161) speculates that ‘perhaps the poet/narrator did not want to involve his own persona intimately because the maid’s grief touched too nearly on some experience of his own. This is to build on the hint of line 3; it is the only clue we have.’ As this essay suggests, there are many other clues that Rees fails to notice. 29 Comparing Shakespeare’s complaint to Daniel’s where Rosamond, ‘a speaking ghost’ returns from the grave, Roe (65) makes the intriguing observation that Shakespeare’s female complainant is ‘a living character’ whose experience, ‘involv[es] decisions yet to be taken.’ This is one of the quintessential characteristics of a poem of courtship: it invites and tries to influence an answering response from the private female lyric audience it addresses and woos.

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Unfinished Business: A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of Lucrece John Roe

Because it is such a compressed poem, and so short compared with other examples of its genre, A Lover’s Complaint has sometimes been considered to be unfinished. On the other hand, the maid’s despairing self-reflection at the end of the poem as we have it seems to bring her sad reminiscences full circle, and we may claim therefore that the poem is complete even if brief and rather stark. At a little over three hundred lines the poem is much shorter than other poems which belong, roughly or precisely, to the same ‘complaint’ genre, such as Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond or (in certain aspects) Shakespeare’s own Rape of Lucrece. It may be that Shakespeare only borrows the complaint form to give a convenient structure to a poem that is meant to be nothing more than an extended lament. The uncertain circumstances of its publication, along with the Sonnets in that teasing quarto of 1609, give further rise to conjectures that Shakespeare was not really finished with it when it went to press. (I assume that the poem is by Shakespeare, and I am persuaded largely by the detailed, sensitive analysis of MacDonald P. Jackson. However, its authority has again been challenged, recently by a computer study).1 I am here less concerned with its own formal composition than with the question of associations, or links, that may be found with other of Shakespeare’s works. The Sonnets are the obvious connection, and this subject has of course received no small amount of speculation in recent years;2 but in my estimate the more fascinating interconnection lies not with another poem but with a drama, that of Hamlet. In that play, the figure of Hamlet is naturally heroic, and he is seen appropriately as an opponent of evil and the victim-martyr of a vile design. The phrase ‘naturally heroic’ may raise a few eyebrows, for much recent criticism has expressed as much skepticism regarding Hamlet’s bona fides, and whether he is a good or admirable man, as Hamlet entertains for those around him.3 However, I think it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare wishes us to see his hero as sympathetic, and even noble, although his nobility is one that has been forced to accommodate an unprecedented degree of complex consciousness. Notwithstanding, his treatment of Ophelia gives rise to alarm, and has to be explained away on the grounds of agitation or temporary instability caused by unbearable pressures.4 Suspicions linger as to Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia (to what degree did he make her suck ‘the honey of his music vows’ [III.i.150]?),5 and though these are finally eclipsed by the play’s tragic denouement, we wonder if they have really settled themselves in the dramatist’s mind. Is 109

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A Lover’s Complaint a means of giving them extra life, while at the same time allowing ‘Ophelia’ a more extended hearing? The kind of situation I am contemplating occurs briefly in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of youthful love, Romeo and Juliet, as I will shortly try to demonstrate. Here, the key to the connection between poem and drama lies in the stylistic, Petrarchan device of oxymoron. Shakespeare is not notably associated with the Petrarchan school, and his famous anti-Petrarchan Sonnet 130 (‘My Mistress’ Eyes’) finds itself often invoked as evidence of his repudiation of such poetry. In addition, the emphatically anti-Petrarchan Dark Lady seems further testimony of his antagonism to—or perhaps simply scepticism regarding—the cult of Laura. Notwithstanding, Petrarch can be seen as the great imaginative enabler of Shakespeare’s expression of the despairing love of Romeo and Juliet, as more than one critic has recently made apparent.6 Of course, people need little reminding of the play’s comic manifestations of Petrarchan antithesis. In an early scene you find Romeo overstating his love for the absent (and never seen) Rosaline: O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything of nothing first create! (I.i.176ff)

Love’s jester in the play, Mercutio, also speaks of Romeo’s passion in terms that are comically Petrarchan, but this in turn signals that the roots of the play’s Petrarchism lie deeper than mere parody of the form. After all, there are somber aspects to Mercutio too, and it his death which precipitates the tragic dénouement. When he raises the Petrarchan topic in the line, Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady, Was a kitchen wench, (II.iv.39-41)

he perhaps still believes that Romeo is mooning over Rosaline, though he may have an inkling that things have changed dramatically. We take his Petrarchan allusion in the context of the richer, more compelling rhetoric of the balcony scene— which we have just observed—beginning with Romeo’s salutation of the visionary Juliet: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun, (II.ii.2-3)

a speech which proceeds through a familiar set of tropes, including the false-dawn idea, the power of eyes to speak, and the lover’s envy of the intimacy enjoyed by inanimate things as in the lines, O that I were a glove upon that hand,7 That I might touch that cheek. (23-24)

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The love imagery of the play is recurrent and integrated as befits a work that resembles the interlocking drama of the Canzoniere. The prelude for Romeo’s balcony speech lies in the first-sighting or innamoramento remark, What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand Of yonder knight? (I.v.41-42),

with its serious Petrarchan pun on knight/night darkness, the converse of the sun/son pun on light which shows up so often in the sonnets and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Hence within a line or two Romeo says: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. (43-45)

The Ethiopian reference appropriately expands the image globally in accordance with the cosmology of light-dark contrasts, which are essentially Petrarchan in form. Even the separation of the lovers by the balcony, which sometimes leads to stunning acrobatics in production, makes for a sense of inviolable distance, which a typical sonnet registers. And speaking of sonnets, let us note the Chorus’s use of the sonnet form at the beginning of both Act I and Act II, especially the second sonnet with its intensification of Petrarchan ideas: Now Romeo is belov’d and loves again, But to his foe suppos’d he must complain And she steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks. Being held a foe, he may not have access To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear. (II. Prol. 5-10)

Like Laura, Juliet is his ‘foe,’ though the terms of enmity are different from those experienced by Petrarch who feels that the opposition lies in the combined operations of chastity and honor. But Juliet who, for her part, is ready to engage in any kind of risk for him is Romeo’s enemy in the more straightforward or contingent sense of political allegiance: they happen to be of opposing families—a point which adds complexity to the deployment of antithesis. As the play reaches its tragic conclusion, it grows more Petrarchan, not less. Romeo’s last words, almost, as he takes poison are antithetical in style and invoke a Petrarchan ideal: Come bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark. (V.iii.116-18 emphasis mine)

When it comes to her death, Juliet continues in an antithetical manner similar to that of Romeo:

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Poison I see hath been his timeless end. O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after? (V.iii.162 ff emphasis mine)

Juliet remonstrates with the dead Romeo for having died before her, but it is a loving rebuke despite her using a term of opprobrium—‘churl.’ The death imagery in the tomb is prolonged as the situation might encourage us to expect, but there is more to it than just the lamentations of the lovers for each other. Romeo is very precise in his recognition that his only rival for Juliet is mortality. More than once, in his last speech, he harps on the theme of Juliet’s beauty persisting in spite of death’s efforts: Ah, dear Juliet, Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe That unsubstantial Death is amorous, And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? (V.iii.101-105)

Petrarch’s preservation of love, even in the face of death’s depredations, seems to be reproduced in the scene in the Capulets’ vault. Although love in Romeo and Juliet differs from Petrarchan love in one important respect—it is a love consummated rather than one denied—the power of denial itself in that play is great, and is acted out in Petrarchan terms, as the imagery shows. The figure of Petrarchan oxymoron accordingly dominates Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless, when Juliet speaks in paradoxical terms denouncing Romeo for his slaying of Tybalt, we might wonder whence can possibly come this vision of Romeo: O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring face, Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, Dove-feather’d raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despisèd substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st. O damnèd saint, an honourable villain! O nature what hadst thou to do in hell When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh? Was ever book containing such vile matter So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell In such a gorgeous palace. (III.ii.73-84)

This speech is inappropriate to the love Juliet has for Romeo; nothing in the relationship of the lovers calls it forth. The death of Tybalt does not warrant it: Juliet would more properly feel a mixture of pathos and anxiety at her kinsman’s death, but not this. Concern for Romeo would inevitably creep in, and indeed has already

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done so slightly earlier when she first hears of the duel. We need not attempt to justify the speech in its context, however, for a mere few lines later, following the Nurse’s weak endorsement of her extreme anger, Juliet takes it all back, insisting that Romeo is the opposite of what she has just described. Bewildered, the Nurse is rebuked for her attempts at empathy: There’s no trust, No faith, no honesty in men … Shame come to Romeo.

To which Juliet, Blistered be thy tongue For such a wish. He was not born to shame. Upon his brow shame is asham’d to sit … (89-92)

So what sort of speech is Juliet’s initial denunciation, and what context would justify it? We can of course argue (falling back on the rationale of psychological plausibility) that Juliet’s fierce words reflect the extremity of a passionate young mind under great emotional stress. Such an explanation, often put forward to account for extreme moments in the plays, ignores the content of the speech: anything wild will do. The speech is not, however, characterized by disorder and incoherence; its terms are, on the contrary, clear and poised, as is true of the language and organization of the play from start to finish. Acting out Petrarchan antithesis to the letter, the play has reached the middle of the third act, and produced its first great crisis. We can try to make internal sense of such ill-fitting speeches, as the play’s most recent editor, Jill L. Levenson attempts to do. Noting that Juliet ‘describes Romeo in a catalogue of oxymora which obviously do not fit him,’ she puts the oddness of it all down to her ‘unreadiness for this first encounter with sorrow and disillusion.’8 Nonetheless, the speech seems to me to require a little more accounting for than this. Perhaps it is part of a deeper love-hate pattern, as Julia Kristeva would argue. Kristeva has written notably on antithesis in Romeo and Juliet as consistent with the love-hate dilemma, but she concentrates on its self-replication throughout the play, without questioning or examining its appropriateness in any one place.9 In such an analysis difference of context does not matter, since all situations serve the same basic opposition. And yet here specifically, a contextual problem emerges: in denouncing Romeo, Juliet speaks too much like a betrayed lover when she has not in fact been betrayed or in any sense abused by his love. Indeed, she puts the record straight a few lines later: Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it? (III.ii.97-9)

Sexual abuse, betrayal, is the one thing of which, as Juliet sees clearly, Romeo cannot be guilty, whatever his other misdemeanours; and she herself tells us so.

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Juliet is trying to extend a love antithesis to a situation—the death of Tybalt—that cannot quite take it; as a result the fury with which she verbally assaults Romeo overloads the trope. Should we suspect the presence of another dramatic situation not in the present text but of which this text is aware? If so, we need not look far. Juliet’s deep sense of outrage (outrage for which there is no answer) fits the character of Lucrece following the rape—Lucrece, a wife who also feels that she has mangled her husband’s name, and whose predicament is strongly marked by antithesis. Guiltily she reflects, ‘If, Collatine, thine honour lay in me, / From me by strong assault it is bereft’ (lines 834-5). Several of the phrases Juliet uses of Romeo might apply to Tarquin, especially the antitheses, ‘damned saint,’ ‘honourable villain,’ ‘wolvish-ravening lamb.’ Shakespeare takes care not to let Lucrece say much about Tarquin’s charms lest she should appear to have succumbed to them—a suspicion which St. Augustine had raised with grim satisfaction when he questioned Lucrece’s credibility in his account of the story in The City of God (Book I, Ch. 19); but in a slightly sideways move he does allow her the opportunity to express antithetically her anger over deception as she contemplates the figure of Sinon in the famous ‘picture’ section of the poem, in which Lucrece contemplates a painting of the Fall of Troy. Sinon, who persuades the Trojans to take the wooden horse inside their gates, stands as a counterpart to Tarquin within the inset story. Here are Lucrece’s feelings as she looks at him: But like a constant and confirmed devil, He entertained a show so seeming just, And therein so ensconced his secret evil, That jealousy itself could not mistrust False creeping craft and perjury should thrust Into so bright a day such black-faced Or blot with hell-born sin such saint-like forms. (1513-19)

If we take these examples from the play and the poem and consider them together, what they seem to create is an intertext moving between the two without quite settling on either. This seems to fit here, and that there, but neither altogether in either. Juliet’s denunciation of Romeo borrows the hell-heaven antithesis from Lucrece and applies it with a religious fervor greater than the play admits (Romeo hardly concerns itself with the ethics of desire). Juliet’s, ‘When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend / In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh,’ seems to belong more to the world Shakespeare creates in Lucrece, where the heaven-hell antithesis moves beyond its familiar and ethically inconsequential bliss-woe representation (lovers feeling themselves in hell, wishing they were in heaven) into the rigorous terms of a recognizable moral predicament, one which involves seriously the problem of damnation. Correspondingly, Juliet’s anger at the saintly-devilish Romeo may suggest that Lucrece found in Tarquin an attractiveness that Shakespeare felt compelled to suppress, but which in the example of Sinon partly emerges. Here is where the suspicions of St Augustine come into play. Heather Dubrow, commenting on the figure of syneciosis or ‘strange harmony,’ has pointed out that the problem with antithesis is that it uncovers resemblances as well as differences between

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characters in a poem of narrative action.10 Shakespeare takes remarkable care not to expose Lucrece to the Augustinian sort of charge, but in so doing, and especially in his use of Petrarchan love-antithesis (a dangerous trope to use in the circumstances), he may have been working against the instinct of the oxymoronic form—hence the compensatory exaggeration of outrage in Juliet’s speech. Juliet is a lover but is not abused by love; Lucrece is abused by love, but is not a lover. Evasion or contraction —elision—in one text may prompt a complementary over-expressiveness in another, where it may be more safely permitted. And since we are looking in particular at the subject of oxymoron, then we need to remember that Augustine expressed his doubts in antithetical form. As he said of Lucretia’s determination to commit suicide, if she was an innocent victim of the rape she should not have killed herself, having nothing to fear from conscience (killing an innocent is a crime); if, on the other hand, she had secretly consented (had indeed responded to Tarquin), she was not innocent. Either way she is condemned. The overlap that can be perceived between Romeo and Lucrece results from more than the effect of one text’s echoing another. (The fact that he was thinking of the one while working on the other is a partial explanation only.) It may be that the nature of oxymoron is such that while appearing to hold contradictions in resolution, in fact it points up the inevitability that every statement incurs its counter-statement in a continuous process, as St. Augustine seems to argue. While resolving division into unity in terms of a balanced symmetrical style, paradox also thematically introduces division into apparent unity—as these examples may show. My point in choosing this example is to argue that certain passages or situations constitute a problem, and that that problem is not resolved in the text that generates it but in another. Now to Hamlet in relation to A Lover’s Complaint. Ophelia has several reproachful things to say about Hamlet, but the driving force of the play, albeit sympathetically, continuously marginalizes her until after her death. She is unfortunate in being co-opted by the wrong side; she loses her wits in the traditional, pathetic female manner, unlike Hamlet in his semi-contrived, provocative madness; and she bears a maidenly innocence which gives her no scope for initiative (and so on). But in the play’s overall symmetry the precise relationship between her and Hamlet (?) remains as murky and unsounded as the relationship of Gertrude to Claudius. Ophelia’s fullest statement about Hamlet comes in the speech she pronounces after he has summarily taken leave of her: Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down, And I of ladies most deject and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled out of time and harsh; That unmatched form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy. (III.i.144-54 emphasis mine)

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Such speeches tempt us to look for more, especially since nobody accepts that Ophelia’s version is the whole story. But the love of Hamlet for Ophelia is a troublesome business for interpretation, not least because of the existence of that wretched letter, written by Hamlet, but hardly in the style of any Hamlet we know, and inseparable from the manner of Polonius who reads it aloud: ‘To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia,’— That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, ‘beautified’ is a vile phrase—but You shall hear. Thus; ‘In her excellent white bosom, these, et cetera (II.ii.109-12)

It is impossible, that is, to distinguish the words that Hamlet is deemed to have written to Ophelia from Polonius’s fussily and pedantic presentation of them, and this is to the hero’s advantage. Polonius’s interfering text short-circuits Hamlet’s. Questions that lie uneasily awaiting an answer regarding Hamlet’s conduct towards Ophelia yield to the more pressing intrigue carried on through Polonius by Claudius. The circumstances of the play let him off the hook, and yet the niggling disquiet we may feel over Hamlet’s behavior in this instance persists as we reflect on it at more leisure. This is to say that there is more in the play than the action can cope with. Are we inclined to look elsewhere for a fuller answer? If so, then such an answer may perhaps be found in A Lover’s Complaint. Here, in this poem, appended without ceremony or explanation to the 1609 Sonnets, we encounter a nymph sorrowing by the banks of a river (possibilities of suicide by drowning are by no means remote), and lamenting her seduction and abandonment by a young man who resembles more than anything the description of Hamlet by Ophelia, that is, Hamlet while still sane in her view. She tells her story to an elderly man, whom she addresses reverentially as ‘father’, though he is not her father. He is easy to identify as a Polonius figure except for his ability to keep quiet. Her seducer, she tells us, had all those qualities that put us in mind of Ophelia’s Hamlet: His real habitude gave life and grace To appertainings and to ornament, Accomplished in himself, not in his case. All aids, themselves made fairer by their place, Came for additions; yet their purposed trim Pierced not his grace, but were all graced by him. (114-19)

Those words which Ophelia despairingly pronounces, and for which the evidence feels inconclusive (‘And I, of ladies most deject and wretched / That sucked the honey of his music vows,’ III.i.154-5), would not falter for a moment in the poem, especially after the lengthy report of his seducer’s rhetoric, which takes up more than half of the narrative. Her speech, in which she bewails the destruction of ‘the glass of fashion,’ could so easily find itself in the poem, where applied to an evident seducer it would gain the conviction her words lack in the play. The poem as mirror image of the play correspondingly reverses the moral strength of the characters, the

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comprised Ophelia persona gaining, the Hamlet figure weakening. Conversely the maid in the poem gives us a vision of the young man, which in context underlines his dangerous capacity for calculation and treachery, but which would fit equally the Hamlet we admire: So on the tip of his subduing tongue All kind of arguments and question deep, All replication prompt, and reason strong, For his advantage still did wake and sleep. To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep, He had the dialect and different skill, Catching all passions in his craft of will. (120-26)

Nothing distinguishes Hamlet so much as ‘replication prompt, and reason strong,’ as his baiting of other characters (all of whom to greater or lesser degree conspire against him) and his powerful analyses of treachery and corruption make clear. Patrick Cheney, in his chapter in this volume, emphasizes the theatricality of the young man’s mode of operation (‘the maid’s phrase craft of will is a perfect one for describing the young man’s use of both poetry and theatre to seduce her’), which brings play and poem closer together, perhaps giving weight to the conjecture that they are in some sense continuous. Unlike the non-appearing young man of the complaint poem, Hamlet commands our approval. Of course we only have only the maid’s description of her lover, a fact that may cause us to be circumspect in terms of judgment, especially if we incline to the view that seduction is never one-sided.11 On the other hand, the one-sided view that we have of the young man may be put down to the poem’s economic means of delivery, all information proceeding from a single speaker. It is not unreasonable to assume that had the poet written the work in the form of a drama the male lover would have conformed in his behavior to the maid’s report of him. Yet while we endorse Hamlet’s procedure by and large, we entertain misgivings nonetheless. I have already touched on the way he misbehaves towards Ophelia. Seduction seems not to enter into the play’s representation of this, except in so far as Ophelia tells us of the effect ‘the honey of his music vows’ has had on her. But there are plenty of indications that Hamlet behaves less well than the noble hero Ophelia had once known, and more like one whose mind is ‘o’erthrown.’ His lack of any remorse over his killing of Ophelia’s father is one instance, and may have been the reason for Ophelia’s disintegration. In the light of such things, it is understandable that Laertes should have lent himself to the conspiracy against Hamlet. Again, critics since Dr. Johnson have found something morally repugnant in Hamlet’s decision to spare Claudius when he finds him at prayer only because he wants to be certain that when he finally kills Claudius the latter will go to hell.12 The cunning with which Hamlet contrives to turn the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and send them to their deaths, has more Machiavellian strategy about it than sits comfortably on a heroic figure. It would be more in keeping with the ideal if Hamlet were to escape their ill design rather through the agency of providence than by personal intervention, and indeed in the latter part of the play, Hamlet re-tells the incident from just such a perspective, as if Shakespeare had re-thought the matter in the interim.13

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Hamlet gives us multiple impressions of its hero: while the dominant image is morally sympathetic, its edges are sometimes slightly blurred so that characteristics that we would more naturally associate with his morally compromised antagonists may be momentarily discerned in him. With much else that is murky and uncertain in the play the concept of heroism acquires an irregular focus. Precisely what has happened between Hamlet and Ophelia the action of the drama never quite determines, just as it never discloses the degree to which Gertrude may have been a willing partner in Claudius’s plot against her husband. Polonius shows us one letter, and with it a poem, that Hamlet had written to his daughter; there have been more (II.i.107). Ophelia attempts to return to Hamlet his ‘remembrances’ (III.i.93) which recall the ‘folded schedules’ (LC 43) that the maid in the poem tells us the young man gave her. The nunnery to which Hamlet urges Ophelia to retire will most likely, and ironically, prove to be the place where the young man/Hamlet (?) found and seduced the ‘sacred nun’ (LC 260). Polonius warns Ophelia against him in language that, in its employment of precise spiritual terms, fits very closely that of the poem: Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers, Not of that dye which their investments show, But mere implorators of unholy suits, Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds, The better to beguile. (I.iii.127-31)

The collocation ‘vows … brokers’ recurs in the maid’s speech when she says, ‘vows were ever brokers to defiling’ (173). Would Ophelia have thus echoed her father’s words had she had space in which to do so? The writing of A Lover’s Complaint may have been Shakespeare’s way of musing further on the troubled love between Hamlet and Ophelia, and giving her a voice that, while it is in keeping with the tenor of the play, it is not in the drama’s interests to express too fully. If this is so, then the poem investigates an area that the play, as part of its interrupted, or unfinished, business had left uncharted. The play of course belongs to Hamlet, and his is the voice that suits all occasions. When Ophelia tries to return Hamlet’s remembrances to him, he denies he ever gave them to her (III.i.95). Who are we to believe? As hero, Hamlet commands our allegiance, especially as Ophelia’s integrity is undermined by the conniving role her father imposes on her. Nonetheless, such dramatic resolutions make us a little uneasy. Just as Juliet’s extraordinary denunciation of Romeo may be a convenient way of expressing a disquiet that more properly belongs to Lucrece, the maid’s extended lament in the poem may be Shakespeare’s means of allowing this displaced Ophelia a greater articulation of her plight, one that the momentum of the play imperiously denies her. All this bears on where we place A Lover’s Complaint, which until recently had an uncertain status in the Shakespearean canon. (Indeed that uncertainty has been increased again, as I noted above.) Normally and naturally we look to the Sonnets, with which it was first published in the 1609 Quarto. Is the young man of the poem an extension of the Young Friend of the Sonnets (as Katherine Duncan-Jones and John Kerrigan argue separately)?14 Clearly there are resemblances; yet the young man of Son. 33 and 94, and elsewhere, is an imprecise figure; and there is no maid

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in the Sonnets. There is a maid in Hamlet who finds herself despairingly speaking of the hero in terms that would fit the poem; and what her counterpart in the poem says of the young man also fits the hero of the play, albeit in a different sense from the one she intends. Applying Heather Dubrow’s observation on syneciosis, it might be more appropriate to think in terms of complementary opposites (Hamlet) rather than of shaded similarities, or mere textual juxtaposition (Sonnets). Such a relationship would suggest placing the poem around 1601 with the play, though a measure of imprecision must be acknowledged in the dating of any work. As in the case of Romeo and Juliet and the Rape of Lucrece the highlighted passages exert an uncanny pull from one text to the other, over and above the habit of inter-echoing that inevitably makes itself heard throughout the works of the same author. Just as Juliet’s speech of denunciation against someone whom it is quite unnatural for her to denounce in the way she does seems to be working off an unresolved problem of attraction-repulsion hovering in the Rape of Lucrece, the maiden lover’s complaint of seduction in the poem may have been written in response to the divided or incomplete representation of Hamlet as far as concerns the love interest in the play. Juliet’s denunciation of Romeo reflect quite closely the maid’s accusation of the young man, though at a much sharper pitch as befits that play’s dramatic register. Ophelia all but accuses Hamlet of having seduced her, and yet the play represents Hamlet as a figure of integrity by and large. If the misrepresented Romeo is anything to go by, then the too-well-represented Hamlet perhaps requires a second, harsher hearing—just to set the record straight. Shakespeare may have written A Lover’s Complaint to exorcise for himself the demon that he had hinted at, but dared not confront, in Hamlet. If that is the case, one can understand why he was not anxious to place the poem in the public eye. Notes 1

See MacDonald P. Jackson, Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: its Date and Authenticity (University of Auckland [Bulletin 72: English Series 13], 1965). But see also the challenge issued by Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, ‘Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare,’ ShQ 48 (1997), pp. 177-207. See, more recently, Brian Vickers, ‘Who wrote A Lover’s Complaint?’ Times Literary Supplement, 5th December 2003. 2 See variously Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shakes-peares Sonnets really unauthorised?’, RES New Series, 34 (1983), pp. 157-71, John Kerrigan, Shakespeare: The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth: New Penguin Shakespeare, 1986), pp. 12-18, and John Roe (ed.), Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 62-64. 3 Philip Edwards summarizes the problem by citing in particular the hero’s reaction to the possibility of killing Claudius while he is kneeling at prayer: ‘repellent though it is that Hamlet so passionately wants the eternal perdition of his victim, it is perhaps more striking that he should think that it is in his power to control the fate of Claudius’s soul. It is surely a monstrously inflated conception of his authority that is governing him.’ See Hamlet, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), p. 54. 4 More explicitly, G.R. Hibbard distinguishes between feigned and real madness as far as Hamlet’s reaction to women is concerned: ‘woman’s sexuality has evidently become an

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Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint obsession with him; and to this extent at least he is genuinely mad.’ See Hibbard (ed.), Hamlet (Oxford, 1994), p. 51. References are to Edwards’s edition. See fn 3. For example, see Anne Pasternak Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True in Romeo and Juliet,’ in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Newark, U of Delaware P, 1988), pp. 129-50. A characteristic, though most likely indirect, source would be Petrarch’s beautiful sonnet ‘O bella man che mi destringi’ l core (Canzoniere 199), which Wyatt translated as ‘O goodly hand.’ This and the following constitute Petrarch’s two celebrated ‘glove’ sonnets. See Jill L. Levenson (ed.), Romeo and Juliet (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 58-59. Julia Kristeva, ‘Romeo and Juliet: Love-Hatred in the Couple,’ in John Drakakis (ed.), Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 296-315. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1987), pp. 80 ff. See Kerrigan, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, pp. 395-96. See the interesting speculations of Philip Edwards (ed.), Hamlet (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), p. 52; and fn 3 above. See Theodore Redpath’s perceptive analysis of this problem, ‘Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern,’ in Surprised by Scenes: Essays in Honour of Professor Yasunari Takahashi, ed. Y. Takada, (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1994), pp.105-13. See fn 2 (above).

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Chapter 5

‘He had the dialect and different skill’: Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover’s Complaint, and Othello Heather Dubrow

I Not the least of the many links uniting A Lover’s Complaint to its author’s other writings is its preoccupation with the workings of power, notably, in the instance of this extraordinary poem, the interactions between erotic and linguistic manipulations.1 Yet, although the role of power in Shakespeare’s plays and poems has hardly been neglected either by contemporary critics or their predecessors, one of the principal ways it operates has not received adequate attention. Through a type of speech that can usefully be termed ‘authorizers,’ speakers in his texts, like those of many other writers, negotiate power, authority, and the often fraught connections between them. Authorizers, this essay argues, are forms of communication like riddles and stories that initiate a process aimed at establishing the authority of the speaker, even, or especially, if it did not exist previously. They typically do so by suspending the rules for quotidian conversation and substituting their own regulations. As ‘forms’ in the sense of particular speech genres or, in some instances, speech acts indicates, Shakespeare is particularly interested in how authority may be achieved not merely through what is said or by whom it is said but also by how it is said in the sense of what type of speech is deployed. In other words, the decision to use a given mode of address may not only or even mainly manifest preexisting markings of status (generals are more likely to give commands than privates) but also reconfigure social rankings. As we will see, the ‘fickle maid’ (5) in A Lover’s Complaint, whose agency is initially called into question by her disheveled appearance, relative youthfulness, and gender, acquires some measure of both power and authority through the very act of telling a story about her seducer, a story that appropriates and incorporates his stories. Always interactive in their workings and often unstable in their effects, authorizers are thus involved in a process: that is, they participate in a series of events in which the original speaker’s authority may not only be asserted but also undermined, at times through potentialities in the very authorizer that created it and at times through a rival speaker or a rival authorizer. ‘Process’ also reminds us that the workings of the authorizers are not independent of the preexisting markers of status that have been stressed by many other readers but rather interact with them. 121

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Intriguing in their own right, the authorizers also variously trope and gloss a number of other issues about subjectivity, gender, and power that currently interest Shakespeareans. They demonstrate, for example, how and why authority is often a consequence rather than, or in addition to, a precondition of authorship. Thus they demonstrate, too, a lability in subjectivity and in status that may recall discussions of fluid sexualities by many critics today. Through our authorizers, a beggar may cross-dress as a king. Yet another reason for analyzing them is that they offer compelling perspectives on some key passages in Shakespeare’s texts and on some challenges in our own academic practices. II The idea that authority may come from, rather than simply be reflected in, forms of speech is hardly a new one. When, for example, the classical rhetoricians advocate narratio, the telling of a story about a legal case, as part of an oration, they draw attention to its instrumentality; when Puttenham personifies figures of speech as, say, ‘the dissembler’ or ‘the advancer,’ he is emphasizing their agency. Certainly the school of linguists known as discourse analysts, which by definition studies the workings of conversations, has traced how power is negotiated, offering models germane to the agendas of contemporary literary critics.2 And in fact, drawing on such models, a couple of important recent studies have traced interactive patterns germane to the workings of authorizers. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson explores the social dimensions of language, indicating, for example, how comments may be read as answers to prior ones; David Schalkwyk’s Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets share with his plays an embodiment in interpersonal situations.3 On the other hand, four professional developments in the current climate risk discouraging other work along such lines in general and distorting our understanding of the authorizers in particular. The first is the facile association of any study of forms with a putatively outdated and politically retrogressive formalism; as Robert Kaufman has trenchantly demonstrated in a series of important articles, that claim involves a misreading of exponents of materialist criticism, while I have asserted that it involves as well a misreading of Kant.4 Stemming from the Foucaldian concept of the discourse and from complementary paradigms of socially constructed behavior in materialist criticism, the second problematical development is the denial of any significant agency or autonomy to a speaker. Autonomy is a myth of the Enlightenment, according to this position, and agency the last refuge of a liberal. More subtle and incisive than most statements of this position, Catherine Belsey’s version presents it cogently: ‘To be a subject is to be able to speak, to give meaning. But the range of meanings it is possible to give at a particular historical moment is determined outside the subject. The subject is not the origin of meaning, not even the meanings of subjectivity itself’ (x). As pervasive and powerful a legacy as the one Hamlet receives from his father, the discussion of speech in some otherwise exciting first-generation feminist studies is the third threat to subsequent investigations of language. Erecting a binary divide between, on the one hand, speech and agency, represented as gendered male, and on

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the other, silence and powerlessness, gendered female, such studies often distort the dynamics of interactions between speaker and listener. Although its impact is still apparent, this dichotomy has, fortunately, been challenged by a number of subsequent studies.5 Surely Iago’s final ploy demonstrates that certain types of silence represent the assertion, not the absence, of agency. And surely Ariel’s forced recital of his imprisonment is not potent speech but another version of imprisonment. The fourth danger arises in the otherwise fruitful writing of speech act theorists, a mode of criticism that enjoyed too brief a vogue among literary critics. To begin with, it typically stresses not a volatile process but a more direct and more predictable action/reaction model, thus manifesting the positivism characteristic of many linguistic projects. Above all, speech act theory errs in its tendency to posit authority as the creator, not the creature, of authorship. According to this assumption, what Austin terms ‘felicity conditions,’ the conditions that enable certain types of speech act to function properly, are based on subject positions determined prior to the act in question. One may name a ship if and only if one had the authority to do so prior to the act. Shakespeare’s Henry V can give commands because his right to do so has already been established. Such readings of language are indubitably true some of the time but by no means always, as a few revisionist studies have asserted.6 An examination of the authorizers substantiates and extends such challenges to earlier versions of speech-act theory. III Shakespeare’s Sonnet 35, a text too often neglected, refers to ‘Authorizing thy trespass with compare’ (6), and its pun crystallizes the characteristics of what I am terming authorizers.7 If these forms of speech initiate a complex process through which the speaker acquires authority, they also negotiate her or his ability to authorize others, that is, to establish subject positions that may involve predetermined types of listening and speaking. Yet, as Sonnet 35 so painfully reminds us, the power of an author may be challenged and compromised even as it is asserted. Thus the authorizers typically involve not only process but a triad of interrelated processes: establishing authority, authorizing the behavior of others, and confronting challenges to those very practices. Riddles, for example, are paradigmatic and powerful authorizers. Whereas certain types of speech, such as jokes and prophecies, assume that role only intermittently, riddles typically do so. Shakespeare’s own famous cast of them ranges from Antiochus’s warning to the witches’ temptation of Macbeth to Touchstone’s joke about the mustard. And the supporting cast of critics who have analyzed this form includes folklorists, psychologists, linguists, and literary critics.8 As their work suggests, riddles differ among themselves enough to complicate scholarly inquiry, and for that and other reasons a number of disagreements attend the form. Is, for example, its primary function imparting knowledge or, as one student of riddles insists, ‘a need to astonish and confuse’ (Abrahams, 196)? The situation in which a patient describes symptoms to a doctor in the hope of eliciting both a diagnosis and a cure is arguably at once an antithesis to and variant of riddling.9 Despite the range

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of practices encompassed by the category, certain widespread ideas about riddles are especially germane to my argument. Often connected to metaphor and proverb, they are seen as violating normal conversational rules and substituting their own by, for example, limiting the acceptable responses for the listener. They are associated with performance. And, whereas other forms of conversation often aim to communicate information, here the solution is typically obscured by blocking elements. Riddles are, then, authorizers in several respects. They confer authority in that the riddler knows the correct answer and positions the listener within a series of rules, within a frame in the sense used by Gregory Bateson among many others.10 And riddles involve authorization in that not only does the riddler acquire the authority to change the normal rules of conversation, but he also authorizes listeners to give only certain kinds of answers. Yet the procedure depends on the listener being both unable to answer the riddle and willing to abide by its rules. When in the fairy tale the name of Rumpelstiltskin is guessed, he collapses. And more to our purposes here, Goneril tellingly trumps her sister, rival for the illegitimate love of that illegitimate son Edmund, with, ‘O ho, I know the riddle’ (V.i.37). In the so-called ‘neck riddle,’ studied by folklorists, the prisoner who poses a successful riddle may sometimes save his life.11 Performed in several senses of that word by both speaker and respondent, riddles are, as those instances remind us, typically interactive, the attribute whose prevalence in conversation has been cogently charted by the discourse analysts. This process of interaction may be further complicated by the existence of different types of listener, such as the so-called side participants analyzed by discourse analysts and cognitive scientists—that is, listeners who, though not directly addressed, are involved in the interaction.12 Thus, whether or not we are challenged to answer a riddle, in listening to it we grant the riddler some measure of authority; but by the same token, if a listener other than the person directly addressed figures out the answer, that authority may, as it were, be riddled. Riddles function in all these ways at many junctures in Shakespeare’s canon. Portia, whose subservience to her father’s power was manifest in her performing his riddles, gains both power and authority in solving Shylock’s. Antiochus’s dominion over Pericles is manifest in the riddle, and is delimited though not destroyed when the eponymous hero guesses it. Early in All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram, no stranger to indulgences of many sorts, indulges in riddling behavior through his letter. Describing herself as a ‘wretched Florentine’ (V.iii.158) near the beginning of the final scene, Diana proceeds in its course to assert and deploy the power to tell a riddle, or rather a series of them, and in so doing empowers herself, intensifying her authority in the dual senses of both force and right through the authorizing function of her riddle. And Helena, having manifested her own power in authorizing Diana’s riddle, proceeds to further that power by solving it. But the canon offers no better instance of the use of riddles to gain power than Rosalind’s patterns of speech throughout the play. In particular, her statement ‘To you I give myself, for I am yours’ has been powerfully analyzed by Susanne Wofford among others: the statement, Wofford demonstrates, asserts Rosalind’s agency, yet qualifies that assertion with the reminders that her subjectivity is created within patriarchy and her speech is bracketed by the performative games of theatricality.13 Recognizing that the statement in question is in fact yet another riddle—how can one

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give oneself to someone to whom one already belongs?—invites us at once to endorse and extend Wofford’s commentary. On the one hand, Orlando and the Duke may possess the solution to the riddle in ways that trope their possession of the riddler; for instance, arguably Ganymede gives herself but Rosalind, the real speaker, already belongs to the men she addresses. Yet on the other hand, the very fact that she is still speaking in riddles, and notably in one that might resist that solution (does Rosalind belong to her father and fiancé any more than Ganymede does?) compromises the conventional wisdom that here and elsewhere in the final scene she is merely surrendering power. Instead, this final, very paradoxical riddle is, paradoxically, on one level an attempt to reassert her control of her many listeners, not just the ones directly addressed by it but also the side participants as well. This series of instances helps us to summarize certain characteristics that recur often, though not invariably, in Shakespeare’s riddles and his other authorizers too. Authorizers are sometimes used in his plays by those already in command to solidify and manifest their sway, such as Jupiter in Cymbeline, but Shakespeare is particularly interested in how and why authorizers may provide power to outsiders and subalterns of all sorts, or activate their latent power, as in Helena’s case. One of the many ways in which authorizers involve a process is that power is often gained through a competitive struggle. Helena and Diana wrest the subject position of riddler and the authority that goes with it away from Bertram. And Rosalind, I maintain, uses the riddle I just cited and others to compete with male characters for the right to establish closure. In the case of riddles, like other authorizers, the power bestowed is as labile as it is intense—listeners are often blocked from seeing the solution, but if they do they not only answer the riddle but also acquire the riddler’s power. Thus authority and status may shift as uneasily as sexualities do in Shakespeare’s comedies, with closure typically involving an attempted reassertion of normative roles in both realms. Conversely, Rosalind’s transgressive riddling in Act V, I suggest, is on one level the verbal analogue to her transgressive gendering in the Epilogue. Narrativity itself often functions as an authorizer in Shakespeare’s plays and in his world and ours. The notion that narrativity conveys authority is hardly a new one, but studying it as an authorizer helps us to see that it does so through functions that can be encapsulated as breeding and blocking. The ends of narrative, in the several senses of ends, are variously and persuasively described as achieving sexual consummation, moving towards death, winning the city, and so on; in these and other ways, so the common tales about tales run, narrative both achieves and signals power.14 Yet breeding and blocking—arguably two no less central goals of narrative—are even more central to its function as an authorizer, both in the Shakespearean texts we’ll examine and in many other writings as well. First, in a passage to which we will turn in more detail later, Henry V insists that others will tell and retell the events of St Crispian’s day that he is recounting now: ‘This story shall the good man teach his son’ (IV.iii.56). As Henry’s comment on two intertwined forms of paternity suggests, one end of narrative is in fact the opposite of death—that is, procreation, breeding other stories. In this and many other respects, A Thousand and One Nights is metanarrative. But this reproductive power, like other types of reproduction in early modern England, is not invariably coded

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positively, as we’ll see when we turn to A Lover’s Complaint, for the very portability of a story may disempower the original teller. If, as I am arguing, breeding other tales is one important though problematical way narrative lends authority to its speakers, its mirror image, blocking other tales, is no less important and no less germane to the workings of this and other authorizers in Shakespeare. We return, then, to the competitiveness we noticed in our other authorizer, the riddle. Narratives are so often impelled by the drive to stave off interruptions from rival stories, rival narrators, rival genres and, in particular, to reach the finish line of closure first, thus apparently at least establishing their version as definitive. Witness the struggle throughout the sonnets with that rival poet, Time. The drive to smother alternative stories, closing them definitely when and because closure in another sense is achieved, is hardly unique to early modern England. But anxieties about incursions by rival narratives, those alternative authorizers, would have attracted Shakespeare and his audiences in part because of the way they enacted and arguably deflected local anxieties about invasion. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, concerns about invasions from Jesuits and the foreign powers they in more senses than one represented were intensified and troped by fears of domestic invasions, whether their source was death, burglary, fire, or the appearance of a step parent.15 The concept of narrative as granting authority to the speaker by fending off alternative, invading stories of course recalls arguments about conflicting plots developed by critics ranging from Bakhtin to Said to a host of feminists.16 But many of these otherwise persuasive analyses err in positing a primary and powerful story synecdochically representing cultural authority, against which frailer and unauthorized narratives struggle in vain. In fact, in Shakespeare and elsewhere, the contest is often closer and its results less certain. Witness the tragic struggle between those rival storytellers Tarquin and Lucrece. Similar pulls among rival stories help to explain the instability of so many sonnet couplets, which often create a battle between competing tales. Shakespeare’s plays and poems are crammed with instances of storytelling that function as authorizers. To be sure, in some cases recounting narratives tropes a lack or a refusal of agency—witness Carlisle’s frustration with Richard II’s invitation to ‘tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (III.ii.156). Venus and Adonis contrasts the impetuous and importunate goddess’s power to move Adonis physically with the failure of her stories to move him in the senses advocated by so many classical and Renaissance rhetoricians. But elsewhere it is precisely through a contestation between rival stories that a struggle for authority between their tellers is enacted— Falstaff famously pits his version of the robbery against that of its other participants, and he is robbed of his version. To return to The Rape of Lucrece, Brutus gains political power by appropriating Lucrece’s story much as he appropriates her iconic body. In A Lover’s Complaint, as we will see, the speaker and seducer compete within and through stories. If, then, narrative has the potential to function as an authorizer, so too does song, that version or vanishing point of lyric. The lyric on which Twelfth Night ends at once asserts and qualifies Feste’s power. The apotropaic song of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—

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You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen, Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen (II.ii.9-12)

—not coincidentally immediately precedes the lyrical chant the venomous-tongued Oberon delivers when he puts the potion on Titania’s eyes. Here too authorizers involve contestation. From where does song draw its authorizing power? Some answers are transcultural, echoing our analyses of riddle and narrative. Not least among the discourse analysts’ contributions is their anatomy of the processes of turn-taking in conversation. Like riddles and stories, song changes the usual rules of conversation by allowing the singer to take a longer turn, to hold onto the microphone for more time and to hold it more securely.17 Interruption becomes more aberrant than the interruption of conversation. Furthermore, the social scientist Maurice Bloch has traced the power of song to its connections with ritual, arguing that like other formalized language, song has a special status that makes argument with it transgressive, if not impossible—another of the characteristics we encountered in riddles.18 Song authorizes the singer in other ways as well. Ritual often involves magic, and our instance from A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminds us how commonly song is associated with magic not only in Shakespeare’s canon, but in many other circumstances in his culture and ours. In a book that itself rises to incantatory prose, Susan Stewart demonstrates the ways song is associated with the power of incantation and with the sacred (81). But a study of authorizers demonstrates how that power is charged with conflicting valences. In that implicit contest between Oberon and Titania’s gossamer-clad bodyguards, as so often when we read Milton and other early modern poets, we may remember that the word ‘charm,’ with all its conflicting resonances, is associated with cantare, or ‘to sing.’ Or, as our contemporary poet Stephen Dunn put it, ‘we felt the old need / to charm, to literally enchant / which also means subdue’ (‘The Dinner,’ 3-5). But once again, the workings of an authorizer, though in some ways transhistorical, in other respects prove to be culturally specific. Though its valences were contested in many ways in the early modern period, notably through the conflicting valuations of polyphonic music, song was imbued with extraordinary instrumentality during that era. Its poster boy, Orpheus, could move even stones; his twin, the psalmist David, could move even nations. On another level, it was precisely through verse paraphrases of the psalms that poets established their own cultural authority in the English Renaissance. IV Authorizers, I have been emphasizing throughout, participate in a process of interactions, and the best way to study the specimen instances identified above, as well as many others, is to locate them within the ongoing action of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Few of Shakespeare’s kings are in more need of authorizers than Henry V, and none uses them better. Unable to rewrite the past in which he and his

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father were thieves, Henry compensates by writing—some students of the play would assert, stealing—the future. In a larger sense the whole drama stages the monarch’s attempt to turn the power he inherited from his father into the authority arguably absent from his father’s reign, and he often does so through authorizers. Hence his use of those authorizers indicates not how they establish a status that did not exist at all previously but rather how they interact with prior markers of both power and authority to buttress them when they are threatened. The best of many possible examples is the St. Crispian’s Day speech, a passage whose authorizers include storytelling and a form of prediction that arguably has some qualities of prophecy, an authorizer that is often unstable in its effects on both speaker and audience [thus Gaunt’s traductio on ‘inspir’d’ and ‘expiring’ (II.i. 31, 32) gestures towards the ways those terms rhyme in the workings of prophecy itself]. Westmoreland has expressed widespread fears about the battle, fears that could implicitly threaten Henry’s authority as military commander and king. In response to both Westmoreland’s immediate though implicit challenge and recurrent questions about the legitimacy of his rule, Henry resonantly declares that those who are present will be so proud that they will tell and retell the story of the day: This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered— (IV.iii.56-59)

Notice that Henry’s narrative helps to bring about action both in the obvious sense that it is meant to inspire the very deeds of which it speaks but also in the sense that it models the act of telling stories about the day and hence spurs others to do so. By deploying epiphora, the rhetorical device in which successive lines or phrases end on the same word, ‘Crispian,’ Henry provides a linguistic enactment of the very event he is predicting. That is, his lines culminate in a reference to Crispian just as the stories of that day will be repeated, and just as the lives of the participants culminate in its victory. Or, to put it another way, the repetition of that word, like the other figures of repetition with which this speech is packed, enacts the processes of memory; here, as elsewhere in the play, that prince of rhetoric Hal replaces uncontrolled and threatening forms of repetition, notably the recurrence of rebellions that echo and arguably ensue from his father’s rebellion against God’s anointed, with a repetitiveness that serves his own ends. If A Lover’s Complaint recounts a ‘sad-tun’d tale’ (4), critics of the poem have feared it is, as it were, out of tune as well. The authorship of this curious text and its putative relationship to the sonnets that precede it and to the other non-dramatic poems still provoke debate. No less controversial is the reliability of the narrative told by the ‘fickle maid’ (5), with readers variously casting her as innocent victim and challenging that description and the story she tells in apparent support of it.19 Examining her tale and the many others incorporated in this poem in terms of the workings of authorizers can help us to reconsider—though not resolve—these and several other issues about A Lover’s Complaint. In its preoccupations with the workings of language as in so many other respects, A Lover’s Complaint is closely connected to the other non-dramatic texts. Having

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problematized the way the label ‘non-dramatic’ renders the texts in question are Shakespeare’s stepchildren or even illegitimate progeny, Colin Burrow powerfully traces connections among those imputed bastards. ‘The poems,’ he observes, ‘are also all marked by a continual and brilliantly various experimentation in juxtaposing speech and narrative circumstance’ (Complete Sonnets and Poems, 5). Supplementing Burrow’s point about how the connections among speech and story link all of their author’s poems, one might observe that A Lover’s Complaint, like Lucrece’s lament in front of the tapestry, or, indeed, many of the sonnets, challenges the divide between meditation and action: reflection may involve winding the spring whose coiled energies burst forth as deeds, whether they be destroying love tokens in this instance or destroying oneself in the instance of The Rape of Lucrece. And here, as in the couplets of some of his sonnets, Shakespeare also challenges the practices of exemplarity, calling into question whether a cautionary tale like that of the ‘fickle maid’ is really stable enough in its meanings to fill the didactic functions so long associated with language. More to our purposes now, the non-dramatic poems are also linked to each other—and to many cognate passages in their dramatic counterparts—by their preoccupation with how power is negotiated in and through the act, or rather acts, of speaking. In particular, in some of the most intriguing passages in A Lover’s Complaint it is precisely through that paradigmatic authorizer storytelling that the ‘experimentation in juxtaposing speech and narrative circumstance’ to which Burrow refers is effected. Although the text emphasizes the many other strategies the seducer deploys, again reminding us that authorizers interact with numerous preexisting sources of authority, it pivots on his storytelling. But he is only one of several characters to rely on that authorizer. Previous lovers, actual or would-be, tell stories to themselves about their relationship to the Bill Clinton of the early modern world (‘So many have, that never touched his hand, / Sweetly supposed them mistress of his heart’ [141-142) and gloss their gifts to him with tales (‘And deep-brained sonnets that did amplify / Each stone’s dear nature, worth, and quality’ [209-210]). And, of course, the apparently ‘reconcilèd maid’ (329) tells a story that is then repeated by the narrator who overhears her. If the ‘womb’ of the hill ‘reworded’ (1) the story, that sort of doubleness occurs throughout, and it is associated both with those who have wombs and those who impregnate that organ. Whether or not Shakespeare was, as some readings of The Tempest assert, a colonialist in his sympathies, he was certainly a post-colonialist in the looser sense of one who identifies and critiques those who appropriate something belonging to someone else. That appropriation is the preoccupation, indeed arguably the praxis, of many passages in his canon. Iago not only participates in the filching of a handkerchief but, also, characteristically, shifts the meanings previously assigned to it. If Henry V’s father appropriated a kingdom in response to the appropriation of his land, his son learns similar strategies at his knee. Having seized the tennis balls for his own purposes, Hal serves them back to the Dauphin with new meanings attached to them; and in the St. Crispian’s Day speech that we examined, he, like his descendant Elizabeth, takes over a saint’s cult for secular and patriotic purposes. The line ‘Then call we this the field of Agincourt / Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus’ (IV.vii.90-91) similarly transform space into place.

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But no text in the canon shows such forms of appropriation in clearer or more intriguing ways than A Lover’s Complaint. In particular, as the list of storytellers compiled above implies, narrative functions as a paradigmatic authorizer in this poem in that certain characters seize the stories of others to build their own power. The text is fascinated with material possessions, a point noted by many readers— ‘and was my own fee-simple’ (144), the maid observes, linking her temporary immunity to seduction with a system of land ownership. What has not received as much attention as it deserves is the connection between the alienability of those material objects and that of language.20 The seducer passes on to his next victim, the maid, the gifts and the attached stories of previous lovers. His reference to her ‘phraseless’ (225) hand is usually read as a compliment to her beauty, but is it not possible that the line implies as well that he is giving her the language she had lacked, placing words in her hands as he does objects? And much as the echo in the opening stanza ‘reword[s]’ (1), much as the seducer takes and misuses the words of his previous victims, so too our ‘fickle maid’ (5) uses his words to justify herself. In short, at several junctures in the poem, power derives from redeploying tales originally told by others, a pattern we shall also encounter in Othello. Yet at the same time A Lover’s Complaint demonstrates the ways narrative may undermine its own authorizing functions. The didactic power often attributed to stories in general and the complaint tradition in particular is challenged by the ‘fickle maid’s’ final statement that she would fall again. And the authorizing functions of storytelling are complicated in another way as well. As we have seen, in what may be a glancing but powerful allusion to the processes of manuscript circulation, A Lover’s Complaint shows how a story, like a love token, may be picked up and discarded or passed on to someone else who uses it for very different ends, thus undercutting the aims of the original teller. This is the reverse, the dark side of the more positive repetition we witnessed in Henry V and will shortly examine in Othello. Contested in its own authorship, A Lover’s Complaint pivots on contestations of rival authors and rival authorizers. Based on the reappropriation of stories in the interest of appropriating or reappropriating power, those contestations are enabled by the act of listening. A Lover’s Complaint, no less than such plays as Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, and Troilus and Cressida, shows us just how variable and labile that act can be. Katharine Craik, positioning A Lover’s Complaint within traditions of confessional broadsides, argues that Shakespeare’s poem is particularly interested in how listeners respond to a confession; similarly, Paul D. Stegner compares the responses of two auditors, the original narrator and the ‘reverend man’ (57) in A Lover’s Complaint, and John Kerrigan relates the poem to the emotional complexities of confession.21 We can extend and modify Craik’s and Stegner’s analyses by borrowing from discourse analysis the previously mentioned distinctions among a ratified listener, a ‘side participant’ of whose act of overhearing the speaker is aware, and an eavesdropper, thus speculating that even when she appears to be addressing only herself at the beginning of the poem, the speaker may fantasize the presence of her seducer, making him a hoped-for overhearer. Might the reverend man eavesdrop before he identifies himself to her? And might she actually see him before he addresses her, making him an eavesdropper in his eyes but a side participant in hers? Might she even be aware of the presence of the narrator of the whole poem? A positive answer

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to any of these questions compromises the apparent immediacy and sincerity of her complaint, raising the possibility that, as Craik also suggests, it is performed in several senses of that word, no less than Daniel’s Rosamond performs her comparable complaint to secure the sympathy and intercession of her listeners, acknowledged and otherwise. But all this is not to say that this lover’s complaint is also a revenger’s tragedy, rendered tragic not least because the victim adopts the corrupt strategies of the victimizer. Her guilt, though asserted by a number of readers, is as uncertain as everything else in this poem.22 The maid may or may not be misrepresenting the actions and words of the man in question. And if she is misrepresenting them, she may or may not know it herself. ‘At the age of seventy-six, I feel that I’m much too old to lie to myself. But of course I can’t be too sure. My complacent attitude toward my own truthfulness could be dishonesty in disguise,’ Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries famously begins (169). Facing a crisis not unlike that of the central character in Bergman’s movie, Prospero describes his perfidious brother in terms that also call his own stories into question: ‘like one / Who having into truth, by the telling of it / Made such a sinner of his memory / To credit his own lie’ (The Tempest, I. ii. 99-102). As this and many other instances demonstrate, both the sonnets and the plays testify to their author’s acuity about how we come to believe our own lies. We may be animators and side participants in the stories we ourselves script. And the text evokes genuine sympathy for the maid even as it opens the possibility that her stories are unreliable: its anti-closural ending mimes formally its refusal of ethical closure. An equally telling instance of the workings of authorizers and, in particular, the complex connections between storytelling and repetition occurs in Act IV, scene iii of Othello, the episode in which Desdemona performs a song told by her mother’s maid Barbary—a song about someone singing a song who was betrayed by a lover who ‘prov’d mad’ (27). In other words, Barbary delivers an ‘old’ (29) song sung by others that apparently glosses her own experience; Desdemona then sings Barbary’s song and sings about Barbary singing it; the song quotes the man involved; and Emilia subsequently refers to singing it before she dies. Thus authorizers authorize others to repeat their act: the dubious appropriations and misappropriations of A Lover’s Complaint morph into a generative and regenerative form of sharing. The relatively few critics who have commented at all on this passage have emphasized the racial hybridity suggested by Barbary’s name. But it is hybrid as well in its representation of these shifts in subjectivity, in the genres it invokes and in the very mixed effects of its authorizers. Many critics have analyzed how and why Othello performs the role of storyteller; Desdemona’s entry into that role is no less intriguing.23 First, most basically and most centrally, the speech works by granting some measure of authority and autonomy to Desdemona. Until now she has been pitifully engaged in excusing Othello and trying to please him: ‘even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns … have grace and favor’ (IV.iii.20-21). Here, however tentatively, however ambivalently, she begins to criticize her lord. From where does she draw and sustain the agency to do so? Her participation in a community of women is one answer, but so too is her participation in what is, not coincidentally, so often a communal act, singing a song. As we have seen, the power

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of song may be traced in part to its connections with ritual, and one of the many functions of the repeated refrain here is to render the utterance more ritualistic. Moreover, in a play whose praxis is the contestation of rival stories and rival storytellers, through her performance of the song Desdemona becomes not only a lyric poet but also a narrative one, telling a tale that rivals those proffered by that master and slave of narrative, Othello. In so doing she reminds us, as Henry V did as well, that the power of narrative comes both from blocking and from breeding. For if Desdemona’s complaint temporarily blocks the novella by Othello and his ghost writer Iago, it does so in part through patterns of repetition that enact and figure the breeding of stories. The passage, like its analogues in A Lover’s Complaint and in the St. Crispian Day speech, is packed with many types of repetition. In the refrain we find the most obvious instance, and that poetic device stages its own workings in the phrase ‘Sing willow, willow, willow’ (43). Desdemona gives Barbary’s song currency, makes it current, much as her own song will be repeated. And the streams by which she sings repeat the story, though if the mirroring effect of the water figures these types of recurrence, it also reminds us that repetition may involve distortion. In any event, all these repetitions draw attention to the encouraging fact that Desdemona’s story may be repeated just as Barbary’s has been and just as Barbary herself has repeated an old song. We may recall that a refrain is itself a type of breeding. And in fact the last service Emilia performs for her mistress is repeating her song. Authority thus derives here, as in the St. Crispian Day speech, from controlling the future by ensuring that one’s tale will be told again. If, as Freud’s theory of reenactment suggests, repetition can aim to establish mastery and effect revenge, here bringing out the repetition of a story accomplishes those aims more successfully than attempts at reenactment are wont to do. But Desdemona’s authority is limited, compromised. For we find in this passage a second quality we have repeatedly encountered in authorizers, the potentiality for undermining the power they have established. That potentiality is flagged here by Desdemona’s presentation of the song in terms of lack of agency: That song to-night Will not go from my mind; I have much to do But to go hang my head all at one side And sing it like poor Barbary. (IV.iii.30-34)

Notice that her phraseology transfers agency to the lyric, literally the subject of the first sentence. Moreover, we have seen that authorizers often involve a struggle for authority, typically with some rival author who may even be a side of the self. In this instance, Desdemona’s culturally encouraged tendency to blame herself for being a victim does not disappear; indeed, the line ‘Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve’ (53) and the rival tale and subjectivity associated with it interrupt her song. Thus two scripts, one authorizing Desdemona and one authorizing Othello, struggle for supremacy, the pattern we have so often observed in studying authorizers. And Desdemona’s song, as Emilia explicitly asserts, is a swan song. Yet all these challenges to her authority do not erase the accusatory story she has authorized here.

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V Like Desdemona, then, our authorizers tell a range of different and often conflicting tales. Typically, however, as we have seen, their workings involve introducing a new set of rules or frames, controlling or incorporating rival stories, and enlisting the participation of listeners. Even that brief an overview indicates some broader implications for Shakespeare studies and for our own professional practices. The work of the discourse analysts, I suggest, demands more attention than it has yet received. Pervasive and often unexamined, certain habits of mind limit the usefulness of that work for literary critics and arguably for other linguists as well, notably the emphasis on the putative goal of translucent communication at the expense of recognizing the conflicting agendas of confusing and overpowering listeners. Similarly, discourse analysts too often assume that speakers are more cognizant of and in control of their language than is often the case. To be sure, the generalizations I have just made, like dismissals of new historicism by members of history departments, risk flattening into a static stereotype a varied and changing movement, and some versions of this and other linguistic movements do acknowledge confounding a listener’s interpretations as one possible aim of speech. Far more common, however, is a positivistic model of language. Yet such problems delimit but do not destroy the potentialities for drawing on discourse analysis in literary and cultural studies. Its relevance to many cutting-edge issues in those fields, notably the workings of agency via language, is, as this essay has attempted to demonstrate, no less profound than pervasive. In its emphasis on the interactive relationships between a speaker and even an ostensibly silent listener, the work of the discourse analysts can help us gloss narrative, lyric, and dramatic texts. When, for example, we study soliloquies, the discourse analysts’ distinctions among types of listeners explicate the ways that type of speech may in fact implicitly address the theatrical audience. What if we assume that when Hal famously explains that, imitating the sun, he plans to justify his time in the tavern in a way that will impress his future subjects (I.ii.195-217), he is actively addressing the audience rather than simply meditating internally? If so, he is in effect seducing, if not suborning, his theatrical listeners into participating in a dry run of his plan to explain away his time in the tavern—or, to put it another way, he is practicing on-side participants in the theatrical audience the political technique he will later use with, on, and against his subjects. The multiple forms of overhearing are germane to the meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets too, as well as to so many other lyrics. Criticisms of the beloved, for example, become a different speech act if one variously assumes that the speaker is positing the person attacked as an overhearer, or assuming another audience for the criticism, or both. More to our immediate purposes in this volume, studying Shakespeare’s authorizers yet again demonstrates the interactive connections among his dramatic and non-dramatic texts, encouraging us to read A Lover’s Complaint, like the sonnets and narrative poems, together with the plays. As Burrow observes in his important recent edition of Shakespeare’s poems, ‘The poems, like the plays, meditate on relations between rhetoric, persuasion, self-persuasion, gender, politics, action, and passion. And they do so with a directness and a clarity which marks them not as offshoots of the dramatic works, but as the works in which Shakespeare undertook

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much of the foundational thought which underpins his dramatic work’ (5). It is through the authorizers that those relations, and so many interpersonal relationships, are negotiated. And it is by authorizing a renewed and intensified critical engagement with Shakespeare’s poems and sonnets that we will solve some of his riddles and tell richer stories about his texts ourselves. Notes 1 A version of this essay was delivered at the April 2002 meeting of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft in Weimar, Germany; the discussion of Othello was presented in earlier form at the Stanford Graduate Program in the Humanities Symposium, May 2001. I am grateful to both groups for the invitations to address them and for fruitful feedback. One of the best commentaries on the overall relationship of A Lover’s Complaint to its author’s other non-dramatic poems is Colin Burrow, ‘Introduction,’ in William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 5, 140-46. Among the many useful analyses of its relationship to its author’s plays are John Kerrigan, ‘Introduction,’ Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’; A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ‘“Deep-brained sonnets” and “tragic shows”: Shakespeare’s Ovidian Art in A Lover’s Complaint,’ and John Roe, ‘Unfinished Business: A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Lucrece.’ Chapter 8 of Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) focusses on connections with the rest of the canon, especially its author’s sonnets. 2 For useful overviews and instances of this work, see, e.g., Herbert H. Clark and Thomas B. Carlson, ‘Hearers and Speech Acts,’ Language, 58 (1982), 332-73; Malcolm Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1986); Marjorie Harness Goodwin, He-Said-She Said: Talk as Social Interaction Among Black Children (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). 3 Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I am indebted to Professor Schalkwyk for making his work available to me before publication, as well as for a number of fruitful discussions about the subject of this essay. 4 See, e.g., Robert Kaufman, ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry, 27 (2001), 354-84. On the role of form in the criticism of early modern texts, see Mark David Rasmussen, ‘Introduction,’ in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and the essays in that collection. 5 For a valuable analysis of and antidote to this binary oversimplification, see Christina Luckyj, ‘A moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 6 Compare the concept of ‘quasi-performatives,’ types of language that attempt to create the conditions that will generate belief, in Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance, esp. 3738. For briefer discussions of the idea that speech may produce, not merely reflect, markers of status, also see Susanne L. Wofford, ‘“To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours”: Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like It,’ in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell

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University Press, 1994), esp. 151-52; and my book A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 266-267. All citations from Shakespearean texts save A Lover’s Complaint are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Among the many literary treatments of riddles are Catherine Belsey, ‘Love in Venice,’ Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), esp. 44-46; Phyllis Gorfain, ‘Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in “Pericles”,’ Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 11-20; Avraham Oz, The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses 1995). For a sample of the varied approaches to this subject in other disciplines, see the linguistic approach in Charles T. Scott, ‘On Defining the Riddle: The Problem of a Structural Unit,’ Genre 2 (1969), 129-42; and the folklorist study by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes, ‘Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle,’ Journal of American Folklore, 76 (1963), 111-18. I am indebted to Michael Hutcheon for perceptive comments about a cognate though separable issue, the relationship of the situation in question to narrativity. On frames, see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1972), 184-88, 190-92. I thank Patrick Murphy for trenchant observations about this and other aspects of riddling. On side participants, see Clark and Carlson, ‘Hearers and Speech Acts,’ esp. 334; Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Westview Press, 1993, 104-10, 113-20, 126-32. Susanne L. Wofford, ‘“To you I give myself, for I am yours”,’ esp. 163-166. For some complementary analyses of that line, also cf. ‘Towards the New Formalism: Experiments in the Analysis of Genre and Closure,’ the unpublished paper I presented at the 1990 Shakespeare Association of America meeting. For an overview of narrative theory, see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). One of the most useful analyses of the ‘ends’ of narrative appears in Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1984), esp. chap. 1. On these types of invasion see my book Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See, e.g., Theresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. chap. 5. Richard Bauman observes that performance transforms the communicative goals of language, using special codes as it does so (‘Verbal Art as Performance,’ American Anthropologist, 77 [1975], 290-311). Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History, and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1989). For examples of those positions, see respectively an essay by Ilona Bell in this volume, ‘Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint’; and John Kerrigan, ‘Introduction,’ in William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1986), esp. p. 59. In ‘Lyric and Property in Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint,’ a paper delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Christopher Warley also comments on the emphasis on property and the unreliability of language in the poem; I am grateful to the author for sharing his work prior to publication. Katharine A. Craik, ‘ Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 53 (2002), 437-59; also see the essay by Paul D. Stegner in this volume, ‘A Reconciled Maid: A Lover’s Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England,’ and Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 50. I thank Craik for

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making her work available to me before publication. She also suggests that the complaint may be read as performance; our analyses differ, however, on several regards, notably the degree of guilt ascribed to the speaker. 22 Dieter Mehl, e.g., draws attention to that guilt by uncovering a parallel with Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ (Archiv fur das Studium der neuerer Sprachen und Literaturen, 152 [2000], 133-38). 23 Linda Austern maintains that she is able to do so because her song is confined to an ‘exclusionary female realm’ (‘“No women are indeed”: The Boy Actor as Vocal Seductress in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-century English Drama,’ in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 99); my argument suggests that she is primarily empowered through other means.

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Chapter 6

‘Honey Words’: A Lover’s Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction James Schiffer

The great stories of seduction, that of Phaedra or Isolde, are stories of incest, including the incestuous relation we maintain with our image. We are seduced by the latter because it consoles us with the imminent death of our sacrilegious existence. Our mortal selfabsorption with our image consoles us for the irreversibility of our having been born and having to reproduce. It is by this sensual, incestuous transaction with our image, our double, and our death, that we gain our power of seduction. … ‘I’ll be your mirror’ does not signify ‘I’ll be your reflection’ but ‘I’ll be your deception.’ —Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (69) Within so small a time, my woman’s heart Grossly grew captive to his honey words. (Richard III, IV.i.78-79)1

I Seduction as Narrative Throughout his career, Shakespeare shows a fascination with seduction, and in many of his poems and plays he explores seduction’s many permutations from the point of view of both the seducer and his or her object of desire. The distinction is worth preserving, though I agree with John Kerrigan’s comment that in Shakespeare ‘seduction is never one-sided’ (Sonnets 395-96), as I do with Jean Baudrillard’s insight that self-seduction always precedes seduction of or by another (69). Written by Shakespeare in the first decade of the 17th century, most recent authorities agree, A Lover’s Complaint offers his most sustained and penetrating exploration of the subject. Not surprisingly, various parts and aspects of the poem show strong links to his other works—especially the Sonnets, All’s Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline—and these links have been traced by scholars in an effort to establish Shakespeare’s authorship.2 So numerous are the parallels when it comes to the theme of seduction, in fact, that it is close to remarkable that scholars of earlier generations (and even a few in our own) have questioned the poem’s authenticity as a work by Shakespeare. Examining some of these parallels of seduction illuminates both A Lover’s Complaint and the rest of the canon, particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s representation of the complex relation between desire and language. Whatever personal motives of pleasure or woe drew Shakespeare to seduction, it offers obvious advantages for a practicing dramatic-narrative-lyric poet, for 137

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seduction is not just a theme or a human activity; it is also a structure, a kind of game with its own rules and character roles. It involves an unstable situation, which is a dramatist’s desire, a conflict of wills, characters motivated to conquer and resist. Seduction calls forth rhetorical display and counter-display, and allows a variety of ways its plot can develop. It is difficult to think of a play by Shakespeare that does not contain one or more scenes of seduction, not all of them sexual, of course; the most memorable of these—like Richard Gloucester’s seduction of Lady Anne, or Cassius’s of Brutus, or Lady Macbeth’s of Macbeth—are among the most powerful in Shakespeare and have been the focus of intense critical scrutiny.3 Seduction is also central to Shakespeare’s two early narrative poems, which makes temping D.J. Snider’s suggestion in 1922 that these two poems and A Lover’s Complaint compose a trilogy and that A Lover’s Complaint ‘gives another phase of Shakespeare’s treatment of love’ (Rollins 599). Venus and Adonis depicts failed seduction and ends with Adonis’s death and Venus’s frustrated, unfulfilled desire and her grief. In The Rape of Lucrece, attempted seduction ends with Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece and her subsequent suicide.4 Rape, with its imposition of patriarchal force, menacingly marks the opposite boundary of seduction that ends in unfulfilled desire. A Lover’s Complaint, by contrast, recounts the story of a successfully consummated seduction. In other words, seduction is the central action in each of these narrative poems. Even for Shakespeare the lyric poet, seduction provides a dramatic situation, a motive for arias of allurement and rejection. While it is true, as Gordon Braden points out, that few of Shakespeare’s sonnets are overtly poems of sexual seduction, their subtext suggests seduction as a possible oblique motive, either for love or for patronage (170-71). Praise and flattery are, after all, important weapons in the arsenal of seduction. And some of the sonnets—like 128 and 135—are direct invitations to pleasure. In each genre then—drama, narrative poem, and lyric— seduction affords both a structure and a means of exploring the psychology of desire. Another motive that may have attracted Shakespeare was the obvious popularity of seduction literature during the early modern period. Ovid’s The Art of Love (which contains lines that advise a young man to mirror the beloved, to cry if she cries [II, 79]) led the way, along with works by other classical authors, especially Horace and Catullus, as well as poets of the continental renaissance. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander contains the inexperienced Leander’s comically sophisticated and sophistical arguments to Hero to surrender to pleasure, while his ‘Passionate Shepherd’ and Raleigh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply’ were set pieces of the age. From Wyatt and Surrey to Sidney to Herrick, Carew, Milton, and Marvell, from the plays of Lyly to Jonson’s Volpone to Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil to Middleton and Rawley’s The Changeling, seduction—if not copulation—thrives. In some respects, clearly, the interest was moral. As Catherine Bates observes, ‘Courtship … enacts the tense and problematic relation between individual desire and the laws which set about to govern it; between the impulse to transgress, on the one hand, and those injunctions which normalize, prohibit, and curtail sexual desire, on the other’ (15). But moral concerns were only part of the picture. There must also have been an aesthetic interest and pleasure in reading about or observing the contest of wills that is seduction, as well as a delight in rhetorical virtuosity, and the focus on sexuality was no doubt as titillating then, if not more so, than it is today. Young people of both sexes were drawn to works like Hero and Leander and Venus and

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Adonis because they were a place where they could learn about sexual technique at a time when, in Bates’s words, ‘wooing a member of the opposite sex [came] to be regarded as a highly complex, tactical, and rhetorical procedure’ (11). While not exactly the Playboy Adviser, Leander’s or Venus’s arguments and images of allurement were a resource for those who wished to succeed in the game of amorous pursuit. Sidney ends his Defense of Poesy with an ironic curse against those who are enemies of poetry that while they live, they ‘live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonet’ (K2). Clearly, poetry was a resource for the ambitious lover, both as an instrument of enticement—one thinks of the young man’s ‘deep-brained sonnets’ (209) to the maid in A Lover’s Complaint—and as a repository of tips for gaining entrance into someone’s bedchamber. II ‘One Particular Tear’ When it comes to the question of the young man’s technique, most commentators have tended to express disappointment and in some cases even moral revulsion. In addition to the obligatory ‘letters penned in blood,’ he gives the maid gifts—‘pallid pearls and rubies red as blood,’ ‘diamonds,’ ‘emeralds,’ and ‘other trophies of affections hot’—that were given to him by his former victims, a practice contemptuously dubbed ‘re-gifting’ on a memorable episode of Seinfeld. In regard to these earlier conquests, furthermore, he glibly evades his own responsibility for their ruin. ‘All my offences that abroad you see,’ he states, Are errors of the blood, none of the mind; Love made them not; with acture they may be, Where neither party is nor true nor kind. They sought their shame that so their shame did find; And so much less of shame in me remains By how much of me their reproach contains. (183-89)

As Kerrigan points out, ‘This is moral doublespeak of the worst, most complacent kind’ (Sonnets 16). Later, it is true, the young man acknowledges the damage he has caused, but his emphasis is on his self-possession in these earlier relationships, not on his remorse: Harm have I done to them, but ne’er was harmèd; Kept hearts in liveries, but my own was free, And reigned commanding in his monarchy. (194-96)

Kenneth Muir implies that he is not impressed by the young man’s words. ‘The woman is not won by his arguments,’ he writes. ‘She had fallen in love with him before he began to woo, and she is overcome not by his words but by his tears which made her pity him and believe his “holy vows.” She confesses at the end of the poem that he was so beautiful, and so good an actor, that his tears and blushes “Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed / And new pervert a reconciled maid”’ (163). I certainly agree with Muir that the young man’s androgynous beauty and his tears are

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essential elements in his success; like the friend in the Sonnets, the young man in A Lover’s Complaint is desired by men as well as by women, a point noted by most of the authors in this volume. I would even add that these two ingredients—his beauty and his tears—are closely related elements in the youth’s rhetorical strategy. But I would disagree with Muir about the effectiveness of what the youth says. His words, in fact, are carefully aimed—they complement his beauty and his tears and even help explain the power of that beauty and those tears.5 Why does he bring up the subject of his former loves? Perhaps he does so because he knows she already knows his reputation. The maid admits that before she yielded to him, she ‘could say “This man’s untrue,”’ and she … knew the patterns of his foul beguiling, Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew, Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling, Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling, Thought characters and words merely but art, And bastards of his foul adulterate heart. (169-75)

Perhaps by raising the subject, he hopes to meet the problem head-on, to preempt her by addressing his lascivious past before she does and turning these conquests into a strategy of rationalizing of his behavior, of flattery, and ultimately of deification of the maid. Or perhaps she has raised the issue before he speaks, and his words are in response to something she has said. In mentioning his former loves, he might also be attempting to make what appears to be an easy conquest as difficult as possible, for the sheer challenge of it. If this is the case, he succeeds not because of what he says but in spite of what he says. Here there may be a parallel with Richard Gloucester who anticipates with relish the great challenge of wooing Anne at the height of her grief and hatred: For then I’ll marry Warwick’s youngest daughter. What though I killed her husband and her father? The readiest way to make the wench amends Is to become her husband and her father. (Richard III, I.i.153-56)

Perhaps the youth plans later to boast, as does Richard: ‘Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won?’ (Richard III, I.ii.230-31). The young man would seem to be adding greatly to his degree of difficulty by telling the maid of the nun he corrupted, a ‘sister sanctified, of holiest note’ (233): ‘O pardon me, in that my boast is true! The accident which brought me to her eye Upon the moment did her force subdue; And now she would the caged cloister fly. Religious love put out religion’s eye. Not to be tempted, would she be immured, And now to tempt all liberty procured.’ (246-52)

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In terms of this particular tactic, an interesting parallel can be found in Venus’s words to Adonis regarding her conquest of Mars: I have been wooed, as I entreat thee now, Even by the stern and direful god of war, Whose sinewy neck in battle ne’er did bow, Who conquers where he comes in every jar; Yet hath he been my captive and my slave, And begged for that which thou unasked shalt have. Over my alters hath he hung his lance, His battered shield, his uncontrolled crest, And for my sake hath he learned to sport and dance, To toy, to wanton, dally, smile, and jest, Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red, Making my arms his field, his tent my bed. Thus he that overruled I overswayed, Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain. Strong-tempered steel his stronger strength obeyed, Yet was he servile to my coy disdain. O, be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, For mastering her that foiled the god of fight! (97-114)

Both passages have the aim of establishing the speaker’s desirability to members of the opposite sex and therefore of flattering the object of desire by using the ‘I was never before conquered until I saw your beauty’ gambit. Possibly too, there may be in both speeches the desire to stir same sex rivalry and emulation. But there are differences as well, related mainly to differences in gender. Venus’s is the more sensual invitation to pleasure, but there is also an unintended subtext that threatens Adonis and undermines her rhetorical aim. By boasting of her conquest of Mars, Venus may hope to offer Adonis a model of proper male response to female beauty (as she will later do with Adonis’s stallion), but her imagery of hanging lances, overswaying, and leading the powerful Mars prisoner in ‘a red-rose chain’ poses for Adonis the threat of emasculation. Venus’s typical role is that of conqueror; being a victim of love’s power is new to her. The young man’s argument similarly stresses his previously unconquered status; he claims that he has never before been subjected by love, nor has he ever before pursued or sought to conquer: Gentle maid, Have of my suffering youth some feeling pity, And be not of my holy vows afraid. That’s to ye sworn to none was ever said; For feasts of love I have been called unto, Till now did ne’re invite nor never woo. (177-82)

Much more than is the case with Venus, his typical role until his encounter with the maid has been that of passive, feminized object of desire. Or so he claims, or so he

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pretends. Jean Baudrillard’s comments are especially relevant here: ‘To seduce,’ he writes, ‘is to appear weak. To seduce is to render weak. We seduce with our weakness, never with strong signs or powers. In seduction we enact this weakness, and this is what gives seduction its strength’ (83). Kerrigan has written that the maid is ‘the victim of false compare’ (Sonnets 59): ‘Similes’ betray her. A bundle of suasive metaphors—made up of gemstones and ‘deep-brained sonnets’—is her undoing, for the similitudes never meant for her appear to validate the young man’s panegyric to her. The ‘fickle maid full pale’ is a victim of praise and likeness, treacherous friends about which Shakespeare has much to say in his own ‘deep-brained sonnets’ (Sonnets 18). He deceives her with similitude in another sense as well, a more important sense, by creating for her the illusion that he is the same as she, feels what she feels, has been desired as now he desires her: O, then advance of yours that phraseless hand, Whose white weighs down the airy scale of praise; Take all these similes to your own command, Hollowed with sighs that burning lungs did raise; What me, your minister, for you obeys, Works under you, and to your audit comes Their distract parcel in combinèd sums. (225-31)

His strategy depends on establishing equivalency by ‘a principle of exchangeability and indistinction’ between himself, his former lovers, and the maid he now seduces—an equivalency he accomplishes in part by the transfer of gifts to the maid.6 As he was to his former lovers—the god of their idolatry—so she is to him: Now all these hearts that do on mine depend, Feeling it break, with bleeding groans they pine, And supplicant their sighs to you extend To leave the batt’ry that you make ’gainst mine, Lending soft audience to my sweet design And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath That shall prefer and undertake my troth. (274-80)

The youth’s method here plays on a double reversal of early modern gender roles. Before he met the maid, he implies, he was the unconquered, feminized, passive object of worship and desire; now, as he worships and desires the maid, he acts towards her as his former female lovers did towards him. In pursuing the maid, in other words, he only reinforces his feminized persona. As the nun was to him, he is to the maid. He becomes her nun. And as he was to his former loves, now she is to him. Furthermore, all his former conquests are on his side and ‘supplicant their vows to [the maid].’7 His tears are the culmination of this strategy of feigned feminization, the last rhetorical thrust, and, as we know, they guarantee his triumph; they not are separable from the words that precede them. They are the visual confirmation of his words, a mirroring of her own feminine melting, of his oneness with her. ‘Even there resolved my reason into tears,’ she says,

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There my white stole of chastity I daffed, Shook off my sober guards and civil fears, Appeared to him as he to me appears— All melting, though our drops this diff’rence bore: His poisoned me, and mine did him restore. (296-301)

While there are other instances of male crying in Shakespeare (Richard Gloucester’s feigned tears with Lady Anne and the friend’s tears in sonnet 34 seem the closest parallels), not all of them have the same gender valence. But in general, crying was thought to be, as it is thought to be in many cultures to this day, more a womanly than a manly thing to do. During the early modern period, there was actually a physiological explanation, according to Gail Paster: ‘That women’s bodies were moister than men’s and cyclically controlled by that watery planet, the moon, was a given of contemporary theory’ (39). Later Paster adds, ‘The cultural association of women and liquids [especially tears and urine] was so deeply inscribed that it required little empirical support’ (44). Shakespeare establishes the association between tears, liquidity, and the feminine early in the poem, which opens with the maid’s weeping. As she throws the gifts the young man had given her into the river, the poet writes: A thousand favours from a maund she drew, Of amber, crystal, and of beaded jet, Which, one by one, she in a river threw, Upon whose weeping margent she was set; Like usury applying wet to wet … (36-40)

Later, when the young man mirrors her ‘fluxive eyes,’ she uses river imagery to describe his ‘wat’ry eyes’: ‘Each cheek a river running from a fount / With brinish current downward flowed apace’ (283-84). The young man also uses water imagery to describe himself: How mighty then you are, O hear me tell! The broken bosoms that to me belong Have emptied all their fountains in my well, And mine I pour your ocean all among. I strong o’er them, and you o’er me being strong …’ (253-57)

Though the maid desired sameness, her discovery of difference brings both temporary pleasure and long-term sorrow: 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 … (323-26)

Instead of real tears and a soul and body identical to her own, she discovered his penis, his semen, and his duplicity. Her mention of infection may well be a

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reference to venereal disease or illegitimate pregnancy, as some commentators have suggested, but the primary meaning here is moral and psychological. Her loss of her virginity marks her entry into the realm of mourning and endless substitution, where her only consolation is the endless, repetitive substitution of language for presence. At the same time, there is something vampiric about the young man’s victory; he is restored rather than destroyed by their sexual union (‘His poisoned me, and mine did him restore’ [301]). He remains unvanquished. Paradoxically, in the sense that he has never yet lost mastery of his own heart, he remains a maid at the expense of her loss of maidenhead. Lacan perhaps would say that the maid’s experience of betrayal marks her second entry into the symbolic order, and indeed, Lacanian psychoanalytical theory affords a way of explaining why the youth’s strategy of feigned feminization and mirroring succeeds. The androgynously beautiful youth mirrors the maid’s desire, which is the desire of the Other, which is, in fact, the maid’s desire for herself. This is not simply a case of narcissism or latent homoerotic desire for someone of her own sex—though these are perhaps important factors, as they are in the Sonnets and in plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The young man deceives the maid into projecting onto him her lost sense of unity and wholeness as a maid entire before she was cleft by desire and prohibition, sexual yearning and the law of the Father. The fear of loss of wholeness and the yearning for sameness are at once both retrospective and anticipatory: they recall her original entry into the symbolic order and look forward to her loss of maidenhead.8 When she is betrayed, the young man’s play on being her nun takes on Lacanian implications: he becomes her NONE, her lack, the lost object in the real.9 His absent anatomical penis becomes the marker of difference and loss. At the start of the poem, the maid attempts to destroy the gifts the young man has given her. As Kerrigan explains, ‘Gifts laden with erotic associations are ubiquitous in complaint … where they are hoarded as substitutes for the lover. Throwing them away is a painful expiation’ (Motives 46). The gifts she can discard, but not his spoken words. These she has internalized, incorporated, introjected. His discourse has become enfolded in her own; as Kerrigan points out, her internalization of his discourse is underscored by the typography of the 1609 quarto, since no quotation marks distinguish his words from hers, words so persuasive they have the power to seduce her ‘yet again’ (Motives 45). His words are the gift that keeps on giving. She is trapped in an endless cycle of linguistic substitution and repetition. Shirley Sharon-Zisser argues brilliantly in her essay in this volume ‘“True to Bondage”: The Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover’s Complaint’ that there is progression and even psychic change at the end of the poem: ‘The poem’s ecstatic ending suggests that even a perverse unconscious structured by archaic privation can undergo a leap, eject a fragment which will enable it to return to a floating organization, but differently … [T]he structure of the poem’s last orgasmic segment, erupting from its multiple O’s as orifices rendered real, indicates the possibility for a pervert’s productive encounter with the bar.’10 My own view is less optimistic: instead of possible progress, I see her trapped in endless circularity that includes both remorse and masochistic ecstasy. Her experience, in other words, seems a lot like the cycle of lust condemned and reenacted in sonnet 129.11

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III The Artist as Impostor: Narrative as Seduction ‘Fiction,’ Catherine Belsey has written, ‘offers the pleasures of seduction … Fiction is frivolous. It permits fantasy and reproduces romance … Itself a mode of seduction, fiction is enigmatic, enchanting; it defies closure; it can be sublime. It is independent of the laws of truth. At its best … fiction like seduction is inventive; it depends upon the play of surfaces’ (39-40). In her own explanation of the young man’s seductive skill, the maid states that ‘He had the dialect and different skill, / Catching all passions in his craft of will’ (125-26). While it is probably not the most fruitful approach to read ‘craft of will’ as an autobiographical pun, the phrase does open up homologies between sexual and textual pleasures, between the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the text. The phrase ‘craft of will’ also reminds us of Shakespeare the artist’s affinity with successful deceivers and seducers of all kinds and moral persuasions. They range from villains like Richard III and Iago to socalled ‘benevolent deceivers’ like Portia, Henry V, Hamlet, and Prospero. What these characters and the poet share is the ability to impersonate, to hide what they think and feel and to shape their appearance to fit the occasion and the audience. Like Shakespeare himself, they are successful manipulators, which requires a deep understanding of human behavior and motivation as well as considerable skill with language. They are especially skillful actors. ‘Shakespeare seems to have been fascinated by the actor’s temperament,’ writes Macdonald P. Jackson in his important monograph on A Lover’s Complaint. ‘His awed wonder that one ‘might smile, and smile, and be a villain’ is not separable from his fascination with the actor’s craft, the power of dramatic illusion, and the immense potency of words’ (34). Shakespeare’s motives differ, of course, from the sexual predator’s in A Lover’s Complaint in obvious ways. Yet the poet does wish intercourse of a different kind, and sets out to seduce the resisting reader to continue to read, to stay in the game; only if the reader stays in the game, can the author manipulate the reader in other respects as well, for a possibly higher purpose. In A Lover’s Complaint, the poet’s methods have more than a few things in common with the young man’s, among them the impersonation of the feminine. As Kerrigan has noted, complaint, which is typically a male-authored genre, ‘fosters impersonation of the feminine in ways which raise interesting questions about gender’ (Motives 2). Just as the young man feigns femininity, so the author ventriloquizes the maid’s voice. In creating the illusion of characters, indistinguishable though they may seem, furthermore, Shakespeare invites our projection of our own desires for unity and wholeness, even as he deconstructs our fixed notions of gender boundaries. Like the poor maid, we are seduced into identification and projection by the mirror created by ‘craft of will.’ Shakespeare ‘holds the mirror up to nature’—and in that mirror we see ourselves in ways that disturb, surprise, and enlighten. For a poem about seduction, A Lover’s Complaint seems often to have failed to seduce its readers. Its critical history is spotted with complaints about its arcane diction, its distracting nonce words, its convoluted syntax and imagery, its inconsistency of tone, and its lack of dramatic tension. Since complaint is a retrospective genre, the seduction has already occurred. Thus, the poem does not take advantage of the suspense that is usually an important element in the seduction

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scenario. Hyder Rollins’s Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s poems traces the numerous attempt to deny Shakespeare’s authorship, which Rollins himself questions. Though some of these attempts have been based on careful comparison of the poem’s language and imagery with that of plays and poems presumed to be by Shakespeare, the impulse behind such denials of authorship has tended to arise from disbelief that Shakespeare could have written so many disappointing lines of verse. Not everyone, of course, has responded so negatively. Edmond Malone called it a ‘beautiful poem’ in the Spenserian mode (Rollins 586); Swinburne was also an admirer (Rollins 589). Kerrigan acknowledges the poem’s strangeness to modern sensibilities before offering praise: ‘Rhetorically it tends to an elaboration which can seem, initially, alienating. Once attuned the reader becomes aware of discourses capable of finely calibrated shifts of feeling and an impressive enlargement of effect’ (Motives 2). Shirley Sharon-Zisser, while conceding that the story ‘is as banal as it is heart-breaking,’ nevertheless sees in it the ‘basis for a fascinating exploration of the erotics of rhetoric, an exploration that may be his most complex and quintessential statement on the links between desire and language’ (196). For some readers, particularly for post-modern readers like us, the poem does have its seductive appeal, not just because of its fascinating psycho-sexual dynamics, or the beauty of some—if not all—of its language and imagery, but because of the way the narrative unfolds through the filters of successive points of view and because of the open-ended way the narrative ends. One might say that we are seduced by the unanswered questions this ending raises. First of all, the framing device that opens the poem is left unclosed at the end, raising the possibility that the poem we have is incomplete or unfinished. In the opinion of most recent commentators, my own included, the lack of closure is deliberate and inspired. Equally intriguing is the maid’s admission at the end of the poem that she is willing—even desires—to be seduced by the young man again. For Kerrigan this admission and the absence of a final comment from poet or reverend father have the effect of undermining the ‘fickle maid’s’ reliability. ‘Judgement,’ he writes, ‘is bound to be complex when the “fickle maid,” circumstantially unplaced, is also left unanswered by the poet’ (Sonnets 59). Ilona Bell, by contrast, finds that the lack of closure from a male voice increases our sympathy for the maid: The conventional male-authored female complaint subjects the female complaintant’s vanity and weakness to the male narrator’s irony and judgment. Typically, the introductory narrative frame introduces the female complaintant, and the concluding narrative frame summarizes the lessons to be drawn from her mea culpa. … [T]he absence of a concluding narrative frame—confirms what the narrative reveals: the unreliable narrator whose sins are revealed by the poem is not the female complaintant but the male lover. Shakespeare’s male narrator does not reappear to provide an authoritative final judgment; therefore, the female complaint frames and judges the male lover’s speech, just as the male narrative conventionally frames the female complaintant. (469-70)

I would like to stake out a middle position between Kerrigan and Bell on this point. In my opinion, we frame the narrative, and sit in silence pulled by both

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judgment and compassion. Through the complex shifts in point of view and psychic distance—from poet, to reverend father, to maid, to young man, and then again to maid—a process of transference is enacted that leaves us in the position of the reverend father, the auditor and silent judge, Lacan’s ‘subject who is supposed to know’ (Four Concepts 230-36). And what we know is that, like the speaker in Sonnet 129, the maid is caught in a cycle of desire that moves repeatedly, inexorably from remorse to grief to renewed desire—and even, as Sharon-Zisser argues, to jouissance. And like all of us, she is caught in the symbolic order of endless substitution that is language—which has so great a power to seduce and console and, paradoxically in the maid’s instance, to cause renewed suffering and pleasure. In the past, present, and future tenses of desire, reader and maid navigate the boundless sea of language. Shakespeare pours his spirits in our ears, as the young man has done to the maid. Lured by the irresolution of its ending, our desire for clarity and understanding differs from the maid’s desire for the man who betrayed her, but let us not underestimate the power of that desire to understand. Notes 1 All quotes from Shakespeare are from Bevington’s edition, except for passages from A Lover’s Complaint, which are from Kerrigan’s edition. 2 MacDonald P. Jackson writes: ‘In fact, everything about the poem—vocabulary, phraseology, imagery, stylistic mannerism, subject matter—confirms the correctness of Thorpe’s attribution. It deserves to be taken seriously as a product of the latter half of Shakespeare’s career’ (39). In his study of word links between the poems and the plays, Eliot Slater concludes that A Lover’s Complaint ‘shows statistically highly significant association with the vocabulary of the third quarter (Hamlet, Troilus, All’s Well, and possibly Lear), and also very definitely with Cymbeline’ (163). John Roe’s essay in this volume notes the recent challenge to Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem issued by Ward E.Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza. 3 Some seductions like Bertram’s attempts on Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well or Venus’s on Adonis, of course, have sexual consummation as the goal; other seductions, like Lady Macbeth’s of her husband, use sexuality and Macbeth’s anxieties about his masculinity as a means to a political goal. Cassius’s seduction of Brutus may seem to some to have no sexual element, though the homoerotics of their friendship has been noted many times, and Cassius’s use of flattery has much in common with that of sexual seducers. 4 Before he forces himself upon her, Tarquin attempts to seduce with threats: ‘But if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend. / The fault unknown is as a thought unacted; / A little harm done to a great good end / For lawful policy remains enacted’ (526-29). 5 In his essay for this volume, Jon Harned writes that ‘the young man’s prowess in rhetoric … is the most potent source of his Orphic ability to produce universal identification and desire.’ 6 I borrow the phrase from Steve Larocca, who uses it in a somewhat different sense in his analysis of Richard Gloucester’s seduction of Lady Anne (253). 7 Jon Harned writes elsewhere in this collection: ‘To use another metaphor for the young man’s rhetoric, we might say that his ‘art of craft’ is ventriloquism. The young man seduces the maiden to a large extent by repeating the words of other women who have fallen to his charm in such a way that we appear to be listening to them speak.’

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8 On Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage as ‘formative of the function of the I,’ see Écrits 1-7. 9 Stephen Whitworth argues in his essay in this volume that ‘[i]n order to be a subject for jouissance, in order to “tempt all,” one must “be” the nun/none.’ 10 Sharon Zisser also makes the argument for progression—from incorporation to introjection— in her earlier essay on the poem, ‘Similes hollow’d with Sighs.’ My own view of the maid’s condition at the end of the poem, that she has not had a breakthrough, is closer to that described by Stephen Whitworth in his essay in this collection. 11 See Helen Vendler’s analysis of sonnet 129: ‘(The poem also comes full circle in its deictic ‘this hell,’ indicating the speaker is back where he started in line 1.) For all that, the major aesthetic move of the sonnet is to paint over our first impression—the shame and blame of lust—with a second, the joy and sorrow and unreality of lust; and then to paint over that with the ironizing and totalizing third—that no matter how much we know of the aftermath, we will be unable to shun this joy’ (553).

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It is possible to detect a certain plaintive tone even in contemporary critical scholarship on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint that no longer seeks to oust the poem from the Shakespearean canon and takes seriously the task of explicating its complexities. Building on Katherine Duncan-Jones’s convincing argument that the 1609 quarto in which A Lover’s Complaint was first printed follows a Renaissance convention of concluding a sonnet sequence with a long poem, often a complaint, John Kerrigan argues that Shakespeare’s poem is integral to his more highly esteemed sonnet sequence in its moral critique of epideictic rhetoric, but then finds himself puzzled by Shakespeare’s unsettling failure to conclude it in the manner of Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond and Spenser’s Ruines of Time with the re-emergence of the poet-narrator whose presence at the beginning of the complaint puts a frame around the lament of the fallen maiden and at the end sums up for us how we are to respond to her complaint. Kerrigan’s distress is aroused primarily by the final words of the poem, the maiden’s seemingly contradictory statement that given the chance she would surrender her honor to the duplicitous and treacherous young man again. Kerrigan evidently would like Shakespeare to have left us in no doubt about the maiden’s moral unreliability: ‘If the poem starts in the territory of Spenser and Daniel, it ends, like the problem plays, with the incorrigibility of passion’ (425)—an interpretation that assumes passion ought to be restrained. Joan Rees’s complaint is motivated less by the poem’s failure to put rhetoric in its place than the young man. She argues that the Dido-Pamphilus episode in Sidney’s Arcadia ‘gave Shakespeare the incentive and much of the material for a fuller exploration of exploitative sex than he makes elsewhere,’ but faults the conclusion for not providing ‘narrative closure’ or ‘the insight gained by watching at first hand the interplay between seducer and seduced’ (167). If Shakespeare doesn’t tell us that the maiden has been morally corrupted or if the poem doesn’t dramatize her seduction and ruin, then Rees seems worried that the young man has been shown to be in the right all along. Despite their different emphases, Kerrigan and Rees share essentially the same anxiety about the poem’s conclusion. Both are troubled that it threatens to break loose from the didactic impulse central to the Renaissance complaint.1 Here wayward rhetoric and desire go unreproached, and we are left with the unthinkable. Yet psychoanalysis teaches us that rhetoric is laden with desire, that both rhetoric and desire are essentially wayward, and that we must try to experience through rhetoric and desire what cannot be thought. Usually we think of the vagaries of 149

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desire in Lacan as the metonymic movement of the signifier, an exchange governed by cultural codes. In this symbolic economy desire slips further and further away from its origin into alienating displacements. But as Lacan’s work from the 1960’s onward makes clear, language and rhetoric have the potential as well to approximate true speech. As Lacan specifies, ‘All that is elaborated by the subjective construction on the scale of the signifier in its relation to the Other and which is elaborated in language is only there to permit the full spectrum of desire to allow us to approach, to test, this forbidden jouissance which is the only valuable meaning that is offered to our life’ (‘Of Structure’ 195). It is only when we perceive the lack at the heart of the signifier that desire can emerge. The recognition of the essential absence in language paradoxically allows us to gain some purchase on our fundamental humanity. A Lover’s Complaint arouses anxiety, I would suggest, because it moves us in this other direction, away from false speech and toward true speech, speech that approaches the vanishing point of signification. The poem’s structural anomaly—the absence at the end of a narrator who would totalize the experience of the poem— corresponds to the speech of the maiden who seeks to convey at last not so much a melancholic misapprehension of her experience as a jouissance that in itself can never be spoken. We must thus confront the poem’s apparent presentation of the young man as the poem’s villain and show how he becomes, for both the maiden and the poet, the master in rhetoric and desire, performing a perverse function akin to that of the analyst in the therapeutic encounter. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud unravels the mystery of the libidinal but aim-inhibited bond between group members and their leader by likening it to the psychological state induced by hypnosis, the therapeutic method he had favored before discovering psychoanalysis. The hypnotist’s eyes or something else that shines like a watch or a point of light must, Freud supposes, serve as an object that induces the patient’s paralysis and suggestibility. In a group the leader functions as this hypnotic object, but each member of the group has taken the object as his or her ego ideal and consequently identifies his or her own ego with that of the leader and with that of every other member of the group, a process Freud represents schematically: Ego Ideal

Source: Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Freud. New York: Norton, 1959.

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The darkened lines represent the process by which an Object becomes internalized as an Ego Ideal for each member of a group; the dotted lines superimpose External Object x, the hypnotist’s glimmering object, on the Object that becomes the Ego Ideal. In Lacanian terms the Object that produces narcissistic identification is to be distinguished from the function of External Object x, the object that causes desire, objet petit a. Indeed, hypnosis can be defined as the ‘confusion … of the ideal signifier in which the subject is matched with the a’; the ‘fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation,’ by contrast, ‘is the maintenance of the distance between the I—identification—and the a’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 273). At the same time the analyst must dispel the illusion of the plenitude of language and other signifying systems of a particular culture. Objet petit a must be disentangled from two forms of narcissistic identification in which it is reduced: the imaginary identification with the person the analysand would like to be (the ideal ego), and the symbolic identification with the position in the cultural structure from which the analysand can look at himself or herself as loved (the ego ideal). Psychoanalytic criticism will thus diverge from humanistic criticism with its misrecognition of the ego as an autonomous self, the path exemplified by Kerrigan’s reading of A Lover’s Complaint, and from gender criticism that assumes the coherence of conventional gender roles, the path taken by Rees. Objet petit a exerts a resistant, destabilizing pressure upon both imaginary and symbolic identifications, allowing the subject some measure of liberation from his or her alienation in the otherness of the imaginary and the Otherness of the symbolic. Freud’s hypothesis of External Object x offers Lacan an exemplary instance of objet petit a in the field of vision, the gaze. In Lacan’s early version of the mirror stage, the infant identifies with the image of coherence in the mirror through the vision of the eye, creating the illusion of the ego as transcendental, all-seeing and all-knowing. But in the 1960’s Lacan enriches this already potent theory by postulating that the hypnotic fascination of the mirror object, like that of a painting or any representation, derives from its opacity, its re-enactment of the splitting of the subject in the acquisition of language from the infantile objects that brought excess pleasure. Beyond the representation in the mirror lies the uncanny gaze that both annihilates the imaginary/symbolic subject and elicits jouissance. We escape narcissism when through analysis or experience we recognize that the signifier points to nothing and that the representation in the mirror is trompe l’oeil. At this moment we suddenly become aware of what we know in our dreams but not in waking life, that ‘we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 75) by the superegoic objet petit a. The young man in Shakespeare’s complaint is precisely this speculum mundi, this gaze that is occluded in narcissistic identification: ‘Each eye that saw him did enchant the mind; / For on his visage was in little drawn / What largeness thinks in paradise was sawn’ (89-91).2 The eyes that see are, of course, windows to the soul, but Shakespeare is here applying a Renaissance rhetorical cliché to an ostensibly demonic figure and the verb ‘enchant’ loses its simple sense of ‘something pleasant’ and begins to take on at the same time the opposite associations of menace and captivity, just as the German heimlich—most commonly used to mean the ‘familiar,’ the ‘home-like’—can shade into the reverse sense—the ‘hidden,’ the ‘alien.’ All the handsome youth’s admirers see consciously is a mirror for identification. What is

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hidden from them is the gaze. Like Freud’s leader, the young man creates a single ego out of many: every mind is enchanted. The distinction between objet petit a and its imaginary clothing is invoked in the subsequent details of the maiden’s initial portrait of the young man. The terms of this portrait derive from the specific context of the Renaissance symbolic, wherein we can recognize the young man as a figure of the courtier in his ideal form, a version of the Hamlet who is to Ophelia ‘the glass of fashion’ and the ‘observed of all observers’ (3.2, 153, 154).3 In addition to his beauty, the young man can hold his own in combat when his anger is aroused, and he rides with such finesse that it arouses the sort of philosophical discussion of the kind carried on by the social elite in The Book of the Courtier: And controversy hence a question takes, Whether the horse by him became his deed, Or he his manage by th’well-doing stead. But quickly on his side the verdict went: His real habitude gave life and grace To appertainings and to ornament, Accomplished in himself, not in his case; All aids, themselves made fairer by their place, Came for additions; yet their purposed trim Pieced not his grace, but were all graced by him. (110-19)

At issue here is whether the young man’s ‘grace’ derives from his accomplishments or from himself; the conclusion is that it derives from him. Like The Book of the Courtier, the poem takes ‘grace’ to be the sine qua non of the courtier. As Castiglione’s speakers enumerate the skills and character traits that a young man must possess to be a courtier, Cesare points out that grace is ‘the seasoning without which all other attributes and good qualities would be almost worthless’ (65). To put the point another way, the traits of a courtier that one can enumerate—like the bodily features in a blazon—are but Aristotelian attributes, or to use Shakespeare’s word, ‘additions,’ which do not touch the essence of grace, a word used in The Book of the Courtier in a decidedly secular sense and yet retaining its sacred overtones. It conveys the idea of something ineffable that cannot be fully taught, for ‘the gracious favour [the courtiers] have received from heaven raises them, almost despite themselves, higher than they might have desired, and makes everyone both like and admire them’ (65). It makes sense here to think of the ‘benign favor’ from heaven as a Renaissance attempt to articulate Lacan’s notions of jouissance and the gaze. The hallmark of grace for those who must attempt to acquire it as opposed to those who are given it is sprezzatura, which is the appearance of effortlessness. Those to whom grace comes from fortune presumably possess the actual, not apparent, divine capacity for effortless achievement. They are the models whom lesser mortals must imitate, try as they can. ‘Grace’ is thus a state of sublime bliss that arouses voyeuristic desire in others even though it becomes conceptually disguised and domesticated as identification with the fancy dress codes of the Renaissance aristocracy that give it the patina of cultural authority.

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Lacan wrote most extensively on the gaze as objet petit a, but his theory gives a certain privilege to another version of it, the voice. In the Graph of Desire, printed in his seminar on Hamlet and in ‘The Subversion of the Subject,’ the voice is singled out as the remnant left over from the symbolic territorialization of the body, speech as sound and tone without meaning. In a commonplace running through the humanistic literature and literary theory of the Renaissance and the Neo-classical age (as we see from Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’), music was thought to possess the divine power to summon up the passions of its listeners. The Book of the Courtier considers skill in music an indispensable requirement of the courtier and tells us that in the ancient world ‘the wisest of philosophers held the opinion that the universe was made up of music, that the heavens made harmony as they move, and that as our souls are formed on the same principle they are awakened and have their faculties, as it were, brought to life through music’ (94-95). The notion that music awakens the soul to life alludes, of course, to the lyric music of Orpheus, the mythical symbol for Renaissance humanists of the power not only of music, but song, oratory, and poetry. The addition of words to music would, in psychoanalytic theory, transform a sonority of pure form into a screen that dissimulates the voice, which is perhaps why Orpheus became not just the giver of life but the bearer of civilization, a confusion of objet petit a with the object of identification. Henry Peacham writes for instance of ancient orators in ‘times past, who by their singular wisdom and eloquence, made savage nations civil, wild people tame, and cruel tyrants not only to become meeke, but likewise mercifull’ (iii). In the Renaissance embellishments of Ovid’s myth, Orpheus is conflated with the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father even though rhetoric retains its association with emotion. In the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, which is either a source or an ur-version of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate’s education in civility is conducted in part by a teacher of the lute, who tells her ‘The sencelesse trees by musick have bin moov’d / And at the sound of pleasnt tuned strings, / Have savage beasts hung down their listning heads / As though they had beene cast into a trance’ (qtd. in Rebhorn 305). In the maiden’s portrait of the young man his prowess in rhetoric is discussed last, for it is the most potent source of his Orphic ability to produce universal identification and desire: He had the dialect and the different skill, Catching all passions in his craft of will, That he did in the general bosom reign, Of young, old, and sexes both enchanted, To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain In personal duty, following where he haunted. Consents bewitched, ere he desire, have granted, And dialogued for him what he would say, Asked their own wills, and made their wills obey. (125-33)

Statements by Thomas Wilson and others that the ear is ‘ravished’ by oratory have led Wayne E. Rebhorn to claim the benevolent intentions of the Orphic orator in Renaissance rhetorical theory ‘can … be seen as a self-serving rationalization which

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mystifies the orator’s verbal violence and savagery, his metaphorical rape of others.’4 But, according to Rebhorn, the New Historicist interpretation of language as power is precisely what Shakespeare is going out of his way to rebut in The Taming of the Shrew. In A Lover’s Complaint, the young man is not imposing his phallic desires upon his listeners, forcing them against their wills; his auditors have paradoxically ‘asked their own wills, and made their wills obey’ in response to his ‘craft of will.’ In psychoanalytic terms they have sensed what the analysand seeks in the analyst, what is ‘in you more than you’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 268). The external voice of the barred Other, the Other beyond the illusion of meaning, is the internal voice of the subject, haunting her or him from within. The passage on the suasive rhetoric and disputation of the young man needs to be read alongside the earlier description of his androgynous appearance: ‘Small show of man was yet upon his skin’ (92). The defense of rhetoric always seems to take place in the context of the assumption that it is ultimately feminine, not phallic. This is the allegation Cesare in The Book of the Courtier seeks to deny in stressing the power of the rhetorician to civilize and the charge propounded in a long series of tracts against rhetoric. Wayne Rebhorn cites, for instance, Pico della Mirandola’s famous comparison of rhetoric to female seduction (322). Patricia Parker has perhaps put her finger squarely on the root of the association. Rhetoric stressed invention and amplification and was therefore identified with the fertile and excessive body of the woman (8-35). The young man not only escapes normative genders but disrupts normative sexualities as well. Readers of Golding’s translation of The Metamorphosis knew full well of Orpheus’ bisexuality, and as Mario diGangi has pointed out the Orphic myth lies behind the adulation of the outlaw courtiers for Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona as well as the homosocial gathering of the exiled Duke Senior and his followers in As You Like It: ‘We can identify a characteristically Shakespearean associative cluster in both plays—Orpheus/ golden world/ homoeroticism/ outlaws’ (diGangi 277, n. 21). The association between ‘the golden world’ and ‘outlaws’ is explicable in terms of objet petit a, for as Tim Dean argues, ‘the Lacanian real … is always relational, oppositional in the subversive sense’ (231) and thus can be aptly figured in the pastoral and the outlaw. For Dean, homoeroticism and bisexuality inhere in the status of objet petit a as object, not person. The normative status of heterosexuality is psychoanalytically secondary and always threatened by ‘a more primary form of relationality that remains stunningly oblivious to both person and gender’ (263). The Orpheus myth might be taken as an allegory of the human search for this archaic relationality. By descending into the realm of death and ghosts, Orpheus is granted the vision of the unconscious object of desire, and after having lost Eurydice again, Orpheus ‘taught the Thracian folk a stew of males to make / And of the flowering prime of boys the pleasure for to take (Book X, 91-92). Moreover, the famous music that made the ‘herds of beasts and flocks of birds’ sing together in harmony, the locus classicus for the Renaissance apologia for poetry, tells ‘of pretty boys / That were the darlings of the gods, and of unlawful joys / That burned in the breasts of girls’ (157-59). The stories Orpheus narrates might have served Havelock Ellis and the early Freud as a mythological catalogue of perverse desire: there is Jove’s love for Ganymede, Apollo’s love for Hyacinth, Pygmalion’s love for a fetishistic ‘image … / Of such proportion, shape

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and grace as nature never gave / Nor can to any woman give’ (265-67), Myrrha’s incestuous love for her father Cinyras, and Venus’ love for Adonis and his ensuing castration. Shakespeare often retells or alludes to these stories and surely he could not miss the irony of the Renaissance Orpheus moralisé, for he is a master of the psychological insight that in morality and identification there lurks forbidden desire. A Lover’s Complaint fits within this literary and psychoanalytic nexus of associations. The young man’s Orphic rhetoric and disputation arouses the ‘wills’ (133) of all, men as well as women. His rhetoric resonates among his listeners on the level of the Lacanian understanding of phantasy as the support for desire and as a relation not to a person but to an enchanting object. The final lines of the quotation provide a particularly trenchant observation on how this phantasy is engaged that again demonstrates the singularity of Shakespeare’s reading of the Orpheus story. In the ‘general bosom’ of those enchanted by the young man this voice has not been fully heard. His admirers have not disentangled identification from desire; objet petit a is still for them i(a), the object that is swallowed in incorporation/identification, not the object that is left over. They have obtained his ‘picture … / To serve their eyes, and in it put their mind’ (134-35). While the young man seduces men as well as women, the spark of desire goes unnoticed in the poem among the men who are seduced by him. His female admirers, however, have less reason to disguise their emotions and indeed the poem suggests that they feel the force of his desire more strongly. We are told, for instance, ‘That maiden’s eyes stuck over all his face’ (81). This grotesque image is doubtless intended to be comical and derisive. At the same time it conveys the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s account of a secondary narcissism that prompted Lacan’s elucidation of the notion of the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: … there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason the vision [that the seer] exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contours of a body one inhabits [what one sees in the mirror image], but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, … this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh. (Qtd. in Julien, 156)

For Lacan the experience Merleau-Ponty calls secondary narcissism is not narcissistic since he does not share the phenomenological assumption of the intentionality of all consciousness. The sense that one’s eyes have been seduced and emigrated into those of another characterizes the encounter not with the imaginary but with the fleshly real of jouissance where one can glimpse oneself at the point from which one is seen, a perspective excluded from the geometrical, Cartesian space of the eye. Because for all women, as opposed to men, not every x is a function of the Name-of-the-Father, because women exist to some extent outside the phallic economy of the symbolic with its pretensions to plenitude, the women’s vision in A Lover’s Complaint of the young man goes more readily than that of men beyond the

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object of imaginary identification to the gaze beyond the mirror.5 Nevertheless, the maidens’ closer encounter with the real of desire remains still a missed encounter between the eye and the gaze, for they are not able to break the spell of narcissistic enchantment: ‘And when in his fair parts she [each maiden] did abide, / She was new lodged and newly deified’ (83-84). Moreover, as we come to understand from the young man’s tales of his previous conquests, many women have flung themselves on him, more as an object of romantic love than desire. They have woo’d him with gifts Of pallid pearls and rubies red as blood; Figuring that they their passions likewise lent me Of grief and blushes, aptly understood In bloodless white and the encrimsoned mood— Effects of terror and dear modesty Encamped in hearts fighting outwardly. (198-204)

The gifts of the women should be distinguished from agalma, the Greek word for treasure and the word Plato uses to describe the desire that emerges in Alcibiades’ declaration of love to Socrates. As Philippe Julien summarizes Lacan’s reading of this speech, Alcibiades takes the risk, steps forward alone, keeping silent. He speaks his passion: of how the voice of Socrates possesses him, troubles him, makes him weep; of how he has obeyed Socrates’ words, and how ashamed he has been to show his dependence in public. Today, in the absence of the fear of castration, he confesses—without shame—his ‘feminine’ passion. Through really-telling (bien-dire), he accomplishes the metaphor of love: he constitutes Socrates in the place of the beloved, the one who harbors the object of his desire.6

Through true speech Alcibiades has produced agalma as objet petit a. Implicit in Plato’s language in recounting this speech is a contrast between the treasure and the wooden box that has heretofore contained it. The simple box represents for Lacan the beautiful mirror image, but here the outside appearance of Socrates takes on the appearance of a primitive and insignificant container of the true beauty that lies within Socrates. The women in A Lover’s Complaint might conceivably be construed as constituting the young man as their agalma, but their gifts are not presented openly and publicly without fear of shame; in fact, they feel the terror of castration and confess their love through secret gifts, like the ‘conceited characters’ (16) inscribed on the silken napkins that they have apparently given the young man,7 Moreover, their gems do not metaphorically effect the translation of the young man into the object of love. Instead metaphor here serves to box up their desire, their sighs and passions, which must be ‘aptly understood’ and interpreted by the knowing reader. In ‘terror’ they have censored their unconscious thoughts through the dream mechanism of condensation that Lacan likens to metaphor and to the psychic process of identification. It is the prettified young man they pay homage to here in this

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courtly ritual, mistaking the box for the true inner treasure. Rhetoric is filled with desire, but metaphor in this context conceals the desire that touches on jouissance. The one conquest that the young man singles out after his generalized account of the other young women provides not a negative example of an illusionary love but a positive example of desire in the real that foreshadows and illuminates the maiden’s psychoanalytically ethical choice. She is a nun who has fled the vanity of the court but as the young man shrewdly observes, her retreat to the world of ‘eternal love’ in a convent has amounted to no more than the preservation of a ‘cold distance’ (237). The nun’s religious chastity blocks desire through an illusionary fullness of being, attempting to undo the very horizon of the subject’s existence, its immersion in the desire of the Other. Her surrender to the young man’s entreaties defines more clearly what is required of the subject: The accident which brought me to her eye Upon the moment did her force subdue, And now she would the caged cloister fly: Religious love put out Religion’s eye: Not to be tempted, would she be immured, And now to tempt all liberty procured. (246-52)

It is not Jesuitical hairsplitting, I think, to note that it is in a passage such as this one that the important difference between the Lacan of the 1950’s and the 1960’s can be measured. Many psychoanalytic critics remain faithful to the 1950’s Lacan who takes as the end of psychoanalysis the moment when the subject accepts symbolic castration, the repression and loss of the signifier of the mother’s desire, the phallus. But for the later Lacan the end of analysis is not an acceptance of the ceaseless, unsatisfying progression from gendered object to gendered object that precludes jouissance. As Lacan puts it in 1960, ‘desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a certain limit in enjoyment’ (‘The Subversion of the Subject’ 309). Rather the end of analysis is the recognition of the lack in the maternal signifier, of the cause of (maternal) desire in the domain of the real, the barred Other and the ‘eternally lost object’ that is objet petit a (Four Fundamental Concepts 180). As Slavoj Zizek maintains, v

v

The trouble with jouissance is not that it is unattainable, that it always eludes our grasp, but, rather, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags along for ever—therein rises the point of Lacan’s concept of surplus-enjoyment: the very renunciation of jouissance brings about a remainder/surplus of jouissance.8

The nun cannot get rid of jouissance however much she may try by locking herself in a convent. What she must do, as the young man indicates, is ‘tempt all,’ tempt the Other, by pursuing desire to its limit point, which is, ontologically speaking, not quite the nothing, but ‘a presence of a void’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 180).9 The story of the maiden plays out this logic of jouissance. Unlike the other women the young man has seduced (except perhaps the nun), she understands that there is nothing romantic about his rhetoric. She falls for him knowing full well what

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‘a hell of witchcraft’ (289) lies in his protestations of love, the ‘foul beguiling’ (170) of his smooth words, the hypocrisy that preached ‘pure maid and praised cold chastity’ (315), ‘the hail of his all-hurting aim’ (310). She sees, in Lacan’s words, ‘the dark God’ present in this desire (Four Fundamental Concepts 275). Objet petit a remains a stranger to the subject interpellated by cultural ideologies of morality and justice. It does not acknowledge the subject’s demand for recognition and prestige; it does not even see the subject as gendered or even as a person. From Totem and Taboo onward, Freud took as his central mission to diagnose ‘the pathology of the man of duty,’ as Paul Ricoeuer has put it (318). Lacan’s late writings insist that ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire’ (The Ethics 323). Greek tragedies such as Antigone or Philoctetes do not teach us to do our duty; they instead lead to a catharsis, a purification of desire ‘that cannot be established, as it is clear if one simply reads Aristotle’s sentence, unless one has at least established the crossing of its limits that we call fear and pity’ (323). Yet one does not seek to dwell in the infernal regions of a Sade or the ecstatic regions of the mystic. Giving way to one’s desire does not overcome the primordial splitting of the subject. What is required is an ambivalence toward objet petit a. In the ethics of psychoanalysis, one must learn to desire what one hates and hate what one desires, which is precisely the ambiguous stance of the maiden toward her seducer. The overall movement of the poem recapitulates the maiden’s own movement from hatred of the young man toward an acceptance of her desire for him. But just as there is an implicit desire at the beginning in the maiden’s hysterical outcries, her ‘suffering ecstasy’ (69), there is an implicit desire marked in the first four lines of the poem’s final stanza which specify the young man’s deceitful traits in an antiblazon: 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 reconciled maid. (332-38)

The ‘O’s that begin each line are not, it seems to me, apostrophes so much as exclamations, and while they suggest the sound of ‘woe,’ they typographically reproduce the form of objet petit a, an enclosed space, like the ‘concave womb’ at the beginning of the poem (2) and thus cipher desire. Even the maiden’s final statement that she would allow herself to be ‘perverted’ again contains an implicit regret. The passions of the ‘fickle maid’ (5) oscillate between hate and desire in such a way that at no point is either entirely excluded. Instead each gives intensity to the other. The maiden has evidently retreated from the court partly in shame, but partly because the pastoral world is the golden world of non-normative desire. She wears ‘a platted hive of straw / Which fortified her visage from the sun,’ as if seeking to escape the speculum mundi, but the poet himself introduces a doubt about the true state of the maiden by the curious expression that ‘the thought might think sometime

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it saw’ a hidden beauty in the ravaged face of the maiden, a radiance that denies her complete ruin. Her eyes ‘anon their gazes lend / To every place at once’ (26-27) as if her vision is no longer simply a property of the eye but troubled by the disruptive sight of the gaze. Her hair is ‘nor loose nor tied in formal plat’ (29). She hurls the gems the young man has given her in the river like the ‘monarch’s hands that lets not bounty fall / Where want cries some, but where excess begs all’ (42-43)— rejection as remote from ‘want’ as is the constraint and repetitive thrust of the drive is from the satiable pressure of need and the moderating pleasure principle. She ‘often kissed, and often ‘gan to tear’ (51) the letters the young man has given her. Moreover, the maiden describes the young man’s seductive rhetoric as a ‘cleft effect,’ producing both ‘cold modesty’ and ‘hot wrath’ (293). His tears have ‘poisoned’ her (301), but the word ‘poisoned’ has the ambiguity of the word pharmakon that Derrida has teased out of Plato’s Phaedrus. The paradox of drugs that kill and cure appears often in Shakespeare.10 It is not, however, an aporia for psychoanalysis as it is for deconstruction. Objet petit a is the poison that murders the ego but restores the life of desire. If the young man’s ‘poison’ is paradoxical, so too is his ‘art of craft’ (295), a phrase that shrewdly captures the psychological complexity of the Renaissance conception of the orator as Orpheus. The orator fascinates his audience. He is an actor, a mimic, and the best gloss on the young man’s seductive language is perhaps to be found in Lacan’s interpretation of the phenomenon of animal mimicry, particularly the exemplary ocellus, ‘which marks the pre-existence to the seen of a given-to-be-seen’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 74), the stain that blots the seeming transparency of the vision of the eye. ‘The effect of mimicry,’ Lacan writes, ‘is camouflage in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled—exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare’ (99). The effect of mimicry, of representation, does not lead to a harmony with one’s world, for mimesis, like the mirror image, produces only the illusion of plenitude; representation is deception and leads to the mottling of the subject, the division between the ego and the unconscious.11 The story of Orpheus fascinates because it can be ‘seen’ in two ways, by the eye and as the gaze. He can be read as the civilizer and the Law only because he is also the visitor to hell and the seducer of young boys. The rhetorician fascinates because he both persuades his audience and raises doubts about his sincerity. His is ‘a craft of art’ in both the honorific and pejorative senses of ‘craft.’ His language creates a confusion of the word and the thing; his voice speaks to the lack in the narcissistic illusion. The maiden does not believe a word the young man says; it is all camouflage. What she responds to is a given-to-be-seenness or a given-to-be-heardness in the words, the voice of the mimic, the undercurrent of desire. His epideictic oratory gives itself away by its own excess and its own absurd logic. We miss the point when we condemn the specious arguments of the young man, such as the claim that his previous conquests have been ‘errors of the blood, none of the mind; / Love made them not; with acture they may be, / Where neither party is nor true nor kind’ (184-86). This is ‘moral Doublespeak of the worst, most complacent kind,’ Kerrigan observes (16), but we should also observe that the maiden reports it as such and still, as she says, ‘shook off my sober guards and civil fears’ (298).

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To use another metaphor for the young man’s rhetoric, we might say that his ‘art of craft’ is ventriloquism. The young man seduces the maiden to a large extent by repeating the words of other women who have fallen to his charm in such a way that we appear to be listening to them speak. Moreover, the curious structure of the poem draws attention to the phenomenon of ventriloquism. The maiden’s complaint is overhead by the poem’s narrator as it is ‘reworded’ by the ‘concave womb’ of the hill that echoes the ‘plaintfull story from a sist’ring vale’ (1, 2). This ‘double voice’ (3) comes not from the maiden, but from the ventriloquizing of her voice by its echo, which is then ventroliquized by the poet. And in telling her story, the maiden then ventriloquizes the voice of the young man, an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo. The structure of the poem gives the impression of the presence of multiple speakers, but at the same time draws our attention to their absence; in the end, even the narrator disappears. All the sound and fury of the poem thus lead to the presence of nothing, to the voice, to ‘the hole in the real that results from loss’ (‘Desire’ 38). Elizabeth D. Harvey has discussed at length the phenomenon of ventriloquism in Renaissance poetry, the frequent practice of male poets writing as if they were women, arguing that ‘ventriloquism and intertextuality overlap, for, in both cases, a putative single and unbounded utterance is destabilized by questions of origin, authorship, and ownership; an intertextual allusion opens a text to other voices and echoes of other texts, just as ventriloquism multiplies authorial voices, interrogating the idea that a single authorial presence speaks or controls an utterance’ (10). Thus ventriloquism in Renaissance texts is not a simple matter of a male appropriation of a female voice; such texts arouse the anxieties of male privilege and male contamination by the female body, especially the uterus, the organ that supposedly produced hysteria. Lacan would say that that all texts are ultimately destabilizing and hysterical. They are thus on the side of the feminine, the not-whole. It is appropriate, therefore, that the lament of the angst-ridden maiden is birthed from the ‘concave womb’ of the feminine (1). The placenta, Lacan notes, ‘may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 198). And it is significant as well that the ‘reverend man’ whose sympathetic ear prompts the maiden to tell her story ‘the ruffle knew / Of court, of city.’ He ‘slides … down upon his grainèd bat’ in a gesture that accords with his rejection of the imaginary and phallic world of the court (57, 58-59).12 Like Alcibiades, he can accept castration, feminize himself. He is an older version of the young man whose ‘phoenix down’ (93) also sparks courtly debate, for his ‘bare out-bragged the web it seemed to wear; / And showed his visage by that cost more dear’ (95-96). The vertiginous confusion in the seducer of boy and man makes him like the transvestite boy actors of the Renaissance stage, a form of ventriloquism that in the plays as well as this poem puts to question presentist orthodoxy of innate and immutable gender distinctions. In this anthology John Roe lays out a textual case for the resemblance between the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship and the maiden/young man relationship in A Lover’s Complaint, arguing that the maiden voices a complaint that could very well have been spoken by Ophelia were Hamlet not the hero of the play.13 This resemblance derives, I would argue, from the similarity between Shakespeare’s and Lacan’s thinking about the hidden treasure in identification. In the first three acts, Hamlet has, as Lacan says,‘lost the way of his desire’ (‘Desire’ 12), still living in the alienating, imaginary world of his infantile attachment to Gertrude and renouncing

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his desire for Ophelia. In this state Hamlet denounces all seeming that does not denote being, whether the treacherous rhetoric of Claudius and Polonius or the exaggerated gestures of actors that do not match their words.Yet Hamlet becomes a mimic himself, and it is the recognition of this inescapable hypocrisy that allows him at the graveyard scene to acknowledge his love for Ophelia and to act in both senses of the word, both jumping into the grave and mimicking Laertes’ hyperbolic lament. According to Lacan, his full transformation occurs at the moment when he speaks of himself as the ‘foil’ that will set off Laertes’greater skill in swordsmanship (5.2.193). In the mirror image of Laertes, with all its homoerotic attraction, Hamlet not only puns on the ‘foil’ as phallic sword but recognizes through this pun that he is the ‘foil’ that sets off a jewel, agalma, the glittering object x. It is easy to miss this reference to the real of desire in Lacan’s densely, if not cryptically, argued theoretical pronouncements in the 1958-59 seminar on Hamlet where it can seem that Lacan’s point is simply that Hamlet has not yet accepted symbolic castration, the substitution in the unconscious of the signifier of the mother’s desire for the signifier of the Father. But it should be noted that Lacan finds the turning point in the play during the graveyard scene when Hamlet re-joins Ophelia, the phallus and objet petit a, as is indicated in the pun Lacan finds in her name, O-phallus. Moreover, Lacan’s explains the central interpretative crux of the play, Hamlet’s hesitation in killing Claudius, in terms of the relation between the imaginary phallus and petit objet a: The very source of what makes Hamlet’s arm waver at every moment, is the narcissistic connection that Freud tells us about in his text on the decline of the Oedipus complex: one cannot strike the phallus, because the phallus, even the real phallus, is a ghost. We are troubled at the time by the question of why, after all, no one assassinated Hitler—Hitler, who is very much this object that is not like the others, the object x whose function in the homogenization of the crowd by means of identification is demonstrated by Freud. Doesn’t this lead back to what we are discussing here? (50-51)

The ghost of Old Hamlet and Hamlet’s anxiety are identical. They are what cannot be seen in the imaginary object but which haunts it nevertheless. To put the matter in another way that connects the young man of A Lover’s Complaint, Orpheus, Hamlet, and the analyst, ‘we have, in Eurydice twice lost, the most potent image we can find of the relation between Orpheus the analyst and the unconscious’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 25). The second loss, the repression of the phallic signifier, retroactively manifests the first loss, the part-object of infantile desire, as a sound makes present the absence of silence. Like Hamlet in his final encounter with Laertes, the maiden comes to recognize the agalma in the amorous object: Experience for me many bulwarks builded Of proofs new-bleeding, which remained the foil Of this false jewel, and his amorous spoil. (152-54)

But this reproach is immediately followed by the maiden’s question, ‘who ever shunned by precedent / The destined ill she must herself assay’ (153-54). It is destiny

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that the maiden must ‘assay,’ must tempt, this young man in the hope that she can experience ‘the only valuable meaning that is offered to our life.’ A Lover’s Complaint can thus be seen as following the trajectory of Hamlet, both reaching the point where both rhetoric and desire can find their rightful and perverse place outside the phallocentric order. And in this way we can read the psychoanalytic relation between A Lover’s Complaint and the sonnets with which it was published. Rather than regarding A Lover’s Complaint as a purely formal satisfaction of the Renaissance convention of concluding a sonnet sequence with a complaint, we can with Kerrigan detect a thematic link as well, though in my view the link is more distinctively Lacanian. For if with Joel Fineman we read Shakespeare’s love for the handsome young noble at the beginning of the sonnets as an imaginary attachment and the love for the ‘dark lady’ in the latter sonnets as a symbolic attachment, A Lover’s Complaint adds Lacan’s third register, the real. And in so doing the complaint marks the passage from the symbolic back to the imaginary but now the imaginary with a hole, to what is cut out and lacking from the image. ‘Desire is death’ at the end of the sonnets because it bespeaks, as Fineman demonstrates, not the earlier ‘homosexual desire for that which is admired’ but an inherently misogynistic, ‘heterosexual desire for that which is not admired’ (71). From this bleak exploration of the lack in the gendered sexual relation, Shakespeare evokes an eros that is neither homosexual nor heterosexual, but beyond gender, an eros neither utopian nor dystopian, but founded in the subject’s lack in Being. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Ilona Bell demonstrates in this volume, however, that the complaint did not always subscribe to the patriarchal agenda of disciplining female sexuality. All textual citations of A Lover’s Complaint are to the edition of Kerrigan. All textual citations of Hamlet are to The Riverside Shakespeare. Rebhorn’s thoughtful analysis of the issues of power and gender in Renaissance rhetorical theory and in The Taming of the Shrew provides an illuminating context for reading A Lover’s Complaint. For the crux of Lacan’s elucidation of this contrast between men and women, see On Feminine Sexuality 78-81. Julien 97. Lacan’s interpretation of The Symposium is to be found in the untranslated Seminar VIII. I infer that the ‘napkin’ in the maiden’s hand comes from the young man’s other female admirers since the maiden is described as lamenting over it as she does the letters and jewels that are specifically indicated as gifts from the other women to the young man, gifts that he in turn has given her. Qtd. in Zupancic 241. Zupancic discusses insightfully the change in Lacan’s thinking during the 1960’s about the ontological status of jouissance and its relation to Lacan’s engagement with Kantian ethics. See especially pp. 170-248. I gratefully acknowledge Stephen Whitworth’s stimulating essay in this volume for drawing my attention to the Lacanian concerns in the passage on the nun. Our readings of the poem differ, as I see it, over Lacan’s understanding of the primal scene. Whitworth offers a rigorously post-structuralist interpretation that regards the maiden’s lament as a primal phantasy understood as re-constituted rather than originary and thus fictitious. v

v

v

v

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10 11 12

13

163

But as I try to show here, the maiden does not long for an eternal Oneness in a romantic encounter with the young man, and phantasy is not purely narcissistic illusion. The ‘fundamental phantasy’ is not for the late Lacan to be discredited as hoax, but to be ‘traversed’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 273), lived through in order to find the occluded and ‘lost object’ that provides the drive its first experience of jouissance. Kerrigan traces ‘the depth of Shakespeare’s associating mutual drops with what, poisoned, can also restore’; see p. 422 for the commentary on line 300. I follow Joan Copjec’s helpful explication of Lacan’s puzzling sentence; see p. 37. As Julien observes, ‘The objet petit a cannot join with the phallus (nor precede it as a pregenital stage!), except when the phallus is, according to Lacan’s gorgeous expression, “flappi” (“dead-beat”)’ (154). Shirley Sharon-Zisser notes the phallic allusion and consistently with association of the phallus with the umbilicus, interprets it as the mark of a transference that is not metaphorical but similaic, feminine rather than masculine, though for Sharon-Zisser, following Michele Montrelay, the feminine denotes a function that could be occupied by either gender. See, for example, Montrelay’s ‘Why Did You Tell Me I Love Mommy’ in which Montrelay interprets Freud’s case study of Little Hans as indicating that the penis becomes a signifier in the erotic, homosexual realm of Hans’s relation to his father. Montrelay’s carefully analysis of the Freudian text, along with Sharon-Zisser’s identification of the simile as a transcording of archaic feminine jouissance, chart important new directions for the study of gender and rhetoric. Interestingly, Roe finds in Juliet’s third-act outburst against Romeo—a reproach which she immediately retracts when the Nurse herself denounces Romeo—an elided version of essentially the same complaint, Lucrece’s denunciation of the fair-seeming but treacherous rhetoric of Tarquin. One might add to this list of rhetorically proficient, aristocratic, and seductive youthful males in Shakespeare Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, whose Petrarchan praises of Sylvia find their darker side in the conduct of his double, Proteus. His attempted rape of Sylvia reveals the aggression implicit in Valentine’s courtship of Sylvia. And does not Don John in Much Ado displace the dormant aggression in the early scenes of Claudio’s courtship of Hero, an aggression that becomes only fully manifest when he publicly shames her later in the play but which is foreshadowed in his suspicion, evidently based on projective identification, that Don John’s brother, Don Pedro, has selfishly wooed Hero not on his behalf but Don Pedro’s? A more decidedly comic version of this pattern might also be found in the churlish behavior of the male doubles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hamlet and A Lover’s Complaint have a privileged place in Shakespeare’s insistent, signature depiction of the artful seducer, I believe, for they explore most deeply the linkage between rhetoric and illicit desire.

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‘Where Excess Begs All’: Shakespeare, Freud, and the Diacritics of Melancholy Stephen Whitworth

Their images I lov’d I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me. Sonnet 31

A disembodied voice calls to us through the silent medium of words that do not seem to have any need of quotation marks. It tells us that it hears, from the ‘concave womb’ of a nearby ‘sistering vale’ the ‘reworded […] plaintful story’ of another disembodied voice, of an echoing ‘double voice’ that lamentingly cries out a ‘sadtuned tale’ (Shakespeare 1-4). And these signs, ambivalent though they may be, tell us that we have now entered the poetic mode of the complaint, that mode that forever presences a traumatic and seductive past. As soon, then, as we have been induced by our narrating guide to ‘lie down’ with him and ‘list’ the echoing ‘sad-tuned tale’ (which will certainly tell us about love and abandonment), the work of presencing begins, and we no longer have to worry about the duplicity of echo (4). For we can suddenly see its source; ‘ere long’ we ‘espy’ a ‘fickle maid full pale’ (5). Our eyes, once focused on the single form of the bereft maiden, will enable us to know what guarantees all this heretofore ‘floating,’ distant, disembodied discourse. They’ll enable us to believe in the real of what we’ve been hearing, of what we’re about to hear. And yet, as hard as the opening stanza of Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint strives to exorcise the silent-speaking of the written word and the dividedness of the Voice-qua-echo that eternally ‘rewords,’ it cannot ever effect the seamless identity, the fusional, ontologically grounded at-one-ment that its emphasis on the visual and the bodily is designed to bring about. The maiden, whose status as speaking object of sight is supposed to authorize the veracity of the tale of past seduction that is sure to follow, doesn’t initially seem all that interested in at-one-ment. We first see her, rather, ‘tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain’ (6). Indeed, as John Kerrigan has noted, ‘as the text proceeds […] its images of doubleness proliferate’ (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 16). Our complainant seems to be sending us right back to our beginning: toward the rewording ‘concave womb,’ toward the ‘double voice,’ the ‘sist’ring vale’ of uncertainty. Small surprise, really, that she should send us back before taking us forward into the past, as we ultimately discover that she is both ‘origin and ender’ (222). What is it about this ‘fickle maid’ and her relationship to the poetic gaze that obviates the conventional conditions of possibility for the taking-place of the complaint? Why does her particular manner of being-seen 165

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repeatedly remind us of what we must forget in order to take pleasure in the complaint? Here we are reminded of the irreducible distinction between ‘reliable,’ historical testimonial and lamentation. Here testimonial purports to tell the one truth of the historical ‘concrete,’ whereas lamentation repeats what Lacan calls the ‘factitious fact’ of a primal scene that engenders suffering ecstasy (Four 70). Why is this? As we have already noted in the first stanza of A Lover’s Complaint, this poem has a tendency to displace the troubling atopicality of voice (significantly coded as the maternal/feminine) onto ‘ground’ (the spectacle of the maiden’s body) that immediately reveals itself to be incapable of supporting the epistemologically necessary fiction of a dependable, unary subject of knowledge and being. What we find instead—metonymically suggested by the maiden’s breaking of the closed (hermeneutic?) circuit of rings into halves—is a speaking of atwainment, dehiscence, a language that grounds the tale that is about to be recounted on nothing more than the ‘missed encounter’ between a past and a present that can only ever collide in futurity, interpretation. According to Lacan, the structure that mediates this missed encounter between past and present desire is the unconscious, which, like the dream, is ‘an act of homage to the missed reality […] that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening’ (58). Shakespeare’s complaint, through its beckoning, echoing repetitions, challenges us long before Lacan to consider what the truth of the event can be, what it can mean when it has been uprooted from the (Imaginary) certainty of ontology and resituated in the ‘strange temporality’ or ‘logical time’ of unconscious working through, in a time that has nothing to do with identity, continuity, or duration (32). This is not to say that historicizing accounts of the poem have no value. On the contrary. As their essays in this volume illustrate, historicist critics such as Patrick Cheney, Paul Stegner, and Ilona Bell can provide great insight into the conflicting ‘nationalisms’ at work in the complaint; they can explain the complaint’s ‘staging’ of the trauma caused by the Reformation’s desacramentalizing of confession; and they can help us see the poem as an intervention into Renaissance debates about courtship and female chastity. A Lover’s Complaint, however, does present serious challenges to historicizing readings, in that it incites us to engage phantasy as something more than mere illusion to be overcome in a triumph of ‘will’ or consciousness, and consequently throws the ‘meaning’ of histories recovered by recollection into question. For in Shakespeare’s poem, the phantasy so inextricably linked to recollection not only gives figure to the trauma of the past, but calls it forth, shapes it in and as the real that is coming into being. As we shall see, this hailing confronts us with a possibility that has heretofore remained largely unthought in psychoanalytic theory: the possibility of there being a form of melancholy that is not merely an ‘anti-cathexis,’ but, rather, a perverse form of jouissance intimately related to feminine sexuality. The complaint practically insists, that is, on an encounter with psychoanalysis, for psychoanalysis has much to learn from this enigmatic poem. It is easy to see why one would be tempted to view A Lover’s Complaint as an object-lesson in psychoanalytic thinking. As Shirley Sharon-Zisser has pointed out, the psychorhetorical dynamics of A Lover’s Complaint ‘resist psycho-retorical

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limiting appeals to history and […] demand that its readers confront the question of desire’ (‘Similes Hollowed with Sighs,’ 187). In her first reading of the poem, Sharon-Zisser encourages readers to imagine the scenario of the complaint to be analogous to the structure of an analytic treatment. As this treatment begins, a young lover/analysand is unable to accept the reality of her amorous loss, and has therefore refused it access to symbolization—she has swallowed her lost fusional connection or melancholically ‘incorporated’ it. After she encounters (in line 57) ‘a reverend man’ who ‘desires to know/In brief the grounds and motives of her woe’—a man who, ‘slid[ing] down upon his grained bat’ (66)—seems curiously analogous to the silent figure of the psychoanalyst1—the young lover free associates. In telling her tale, she eventually learns through speaking the game of symbolic substitution or ‘introjection,’ which teaches her to work through loss by replacing it with signs whose very emptiness ‘rebirths’ the young woman into ever necessarily repeated articulations of desire in a future beyond the bounds of the poem. Significantly, this progression from incorporation to introjection corresponds to a rhetorical progression. Over the course of the poem, the maid abandons the rhetoric of nondifferentiated metaphoric copulation, and begins to employ (to privilege, in fact) the gaping, ever proximate copulations effected by the figure of simile. And, indeed, thinking of the complaint in terms of this analytic analogy sheds much light on the psycho-rhetorical structure of Shakespeare’s poem of loss and reparation. The maiden, the sight of whom has subtly moved us out of the aural/oral register and into the realm of the scopic, is for many stanzas associated with a metaphoric rhetoric of non-differentiation. With her ‘mind and sight distractedly commix’d’ (28) and ‘Her hair, nor loose nor tied in formal plat’ (29), she dissolves with ‘her fluxive eyes’ (50) all the remaining signs of her beloved’s absence, in a ‘shrieking, undistinguished woe’ (20). All the signs, and especially the written signs, that remind her of the loss of her lover are subjected to the ‘pellet[ing]’ (18) dissolution of the ‘flood’ (44) of her tears. The ‘conceited characters’ (16) on the ‘napkin’ she raises to her eyes are ‘launder[ed] in the brine’ (17); ‘the folded schedules’ (43) and ‘letters sadly penn’d’ (47) of which ‘she had many a one’ (43) she ‘bathe[s]’ (50) in weeping. All the maid’s activities psychically monumentalize, oceanically reify, a memory—a memory of a young man, the lass recollects, ‘on whose visage was in little drawn/What Largeness thinks in Paradise was sawn’ (9091), a man who embodied the Edenic oneness of pastoral otium, an unimaginably beautiful lad so primally alluring that he ‘sexes both enchanted’ (128). A young man who, the lass recalls, finally ‘emptied,’ before disappearing, all the fountains that his other lovers had deposited in his ‘well’ and ‘pour[ed]’ them her ‘ocean all among’ (255-56). By the end of the poem, the young woman does seem to be able to approximate this lost ‘oceanic feeling’ of unity that the young man gave to and took from her when her memory tells her how best to re-present it: through the linking figure of separation, the ‘similes […] hollowed with sighs’ (228) that the youth had purportedly given her prior to her deflowering. Once she reaches this realization, she no longer seems to need the apotropaic power of the reverend Father’s (psychoanalytic) listening. She appears to confidently proclaim her own libidinally charged rhetorical question as a sort of triumphant conclusion to the complaint: ‘Who, young and simple, would not be so lover’d? / Ay me, I fell, and yet do question make/ What I should do again for such a sake’ (320-22).

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Certainly, being attentive to the interrelation of eroticism and rhetoric can help us recognize the transferential dynamics between maid and reverend Father that make of this narrative poem a proto-psychoanalytic allegory about the melancholic and mournful polarities of loving. It also iterates the important point that the forms of the psychic structures that make us love, hate, and desire and the linguistic and rhetorical forms that make speech-acts material and transformative constantly transcode one another.2 A few important questions remain unanswered by such a reading, however. It has not, for instance, been able to tell us whether it makes a difference to say that the young woman’s encounter with her young man was or ‘ontologically verifiable,’ nor has it investigated the relationship between desire and phantasy and the temporality of narrative. But this is as it should be. Why shouldn’t each critical echoing of this echoing3 narrative poem (or of this echoing poem about narrative) itself go reverberating, echoing inside and outside the text into yet another calling, into yet another duplicitous rewording? The ‘future’ of/in this poem is, after all, open, intimately tied up with analytic conjecture. What does it mean to be ‘real,’ especially where the relationship between phantasy and recollection is concerned? That is the question with which we began our response to Shakespeare’s text, the question that confronts the poem’s narrator as he lies down to listen to the maid’s ‘sad-tuned tale.’ This is a tricky question, for if answered in a manner that places too much weight on the side of phantasy, it can reduce all traumatic recollection to the level of ‘regressive distortion,’ retrospective (mis)interpretation that attributes present knowledge, experience, and affect to the subject of a past event. Mainstream psychoanalytic thought has long resisted this approach to understanding the real of trauma. Freud himself was vehemently opposed to the idea that all childhood memories were adult fictions projected backwards in time. And yet he could not deny that much distortion did take place in recollection, and that frequently such distortion assumed the (non)form of gaps, lacunae, forgettings. This problem became particularly important for Freud in the ‘Wolf Man’ case history, when the eminent psychoanalyst tried to determine whether the explanation for the Wolf Man’s obsessional neurosis was to be found in an actual seduction scene (when the Wolf Man, at the age of three, had been prematurely initiated into sexual practices by his elder sister), or whether a dream (the dream of the wolves) that the young man had years later had, as a screen-memory for what Freud called a ‘primal scene,’ far greater psychologically explanatory power. In the case history, Freud immediately recognizes the difficulty of his situation. He freely admits of the Wolf Man that ‘his seduction by his sister was certainly not a phantasy’ (Three 203), and that there was, consequently, a kernel of recollected trauma that could be verified by factors in the subject’s history external to memory. Once he has established this fact, however, Freud is able to put it to little (if any) analytic purpose. For the Wolf Man’s obsessional neurosis is not the mere passive, inverted identification with castration that the analyst would have expected such a seduction scene to produce. The Wolf Man’s sexual disposition is infinitely more complicated. What Freud discovers, to his temporary consternation, is that in the Wolf Man’s character, libidinal registers—the oral, the aural, the scopic, the anal, the genital—typically thought of as successively preeminent in the sexual life of the subject are simultaneous, and that their confusing simultaneity cannot be easily related to or linked with the prior, single event of the Wolf Man’s seduction by his

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sister in any cause-and-effect manner (209). Something in the Wolf Man’s history has revealed the origin or cause given by recollection to be explanatorily inadequate, and this gap has opened up the ‘incessant vacillation,’ the ‘timelessness’ of the unconscious that Lacan calls a ‘pulsative function […] constituted essentially […] by that which is refused’ (Four 43). And what is ‘refused,’ primordially repressed, made into the ‘representation of the lack of [causal] representation’ in the Wolf Man’s case history? That is precisely what Freud must set out to discover once he has realized, as Lacan would have it, that seduction considered as absolute, explanatory fact can only ever reveal that ‘between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong,’ and that in the split ‘characteristic of cause … Something of the order of the non-realized’ but nevertheless structuring is to be found (22). So Freud provisionally gives up his dependence on the products of recollection for analysis, and casts about for replacement tools to use in his archaeology of the psyche. And the answer he comes up with is construction. When speaking of the task of the analyst in a case such as that of the Wolf Man, Freud asks: What then, is his task? His task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it. […] His work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. (‘Constructions’ 275)

It is, therefore, the task of the psychoanalyst to look at the remaining evidence around the limits of the gap of the primally repressed, and to interpolate or hypothesize a psychic structure or event that could be the forgotten. In the Wolf Man’s case, the remaining traces of the event seemed to be the simultaneity of drives that should have been mutually subordinated and/or successive: ‘it was not only a single sexual current that started from the primal scene but a whole series of them […] his sexual life was splintered by it’ (Three 229). To explain this ‘splintering,’ the ‘incessant vacillation’ that enabled the Wolf Man to assume a bewildering multitude of sexual dispositions, Freud hypothesizes that at some very young age, probably at the infant stage, the child had witnessed a scene— the scene of his parents having intercourse a tergo. Freud further proposes that the child had not properly understood the spectacle of this primal scene at the time but that he had significantly (mis)interpreted it, and that this (mis)interpretation— though overlaid with screen memories and dream-distortions as the years progressed—had nevertheless survived at the unconscious level and had continued to exert a powerful influence upon psychic development. It mattered little, Freud insists, that the Wolf Man himself was never able during his analysis to remember this primal scene. What did matter was that this (re)construction gave the Wolf Man access to meaning. It enabled him to understand that his discontent was the semiotic product of something (we don’t know what exactly, as the primal scene is only ever an approximation) that must have happened but that had been assigned an inappropriate psychic value or signification, a signification or ‘factitious fact’ that could be refictionalized, rewritten in some less unsatisfactory manner. Analytic constructions such as the primal scene, Freud concludes, are ‘absolutely equivalent’

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(239) in therapeutic value to recollection. They are like dreams, ‘another kind of remembering,’ in which ‘patients gradually acquire a profound conviction’ (239) that enables them to change their lives for the better. This, then, is the Real with which psychoanalysis is concerned, the Real as (in Ned Lukacher’s apt phrasing) ‘non-originary temporal difference’ occupying the position of an ‘originary function,’ a function whose status as indeterminate ‘(non)event … precipitates the temporal ordering of subsequent events’ (Primal 38). A Real that, as cause or origin, is fundamental, revealed concealment or forgetting, a real whose temporality ‘demands that the origin be sought not in the past … but in the future, in the projective repetition … elaborated through the transference’ (42). Is this also the real with which Shakespeare’s complaint is concerned? Can we discern in the lamentations of Shakespeare’s pale, fickle maid any traces of the analeptically lived, fictionalized past that would make of her ‘seduction’ a primal scene? Does our fickle maid, like the Wolf Man, have any of the ‘conviction’ produced by (re)construction that Freud believed to be therapeutically useful? We said earlier that inappropriately assigned semiotic values were often indications (or traces) of a determinant, (mis)interpreted event that ‘must have been’ in the pre-history of the desiring subject. Certainly, the maiden of A Lover’s Complaint, who speaks from the space of the proximate (the ‘sist’ring vale’) characteristic of the primal scene, bestows value in all the wrong places. After the poem provides a blazon of the ‘loose negligence’ of her appearance (which possibly connotes the oceanic fusion the young woman has recently lost), the maid takes a series of hard, precious stones—the ‘concrete’ signs of her lost absolute love or copulation—and carelessly disposes of them: A thousand favours from a maund she drew Of amber, crystal, and of beaded jet, Which one by one she in a river threw Upon whose weeping margent she was set; Like usury, applying wet to wet, Or monarch’s hands that let not bounty fall Where want cries some, but where excess begs all. (36-42)

It is immediately apparent from this passage that our maiden ascribes far more import to desire—the source of phantasies concerning the beyond of the immediate—than to something as basic as need. She gives ‘where excess begs all’ rather than ‘where want cries some;’ she is a woman given to surplus, to ‘bountiful’ distribution, ‘applying wet to wet,’ producing, like usury, something from nothing so that it may be given back to more production ex nihilo, endlessly. In fact, our maiden’s addiction to excess makes her so talented at bestowing inappropriate semiotic values that the symbolic nature of the scenario she here stages by the river nearly makes this stanza’s poetry nonsensical. What could be more dissimilar than the hardness of precious gems and the fluidity of a river? And yet through the lens of the young woman’s eyes, the meeting of these precious gems with the water is a meeting of ‘wet to wet.’ This symbolic nonsense or paradox is another hint that our fickle maid has been suffering from the Real effects of a fictionalized trauma, for as we proceed further into the poem and consequently further into the prelude of

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seduction, the source of the precious stones is revealed to us, as is their original signification. Not surprisingly, the stones did most emphatically not originally signify fusional love or ‘oceanic’ bonding. They were the ‘tributes wounded fancies’ (197) had sent the beautiful youth, gifts from all his other lovers ‘Figuring … their passions’ (199), tributes in which, incidentally, he did not place much stock. ‘I hoard them not,’ the young man proclaims as his words are remembered by the maid, ‘But yield them up where I myself must render’ (220-21). Furthermore, the love lesson the young man teaches the maiden after giving her the stones seems to have been totally forgotten or repressed by the young woman, for she throws the stones into the river and laments the loss of ‘a plenitude of subtle matter’ (302) she supposedly experienced with the youth. Paradoxically, when the lass recounts the youth’s philosophy of love, it seems to have had precious little to do with romantic illusions of plenitude. On the contrary, according to him, love is about a giving of the negative; it is about recognizing the nothing at the center of the self that opens the self up to possibility, to the Other. To make this point, the youth tells the maiden the story of a nun he once ‘knew,’ a ‘sister sanctified’ (233) who ‘not to be tempted, would … be immured’ (251), but who accidentally caught sight of the young man one day, and subsequently allowed ‘Religious love’ to ‘put out religion’s eye’ (250) and lead her to sexual liberty, and, he implies, enjoyment. In order to be a subject of jouissance and ‘tempt all,’ one must be like this nun/none. One must recognize the inevitably forgotten and concealed emptiness at the heart of the desire that defines us; stop imagining it as a single, sublime object or connection; and search for the corresponding gap of that emptiness in the Other, in a whole series of others that can never be complete, that is always (in Lacanian parlance) ‘not-all.’ Such seems to be the philosophy of love implied by the young man’s nun-sensical exemplum, a philosophy very much compatible with the Lacanian notion that the mirage of plenitude or oneness produced by the sexual (non)relation is not a memory of some oceanic prelude to consciousness, but, rather, a misprision of the unconscious, which does not grant temporal priority to the ‘one’ and actually makes the ‘one’ emerge as the absence ‘of the split, of the stroke, of rupture’ (Four 26). Despite this ‘love lesson’ that his words convey, the young man, for the purposes of seduction, encourages in the maid the very phantasy of love-asplenitude he has been decrying. He sheds tears, whose liquidity acts upon the maid, as James Schiffer has said, as ‘the visual confirmation’ of her own imagined ‘feminine melting’ into the young man’s ‘oneness with her.’4 Might this suggest, then, that the ‘weeping margent’ (39) that separates the young woman from the river represents something other than the past trauma that has separated her from an oceanic, loving oneness that could possibly be recovered? Might the margent represent, rather, the internal limit of desire, the bar that designates the subject’s own lack-in-being, the lack eternally misrecognized in the imagined, sublime totality of the object? The lack that Shakespeare’s complainant narcissistically refuses to see reflected back to her in the eyes of her lover? In truth, or in the ‘truth’ of the non-linear, phantasmatic temporality of this poem, the bond between young man and lass was precisely what he said it was: a ‘most potential love’ (264), a vacuum that, like the ‘unborn’ identified with the unconscious, necessitated that ‘repression should discharge something into [it]’ in

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what Lacan somewhat grotesquely characterizes as a sort of inverse abortion procedure (Four 23). And what the lass’s repression has discharged into that vacuum is the standard, illusionary trope of maternal fullness, of intrauterine, oceanic satiety recoverable in the absolute bond of romantic love. But does the fickle maid’s seduction—when considered as primal scene or factitious fact—make it inconceivable that she has gone through the redemptive progression from melancholy to mourning that some have seen in the poem? When the maid exclaims that her loss has produced a ‘cleft effect’ (293), is she symbolically appropriating that ‘cleft effect’ of subjectivity as the grounds of possibility for her renewal in desire, or is she, rather, nostalgically, melancholically crying out against a separation that she still believes once did not exist? Has our young woman’s primal scene had the therapeutic effect that Freud assures us analytic constructions can have? These questions can, of course, only be answered analytically, for in responding to them, we shall have to interrogate the role that readerly desire, countertransferential energies, and critical investment play in the construction of A Lover’s Complaint either as psychoanalytic cure or as psychoanalytic conundrum. No doubt much evidence supports the observation that within the complaint, a therapeutic progression from incorporation to introjection seems to occur. The oceanic, maternal of plenitude (re)constructed by the lass is, after all, concave, hollow. And the sobbing, self-pitying tone of the lass initially seen by the ‘weeping margent’ is certainly not to be found in the voice that speaks in the final two lines of the poem, when the young woman expresses her wish that another charming lad ‘Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d/And new pervert a reconciled maid!’ (328-29). Other factors hint, however, at a persistence of the melancholic and incorporative in the poem, and if viewed from the perspective of the non-linear, unconscious time that structures the complaint, these factors could be seen to cancel out or severely problematize the introjective cure arrived at in the maiden’s confession to the reverend father. When discussing how the psychoanalyst can ‘locate the truth’ of the unconscious, Lacan says that s/he should practice a ‘signifying scansion’ and punctuation, which will have ‘a reference to the real … that supports the phantasy … that protects the real’ (Four 41). If we were to practice such a signifying scansion and search for the structuring phantasy that protects and reveals the fundamental concealment of the psychic Real of A Lover’s Complaint, where would we begin? The answer is perhaps all too obvious. Critics have remained curiously silent about one of the most salient features of the poem: 103 of its 329 lines (lines 177280, stanzas 26-38) are reported speech (the lass reciting the young man’s seductive speech) relayed to us by reported speech (the anonymous narrator telling us what he heard the lass tell the reverend man). Nearly a third of the poem, in other words— much of which is located toward the structural center of the piece—performs a sort of diacritical incorporation; its nesting of voices within voices has the effect produced by double sets of quotation marks.5 It encloses the lost young man’s speech in the mouth and words of our speaking maiden. Though the disturbing, echoing duplicity of the faceless Voice heard in the first few lines of the complaint momentarily goes silent when we see its would-be ontological ground (the unary, assumedly originary body of the lass), its unsettling, haunting doubleness is surprisingly, diacritically reintroduced by the lass herself, almost as soon as she

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begins to recount her tale. Her voice is, from the outset, the voice of the dead, of the living dead; she is, as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 31, ‘the grave where buried love doth live.’ And as her lamentation proceeds, more and more of her intersubjective context, more and more of the Others who attempt to share her language, get swallowed up, disappear into her uninterruptable, impervious speech, which, significantly, finally assumes the form of apostrophe, of prosopopoeia, the figure that the sixteenth-century rhetorician John Hoskins said ‘made dead men speak’ (48). By the time our maiden concludes her cry, the ‘reverend Father’ with his ‘grainèd bat’—who never was allowed to speak in more than indirect discourse in any event—has fallen completely silent, and the safe space on the hill from which we and our unidentifiable, initially narrating ‘I’ were allowed to watch the maiden no longer seems to exist. It seems to have fallen into the abyss of the repeated open ‘O’s’ of her final, incantatory, anaphoric apostrophe: O, that infected moisture of his eye, O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed, O, that forc’d thunder from his heart did fly, O, that sad breath his spungy lungs bestowed, O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed, Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, And new pervert a reconciled maid! (323-28)

After these lines, after this iteration of the zero, of the nothing that already seems to be speaking, there is, as Kerrigan has noted, no further framing of the fickle maid’s words, no more ‘outside’ of her quotation marks. Shakespeare’s complaint does not observe the convention of allowing the poet/listener to make a final didactic comment on its complainant’s words. ‘Judgment’ about the maiden, therefore, ‘is bound to be complex’ (59). We seem to have reached a point of absolute (and paradoxically split) singularity, a psychic ‘black hole,’ or, in psychoanalytic terms, total anti-cathexis. Freud describes this scenario in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), where he observes that, ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound drawing to itself cathectic energy from all sides … and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted’ (General 174). In melancholia, Freud reminds us, the shadow of a loved and lost object has fallen ‘upon the ego’ and split it. This cleavage within the ego mirrors (in miniature) the split between ego and unconscious (170). Could this be the ‘cleft effect’ riving our fickle maid in the 42nd stanza of the complaint? If so, this presents us with a serious critical and theoretical problem, for it suggests that some forms of psychic melancholy may ‘swallow up’ the theoretical pathway that is supposed to lead out of melancholy in the complaint: introjection. It would be one thing if this phenomenon were a peculiar characteristic of this single, anomalous complaint. As usual, however, a psychological dynamic represented in all its complexity in one of Shakespeare’s texts anticipates a problem that will haunt psychoanalysis four hundred years later. It is generally assumed that Abraham and Torok’s influential essay ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’ retrospectively nuances or ‘corrects’ the argument of Freud’s original essay on mourning and melancholy. Significantly,

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in Freud’s essay, half the subject matter identified in his title is nearly missing from his actual discussion. Although his piece purports to be a discussion of both mourning and melancholy, he actually has very little to say about mourning, other than that ‘It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological’ (General 165). Mourning, he suggests, is a reaction to loss in which the mourner gradually learns to substitute other objects for the lost object, and this differentiates mourning from melancholy, in which the shadow of the lost object is internalized, made a separate part of the subject’s own ego. Perhaps sensing that in the structure of Freud’s essay one of two terms that it was therapeutically crucial to differentiate had been turned into the incorporated ‘shadow’ of the other, Abraham and Torok proclaim that for the sake of clarity, psychoanalysis should specify that ‘incorporation denotes a fantasy, introjection a process’ (125). They then explain that in mourning, the mourner learns not so much to substitute other objects for the lost object as s/he learns to internalize (or introject) successive symbolic representations of loss, representations that will bind the energy freed by the demise or disappearance of the once exquisite but now absent object. The melancholiac, on the other hand, merely—and often in a single, not necessarily repeated gesture—‘thingifies’ the libidinal energy freed by the disappearance of the lost object, turns it into a phantasmatic living corpse ‘encrypted’ in the subject’s psyche. One objection that can immediately be raised to Abraham and Torok’s attempt to save mourning from disappearing into melancholy is that the initial distinction that they announce and depend upon is itself false. As Freud’s exploration of the (non)event of the primal scene demonstrates, phantasy is frequently a process, a sustained dialectical interplay of analepsis and prolepsis. Furthermore, phantasy is very much concerned with ‘internalizing representations of loss.’ What is the shadow that has fallen across the melancholic ego if not the empty sign of the absence of the exquisite, beloved, lost object? Even the language that Abraham and Torok use to discuss melancholic incorporation suggests this connection between mourning and melancholy. Yes, the melancholic psyche en-crypts the lost object, epitaphically writes and re-writes loss in an incessant monumentalization. But in what way is this encrypting to be distinguished from the ‘empty signs of loss’ introjected by the mourner? Even if one were to argue that mournful introjection is linguistic, whereas melancholic encrypting is located in the register of the image, would that not still lead us to the confusing conclusion that mournful introjection is a ‘fetishism of the word’? A conclusion that would lead us right back to ‘thingification’ and shadowing, as the fetishist makes lack an object, and the word has always been thought of as the ghostly remainder of the Voice and presence? What the psychoanalytic history of the concepts of mourning and melancholy leads to, then, is an impasse, or a question: a real difference experienced in the therapeutic process repeatedly leads analysis to identify, hypostatise that difference in theoretical definitions whose opposition to one another cannot be sustained. This impasse or aporia opened up in theory by the necessary constructions of analysis gestures, like Shakespeare’s Lover’s Complaint, in the direction of the analytically unthought or unimagined. It invites us to conceptualize two melancholias, which, when considered together, are perhaps an omnipresent component of human psychic

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life in general: the familiar melancholy of simple incorporation, and the mysterious, infinitely more complicated and pervasive melancholy that incorporates mourning or introjection and turns it into the perverse form of masochistic jouissance. In the final stanza of A Lover’s Complaint, this second melancholy, rather than bringing about an absolute anti-cathexis, actually emphasizes something like orgasm or ecstasy. The stanza’s rhythmic yet frenzied repetition and graphic iteration of concentricity are highly erotically charged. The five consecutive ‘O’s of this stanza have a yonic function; the concentricity or orificiality they connote has long been recognized as a definitive component of the ‘feminine’ aspect of human sexuality.6 In this sense, our purportedly ‘reconciled’ maid is not ‘cured’ by penitence and/or mourning. She is still just as ‘fickle’ as she was initially described as being by the poem’s anonymous narrator. By passively opening herself up again and again as the phantasy object of the Other’s jouissance, she eternally holds onto the lost object by investing it with her own subjectivity; she guarantees the ‘presence’ of the beloved Other by acting as the guarantee of (his) jouissance. In so doing, she obtains what Lacan would call a ‘supplementary jouissance’ of her own, a painful pleasure ‘proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it’ (Feminine 145). Is this melancholic pleasure proclaimed by the maiden so triumphantly in the poem’s final stanza a psychoanalytically positive outcome? Does it tell us something essential about the nature of feminine jouissance? Shakespeare’s complaint does not provide answers to these questions of the Real of this painfully pleasurable second melancholy, but it does pose those questions, and it does require that we counter-transferentially respond to them. For as readers, we are transferentially engaged with this poem before we’ve even read through the first stanza. The title of A Lover’s Complaint is unconventional in two important ways. Quite unlike most Renaissance complaints that name the principal complainant, the maiden of this poem seems to be merely a ‘type’ for Woman in general. And who is the ‘lover’ mentioned in the title? According to Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘The title will initially be read as denoting a complaint by a lover … But by the time the poem is read to the end, the title can be glossed … as a complaint concerning a lover’ (431). The title’s referential ambiguity reflects the ambiguity presented to us within the complaint by the many layers of reported speech. A typical Renaissance complaint—because of the influence of Petrarchism and the courtly love tradition—would call the inconstant male seducer the ‘lover,’ and the female complainant would typically be called the abandoned and/or ruined ‘beloved.’ Yet here the role of lover clearly belongs to the maiden, and the role of beloved is unoccupied. It is a space waiting to be filled, the empty space of the Other that the maid’s perverse form of jouissance strives incessantly to make material once again. By the time the reverend father, our safe hill and our distant, originally narrating ‘I’ have dematerialized and we are being prosopopoeically confronted by the fickle maid’s incorporating speech in the final stanza, we cannot but realize that we have been in error throughout our reading of this poem. As poetic voyeurs, we initially assume that the lass is the object of our gaze. But this object is Real, looks back at our seeing, and in so doing divests us of the comfortable polarities of subjectivity and objectivity. It symbolically encrypts us, turns us into the internalized representation of a remembered loving fullness that never was, that was always

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already lost. It makes us aware that what we took to be our gaze was merely a look under the scrutiny of One who has psycho-rhetorically anticipated us, and who is waiting to hear us as an echo, waiting for us to obligingly consent to be ventriloquized. We cannot but, in other words, participate in the perverse phantasy of the complaint, cannot but assume the Voice, the face, the gaze of the dead that the lass’s prosopopoeic demand makes exigent. Each reader, in other words, ultimately is placed in the position of the beloved, lost Other being rematerialized by the maiden’s perverse phantasy; each of us becomes, as Jon Harned argues, ‘the external voice of the barred Other … beyond the illusion of meaning … the internal voice of the subject, haunting her … from within.’7 Failing to be aware of this transferential and counter-transferential dimension of the lament is to ignore the poem’s central, diacritical insistence that not even symbolic substitution offers a way out of a melancholy that allows one to undergo jouissance, to experience ‘suffering ecstasy.’ When, that is, we fail to recognize our own implication in the text as subject and object of desire, we place our faith in the promise of mourning, the very promise that the complaint has revealed to be empty. Our critical response to this call is always, thus, both necessary and impossible, for we are, as Paul de Man has argued of all addressees of prosopopoeia, necessarily critically ‘de-faced’ or ‘dis-figured’ (930) by the end of A Lover’s Complaint. We have become a part of the poem’s perverse structuring phantasy. As we have seen, the forms that this counter-transferential disfigurement can take are various, but they all involve some positioning with respect to the ethics of forgetting. When speaking of lyric, Giorgio Agamben has said: The poet recalls in the song what in the song he would like only to forget; or—and this is bliss—in the song he forgets what he wanted in the song to remember. This is why the lyric … is necessarily empty; it is always transfixed on the verge of a day that has always already set: it doesn’t have, literally, anything to say or recount. But thanks to this sober, exhausted dwelling of the poetic word in the beginning, something like a lived experience … comes to being for the first time. (52-53)

Shakespeare’s Lover’s Complaint, which paradoxically strives toward the approximate singularity and concision of lyric, compels with its anonymity and its transferential erotics the poetic word and the de-faced critic to ‘exhaustively dwell’ on a beginning (seduction) that has been primordially, irretrievably forgotten. And that dwelling necessitates an ethical choice. We can either agree to forget the concealment of the beginning and valorize a therapeutic process whose illusionary, Imaginary faith does sometimes reduce the discontent that plagues the lives of so many people; or, we can, like Shakespeare’s unconventional maid, remember the fundamental concealment that is the pleasure of the melancholic Real, and approach a largely unexplored region of the psyche that could very well be an end-point to theory.

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Notes 1 In ‘Rhetoric and Perverse Desire in A Lover’s Complaint’ (included in the present volume), Jon Harned offers an alternative psychoanalytic reading that considers the young man, rather than the reverend father, as ‘performing a perverse function akin to that of the analyst,’ a function that enables the analysand/maiden to ‘perceive the lack at the heart of the signifier’ and experience the emergence of ‘desire in the real.’ 2 Heather Dubrow’s contribution to this volume, ‘The Tip of His Seducing Tongue: Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover’s Complaint, and Othello, ‘is a good example of criticism attentive to such transcoding, although her essay tends to focus more on the transcoding of language and power than on the relation between language and eroticism. 3 For an account of A Lover’s Complaint as a series of echoes from other Shakespearean texts, see John Roe’s ‘Unfinished Business: A Lover’s Complaint and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Lucrece,’ included in this volume. 4 See Schiffer’s ‘Honey Words: A Lover’s Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction,’ included in this volume. 5 Modernized editions of the poem use double quotation marks to indicate this nesting. There were no such quotation marks in the 1609 quarto in which the sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint first appeared. Ultimately, however, it makes little difference whether or not the punctuation marks are graphically indicated in the text, for the effect of the poem’s rhetorical nesting of voices within voices is the same. As Jonathan Crewe has argued, the historical difference between early modern ‘rhetorical’ or ‘voiced-text’ punctuation and modern logico-grammatical punctuation is not as ‘polarized’ as many think. See Crewe’s ‘Punctuating Shakespeare,’ Shakespeare Studies, Jan. 2000, Vol. 28, p. 30. 6 Ernest Jones’s ‘Early Development of Female Sexuality’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 8 part 4 (October 1927) first proposed the ‘concentric’ theory of female sexuality. For a full account of the debates within psychoanalysis caused by the concentricity theory, see The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity (New Library of Psychoanalysis, no. 18). New York: Routledge, 1993, ed. Elizabeth Bott Spillius. 7 See Harned’s essay in this volume.

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylo randfra n cis.com

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‘True to Bondage’: The Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover’s Complaint Shirley Sharon-Zisser

Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint is a poetic theorization of the psychic condition which psychoanalysis came to call female masochism. Masochistic satisfaction may be semantically articulated, as in the reference to the ‘suffering ecstasy’ of the woman in the poem (line 70) or even to a feature of her appearance being ‘true to bondage’ (line 34). But psychoanalysis teaches that the truth of the subject cannot ever be sought on the level of conscious content. Beyond the poem’s pointing to ecstatic satisfaction in suffering as a crucial component of the psychic make-up of its female protagonist, A Lover’s Complaint deploys linguistic forms functioning as female masochism’s real, opaque core. Attending to these forms in the poem could enrich psychoanalytic theory’s understanding of the formal underpinnings of female masochism. Contemporary scholarship on the poem recurrently notes the dejected state of its female protagonist.1 Critics seem to agree that the woman in the poem has undergone a ‘trauma’ (Craik 441, Stegner this volume). Yet they remain divided on the nature of her response to this trauma. Jon Harned diagnoses the maiden as ‘angst-ridden’ (this volume). Ilona Bell sees her as ‘hysterically bemoaning her fate’ at the same time as she characterizes the complaint as ‘melancholy’ (this volume). Like Bell, Paul Stegner regards the maiden as ‘locked within melancholic repetition’ (this volume). In his analysis of the maiden as an Ophelia figure, John Roe too regards the woman as melancholic. The possibility of ‘suicide by drowning (ever the melancholiac’s resort [Freud ‘Mourning and Melancholy’ 252]),’ he writes, ‘is by no means remote’ in the beginning of the poem (Roe ‘Unfinished Business,’ this volume). Katherine Craik’s description of the woman’s confession as a ‘troubling statement of self-loathing’ (441) also assumes she suffers from the devaluation which Freud teaches accompanies melancholia (‘Mourning and Melancholy’ 251). To be sure, the poem’s language offers ample reasons for speaking of the woman’s angst and hysteria, as well as of her melancholy. After all, the maiden’s ‘Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain / Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain’ (lines 6-7) does suggest aggression towards the lost love-object which has been ‘turned round upon the subject’s own self’ that Freud identifies as a hallmark of melancholy (‘Mourning and Melancholy’ 251). I wish to argue, however, that the narrator’s characterization of the woman’s speech as ‘suffering ecstasy’ invites us to consider neither hysteria nor anxiety neurosis nor melancholy as the psychological 179

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dominant of her condition. Even at the poem’s beginning, the maiden does not merely evince a ‘satisfaction from … suffering’ (‘Mourning and Melancholy’ 251). The relish with which she gives herself to this suffering bespeaks a libidinal cathexis absent from melancholy, a condition in which libido is thoroughly depleted through the psychic wound occasioned by object loss. ‘The complex of melancholia,’ Freud writes, ‘behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies … from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’ (253). If the maiden’s suffering is ecstatic, as the narrator indicates, her psychic wound seems to function not as a hole though which libido escapes, but as a site in which libido is caught up. Hers is a suffering ecstasy, suffering which has an erotic component to it. This is emphasized by the poem’s last stanza, with what John Kerrigan calls its ‘overtones of orgasmic excess’ (Motives of Woe 51), in which the maiden speaks with ‘operatic vehemence’ her desire for the scenario that had caused her suffering to be reenacted (46). Given this erotic component of her suffering, the maiden’s condition is one wherein, in Freud’s words, ‘the subject’s destruction of himself [involves] libidinal satisfaction,’ the condition of masochism (‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ 170). In his essay in this volume, Stephen Whitworth focuses on the maiden’s masochism, a ‘form of jouissance intimately related to feminine sexuality.’ Drawing on the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Whitworth regards this masochism as a ‘form of melancholy’ which ‘incorporates mourning or introjection and turns it into … jouissance.’(19). Yet as Whitworth also notes, masochism is a ‘perverse form of jouissance’ (my emphasis). Masochism, that is, is not a neurotic structure like hysteria nor a psychotic state such as melancholia, but a perverse structure in which the subject, as Lacan puts it, locates himself as object of the drive, as means of the jouissance of the Other (e.g. Seminar 11 185). Four hundred years before Freud, the maiden’s articulation of her desire for the youth to ‘new pervert’ her (line 328) locates her as a perverse rather than melancholic subject. This articulation and the reference to the maiden’s suffering ecstasy identify the manifest content of this poem as a phantasm of female masochism. But beyond the manifest content of the complaint’s masochistic phantasm, what are the specifics of the psychic structure of masochistic perversion in a woman, and what is the relation of these specifics to language? In The Chains of Eros, Andre Green observes that although Freud’s discovery of the fundamentally polymorphic forms of infantile sexuality elevated perversion ‘to the rank of a paradigm … the positive form of which neurosis is the negative’ (8), ‘masochism has remained an obscure, unresolved problem’ (48). Masochism remains ‘extremely mysterious,’ Green says, especially as concerns its economy of jouissance, the mingling of pain and pleasure in the beyond of the pleasure principle (50). Yet in A Lover’s Complaint, such a detailed structural analysis of female masochism’s mechanisms had already been attempted, in poetic form, long before masochism came to be known by its current name. In what follows, I outline A Lover’s Complaint’s meticulous poeticization of the rhetorical and psychological coordinates of the perversion of ‘suffering ecstasy,’ or masochism. To this end, following the work of psychoanalyst Michele Montrelay, I examine the way in which the text of A Lover’s Complaint manifests the structure of an orifice carved out within language by a masochistic drive. From this orifice, the

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poem’s ecstatic last lines (321-28) leap as an elemental signifier, a fragment of the archaic reaches of the psyche. I demonstrate how A Lover’s Complaint is not only a textual orifice from which an elemental signifier leaps at a significant moment of a masochistic subject’s psychic trajectory. A Lover’s Complaint is also a textual orifice within which particular linguistic forms, the poem’s rhetorical and prosodic dominants, resonate as kernels of a woman’s masochistic jouissance. As kernels of jouissance, the poem’s rhetorical and prosodic forms do not enhance the manifest, conscious meaning its semantemes unfold. Instead, they are points from which the poem’s sense leaks out. Jacques Lacan points to the function of such points of opacity in representation. Where phantasy’s relation to the real is concerned, Lacan says, representational ‘opacity appears to us to be an indefinite jouissance’ (Seminar 13, lesson of 8 June 1966). Following Lacan, I regard the dominant rhetorical and prosodic forms resonating in A Lover’s Complaint as those points in the masochistic phantasm (or screen) where meaning collapses but jouissance is specified as real, for the poem’s readers no less than for the female protagonist. In paying close attention to the poem’s linguistic form, I follow such earlier commentators on the poem as Mackail, who noted the recurrence in A Lover’s Complaint of ellipsis of subject, ellipsis of verb, and asyndeton (30-31), and Macdonald Jackson, whose analysis of the poem’s style and diction included a mapping of its manifold deployment of ‘compound adjectives and participles used adjectivally by adding -ed to them, words beginning with un-, [and] agent nouns’ (14-16). John Kerrigan also scrutinizes the poem’s stylistics when he positions the text within the tradition of female complaint, whose primary stylistic features, he notes, ‘are apostrophe and antistrophe, epimone, ecphonesis—schemes of repetition and outburst—and above all, echo and anaphora’ (Motives of Woe 21). Like Mackail, Jackson, and Kerrigan, participants in this volume, including Roe, Bell, and Dubrow, foreground textual strategies in the poem. Roe, for instance, singles out the ‘stylistic … device of oxymoron’ as a salient linguistic feature of the poem (‘Unfinished Business’). Ilona Bell is also attentive to linguistic form in her exploration of the female complainant’s amatory retrospection (‘That Which Thou Hast Done’ 469). And Heather Dubrow’s essay uses the poem as a means of exploring the performative category of ‘authorizers.’ While my interest in linguistic form continues a tradition of formal commentary begun by Mackail, Jackson, Partridge, Muir, and Kerrigan, my understanding of the nature and function of linguistic form diverges from theirs, as well as from that of other contributors to this volume. For Mackail and Jackson, isolating stylistic dominants is a tactical device used in authorship attribution arguments. For Roe, stylistic analysis establishes connections between the poem and Shakespeare’s dramatic works. In Bell’s analyses, rhetorical analysis establishes the authority of the speaker. Kerrigan and Dubrow regard linguistic form as triggering a particular affective or cognitive response. I, by contrast, regard linguistic form not as the cause of an experiential psychic category, nor as a category that links the poem to its various contexts (the female complaint tradition, early modern poetry and courtship, Shakespeare’s drama). Instead, I view form as the very structural underpinning of psychic categories, a category that is itself empty of meaning and that serves to empty the text’s phantasmatic layer of signification, bringing it close, as Jon Harned argues, to a ‘vanishing point’ (‘Rhetoric and Perverse Desire,’ this volume). Hence,

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unlike Dubrow, I do not use linguistic form as a means to ‘gloss’ ‘issues about subjectivity, gender, and power that currently interest Shakespeareans.’ In what follows, linguistic form is treated as a point in the text where meaning vanishes but where a particular form of jouissance emerges as real, resisting signification. My attitude to linguistic form bears an affinity to essays in this volume which draw upon Lacanian psychoanalysis: those by Jon Harned, James Schiffer, and Stephen Whitworth. Yet unlike Harned and Schiffer, I do not propose a psychoanalytic reading or interpretation of the poem, which would be a piece of ‘psychoanalytic criticism’ (see Harned). Harned and Schiffer employ Lacanian theory to explicate the poem and expand its meanings, Schiffer arguing, for instance, that ‘Lacanian psychoanalytical theory affords a way of explaining why the youth’s strategy of feigned feminization and mirroring succeeds’ (‘Honey Words’), and Harned stating that the maiden’s oscillation between hate and desire can be productively understood in terms of the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis, [according to which] one must learn to desire what one hates and hate what one desires.’ While Harned and Schiffer use psychoanalytic theory as an explanatory tool, I follow Lacan’s ‘Lituraterre’ in maintaining that psychoanalysis’s relation to literature consists in going to literary texts to learn about the ‘enigmas which are [psychoanalysis’s] concern’ and which literary texts poeticize (13). Hence, I agree with Whitworth that ‘psychoanalysis has much to learn from this enigmatic poem.’ But how might psychoanalysis learn from this poem? I wish to suggest that the answer be sought in the way its formal mode of operation deploys the drive. Perhaps the best example of the intersection of language and the drive in A Lover’s Complaint is the poem’s climactic conclusion, an irruption of jouissance in language whose ‘orgasmic’ nature has already been noted. This climactic conclusion, I propose, is an instance of what Michèle Montrelay would call an elemental signifier, a fragment of the archaic, leaping into the phonic-graphic mass constituted by the preceding lines of the poem. In such elemental signifiers, the layer of meaning barely conceals a more primal mode of representation which means nothing in itself but functions as the condition for signification, a mode of representation closest to the real it veils. Such elemental signifiers, Montrelay teaches, leap from the shadowy zones of the real when two sexualized signifying chains (in this case, the woman’s avowed passion for the youth, the youth’s enunciation to the woman) coalesce to form an unsustainable connection. At such intense and untenable instances, Montrelay explains, the Other, a function within the symbolic, is ruptured by the effect of too much sense. An orifice opens up in the Other, enabling a fragment, product of the cataclysmic collision between two sexualized signifying chains, to be cast forth, to leap from the archaic, shadowy zones of the real as a signifier, a constituent of the symbolic (L’ombre et le nom 113-18). . What justifies the reading of the last lines, from the maiden’s admission ‘Ay me! I fell’ (line 320) in the penultimate stanza, through her anaphorically apostrophaic references to recollected qualities of the youth, to her subjunctive enunciation of her desire for him to ‘new pervert’ her (line 328) as an elemental signifier? The lines’ synchronic dominant offers one indication. While the lines do simultaneously orient the poem toward archaic past and desired future impossible, they do not only linearly and diachronically tunnel back and toward these temporalities. While doing so the lines synchronize past utterances into a tightly organized enunciation. The

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anaphoric succession of five orgasmic O’s echoingly synchronizes the five seductive apostrophaic O’s of the youth’s quoted enunciation (lines 225, 239, 246, 253, 264) located in various positions in the diachronic, horizontal progression of the line (thrice as first word, once as second, once as sixth) and alternately stressed and unstressed within the progression of the youth’s enunciation. The last line to begin with an orgasmic O (‘O all that borrowed motion seeming owed’ [line 327]) supplements this O with another series of five o’s. The letters A and W, Will-I-am Shakespeare’s initial and the imprint of his sex and desire (Fineman ‘The Sound of O in Othello’ 46), vertically enfold these five O’s. The result is a symmetrical acrostic—A-W-O-O-O-O-O-W-A—devoid of semantic meaning but phonically suggesting a cry of pain and pleasure indexing a moment of suffering ecstasy. The A’s and W’s flanking the O’s, curves marking out absence as they reorganize past seduction into present sexual climax, function similarly to the letters AZ Lacan points out in his return to Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. Lacan speaks of the letters he sees in the formula appearing in Freud’s dream as the ‘alpha and omega’ of the signifier (Seminar 2 159). In the acrostic formed by the ending lines of A Lover’s Complaint one might similarly speak of the letter of absolute beginning (A), conjoined not with the letter of absolute ending (Z), but with a close antecedent (W) bespeaking the author’s name (Will) as desire. As in the chemical formula appearing in Freud’s dream as analyzed in Lacan’s second seminar, in the acrostic formed by the last lines of A Lover’s Complaint there seems ‘no other word’ for conjoined letters ‘than the very nature of the symbolic’ (Lacan Seminar 2 160). The symbolic appears here in its pure form, a scaffolding of signification excluding the real in order to make signification possible, but signifying nothing in itself. This is not to say that the eight lines whose first letters constitute the acrostic have no lexical meaning. They do, just as does the second part of Freud’s dream of Irma, at whose end the letters of the chemical formula appear. But in the last lines of the poem as at the end of Freud’s dream as analyzed by Lacan, empty egoic speech, the speech of semantic content, shuts down. Meaningful speech, the speech of the ego, gives way to ‘what in the subject is of the subject and not of the subject, that is the unconscious’ (Lacan Seminar 2 159). The first line of this tightly-structured ending affirms the ego twice grammatically (I me) and thrice phonically (Aye me I) only to make way for the revelation of its fall (Aye me I fell). The I’s reappearance in the next line is followed by an interval between the two last stanzas. After this interval, the I does not speak again in the poem. The poem’s last segment is not the only instance wherein the I appears only to disappear. In the poem’s first stanza too, the speaker says ‘I’ only in order to affirm his having ‘la[in] down’ (line 4). In the poem’s framing enunciations, the I as marker of the ego appears only to vanish, giving way to the apotropaic, unconscious writing of the archaic. The pronominal frame of A Lover’s Complaint, wherein I’s orificialize into O’s, has the effect of an enallage (the use of one grammatical category for another) which renders all of the I’s of a poem punctuated by alternating I’s and O’s always already ruptured. Only in the last segment, however, is the rupturing of the empty speech of the ego and semantic content accompanied by the casting forth of a signifier as pure combinatory of letters without sense, a signifier excluding the real yet carrying something of the real in its articulation of jouissance. And it is only in the poem’s last segment that the I not only becomes ‘orificial’ but

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also disappears into an empty space on the page, material substrate of representation, or in Freudian terms, representative of representation (Vorstellungsräpresentanz). Who or what speaks in the closing lines of the poem after the I has been absorbed into a blank space, a representative of representation? No quotation marks will tell us for sure, nor will any deictic markers. In his analysis of Freud’s dream of Irma, Lacan suggests that what is heard once the ego falls away is ‘another’—one might better say Other—‘voice’ (Seminar 2 159). What speaks once all egoic scaffoldings collapse and voice returns to Bejahung, primal imprinting, is the ‘it’ (ça). ‘It’ is what speaks, then, in the last lines of A Lover’s Complaint as part of an elemental signifier, cast forth as at once (symbolic) enunciation and (real) thing. An elemental signifier is cast forth, Montrelay says, when the drive creates an orifice in the Other. The poem’s phantasm, unfolded in its imaginary register of semantic content, specifies the drive at work in it as masochistic. In addition to the pressure of the masochistic drive unfolded in the poem’s imaginary register, what formal conditions in the poem allow this leap to be staged? So long as the poem is read simply as a line progressing from exposition to climax and closure, this question will remain unanswerable. The poem’s narrativity does signal diachrony, from reconstructed past seduction to a poetic present consisting of desolation to a desiring gesture toward the future. And yet the text’s macrostructure cannot be univocally identified as resting on diachronic progression. As Patrick Cheney notes, the ending of A Lover’s Complaint is ‘the most baffling dénouement in the canon’ because ‘Shakespeare does not complete the narrative with which he began … We expect some narrative resolution, but we do not receive it’ (see Cheney, this volume). Other readings of the poem have noted how in addition to compromising narrative linearity, the poem makes such linearity recursive. Bell, for instance, points out how ‘instead of ending … the fickle maid’s confession doubles back on itself’ (‘Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint’). Roe notices how the maiden’s ‘despairing self-reflection at the end of the poem as we have it seems to bring her sad reminiscences full circle’ (‘Unfinished Business’). This circularity noted is intensified by the woman’s retrospection, accentuated by the predominance of the past tense in her account of her seduction, which creates what Colin Burrow has aptly termed ‘temporal looping’ (143). At the same time, this circularity is intensified by the text’s compromising of its narrativity and diachrony by its very performance as verse, a form of writing fundamentally structured by curvilinear reversal (Agamben Language and Death 78). Graphism too reinforces the orificialization of the poem’s macrostructure. At the structural heart of the poem, the woman quotes the youth’s seductive words. In the absence of quotation marks from the poem’s first edition, which causes deictics to function as quotation-transformers, quoting frame and quoted inset come into uncanny proximity. In the Quarto, the maiden’s frame and the youth’s inset form a singular graphism from which, as Kerrigan also notes, a typographic marker of separation is absent (Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint 59). According to Montrelay, a text’s graphism ‘does not passively reflect, as an image, some pre-established characteristic of unconscious structure’ but ‘functions as organizer of unconscious structure’ (‘L’enoncé en tant que chose’ 83). If so, one might read the graphic mark of inverted commas introducing insets as indices of the bar, ratio of negativity and desire (Lacan ‘Signification of the Phallus’ 288), and the absence of this mark as the

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absence of the bar’s primal marking. In A Lover’s Complaint, the woman’s words, quoted by the poem’s narrator, enfold the words of the youth without this primal (though not most primal) graphic marking of linking separation. This unusual structure of quotation is a beyond of the veiled phallus, wherein quotation marks fail to function as graphic bar. Consequently, the words of narrator, woman, and youth are not entirely distinct. This structure is isomorphic to the non-linear organization of points separate from one another yet containing one another which Montrelay speaks of as characterizing the archaic zones of the unconscious (‘On Folding and Unfolding’ 204). In Montrelay’s terms, this structure of point nested within separate (but not barred) point also typifies the structure of an orifice, the locus of archaic concentric drives (L’ombre et le nom 25, 60, 88). In A Lover’s Complaint, non-linear nesting combines with circularity, temporal looping, and the compromising of narrative by verse to stage the text as an orifice, a poetic concavity carved in the Other by the pressure of the masochistic drive. From this masochistic orifice the poem’s last segment is cast forth as a fragment of the archaic, a primordial form of representation carrying a woman’s meaningless but nevertheless ‘real’ masochistic jouissance. But the poem’s macrostructure is not its only orifice. Throughout the poem, ‘ruptures in the symbolic’ synecdochically bolster macrostructural orificiality. ‘What, primarily,’ Montrelay asks, ‘divides and fragments the graphic/phonic mass [of a poem]’ (‘Ruptures dans la symbolique’ 80)? She identifies this fragmenting verbal function as microstructural ruptures, ‘faults’ transforming the text from phonic mass into a ‘surface of holes’ pointing ‘like orifices, to a libidinal absence’ (80). ‘The rupturing holes in a poem’s phonic-graphic mass do not function as a representation of an organ,’ Montrelay says. As an organ-izing void ‘making signification possible’ even in the pre-veiling absence of the bar, these rupturing holes, these textual orifices become ‘organs in themselves’ (80, my emphasis). These microstructural orifices functioning as what Montrelay calls ‘the curves of an unconscious archaic writing’ (79) proliferate in A Lover’s Complaint. The poem proffers the apostrophaic O as its copulaic dominant, featuring in the mutually enveloping enunciations of woman (lines 52, 80, 166, 285, 288, 293), and youth (225, 239, 246, 253, 264), and most markedly in the condensed anaphoras of the climactic ending. Such O’s, Montrelay says, ‘silently recurve’ the text on itself ‘as though to define on the page with the O of the lips too an orifice which delimits an erogenous zone or an organ of sense’ (‘L’enocé en tant que chose’ 84). The capitalization, in the 1609 Quarto, of nouns beginning with the letter ‘o’ (‘Orchards’ [line 171], ‘Ocean’ [line 256], ‘Opall’ [line 215]) and the frequent repetition (anaphoric and not) of ‘Of’ (lines 15, 37, 43, 59, 128, 138, 153, 154, 198, 201, 219, 268, 270, 304) and ‘Or’ (lines 41, 112, 157, 191, 192, 233, 305, 308), graphically reinforce the opening up of microstructural orifices in the poem. More than the echoing of the apostrophaic O effects such orificial marking. In the poem’s realm of primal marking, typographic reinforces rhetorical apostrophizing which ruptures. The 1609 Quarto offers many examples of the use of the typographical apostrophe (‘) to mark the figure of syncope (the removal of a letter or syllable from the middle of a word, e.g. ‘ti’d [line 29], ‘batt’ry’ [line 23], ‘wat’ry’ [line 281], ‘smil’d’ [line 217], ‘resolu’d’ [line 296]). Typographical apostrophes mark absences in the end of words (e.g. ‘Oft’ [line 15]) and beginning of words too

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(e.g. ‘gan’ [line 177], ‘’twixt’ [line 102], ‘’gainst’ [lines 157, 277]) propelling apocope and aphaeresis toward the function of textual orifices. The common use of these figures in the versification of the time does not detract from their functioning in this particular poem as reinforcement of microstructural orifices. This is all the more the case in view of syncope’s, apocope’s, and aphaeresis’s accompanying, in this poem, the less frequent figure of synaloepha (the elision of a vowel at the juncture of two vowels, e.g. ‘t’attend’ [line 3], ‘th’orbed’ [line 25], ‘th’imagination’ [line 136]). Rhetorical syncope and synaloepha and the less frequent apocope and aphaeresis function prosodically too, creating the skips in meter theorized as rhythm’s and music’s syncopes. If metrical syncope, as Catherine Clement puts it, births rhythm through effecting the disappearance of ‘a fragment of the beat’ (5), its instances in A Lover’s Complaint, primally marked by typographic apostrophes, help rhetorical apostrophe’s rupturing of the poem’s graphic mass. The apostrophaic O as a copulaic dominant also phonically ruptures the poem’s phantasm. The rhetorical apostrophe’s sound of ‘O’ indexing a rupture in the symbolic echoes in the ubiquitous assonance of o’s in the poem. In reference to Othello, Joel Fineman has called this sound of O ‘abject’ (40). The poem’s assonance of o’s does involve a series of ‘o’-words whose sense has much to do with abject melancholy. These include ‘down’ (lines 4, 94, 284), ‘sorrow’ (lines 7, 73), ‘low’ (line 21, phonically echoed in ‘Lo’ [lines 204, 218, 232, 295] and ‘glow’ (lines 286, 324) ‘moan’ (line 217), ‘groans’ [line 275], and, most emphatically, ‘woe’ (lines 18, 20, 63, 78,143, 307). The sound of O as woe resonates in woe’s twice-repeated anagram, ‘owe’ (lines 140, 327)—itself enfolded in ‘flower’ (lines 75, 147), ‘powre’ or ‘power’ (lines 74, 256, 260) ‘glow’ (lines 286, 324), ‘flowed’ (line 284), ‘showes’ (line 308), ‘bestowed’ (line 326), ‘vowe’ (lines 173, 179, 263), and ‘borrowed’ (line 327). O’s functioning as the poem’s dominant phoneme offers a telling variation upon the primal rhythm, the phonemic alternation Freud would identify in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a child’s ‘great cultural achievement’: ‘instinctual renunciation’ attendant upon the fort-da game (15). The poem’s prevailing O’s, like Freud’s grandson’s ‘expressive ‘o-o-o-o,’ uttered when the reel of cotton he had made signify his primal object, the mother, disappears from his sight, seem to mark an object’s painful absence, its being ‘fort’ [‘gone’] (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 15). But in the healthy game Freud speaks about, another phoneme regularly succeeds the abject O’s primally marking an object’s absence. The reappearance of the reel the child has made to stand in for his absent mother is ‘hailed with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]’(15). The I occasionally counter-pointing the prevailing O’s of A Lover’s Complaint may seem a version of a phoneme primally signaling a lost object’s return, nurturing a nascent ego. But in A Lover’s Complaint, something disturbs the healthy rhythm of ‘disappearance and return’ Freud describes (15). Unlike in the Mallarmé fragment Montrelay analyzes, in Shakespeare’s poem I and O do not ‘come always closer in order to finally conjoin,’ their alternation ‘annulling and spreading itself in the summation “I + O”’ (‘L’énoncé en tant que chose’ 85). Instead of the rhythmic alternation of absence and presence, the poem recurrently presents the phoneme registering the absence of an object—even when this phoneme masquerades as presentifying, egoic I. The rupturing of the O-I, absence-presence alternation suggests a mode of alternation between alterities, of organization,

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without the presence of any reassuring return. A Lover’s Complaint makes it possible to think about an originary mode of marking different from that theorized by Freud, in which absence gives itself a name not through its alternation with presence (or a phoneme imagined to mark presence) but through echoing variations on its own abjection. Yet although its phonic dominant may make the complaint seem a hypertrophied privative, there is reason to question whether the sound of O does indeed function to stage abjection in the poem. The concluding stanza brings the dominant sound of O, abject though its connotations may sometimes be, to a climax at once rhetorical and sexual. The jouissance involved in this climax is formally specified as masochistic. The poem’s last segment twice repeats and underscores the quintupling of the O’s resounding in the poem. Five O’s are dispersed through the youth’s enunciation to the woman; five are anaphorically and vertically repeated in the last lines of the poem; five horizontally echo in the last anaphoric line after its initial O (O all that borrowed motion seeming owed [line 327]). The five vertical O’s in the poem’s last stanza cross the five horizontal o’s of line 327, graphically performing a cross and acrostically yielding the A-W-O-O-O-O-O-W-A, sound of suffering ecstasy. The sound of passion as suffering and joy, the quintupling of the poem’s O’s in a cross form which echoes an earlier quintupling rhetorically performing the five wounds of Christ—all these make the poem’s last stanza into a rhetorical and graphic performance evoking the passion of Christ, whose status in Christian faith as an object fallen from God renders him, Lacan argues in his tenth seminar, a paradigm of masochistic jouissance (lesson of 6 March, 1963). The last stanza of A Lover’s Complaint functions as a poetic version of the ostentatio vulneri as discerned by Leo Steinberg in the period’s visual art. In this version of the sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art, the wounds are psychic and the sufferer a woman, yet the structure of suffering is the same masochistic perversion Lacan diagnoses in the ‘fundamental Christian myth’ of the passion (Seminar 10, lesson of 6 March 1963). If the poem’s last stanza functions as feminized ostentatio vulneri, part of a woman’s perverse psychic trajectory, the microstructural orifices opened up in the text’s phonic-graphic mass by the apostrophaic dominant and its cognates in the figures of subtraction (syncope, synaloepha, apocope), in hollowing-out epanalepses, bespeak not abjection but masochistic jouissance. Yet the most fundamental reason for the ecstatic rather than abject functioning of these orifices lies not in any semantic content but in their psycho-rhetorical function. For Montrelay, textual orifices do not stage or reflect a psychic state. Instead, ‘the specific turns of [a] style’ which form such orifices ‘open up on the vertiginous issue’ of the point where ‘words lose their signifying power’ (‘L’énoncé en tant que chose’ 74). Textual orifices, the effect of a poem’s style, function as points from which sense leaks out, leaving the text an ‘enclave of the real’ (79). What is the specificity of the orifice the poem becomes once its phantasm leaks out? In Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud theorizes the erotogenicity of the body’s orifices as an effect of their expropriation from their anatomical function to serve the pleasure principle. The erogenicity of the mouth, for instance, depends on its arrogation from ingesting food to taking pleasure in sucking (183). In his later paper on narcissism, Freud labeled the dependent nature of the sexual drive Anlehnung (leaning on) (81). Freud’s English translator, James Strachey, substituted the

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common German term by the neologism ‘anaclisis,’ forged from the grammatical term ‘enclisis’ (particles such as ‘and,’ ‘or,’ whose usage depends on signifiers to which they are attached). In A Lover’s Complaint, the erotogenicity of the rhetorical orifices through which sense leaks out is reinforced by a predominantly anaclitic rhythmics whose forms are prosthetic. Enclises abound in the poem, beginning with the first stanza’s ‘And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale’ (line 4), ending with the last line’s ‘And new pervert a reconciled maid’ (line 329), these two enfolding many instances such as ‘And often reading what contents it bears’ (line 19), ‘And, true to bondage’ (line 34), ‘And veiled in them, did win whom he would maim’ (line 312, emphases mine). Shakespeare often repeats the enclitic ‘and’ in the beginning of lines (22 times in 328 lines). Whether or not these enclises are part of a grammatically correct sentence, their positioning creates the graphic effect of ungrammatical enclisis, the leaning on a signifier that is not there on the white margins of the text preceding the enclitic particle. Prostheses appear too, rhetorically and metrically. Figural prostheses feature in constructions wherein an extra syllable becomes attached to verbs as in ‘Espied’ (line 5) or ‘Enswathed’ (line 49). Such constructions are enclises on the level of the word, wherein the phoneme as minimal unit of the enunciation as thing is attached to a signifier, providing it with a phonic and graphic stay. Much more common in the poem are the rhythmic enclises, extra beats in rhyme royal’s decasyllabic lines, which make the last foot in those lines hypercatalectic. In most cases, the excess syllable to rhyme royal’s ten is stressed (e.g.‘O that infected moisture of his eye’ [myemphasis]), providing rhythmic closure to the line. Most of the poem’s lines, one might say in terms of the phenomenological rhythmics proposed by psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham, end not with prosteleutes (dynamic rhythmic units characterized by expectation of what is not yet there), but with a teleute, a Greek word denoting ‘ending, completion, closedness’ (80). The poem in general may be said to have a tightly teleutic structure, comprising inferior rhythmic fulfillments on the way to the resounding teleute, the climax constituting the last stanza. The poem’s anaclitic rhythmics, consisting of a dominant of enclises, prostheses, and teleutes, underscore the erotogenic function of the orifices the poem’s rhetorical dominant opens up in its phantasm, enabling this phantasm to leak out. The anaclitic structure of the poem’s rhythm bespeaks the anaclitic operation of these orifices, their arrogation from a physiological function to one subserving a jouissance specified by the poem’s phantasm as masochistic feminine jouissance. In ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ Freud suggests the ‘muscular apparatus’ in relation to which a destructive drive ‘remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation … becomes libidinally bound there’ (164). Yet in the rhythmics and rhetoric of A Lover’s Complaint Shakespeare suggests a more complex metapsychology for the libidinal organ cathexis involved in female masochism. This metapsychology centers not on the solidity of musculature but on the result of musculature’s rupturing, a wound, which nevertheless functions as the woman masochist’s eroticized organ, the organ she fetishizes to perversely disavow the hole of an archaic privation. In Freud’s account, the organs sexuality leans on serve life-preservative functions such as the ingestion of food or the disposal of waste, and in sadism and masochism, motility. But the ostentatio vulneri, the display of wounds with which A Lover’s Complaint formally

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ends, and which retroactively casts the O’s it echoes as orifices of the same order, posits the wound, not the muscle as the organ libidinally cathected in masochism. The metapsychology aesthetically postulated in A Lover’s Complaint suggests that masochism is a perverse anaclisis, wherein the organ expropriated from physiology and sexualized does not enhance vital functions but depletes them. What psychic conditions must prevail for a wound to become erogenized? The poem’s first instance of rhythmic anaclisis suggests an answer. The poem’s first line is hypercatalectic, but unlike most other hypercatalectic lines in the poem, its last syllable is unstressed, forming a weak prosthesis within a foot which becomes a trochee. The poem’s next line begins iambically, normatively, but the syntactic scission at the end of the first line creates a caesura. The transition between the poem’s first two lines involves the combination of a trochee and an iamb by a caesura, a metrical copula which is not. The trochaic ending of the poem’s first, hypercatalectic line and the iambic beginning of the poem’s second line combine to create a choriambic foot ( _ _ ). At the choriambus’s center, in the gap between two unstressed beats, the caesura tears the foot in half, formally creating a rhythmic unit whose center, beyond the poem’s printed letters, is an infinite abyss from which all life might escape. Such a hole in rhythm, Montrelay suggests, is created in cases when the absence of the desire of the mother at the subject’s most archaic origin creates a disturbance in the rhythmic alternation of pulses heard in utero and organizing ‘not the content but the succession of infant experiences’ (‘Ruptures dans la symbolique’ 77). In the absence of the desire of the mother, precocious experiences become marked by privation. ‘Pure need’ then ‘invades the totality of the psychic scene and breaks the cadence of the symbolic’ (77). ‘If the orifice which by its gaping usually inscribes the experience of a privation, is found destitute of symbolic powers,’ Montrelay asks, ‘what kind of writing could ensure the inscription of a primal cutting?’ (77). A Lover’s Complaint’s anaclitic prosody recurrently suggests a metric unit (enclisis, prosthesis, teleute) posited to stop the hole or wound of precocious privation. The graphic-phonic ostentaio vulneri in the poem’s last stanza retroactively casts the orifices opened up in the poem’s form by its formal dominants as wounds. When bodily orifices which would have been erogenized become marked by the wounding of precocious privation, A Lover’s Complaint suggests, subsequent psychic wounds can be fetishized as provisional stop-gaps. The poem’s fundamental rhythmic structure is not the progressive ascent from teleute to superior teleute, but the alternation between the infinite hole of precocious privation and the prostheses—from stressed syllable at a line’s end to climax—psychically manufactured to stop this hole. Flux and reflux. Ecstasy generated by a fetishized wound vanishing into the bottomless hole of primal privation. Such is the rhythm of Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint, each teleute not pretending implication in a happy and easy circulation but marking the boundary where—if it were not for the teleute—one would certainly fall. Teleutes function as immovables, rhythmic motion petrified so as to avert the horror of a beat’s fraction taking on mass and falling, as happens at the heart of the choriambus between the poem’s first and second lines. The perversion whose underlying linguistic forms A Lover’s Complaint can help psychoanalysis specify is thus not simply female masochism in which a woman disavows her castration by striving to make of herself an object that would stop the

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hole in the Other marking this castration. At stake in the poem is a particular form of female masochism resting on what Andre Green has recently theorized as ‘primary anality’ (The Work of the Negative 284-285) and involving an attempt to avert not castration but privation. This psychic structure involves woundfetishization which relieves psyches suffering from precocious privation because it insists on repetition with ‘a genuinely invisible prosthesis,’ functioning as ‘an internal axis’ (284). The poem’s rhythmic and rhetorical orifices from which its sense leaks out, turning them into enclaves of the real—its teleutes, protheses and enclises, its manifold apostrophaic O’s and their cognates in the hollowing-out figures of syncope, synaloepha, apocope, and epanalepsis—function as such fetishized wounds, points of masochistic jouissance covering a most primal wound of privation. One might describe a woman masochist whose psychic landscape the poem’s aesthetics explore as a psychic anorectic. If anorexia is a perversion wherein, as Lacan puts it, the woman ‘eats nothing,’ devours the ‘Nothing of desire’ in ‘her body which voids itself and avidly devours itself,’ fetishizes the void of hunger, the female masochist portrayed in the poem fetishizes the Nothing, the O of the psychic wounds repeating and covering the wound of her elemental privation. And yet the poem ends with an ecstatic ejection of an elemental signifier. Such ejections, Montrelay says, mark moments of significant psychic change. The poem’s ecstatic ending suggests that even a perverse unconscious structured by archaic privation can undergo a leap, eject a fragment which will enable it to return to a floating organization, but differently. A female masochist such as A Lover’s Complaint aesthetically anatomizes may always ecstatically suffer. Yet the structure of the poem’s last orgasmic segment, erupting from its multiple O’s as orifices rendered real, indicates the possibility for a pervert’s productive encounter with the bar. Indexing the letter, the real matter of the alphabet from which the text is made at the very same time that it performs sexual jouissance, the leap at the end of the poem says nothing but insists on a limitation, a marking which would allow the Shadow the woman masochist eternally inhabits not to swallow and efface her, but to manifest itself in her life in measured moments of real pleasure. Notes 1

Katherine Craik, for instance, summarizes the poem as a ‘predicament of an abandoned female lover who laments her undoing’ (437). Kenneth Muir describes the woman in the poem as a ‘forsaken lover’ (158), and Underwood underscores the ‘bleakness of her rejection’ (32). She is, he says, ‘in an orphaned state’ (70). Others have remarked on her appearing ‘emotionally distracted’ (Bell ‘That Which Thou Hast Done’ 464) or ‘distraught’ (Cohen 562, Underwood 16). Like the women in the complaint by Lee which Ilona Bell analyzes as an analogue to A Lovers’ Complaint, the woman in Shakespeare’s poem is, she says, ‘miserable and vulnerable’ (‘Shakespeare’s Exculpatory Complaint’ this volume). ‘Poor maid,’ James Schiffer says of her (this volume).

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INDEX

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Index Diacritics 51-52, 165, 172-173, 176, 184 Dickenson, John 41 Discourse analysis 122, 124, 127, 130, 133-134 Drayton, Michael 107 Drive 182, 184-185, 188 Dubrow, Heather 34, 46, 50-51, 87, 90, 107, 114, 118-120, 121-136, 177, 181-182 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 6-7, 9-14, 16, 33, 35, 37, 47, 61, 70, 72, 74, 88, 97, 105-107, 118-119, 149, 175

Abraham, Nicolas 52, 173-174, 180, 188 Agalma 156, 161 Agamben, Giorgio 176, 184 Anaclisis 188-189 Anaphora 29, 46, 72, 181-183, 185, 187 Anxiety 149-150, 161, 179 Apocope 186-187, 190 Apostrophe 173, 182, 185-187, 190 Ariosto, Ludovico 64-65, 74 Asyndeton 181 Augustine, St. 114-115 Authorization 121-134 Authorship 3-9, 15, 17, 31, 40, 48, 55, 58, 89, 107, 109, 122, 128, 137, 146

Economy 34-35, 130 Ecstasy 1, 28, 51, 158, 166, 175-176, 179-181, 183, 187, 189-190 Elemental signifier 181-182, 184-185, 190 Enclitics 188 Epanalepsis 187, 190

Barnfield, Richard 14 Baudrillard, Jean 137,142 Beauty 39-40 Bell, Ilona 11, 16, 18, 33-34, 42-45, 47, 49-51, 67, 90, 91-107, 135, 146, 162, 166, 179, 180, 184, 190 Chaucer, Geoffrey 20-21, 26 Cheney, Patrick 49-51, 55-77, 84, 86, 105-107, 117, 166, 184 Churchyard, Thomas 22, 24, 49, 91, 100, 107 Complaint poetry 2, 10, 13-15, 19-31, 33, 37-38, 45-46, 48-49, 91-104, 109, 130, 145, 149, 162, 165-166, 172-173, 175, 181 Confession 21, 31-32, 45, 49, 79-88, 91, 130, 166 Copula 45-46, 185-186, 189 Courtship poetry 11, 18, 45, 50, 91, 93, 96, 98-99, 103, 152-153, 166, 175 Daniel, Samuel 10-11, 14-15, 18, 22-25, 72, 74, 101, 105, 107, 109, 131, 149 Derrida, Jacques 159 Desire 1, 25-26, 34-35, 45-46, 51, 137-138, 141-142, 144-145, 147, 149-151, 154-162, 166-172, 176, 180, 182-184

Fineman, Joel 30, 33, 88, 162, 183, 186 Fragment 181-182, 185-186 Freud, Sigmund 51-52, 132, 150-151, 154, 158, 163, 168-169, 172-174, 179-180, 183-184, 186-188 Gender 20-21, 24, 31, 34, 42-44, 46-47, 49, 51, 56-57, 93-96, 99-105, 121-123, 141-142-143, 145, 151, 154, 160-163, 165, 170, 179-190 Graphism 183-190 Green, Andre 180, 190 Grosart, Alexander 39-41 Harned, Jon 12, 31, 44, 51-52, 79, 107, 147, 149-163, 176-177, 179, 181-182 Homoeroticism 33-34, 144, 147, 154-155, 161-162 Hoskins, John 173 Identification 150-152, 155-156, 160

201

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Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint

Jackson, Macdonald Pairman 5, 109, 119, 145, 147, 181 Jouissance 51-53, 147, 150-152, 155, 157, 163, 166, 171, 175-176, 180-183, 185, 187, 188, 190 Kerrigan, John 2-3, 9, 11-14, 17, 20, 25, 29-33, 42-43, 46-49, 56-60, 63, 66, 70, 72-74, 79, 87, 91-92, 97-99, 101, 105-107, 118-120, 130, 134-135, 137, 139, 144-146, 149, 152, 159, 162-163, 165, 173, 180-181, 284 Lacan, Jacques 51-53, 144, 147-148, 150-163, 165-166, 169, 171-172, 180-181, 183-185, 190 Lamentations 19 Lee, Sir Henry 88-89, 94-95, 98-106 Letter 183-187, 190 Lodge, Thomas 11, 15, 22-24 Lynch, Richard 11 Marlowe, Christopher 58-61, 63, 67, 73-74, 138-139 Marrotti, Arthur 7, 17-18, 36-37 Masochism 52, 144, 175, 179-181, 184-185, 187-190 Melancholy 1, 20, 46, 51-52, 150, 166, 168, 172-176, 179-180, 186 Meres, Francis 13, 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 155 Metaphor 156-157, 167 Metonymy 150, 166 Montrelay, Michele 163, 180, 182, 184-187, 189-190 Narcissism 150-152, 156, 159, 161, 163, 171 Nationhood 49, 58, 61-62, 74, 166 O 29-30, 52, 158, 173, 183, 185-190 Object a (object cause of desire) 151-159, 163, 170 Orifice, textual 172-173, 175, 180, 183-190 Orpheus 152-159, 161 Organs, textual 185-188 Orgasm 52, 73, 175, 180, 182-183, 187, 190 Ostentatio vulneri 187-189 Ovid 19-21, 26, 45, 49, 58-60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 138, 153-155 Oxymoron 110-112, 114-115, 170

Pastoral 2, 10, 13-14, 19, 45, 59, 61, 65, 76, 154, 158, 167 Patriarchy 20, 22, 24, 27, 45, 101, 103-105, 124, 138, 162 Peacham, Henry 153 Petrarchism 21-22, 24-25, 36, 110-113, 120, 163, 175 Perversion 51, 150, 163, 166, 175-177, 180, 182, 187, 189-190 Phantasy 155, 162-163, 166, 170-172, 174-176, 180-181, 184, 186-188 Phoneme 186-189 Primal scene 162-163, 166-170, 172, 174 Proper name 14-15, 30, 173, 175 Prosody 181, 183, 186, 188-190 Prosopopeia 173, 175-176 Psychoanalysis (Freudian and Lacanian) 149-190 Psycho-rhetorical criticism 165-190 Punctuation 172-173, 184 Puttenham, George 105, 122 Repetition 132, 144, 160, 166, 173, 175, 181, 183 Representative of representation 184 Rhetoric 1-3, 14, 29-30, 33, 39-41, 45-47, 51-52, 56, 72, 80, 85, 87, 92, 95-96, 103, 110-116, 121-123, 126-129, 132-133, 137-140, 142, 146-147, 149-150, 153-155, 157-163, 166-168, 172-177, 179-190 Rhyme royal 21, 188 Riddle 123-126, 135 Roe, John 6, 9-12, 28, 31, 33, 42-45, 50-51, 66, 70, 72, 106-107, 109-120, 134, 160, 163, 177, 179, 181, 184 Schiffer, James 9, 15, 17, 36, 38, 48, 51, 79, 106-107, 137-148, 171, 177, 182 Seduction 1, 21, 24, 26, 32, 34, 46, 50-51, 56, 100, 116-117, 119, 137-139, 142, 145-146, 155, 159-160, 163, 165, 168-172, 176, 184 Sexuality, female 20, 25-29, 32-33, 35-36, 45-47, 49-50, 104, 107, 119, 155, 160, 162-163, 166, 175, 180-181, 186-190 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 28, 124-125, 137, 147 As You Like It 123-125, 144, 154 Antony and Cleopatra 27-28, 33

INDEX

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Index Cymbeline 28, 125, 137 Hamlet 30-33, 50, 80, 106, 109-110, 115-120, 122, 130, 137, 152, 160-163 King Henry IV, Part 1 130 King Henry V 123, 125-130, 132-133, 145 King Richard II 126 King Richard III, 137-138, 140, 143, 145, 147 A Lover’s Complaint passim Macbeth 138, 147 Measure for Measure 32, 80, 84 Much Ado About Nothing 163 The Merchant of Venice 145 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 126-127, 163 Othello 29-31, 33, 123, 129-132, 145 The Rape of Lucrece 2-3, 10-11, 13, 15, 26-29, 36-37, 58-59, 61, 64, 71, 74, 109, 114-115, 119, 126, 129, 138, 147, 163 Romeo and Juliet 84, 110-115, 118-119, 163 The Sonnets 9, 13-18, 25, 33-35, 48, 55, 58, 80, 87-90, 96, 102-103, 106, 109-110, 116, 118-119, 122-123, 126, 129, 131, 133, 137-138, 140, 143-144, 147-148, 162, 173 The Taming of the Shrew 153-154 The Tempest 73, 123, 129, 131, 145 Titus Andronicus 63, 73 Troilus and Cressida 130, 137 Twelfth Night 126, 144 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 163 The Two Noble Kinsmen 30-31 Venus and Adonis 2-3, 10, 13, 15, 26-27, 36-37, 59, 61, 74, 126, 138-139, 141, 147 The Winter’s Tale 72

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Sharon-Zisser, Shirley 42, 45-48, 52, 73, 75-76, 87, 105, 144, 146, 148, 163, 166-167, 179-190 Sidney, Philip 14, 43-44, 139, 149 Simile 46, 142, 163, 167 Smith, William 15 Sonnet sequences 21-23 Speech acts 121, 123, 133, 168 Spenser, Edmund 59-63, 65, 67, 69-74, 105, 149 Stegner, Paul D. 16, 49, 51, 79-90, 130, 166, 179 Style 12-13, 21, 29-30, 32, 39-42, 45-47, 92, 102, 110-115, 121-123, 128, 132, 137, 158, 172-175, 179-190 Suffering 1, 20, 24, 28, 51, 88, 94, 147, 158, 166, 176, 179-180, 183, 187 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 39 Syncope 185-187, 190 Theater 55, 57-58, 63, 65, 67-74, 117, 124, 133, 159 Thorpe, Thomas 6-7 Torok, Maria 52, 173-174, 180 Unconscious 166, 169, 171-173, 183-185 Vavasour, Anne 91, 96, 98-105 Ventriloquism 160, 176 Virgil 20, 49, 58-63, 65, 71 Whitworth, Stephen 14, 44, 51-52, 79, 105, 148, 162, 180, 182 Wilson, Thomas 153 Wound 187-190 Wriothesley, Henry (Earl of Southampton) 15-16 Writing 182-189 Wyndham, George 17, 39