A Lover's Complaint revisited.
IA LOVER'S COMPLAINT was first published in 1609 at the end of Thomas Thorpe's famous quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Until the early 1960s this narrative poem of 329 iambic pentameter lines had been neglected by Shakespeareans, who tended to reject it as spurious or disdain it as an unsatisfactory product of Shakespeare's youth. Then Kenneth Muir and MacD. P. Jackson independently argued in favor of the poem's authenticity and a seventeenth-century composition date. (1) Most editors have accepted their case, which has been supplemented by other scholars. (2)
Muir and Jackson overlooked one signficant point. Samuel Daniel's sonnet sequence Delia (1592), an obvious influence on Shakespeare, had closed with The Complaint of Rosamund, and before Shakespeare's Sonnets appeared a convention of completing a book of sonnets with a long poem had been firmly established. Scholars such as John Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones have regarded A Lover's Complaint as an integral part of Thorpe's volume. (3) Recent commentators have sought to show not only that the quarto preserves Shakespeare's own arrangement of his sonnets, but that he intended A Lover's Complaint to be the third movement in a sonata-like structure preceded by the sections devoted to Fair Friend and Dark Lady, and helping to resolve their contradictions, or at least to put the experience embodied in them into a new perspective. (4) The status of A Lover's Complaint--whether it is Shakespearean or non-Shakespearean--is thus directly related to the question of the authority of the 1609 quarto's text and the order in which sonnets are presented and numbered. A spurious A Lover's Complaint would undermine trust in Thorpe's volume; a Shakespearean A Lover's Complaint tends to authenticate it.
However, even as criticism has been discovering a rationale for the authorial inclusion of A Lover's Complaint within Shakespeare's Sonnets, research by the Claremont-McKenna Shakespeare Clinic, run by Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, has been casting fresh doubts on Shakespeare's responsibility for the poem. (5) Elliott and Valenza evolved a variety of tests for Shakespearean authorship, starting with his undisputed plays and establishing, for each of the linguistic phenomena counted, a range within which rates of occurrence for any authentic play should fall. Works generally accepted as wholly Shakespeare's exhibited Shakespearean rates on all but a very few tests, whereas suspect, collaborative, and apocryphal works failed large numbers of tests. Elliott and Valenza found that fourteen of the tests thus validated on plays were also usable on poems, and that when the poems (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets) were broken into approximately 3000-word blocks, none of the fourteen undisputed Shakespearean blocks failed more than two tests and most failed none, but that A Lover's Complaint failed six. The same Claremont-McKenna methodology that emphatically, and rightly, rejected Donald Foster's ascription of A Funeral Elegy to Shakespeare also questions the authenticity of A Lover's Complaint. (6)
Elliott and Valenza are sensibly cautious about their findings, conceding that the new methods they and other computer users have adopted are so experimental that "it is foolish to expect any of them to be the last word on the subject at this stage." (7) It is a pity that none of the six "blocks" of sonnets tested comprises the last twenty-five or so of those to the Fair Friend: from the number of iambic pentameter lines given for each block, it appears that Block 4 consists of Sonnets 85-112 and Block 5 of Sonnets 113-140, so that the sonnets that can most plausibly be assigned to the seventeenth century and were thus most likely to have been roughly contemporary with A Lover's Complaint (approximately numbers 100-126) are mixed with much earlier ones. (8) However, even Shakespeare's last-written group of sonnets might display a rather different profile from a 329-line complaint written in rhyme royal. A major difficulty is that, whereas the profile for Shakespeare as dramatist rests on a wide range of plays, that for Shakespeare as poet rests merely on two early narrative poems and the Sonnets: these may not provide firm enough grounds for inferring Shakespeare's likely practices in a complaint narrative composed around 1604-6, even though, in setting Shakespearean parameters, Elliott and Valenza also take usages in the plays into account.
One test that A Lover's Complaint fails concerns the ratio of "no" to "no" plus "not," which is lower than in any undoubted Shakespeare work. Yet it is also lower than in any dramatic work by anybody else listed; and of eighty-one blocks, of approximately three thousand words each, from non-Shakespearean poems only the Funeral Elegy and one block from Heywood's Oenone (1605) are as low or lower. (9) The figure of 120 for A Lover's Complaint is thus anomalous for any author, and within-author variation may evidently be considerable: the six Heywood samples range from 111 to 667. Content would seem to be the most significant influence in such ratios. Moreover, there is a certain arbitrariness about the piecemeal creation of tests of this kind. The ratio of "no" to "no" plus "not" is, of course, a function of the tallies for each individual word, and two more instances of "no" would have lifted the ratio for A Lover's Complaint into the "Shakespearean" range. A safer way of dealing with such function words may be to investigate all those that occur in Shakespeare's works above a certain level of frequency and compare samples by principal component analysis.
The conversion of low frequencies into rates can make the differences between samples seem larger than in fact they are. A second test failed by A Lover's Complaint is for rates of "with" as the penultimate word of a sentence, where a sentence is defined as a sequence of words ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, or semicolon. Although Elliott and Valenza relied on edited texts, we may grant that there is likely to be some consistency in the punctuation of a single modern Shakespeare edition, and that this punctuation will reflect authorial sentence-structure. The rates for "with" as the penultimate word of a sentence are presented as ranging from 6 to 34 in fourteen approximately 3000-word blocks from Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets, and as being 0 for A Lover's Complaint. But the figure 6 in each of the first two Venus and Adonis blocks and the second Lucrece block represents only a single instance, as does the figure 7 in the third, fourth, and fifth blocks from the Sonnets. The raw figures for the fourteen blocks work out at 1, 1, 5, 2, 1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, 1, 1, 2. This yields an average of just over 2, with an estimated standard deviation for the whole population of 1.2. There is a better than one in twelve chance that a 3000-word sample from a genuine Shakespearean poem will have no examples of "with" at the end of a sentence--and A Lover's Complaint happens to consist of only 2579 words.
A Lover's Complaint also fails two "Thisted-Efron" tests. These, as Elliott and Valenza remark, are "novel, fancy, high-tech tests" devised by statisticians Ronald Thisted and Bradley Efron, and difficult to explain in "nontechnical terms." (10) But in essence they concern the rates of use of words unique or rare in the core Shakespeare canon. A Lover's Complaint has "too many." Here I think we have a case where mechanical counting is less informative than hands-on analysis of the poem's vocabulary, with an eye to the kinds of rare words it contains and to Shakespeare's habits of word formation. (11) A Lover's Complaint reads like an experiment in the adaptation of Shakespeare's most condensed mature style to nondramatic poetry, and, if my dating is correct, it was composed at about the same time as the most lexically rich and inventive of his plays. His early narrative poems use "once-used words" at much higher rates than his plays of the same date. (12) We might expect A Lover's Complaint, packed with images and associations, to be the boldest of all Shakespeare's works in its contributions to his vocabulary.
The other two tests failed by A Lover's Complaint are metrical. It has too few "leaning microphrases" of both the "proclitic" and "enclitic" types, as these are defined by Marina Tarlinskaja, who has recently studied the prosody of A Lover's Complaint in detail and found it to be at variance with Shakespeare's at any phase of his career. (13) The issues raised are too complex to be treated here. Tarlinskaja is an expert analyst of meter, and her previous work has cast light on problems of authorship and dating. Yet the technical anomalies identified in the verse of A Lover's Complaint do not prevent it from sounding Shakespearean when read aloud--at least to my ear. Tarlinskaja's data for plays do not distinguish between blank verse and rhymed lines: the 285 rhymed lines in Ali's Well That Ends Well might conceivably yield figures closer to those for A Lover's Complaint.
Elliott and Valenza distinguish between "green-light" testing, in which the investigator finds "quirks" that link a disputed work with the Shakespeare canon and then seeks to establish the genuine rarity of these quirks within non-Shakespearean controls, and their own "red-light" testing, which begins by setting Shakespearean boundaries outside which, for any one test, rates for at least 10 percent of non-Shakespearean controls fall, and goes on to demonstrate that the non-Shakespearean works flunk significantly more tests than any of the canonical ones. And they judge "red-light" testing to be superior: "with less-than-perfect identifiers, strong exclusionary evidence normally trumps strong inclusionary evidence." (14) Elliott and Valenza are right in claiming that their "red-light" procedures more effectively safeguard against "false positives"--against the identification as Shakespeare's of material that is not in fact his. But those procedures may be more apt to suffer from the obverse flaw of sometimes registering "false negatives."
Ideally, from a statistical point of view, Elliott and Valenza would have divided the noncontentious Shakespearean material into halves, employing a random process to assign plays, poems, or blocks of text to either of two sets, one from which to generate the Shakespearean profiles or ranges and another on which to check and calibrate these. Almost certainly, because of a phenomenon known to statisticians as the "regression effect," the ranges initially generated would have been found to exclude some of the genuinely Shakespearean works in the calibrating set: the plays, poems, or blocks of text used for "checking" would have failed more tests than those on which the profiles were based. (15) Since Elliott and Valenza's Shakespearean ranges were derived from the whole noncontenious corpus, disputed plays and poems, whether or not Shakespeare's in fact, might be expected to yield some "false negatives."
Nevertheless, Elliott and Valenza, who have been assiduous in refining their methods in response to criticism, have undoubtedly succeeded in reopening the question of A Lover's Complaint's authenticity. So it seems worth rehearsing the gist of the "inclusionary" case for Shakespeare's authorship and adding some new evidence that greatly strengthens it.
II
The internal evidence carries considerable weight: the poem is included within Thomas Thorpe's 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets and is itself headed "A Louers complaint. / BY / WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE." Shakespeare's responsibility for one or two sonnets has been denied by some scholars, but nobody doubts that the vast bulk of them are indeed his, and Thorpe could have had no commercial motive for fraudulently adding A Lover's Complaint to a volume that would have sold just as well without it; he was, in any case, a reputable publisher, whose dealings with Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, appear to have been perfectly honorable. (16) If A Lover's Complaint was misattributed, Thorpe most probably made an honest mistake. But no external evidence hints at any other poet's authorship of the poem.
The basis of my own case for accepting Thorpe's attribution was a systematic and thorough analysis of the poem's rare words--those used elsewhere by Shakespeare only five or fewer times. The overwhelming proponderance of rare-word links between the poem and the dramatic canon is to seventeenth-century plays, particularly to those of around 1604-1606. (17) OED's first citation of many of these words is from Shakespeare, and the coinages reflect Shakespeare's known habits of word formation: the turning of nouns into verbs or adjectives, the invention of words beginning with "un-" and "en-," a liking for agent-nouns ending in "-er," and so on. The proportions of new words and of "once-used" words accord with Shakespeare's practices, as established by Alfred Hart's researches into Shakespeare's vocabulary, but would be anomalous for other authors whom Hart investigated. (18) My lexical evidence was buttressed by examination of phraseology, imagery and wordplay, stylistic mannerisms, and subject matter.
The use in A Lover's Complaint of several words that, so far as OED can be trusted, were first used in written form either in the poem or in some work known to be Shakespeare's (depending on the precise date of the poem's composition) may seem of dubious significance, in view of OED's acknowledged shortcomings. But if we did not know that George Chapman was the author of The Shadow of Night (1594), for example, consultation of its rare words in OED would quickly permit a correct guess. (19) The Shadow of Night was evidently not read for OED, but among the poem's handful of new words are the following, with the source of OED's first citation, for the required sense, noted in brackets: Daphnean [Chapman's Sir Giles Goosecap (1606)]; disparent [Chapman's Iliad (1611)]; expansure [Chapman's portion of Hero and Leander (1606), other citations from Chapman's Sir Giles Goosecap and Iliad]; manless (meaning "inhuman") [Chapman's Iliad]; repulsive [Chapman's Iliad]; windy-footed [windy 9. comb. Chapman's Iliad]. In addition, although expulsatory is not recorded, the first citation for expulsive in the same sense is from Chapman's Hesiod (1618), and the first citation of expulsive in any sense is from Chapman's Iliad; also, sail or safed (meaning "made safe") is cited from Chapman's Iliad. The rare-word vocabulary of The Shadow of the Night is thus as Chapmanesque as that of A Lover's Complaint is Shakespearean.
It must be admitted that Alfred Hart's studies of Shakespeare's vocabulary, based on data painstakingly compiled by hand and eye before the computer age, have their vulnerabilities, and that little is yet known about the lexical habits of rival candidates for the authorship of A Lover's Complaint. (20) But the study of Shakespeare's rare words inevitably shades into a broader kind of stylistic analysis, and this is not without some persuasive force. Let us look carefully at the opening stanza:
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.
The rhyme royal stanza (ababbcc) is the same as Shakespeare used in The Rape of Lucrece. The opening two lines of A Lover's Complaint and of The Rape of Lucrece even have "the same grammatical and rhetorical evolution." (21) Lucrece begins:
From the besieged Ardea all in post, Borne by the trustless wings of false desire....
This leads into the subject of the sentence, Tarquin. In both poems "the single epithet in the first line is followed and as it were reduplicated by the pair of epithets in the second; in both the middle epithet of the group of three, trustless, plaintful, has the same sort of preciousness in its quality." (22)
The opening stanza of A Lover's Complaint contains several rare words that nevertheless appear a few times in Shakespeare's works: (23)
concave is used only in Julius Caesar (1599) and As You Like It (1599-1600); the related concavities occurs in Henry V (1598-99) reworded is used only in Hamlet (1600-1601) sist'ring is a participial adjective derived from the verb to sister, which is used in Pericles (1607), within the Gower chorus heading the Shakespearean act 4 accorded is used with an infinitive construction: accorded to attend; accord is followed by the infinitive only in Henry V (1598-99) a-twain occurs only in King Lear (1605-6) storming, in the sense "raising a storm in," is paralleled by a single use of outstorm in The History of King Lear (1605-6), 8.9 (3.1.10 in conflated editions), where most editors emend the quarto's outscorne.
In addition, plaintful and sad-tuned are not used elsewhere by Shakespeare, though he used other compounds in tuned, such as care-tuned, ill-tuned, new-tuned, and well-tuned. Also, there is no other Shakespearean intransitive use of laid to mean simply "lay": perhaps one should think of the usage as eliding the reflexive "me" ("laid me"). Every Shakespearean work contains many words and usages that are not found anywhere else in the canon.
The links, even within this single stanza, are overwhelmingly with Shakespeare's plays of the period 1598-1607. Whoever wrote it, A Lover's Complaint must be a seventeenth-century composition.
OED's first example of sister as a verb ("to stand to [a person or thing] in the relationship of sister or sisters") is the Pericles one. So this usage was evidently a Shakespearean coinage, unless somebody else wrote A Lover's Complaint and its composition preceded that of Pericles. As Hart pointed out, Shakespeare is apt to enrich the language by being the first writer to use a noun as a verb, as happens here. It is a favorite method of creating imagery and enhancing the figurative element in his verse. As OED notes, when sister is employed as a verb hereafter it is normally in a figurative sense. Here sist'ring has been coined on the analogy of neighbouring, but it suggests a more intimate natural relationship between the hill with its "concave womb" and the nearby vale (they are not just neighbors, but sisters) and of course the tonings are all appropriately feminine. Nature is not merely humanized but feminized to provide a setting for the entry of the "fickle maid." Neighbouring, meaning adjacent, is itself a Shakespearean coinage, according to OED, where the first citation is from All's Well That Ends Well (1604-5), but the participial adjective is a fairly obvious development from the verb to neighbour, of which there are instances as early as 1586.
The example of the verb sister in Pericles is in a passage describing Marina as maiden princess with all the appropriate accomplishments-in singing, dancing, scholarship, and embroidery: she
with her nee'le composes Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry, That e'en her art sisters the natural roses. Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry.... (20.5-8)
Here nee'le is an elided form of "needle" and inkle is linen tape or thread. The embroidered flora and fauna are remarkably good likenesses of real life: Marina's art imitates nature. The roses that she embroiders in the silk are as like natural roses as one sister is like another--twin sisters, at that, as the next line adds of her depiction of cherries. Again, the word sisters suits the conventionally feminine activity. The Shakespearean concern with "art" and "nature" carries over, of course, into The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Nobody could doubt that this passage in Pericles was written by Shakespeare, and the opening stanza of A Lover's Complaint has a similar complexity and inventiveness.
Pericles is the first work to use the adjectival rubied, meaning coloured red like a ruby: it is another instance of Shakespeare's pressing a noun (ruby) into service as another part of speech, and so condensing a simile, "like a ruby," into one word; the image of the gemstone, scarlet like the rose and ripe cherry, adds to the impression of richness both in nature and in art, and the associations of value and abundance adhere to Marina herself. The originality of Shakespeare's vocabulary, in A Lover's Complaint as in Pericles, is an essential part of his distinctive poetic art.
To return to A Lover's Complaint, OED cites this instance of storming as the first transitive use of the verb in the sense "to raise a storm in, make stormy," as a figurative way of indicating a troubled mind. Again, the noun storm is given a new verbal twist. The idea in "storming her world" is of man or woman as a microcosm, a little world analogous to the macrocosm, the wider world as a whole. This is a Renaissance commonplace, but the way it is developed through a lexical coinage is characteristically Shakespearean, and, as noted above, Shakespeare's one parallel use of the noun-turnedverb is in King Lear, where Lear
Strives in his little world of man to outstorm The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.
(The History of King Lear, 8.9-10)
In these lines, too, the human body and mind constitute a microcosm. It is a critical truism that the storm in King Lear externalizes Lear's own inner fury. Similarly, in Pericles, the nurse Lychorida, informing the tempest-tossed voyager Pericles that his queen is dead, exhorts him: "Patience, good sir, do not assist the storm" (11.19). As Arden editor F. D. Hoeniger explains, "Any storm in the microcosm, the mind of man, might arouse further the storm in the macrocosm, the world at large.... The sympathetic analogy between the two worlds was part of the Elizabethan world picture." (24) Pericles' tearful sobbing simply augments the rain, "applying wet to wet" (as A Lover's Complaint says at line 40 of the maid weeping into the river). The same comparison informs the lines in Antony and Cleopatra: "We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report ... she makes a shower of rain" (1.2.140-44). Cleopatra's grief is on a global scale. In A Lover's Complaint "sorrow's wind and rain" are obviously sighs and tears, as they quite explicitly are in the Antony and Cleopatra passage. Shakespeare had used the wind/sighs, rain/tears analogy as early as Titus Andronicus, where the protagonist laments:
When heavens doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threat'ning the welkin with his big-swoll'n face? And will thou have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow! She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be moved with her sighs, Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned.
(3.1.220-28)
It also occurs in Venus and Adonis: "like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, / Sighs dry her cheeks, tears make them wet again" (965-66); and Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona says "if the river were dry, I am able to fill it with my tears. If the wind were down, I could drive the boat with my sighs" (2.3.51-53); while in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) York compares his raging to the wind that "blows up incessant showers" of rain that he equates with tears (1.4.145-50).
The woman who positions herself "by the weeping margin" of a river, "applying wet to wet" (39-40) is like Jaques who in As You Like It "Stood on th'extremest verge of the swift brook, / Augmenting it with tears" (2.1.42-43), or Romeo, who is seen "With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew" (Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.129). There are doubtless many other such passages within Shakespeare's plays. "Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain" thus condenses a complex of habitual associations in a typically Shakespearean way.
The opening lines of A Lover's Complaint set the scene, economically providing a lot of detail. There is a hill, with a "concave womb," which must be some sort of cave, or hollow, or crater that echoes the noise from a "vale," or valley, below: since a river is mentioned a little later as part of the setting, the sound is presumably that of running water, and perhaps of wind in the valley's trees. But nature is here personified, so that the sound is said to be a "plaintful story," which the vale tells the hill cave and the hill cave repeats, recital and echo merging into a "double voice," a virtual duet. The valley's narrative reverberates. The phrase "plaintful story" gestures toward the title of the poem itself. And what the poet-narrator settles down to listen to is also a "sad-tuned tale," a kind of melancholy music, as well as a story.
The "I" of the poem thus presents himself as like a spectator or auditor at a performance, which nature itself is already putting on as an overture to the histrionics of the main actor, the "fickle maid," who enters making melodramatic gestures and soon pours out her tale of woe. The hill cave's relaying of the vale's "recitative," as it were, foreshadows the curious involutions of narrative voice in the poem. The poem's speaker recounts what he hears the maid tell a "reverend man," and a large part of her story is taken up with reporting the speech of the young man who seduced her. The effect is of opening up a series of Chinese boxes. "The Phoenix and Turtle," the Shakespeare poem closest in date of composition to A Lover's Complaint (if the vocabulary evidence is not misleading in assigning the latter to the seventeenth century), adopts a similar sort of narrative strategy, enclosing voice within voice: the five-stanza threnody that ends the poem is presented as a composition by a bewildered Reason, who is a personified abstraction within an anthem performed by (or among) a flock of birds who, on the instructions of the poet-speaker, have been summoned to a funeral by the "loudest" of their number.
Possibly the "plaintful story" that issues from the "vale" is the woman's lamentations themselves, heard from afar, but, if so, they blend with the sounds of nature. The human figures seem almost to emerge out of the landscape--like the witches in Macbeth, except that the poem's trio are the very incarnations of pastoral and complaint.
I have pointed out that the word concave occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare only in Julius Caesar and As You Like It. The Julius Caesar example shares with the one in A Lover's Complaint the association with echoing and rewording:
Tiber trembled underneath her banks To hear the replication of your sounds Made in her concave shores.
(1.1.45-47)
The shouts of the plebeians, as they greeted Pompey, are said to echo resoundingly within Tiber's riverbed. (The parallel perhaps reinforces the suggestion that a river running through the valley is involved in the "plaintful tale" of A Lover's Complaint.)
It is Venus and Adonis, however, that provides the closest parallel to the opening lines of A Lover's Complaint. Venus has been deserted by Adonis:
And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans, That all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled, Make verbal repetition of her moans; Passion on passion deeply is redoubled. 'Ay me,' she cries, and twenty times, 'Woe, woe!' And twenty echoes twenty times cry so.
(829-34)
Marking the echoes, she "begins a wailing note, / And sings extemporally a woeful ditty" or "heavy anthem," to which the "choir of echoes answer" (835-40). A Lover's Complaint compresses the ideas elaborated here. In each poem caves resound with a lament that is musical as well as verbal. "Double voice" in A Lover's Complaint picks up Venus and Adonis's "redoubled," which the later poem recasts as "reworded." Moreover, the adjectival use of "neighbour" in "the neighbour caves" begins the process which leads to "neighbouring" in All's Well and "sist'ring" in A Lover's Complaint. By the third stanza the "fickle maid" is "shrieking undistinguished woe" (line 20), as Venus does. (One might even add that in A Lover's Complaint "woe" rhymes with "high and low," while in Venus and Adonis, 1139-40 "woe" rhymes with "high or low.") Even the echoing "womb" of A Lover's Complaint is anticipated in some earlier lines of Venus and Adonis, which speak of "earth ... / Whose hollow womb resounds" (267-68).
The first stanza of A Lover's Complaint thus has an extraordinary number of links with the Shakespeare canon, and the verse has a linguistic complexity that few other poems customarily match. There is even a hint of dream, myth, or allegory, which further connects the poem with the Ovidian Venus and Adonis. The resonant hillside cave has about it a slight air of the haunt of the Muses, or the Sibyl, or the Delphian Oracle, or the Graces, which the word sist'ring tends to reinforce. The poet lies down as though to experience some Jungian fantasy, in which the cast of Fair Young Tempter, Fallen Maid, and Reverend Father have almost archetypal status.
Considerations of quality are sometimes said to be strictly irrelevant to questions of authorship: great poets or dramatists can write poorly, and even Shakespeare's lesser contemporaries may on occasions write extremely well; besides, de gustibus non est disputandum, and literary tastes change with the times. Yet to appreciate Shakespeare's genius as a poet is to be aware that in his mastery of language he exceeds all his contemporaries. The inventiveness with which he interchanges parts of speech is related to the same intellectual process that generates a flow of imagery, as metaphor and pun bond ideas and emotions to external phenomena, ensuring a lively play of thought and sensation within the reader's mind. Few critics have held A Lover's Complaint in high regard, and it is only in recent years that it has been subject to enthusiastic commentary. But it uses English in typically Shakespearean ways, and often with a Shakespearean eloquence. Among the most admired lines in A Lover's Complaint are those in which the Young Woman, referring to her seducer's feigned passion, exclaims: *****
O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear!
(288-89)
Swinburne considered these "two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed us by Shakespeare." (25) Moreover, the poetic effectiveness is matched by the Shakespearean nature of the phraseology, vocabulary, and thought. Particular becomes an obsession with Shakespeare from the period of his great tragedies onward: the first fourteen plays and the two early narrative poems account for only one of sixty-four instances, but thereafter the word is associated with such memorable lines as Hamlet's "So oft it chances in particular men," Gertrude's "Why seems it so particular to thee?," Hector's "But value dwells not in particular will," Brabantio's "my particular grief / Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature," and Helena's "'Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star." (26) Further, the unusual expression "a hell of witchcraft" is paralleled in Sonnet 120's "a hell of time," which was probably written at about the same time as A Lover's Complaint, and "a hell of pain" in Troilus and Cressida, 4.1.59. And the word "orb," of which the mature Shakespeare is very fond, gives a precise visual image of the globular tear, while turning it also into a microcosm, not of a celestial body but of "hell." The Young Man's crocodile tears are at once enchanting and devilish: King Henry tells the Princess Katherine, "You have witchcraft in your lips" (Henry V, 5.2.274). The hint in A Lover's Complaint of glistening teardrop as all-reflecting concave mirror enforces the idea of the microcosm. Earlier the Woman viewed the Young Man's visage as paradise "in little"--the epitome of a beauty that is heavenly; the sight "did enchant the mind" (89-91). In hindsight, she recognizes the sinister side of her seducer's power to bewitch. The positive picture--"For on his visage was in little drawn / What largeness thinks in paradise was sawn" (90-91)--also yields convincing parallels with Shakespearean plays written around the turn of the century: "The quintessence of every sprite / Heaven would in little show" (As You Like It, 3.2.136-37), "If all the devils of hell be drawn in little" (Twelfth Night, 3.4.83-84), and "his picture in little" (Hamlet, 2.2.366).
Elliott and Valenza are right in maintaining that merely to accumulate "quirks" that a work shares with a particular writer cannot in itself establish authorship. But a presupposition in favor of Shakespeare's responsibility for A Lover's Complaint is raised by the external evidence, and the poem is extraordinarily rich in Shakespearean words, images, phrases, and ideas. Moreover the accumulation of quirks can be systematized so as to yield results that are immune from the strictures that may be directed at simple citing of parallels, as I shall show in the following section.
III
The Chadwyck-Healey electronic database "Literature Online" permits comprehensive searching of virtually all early modern drama, most poetry of the period, and a good deal of prose. (27) Through its use it is possible to determine which texts by a wide range of authors are most closely linked, through rare phrases and collocations, with a work of doubtful authorship. The technicalities have been described in full elsewhere. (28) The method has been applied to dramatic material by Dekker, Ford, Heywood, Middleton, Rowley, Shakespeare, Shirley, Webster, and Wilkins: analysis of linkages can pick out, from among several candidates, the correct author, when he is known, or, in collaborative plays, the author to whom other evidence clearly points. (29)
The investigation reported on here adopted a procedure that had been used for testing whether John Webster, James Shirley, or some other playwright was most likely to have been the author of a handwritten dramatic fragment known as the Melbourne MS. (30) A Lover's Complaint consists of forty-seven seven-line stanzas, and searching "Literature Online" for phrasal links is onerous and takes time. So samples of the poem were used: the first five stanzas, stanzas 20-24 from the middle of the play, and the last five stanzas. These fifteen stanzas were systematically checked for phrases and collocations occurring five or fewer times in dramatic works of the period 1590-1610. The total number of such works in the database that are assigned to first performances dates during these years is 269, though several of these are masques, entertainments, or pageants, rather than plays. Of the 269 works, John a Kent, dated 1589 in Annals of English Drama, (31) The Brazen Age (1611), and The Telltale (1639), may be disregarded as falling outside the 1590-1610 limits but misclassified by "Literature Online." This leaves 266 dramatic works.
The many connections that have been noted between A Lover's Complaint and Shakespeare's sonnets might conceivably (though not very plausibly) be explained by a non-Shakespearean poet's writing in deliberate response to them. (32) But we would hardly expect the mind of such a man (or woman) to be saturated with the phraseology and diction of Shakespeare's plays. If A Lover's Complaint's links with Shakespearean drama outnumber its links with the drama of other playwrights, once the amount of searchable text for various authors is taken into account, then this will constitute quite weighty evidence in favor of Thorpe's ascription of A Lover's Complain t to Shakespeare.
The actual results are listed below: (33)
double voice (3): "Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, The numbers of the feared," Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV (1597-98); "a voice ... As double as the Duke's." Shakespeare, Othello (1603-4); the only instances of the juxtaposition of "double" and "voice."
list the, meaning "listen to the" (4): Day, The Isle of Gulls (1606).
sad-tuned (4): "I'll tune a sad ... song," "sad tunes," Anon., The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey (1595); "sad tunes," Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1610).
maid full pale (5): "like a maid ... look pale," Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1598); "pale and maiden blossom," Shakespeare and others, 1 Henry VI (1592); "pale-vis-aged maids," Shakespeare, King John (1596); "maid-pale," Shakespeare, Richard II (1595).
Tearing of papers (6): "I will tear this paper," attributed to Samuel Rowley, Thomas of Woodstock (1608); "He tears the papers" stage direction, Marston, Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600); "I do tear his paper," Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590-91).
breaking rings (6): "Break, break Pandora's ring," Lyly, The Woman in the Moon (1593); "cut the wedding ring, And break it," Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (1594).
wind and rain (7): Anon., Look About You (1599); Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599-1600); Shakespeare, King Lear (1605-6).
fortified her visage from the sun (9): "To shade me from the sun," Chapman, Monsieur D'Olive (1605).
spent and done (11): "spent and past," Haughton, Grim the Collier of Croydon (1600); the only instance of "spent and" followed by another past participle.
Time had not scythed (12): "Time bears no scythe," Chapman, The Widow's Tears (1604); the only instance of "Time" near "scythe" or its derivatives.
spite of heaven's fell rage (13): "spite of heaven," Chapman, Caesar and Pompey (1605); Anon., attributed to Greene, Selimus (1592); "fell rage," Marston, Antonio and Mellida (1599).
Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age (14): "let her beauty Look through a casement," Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1610); the only example of "beauty" looking or peeping "through" something.
seared age (14): "My way of life Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf ... old age," Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606); "sere age," Jonson, The Entertainment of King James and Queen Anne at Theobalds (1607); "sear" and "sere" are spelling variants.
Oft did she (15): Heywood, The Golden Age (1610).
Napkin ... to her eyne ... tears (15-18): "Thy napkin cannot drink a tear," Shakespeare and Peele, Titus Andronicus (1592); "His napkin with her true tears all bewet"; Shakespeare and Peele, Titus Andronicus (1592); "to dry his cheeks, A napkin," Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI (1591); instances of a napkin wiping a brow in Hamlet and Othello have been omitted as less closely parallel.
the brine That seasoned woe had pelleted in tears (17-18): "tears. 'Tis the best brine a maiden can season her praise in," Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1604-5); "By the discandying of this pelleted storm," where the pellets are hailstones, Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606); only in A Lover's Complaint and Antony and Cleopatra are pellets formed of water.
reading what contents it bears (19): "read the contents," Jonson, Every Man in His Humour (1598); Marston and Barkstead, The Insatiate Countess (1607); "they read ... those contents," Shakespeare, King Lear (1605-6); "the plain contents they bear," Chapman, The Gentleman Usher (1602).
shrieking undistinguished woe (20): "undistinguished sound," Heywood, The Golden Age (1610); the only instance of "undistinguished" referring to sound.
clamours of all size both high and low (21): "songs of all sizes," Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (1609); "sing both high and low," Twelfth Night (1601); the only instances of "size" and "both high and low" connected with sounds.
levelled eyes (22): "eyes to take level," Lyly, Love's Metamorphosis (1590); "The mark his eye doth level at," Shakespeare and Wilkins, Pericles (1607), in 1.2, attributed to Wilkins.
eyes ... diverted (22-24): "divert your eye," Chapman, The Widow's Tears (1604); "divert mine eyes," Jonson, The Poetaster (1601).
eyes ... their poor balls (22-24): "O, were mine eye-balls into bullets turned," Shakespeare and others, I Henry VI (1592); the only instance of eye-balls associated with missiles: the imagery of A Lover's Complaint links eye-balls to canon balls.
to the spheres (23): Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604).
orbed earth (25): "orbed ground," Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-1).
right on, meaning "directly on" (26): Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599).
hair ... nor tied in formal plat (29): "plat ... your hair," Marston, Histriomastix (1599).
hair ... descended her sheaved hat (29-31): "every hair a sheaf [Q "sheave"] shall be," Peele, The Old Wives Tale (1593).
still did bide (33): "bides still," Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (1594).
goodly objects (137): "goodliest objects," Tomkis, Lingua (1607).
in ... to bestow them (139): Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1604-5).
gouty landlord which doth owe them, meaning that he "owns" "lands and mansions" (140): "gouty keepers" (of gold), Shakespeare and Middleton, Timon of Athens (1605).
mistress of his heart (142): "mistress of my heart," Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1590-91); Peele, The Old Wives Tale (1593) twice; "mistress of your heart," Greene, James IV (1590); Anon., Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter (1590).
My woeful self (143): Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (1594-95).
My ... self that ... was my own fee-simple (143-44): "that are mine own fee-simple," Anon., 1 The Return from Parnassus (1600).
in freedom (143): Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607); Heywood, 1 The Fair Maid of the West (1604).
What with his (145): Anon., Fair Era, the Miller's Daughter (1590); Haughton, Englishmen for My Money (1598).
Yet did I (148): Chapman, Monsieur D'Olive (1605); Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI (1591); Alexander, Julius Caesar (1607).
Demand of him (149): Anon, Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596); Shakespeare, Ali's Well That Ends Well (1604-5) twice; Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1596-97).
new bleeding (153): "a letter ... new bleeding from their pens," Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (1606); "bleeding new," Heywood, The Golden Age (1610); Shakespeare and Middleton, Timon of Athens (1605), in 1.2, attributed to Middleton.
by precedent (155): "by precedent," Elizabeth Cary, Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry (1604).
herself assay (156): Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (1603).
examples 'gainst (157): "examples ... 'gainst," Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk (1610).
her own content (157): Anon., The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1602); Barry, Ram Alley (1608); Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1598).
by-passed (158): Alexander, The Alexandraean Tragedy (1607).
is often seen (160): Dekker and Webster, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1602).
By blunting us to make our wits more keen (161): "blunt his keen edge," Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607); "more keen," Anon., The Fair Maid of Bristow (1604); "keen ... wits," Shakespeare, Richard III (1592-93).
Nor gives it satisfaction to our blood That we must curb it upon others' proof (162-63): "his headstrong riot hath no curb, When rage and hot blood are his counsellors," Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV (1596-97); the only instance of curbing associated with blood.
must curb (163): Chettle, Dekker, and Haughton, Patient Grissel (1600); Chettle and Munday, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598).
For fear of harms (165): "for fear of harm," Anon., The Taming of a Shrew (1592).
appetite ... a palate hath that needs will taste (166-67): "To please the palate of my appetite," Shakespeare, Othello (1603-4); "their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate," Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1601); "When divers cates the palate's sense delight And with fresh taste creates new appetite," Marston, What You Will (1601); "The taste whereof in him so soothes his palate And takes up all his appetite," Chapman, Byron's Conspiracy (1608); "pallate" near "taste" is common in Shakespeare.
It is thy last (168): Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (1609).
but an art of craft (295): "honesty is but an art to seem so," Marston, The Malcontent (1604); the only other instance of "but an art," in Chapman's The Revenge of Bussy, expresses a quite different idea and so is discounted.
resolved my reason into tears ... All melting, though our drops this difference bore: His poisoned me, and mine did him restore (296-300): "resolves ... into salt tears," Shakespeare and Middleton, Timon of Athens (1605); "melt ... and resolve ... into a dew," Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-1601); "of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum," Shakespeare, Othello (1603-4); "restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips ... Be your tears wet? ... If you have poison for me, I will drink it," Shakespeare, King Lear (1605-6); Hamlet links melting and the verb "resolve"; in Othello, as in the poem, tears, melting, and drops are associated with medicine or a restorative; King Lear, like the poem, links tears, restoration, and poison.
white stole of chastity (297): "Chastity all in white," Anon., A Warning for Fair Women (1599); the only instance of chastity dressed in white.
Shook off my sober guards and civil fears (298): "civil night ... sober-suited matron all in black," Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1595); "a civil suit ... a sober beast," Dekker and Webster, Northward Ho (1605); the Shakespeare parallel shares with the poem not only the collocation of "sober" and "civil" but the suggestion of chastity.
as he to me (299): Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595).
strange forms (303): Daniel, Cleopatra (1593); Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606).
sounding paleness, where "sounding" is a variant of "swooning" (305): "he'll swoon [Q sound] ... Why look you pale?," Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (1594-95); the only linking of swooning (sounding) with pallor.
as it best (306): Anon., Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596).
To blush at (307): Heywood, Fortune by Land and Sea (1609); Anon., Lust's Dominion (1600).
weep at woes (307): "weeping at woes," Shakespeare and Peele, Titus Andronicus (1592).
turn white (308): Middleton, The Reyenger's Tragedy (1606); Barry, The Family of Love (1603); Shakespeare, Henry V (1598-99).
sound at, meaning "swoon at" (308): Heywood, How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602).
tragic shows (308): "tragic show," attributed to Dekker, The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602).
fair nature (311): Shakespeare, Henry V (1598-99); Mary Sidney Herbert, Antonius (1590); Marston, The Malcontent (1604); Daniel, The Queen's Arcadia (1605); Barnes, The Devil's Charter (1606).
preached pure maid (315): "Speak ... true maid," Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599-1600).
cold chastity (315): "Cold, cold ... like thy chastity," Shakespeare, Othello (1603-4); "Chastity ... lies a-cold," Middleton, The Reyenger's Tragedy (1606); "the cold of her chastity," Jonson, Cynthia's revels (1600); "cold ... chastity," Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess (1608).
like a cherubim (319): "like a cherubin," Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour (1599); Q of A Lover's Complaint reads "cherubin."
cherubim above them hovered (319): "cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air," Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606).
young and simple (320): "a simple young man," Middleton, The Puritan (1606); "young man.., very simple," Anon. Wily Beguiled (1602).
I ... do question make (321): "I question make," Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1596-97).
What I should do (322): Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1596-97).
moisture of his eye (323): "moisture in their eyes," Wilkins, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1606).
in his cheek so glowed (324): "My cheeks do glow," Chettle and Dekker, Patient Grissel (1600); "cheeks ... glowing," Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (1606); "glowing cheeks," Marston, The Fawn (1605); "glows upon my cheek," Shakespeare and Wilkins, Pericles (1607).
forced thunder (325): "makes forced heavens quake And thunder," Marston, Sophonisba (1605); the closest parallel.
No doubt some pertinent data have been omitted from the above list through accident or inadvertence, but searching was methodical and without any conscious bias. The searches turned up three links with plays to which the Annals of English Drama assigns dates outside the 1590-1610 limits: these were eliminated. In collecting the rare phrases and collocations, similarity of thought, without verbal agreement or the shared use of at least one striking word or idiom, was ignored. (34) Correspondences that were fuller or more exact normally ousted less exact ones from the list. Single-word links were included only if they were hyphenated compounds. Titus and Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, Timon of Athens, and Pericles are regarded as collaborations, but in the computations that follow they count as Shakespeare plays: there are only two links with non-Shakespearean scenes (one with Timon of Athens and one with Pericles) and these are omitted from the tally of links to Shakespeare. (35)
There are fifty-three links to Shakespeare, eight to Marston, eight to Chapman, six to Heywood, and six to Jonson. Of course the period 1590-1610 covers most of Shakespeare's highly productive playwrighting career. Of his plays, only The Tempest and the collaborations with Fletcher, All Is True, or Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, fall outside this period, so that thirty-five Shakespeare plays have been searched. However, since the database for 1590-1610 includes fourteen dramatic works by Chapman, eight by Marston, fifteen by Heywood, and twenty-one by Jonson (though many of Jonson's are masques and entertainments), even when authorial links are reckoned in proportion to the number of each playwright's searched plays, Shakespeare (with 1.5 links per play) is far ahead of the playwrights whose scores on the raw figures come closest to his: Marston leads the chase with 0.8, with Chapman (0.6), Heywood (0.4), and Jonson (0.3) following. (36) These are the only playwrights to display five or more links to the fifteen stanzas of A Lover's Complaint. Between them Chapman, Marston, Heywood, and Jonson have a total of twenty-eight links from sixty dramatic works, compared to Shakespeare's fifty-three from thirty-five. And in fact all 231 non-Shakespearean works yield only eighty-two links, just slightly over 50 percent more than Shakespeare's thirty-five. Moreover, only four of Shakespeare's thirty-five plays fail to provide at least one link, whereas 162 of the 231 non-Shakespearean plays provide no links. Links to Shakespeare predominate in each of the three sets of five stanzas, whereas links to Chapman, for example, though quite frequent in the opening stanzas, disappear completely from the last five.
It is unlikely that some dramatist who wrote only one or two plays during the relevant period was responsible for A Lover's Complaint, since even in terms of links to single plays Shakespeare outstrips all rival candidates. Only three non-Shakespearean plays have as many as three links: Heywood's The Golden Age, Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, and Peele's The Old Wives Tale. Shakespeare has two plays with four links, Othello and Ali's Well That Ends Well.
Almost as significant as the unequaled proportion of links to Shakespeare's plays is the chronological distribution of links. (37) If Shakespeare's plays are arranged in chronological order, according to the Oxford Shakespeare's Textual Companion, and each of the links to Shakespeare is marked against the appropriate play, those two plays with the greatest number of links, namely Othello and All's Well That Ends Well with four each, can be seen to be consecutive, and they are immediately followed by two plays with three links each, Timon of Athens and King Lear. So this tight group of four Shakespeare plays, dated 1603-4 to 1606, affords fourteen links, many more than any other group of four plays.
The only other Shakespeare plays with three links are Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice. An interesting point about the Titus Andronicus links is that they are all to 3.2, the "fly scene," which was absent from the quarto of 1594 and first appeared in the First Folio of 1623, and so has usually been considered a later addition to the play.
No less remarkable than the chronological distribution of A Lover's Complaint's links to Shakespeare's plays is the chronological distribution of links to the non-Shakespearean plays. A table may easily be drawn up showing the number of links for each of the twenty-one years from 1590 to 1610. The years with the highest tally are 1604 and 1606, each with eight, and since 1605 and 1607 each have seven (the only other year with as many as seven being 1600), the number of links peaks markedly (at 30) within the period 1604-1607, which closely matches the results from the Shakespeare plays. The first eight years, 1590-1597 have only fifteen links, and so average 1.9; the last thirteen years have sixty-seven, and so average 5.2.
These results are very like those of the similar test (mentioned above) of I. A. Shapiro's theory that the Melbourne MS, containing part of a scene from an evidently seventeenth-century tragedy, represents a discarded early autograph draft of James Shirley's The Traitor (1631), rather than a fragmentary composition by John Webster datable to 1606-1609. An inventory, compiled with the aid of "Literature Online," of phrases and collocations linking the MS to five or fewer plays of the period 1600-1640 showed not only that links to Shirley's plays were disproportionately numerous but also that the number of links to all plays reached a decided peak within the years 1631-1635, the period within which The Traitor was first performed and printed. Two features of rare phrases and collocations seem clear: (a) they tend to be "in the air" during particular stretches of time; and (b) they tend, rather strongly, to associate works by the same author.
The provisional conclusions to be drawn from the present investigation are, therefore, that Shakespeare was the author of A Lover's Complaint and that he most probably wrote it within the period 1603-1607, which might reasonably be narrowed to 1604-1606. This is what, forty years ago, analysis of vocabulary also suggested. Might some unidentified poet have composed a poem in which phrasal links to plays of 1590-1610 are so overwhelmingly with Shakespeare, and done so in a complaint that was not only printed in the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets with an explicit attribution to Shakespeare but can also be seen as completing the structure of the whole volume? The possibility strikes me as remote in the extreme. No doubt A Lover's Complaint is stylistically freakish in certain respects. J. M. Mackail sensed a "cramped, gritty, discontinuous quality" in the writing, "a certain stiffness, tortuousness, or cumbrousness ... a forcing of phrase." (38) But "an almost violent forcing of the expression" that is "odd and idiosyncratic" has also been identified in such late plays as Cymbeline, and G. K. Hunter described the "characteristic verse of All's Well" as "laboured and complex, but not rich ... contorted, ingrown, unfunctional." (39) And All's Well and Cymbeline are among the plays most closely tied to A Lover's Complaint in vocabulary, imagery, and phraseology. At its best, A Lover's Complaint is, like them, very fine. Unless there can be found some alternative candidate whose work shows even more points of contact with the poem than does Shakespeare's, Thorpe's unambiguous ascription should stand. (40)
Notes
(1.) Kenneth Muir, "'A Lover's Complaint': A Reconsideration," in Edward A. Bloom (ed.), Shakespeare 1564-1964 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), 154-66; reprinted in Muir's Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies (London: Heinemann, 1973), 204-19; MacD. P. Jackson, Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint": Its Date and Authenticity, University of Auckland Bulletin 72, English Series 13 (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1965).
(2.) Roger Warren, "'A Lover's Complaint,' 'Ali's Well,' and The Sonnets," Notes and Queries 215 (1970): 130-32; A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, "Shakespeare's Rare Words: 'Lover's Complaint,' Cymbeline, and Sonnets," Notes and Queries 232 (1987): 219-24. Among the more significant editions are John Kerrigan (ed.), The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Nelson, 1997); John Rowe (ed.), The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). I quote A Lover's Complaint from Burrow's edition. Throughout this article other Shakespeare works are cited from The Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, (gen. eds.) (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986).
(3.) In their editions, as in the previous note and also in Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Was the 1609 Shake-speare's Sonnets Really Unauthorized?" Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 151-71; and John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and "Female Complaint": A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Editors Rowe and Burrow agree with Duncan-Jones and Kerrigan.
(4.) Jennifer Laws, "The Generic Complexities of A Lover's Complaint and its Relationship to the Sonnets in Shakespeare's 1609 Volume," AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 89 (1998): 79-97; MacD. P. Jackson, "Aspects of Organisation in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Parergon 17 (1999): 109-34; Ilona Bell, "'That which thou hast done': Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint," in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 455-74; Katherine A. Craik, "Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession," Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 437-59. For further arguments for the authenticity of the 1609 quarto's ordering of sonnets, see MacD. P. Jackson, "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Rhyme and Reason in the Dark Lady Series," Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 219-22; "The Distribution of Pronouns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 97 (2002): 22-38.
(5.) Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants," Computers and the Humanities 30 (1996): 191-245; "Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 177-207.
(6.) For a history of, and verdict on, the controversy over A Funeral Elegy see Brian Vickers, 'Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "'Funerall Elegye" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(7.) Elliott and Valenza, "Glass Slippers," 197.
(8.) See Elliott and Valenza's full tables in "And Then There Were None," especially 237 and 241. Sonnet 145, in tetrameters is rightly ignored, but (a matter of no practical consequence) the figures given overlook the fact that Sonnet 99 has fifteen lines and Sonnet 126 twelve. For the dating of Shakespeare's Sonnets, see MacD. P. Jackson, "Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 59-75; "Rhymes in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition," Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 213-19; "Dating Shakespeare's Sonnets: Some Old Evidence Revisited," Notes and Queries 247 (2002): 237-41.
(9.) See Elliott and Valenza, "And Then There Were None," appendix 4 for A Lover's Complaint and appendix 5 for poems by other poets (237-40). However, some figures are corrected in Elliott and Valenza, "The Professor Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Problems with the Foster 'Response,'" Computers and the Humanities, 32 (1999), 425-90; two more that in "And Then There Were None" are lower than that for A Lover's Complaint are raised: 46 for a sample from Aurora (1604) becomes 380 and 93 for a sample from a translation by Queen Elizabeth (1598) becomes 152. And the ratio for A Lover's Complaint rises from 111 to 120.
(10.) Elliott and Valenza, "Glass Slippers," 191.
(11.) Elliott and Valenza's computer program defines words as graphic units, so that "religion's" (the possessive) becomes a different word from "religion" and "murm'ring" from "murmuring." Jackson in Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint" followed Alfred Hart in differentiating between meanings but treating different inflexions and metrical forms as belonging to the same word. See section II below.
(12.) Jackson, Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint," 12. In an e-mail sent me 17 July 2003, Ward Elliott reported that a new recent count of "new words" (which I call "once-used words") according to the definition used for his and Valenza's tests put A Lover's Complaint at 86, rather than the previously counted 88, and so "just inside our Shakespeare profile," But a further recount restored the figure of "88 new words and a narrow rejection" (22 September 2003). I am extremely grateful to Professor Elliott for clarifications of the Clinic's procedures.
(13.) Marina Tarlinskaja's "The Verse of A Lover's Complaint: Not Shakespeare" is forthcoming in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship, ed. Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses). The same volume contains a restatement by Elliott and Valenza of their case against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint. But even since these forthcoming articles were completed, "new enclitic and proclitic counts" by Tarlinskaja have altered Elliott and Valenza's "Shakespeare range minima from 43/365 to 27/265, both more favorable than the old ones to a Shakespeare ascription" for A Lover's Complaint. Its proclitic rate of 267 is within the new Shakespeare range, though its enclitic rate of 12 remains anomalous. (Quotation and new data from Elliott, private e-mail, 17 July 2003.)
(14.) Elliott and Valenza, "Glass Slippers," 183.
(15.) For this "regression effect," whereby discriminators are apt to lose some of their original potency when applied to a new set of data, see Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 200.
(16.) As Katherine Duncan-Jones argued in her article cited in n. 3.
(17.) The tendency for rare words to link Shakespearean works most closely to others of approximately the same date has since been demonstrated decisively by Eliot Slater, The Problem of "The Reign of King Edward III": A Statistical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
(18.) Alfred Hart, "Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen," Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 274-87; Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1934); "Vocabularies of Shakespeare's Plays," Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 128-40; "The Growth of Shakespeare's Vocabulary," Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 242-54.
(19.) For The Shadow of the Night I have used Phyllis Brooks Bartlett's edition of Chapman's Poems (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962).
(20.) The data collected by Elliott and Valenza are helping fill these gaps in our knowledge, but they tell us nothing about non-Shakespeare writers' rate of use of OED first citations, or about their use of rare words when these are differentiated according to meanings, rather than according to graphic presentation. But see Jurgen Schafer, Documentation and the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
(21.) J. W. Mackail, "A Lover's Complaint," Essays and Studies 3 (1912): 51-70, at 65.
(22.) Mackail, "Complaint" 65.
(23.) I quote the listed words (from Burrow's edition) in the inflexions they have in A Lover's Complaint. Dates for Shakespeare's works are, as throughout this article, those of the Oxford chronology, as in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 109-34.
(24.) Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963, commentary on 3.1.19.
(25.) A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879; repr. Heinemann, 1918), 61-62.
(26.) Hamlet, Additional passages B, line 7; 1.2.75; Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.52; Othello, 1.3.55-56; All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1.84-85.
(27.) The website is <http://80-lion.chadwyck.co.uk>.
(28.) MacD. P. Jackson, "Determining Authorship: A New Technique," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 1-14; Defining Shakespeare: "Pericles" as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 190-215.
(29.) MacD. P. Jackson, "Late Webster and his Collaborators: How Many Playwrights Wrote A Cure for a Cuckold?," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 95 (2001): 295-313; Gary Taylor, "Middleton and Rowley--and Heywood: The Old Law and New Attribution Technologies," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 96 (2002): 165-217; "Appendix: The Authorship of [Anything for a Quiet Life] IV.ii.1-44," in The Works of John Webster, volume 3, ed. David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson (forthcoming); Gary Taylor and MacD. P. Jackson, "Thomas Middleton and The Spanish Gypsy: Protocols for Attribution in Cases of Multiple Collaborators" (forthcoming).
(30.) MacD. P. Jackson, "John Webster, James Shirley, and the Melbourne Manuscript" (forthcoming). The fullest previous discussion of the manuscript is Antony Hammond and Doreen DelVecchio, "The Melbourne Manuscript and John Webster: A Reproduction and Transcript," Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 1-32.
(31.) Alfred Harbage, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. S. Wagonheim, Annals of English Drama 975-1642 (London and New York: Methuen, 1989); all dates that I give for dramatic works other than Shakespeare's are those of Annals, except in two cases: Peele's The Old Wives Tale is dated as in the chronological table in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, repr. 1997), 419-42, which is based on the Annals, but with a few adjustment; and the anonymous Woodstock is redated 1608, in accord with the findings of MacD. P. Jackson, "Shakespeare's Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2002): 17-65, which gives grounds for attributing the play to Samuel Rowley.
(32.) The commentaries on A Lover's Complaint in the editions listed in n. 2 above, and that of Burrow in particular, note many of the verbal connections between the poem and the Sonnets.
(33.) Texts are quoted from "Literature Online" but modernized, with modernization of passages from Shakespeare conforming to the Oxford Complete Works. Searches were conducted July 2003.
(34.) This rule disallowed some striking parallels with Shakespeare. For example, the Young Woman's napkin "Which on it had conceited characters" and "silken figures" (16-17) is strongly reminiscent of Desdemona's handkerchief, which is also made of silk (Othello, 3.4.73) and is embroidered "with strawberries" (3.3.440). But no single passage in the play brings together two or more of the words describing the napkin in A Lover's Complaint.
(35.) The Oxford Textual Companion's allocations to collaborators were accepted, except that Peele's hand in Titus Andronicus is regarded as now established: see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 148-243.
(36.) The totals for numbers of plays by different authors are for plays of single authorship only.
(37.) In these chronological computation the links to Middleton's portion of Timon of Athens and Wilkins's of Pericles are included, giving 55 links altogether.
(38.) Mackail, "Complaint" 60-63.
(39.) James Sutherland, "The Language of the Last Plays," in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London: Longmans: 1959), 145,148; G. K. Hunter (ed.), Ali's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959, repr. 1967), lvi.
(40.) On Elliott and Valenza's tests Chapman, the only other poet whose candidacy had been put forward, "seems an even less likely author than Shakespeare." "Glass Slippers," 200. Since this article was copyedited, Brian Vickers has proposed John Davies of Hereford as author of the poem: "A rum 'do': The likely authorship of 'A Lover's Complaint'," Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 2003, 13-15.
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| Author: | Jackson, MacD.P. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Shakespeare Studies |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2004 |
| Words: | 10874 |
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