A Lover's Complaint
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A Lover's Complaint is the title of a narrative poem that was published together with William Shakespeare's Sonnets in the original Quarto Edition of 1609 and that has therefore been considered a constituent part of the collection more or less ever since; not, though, without some – for Shakespeare's works almost obligatory – scholarly dispute.
The poem contains 47 stanzas composed in rhyme royal, a verse form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer – so a good two hundred years before Shakespeare –which consists of seven lines per stanza, usually in iambic pentameter, much like Shakespeare's plays and the sonnets, but with a different rhyme scheme. The poem is thus distinct from the sonnets in form as well as in content. It tells the story of a young woman who sits by a river bank, tearing up letters and poems she has received from a dashing young man. Together with many tokens of love – jewellery, trinkets, precious stones – she throws these papers into the river. An elderly country gentleman notices her and approaches her to ask her the cause of her woes, in response to which she tells him how, unlike many other young women, she had resisted the charms and advances of this young man who himself had boasted to her of his many conquests in love, including that of a nun who abandoned her calling to be with him. Tearfully, she recalls how he tearfully entreated her to take pity on him and accept him since she was his only true love. This, she tells the old man, she did, only to be betrayed by him like all the others, whence now of course her sorrow. In a surprising twist at the very end though, she also tells him that given the exact same situation, and now knowing everything she knows from painful experience, she would do exactly the same again and once more give in to this young man. A Lover's Complaint on the one hand follows, on the other hand entirely departs from, the tradition of the poetic Complaint that had been in fashion much as the sonnet had been roughly ten to fifteen years earlier. Other sonnet series by other poets conclude with a Complaint voiced by a young woman, among them most prominently Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond which comes with his sonnet sequence Delia, published in 1592, but also Thomas Lodge's Complaint of Elstred, with his Phillis, in 1593, Michael Drayton's, Matilda the Fair, with his Ideas Mirror in 1594, and Richard Barnfield's Cassandra, with The Affectionate Shepherd in 1595. In other words, William Shakespeare, as we noted when discussing Sonnets 153 and 154, follows a then perfectly well established tradition by closing his collection with a Complaint. Where he departs from this tradition and finds intriguing layers of storytelling and therefore potential meaning is in the surprising twist at the end, and in the curiously distancing structure of his poem. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who opens by setting the scene and describes how he is drawn towards it by hearing the voice of the young woman echoing through the valley. He sees her from afar and lies down to observe her in her woeful act of relinquishing to the river the testaments of love she'd been given, when he notes a "reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh" who also had become aware of the young woman and who now actually approaches her to ask her the reason for her distress. Noteworthy at this point is that the older man does so "privileged by age," meaning that his age gives him enough authority and credibility not to be seen as another wooer or as someone who is trying to take advantage of the woman's vulnerable condition, and that the narrator of the story, though keeping his distance, is close by enough to hear every word of the conversation that now ensues. After ten stanzas in the voice of the narrator, we now hear the young woman speak as she confides in great detail how she was attracted to, but ever resisted being drawn into the orbit of, this beautiful, charming, intelligent, strong, skilful, educated young man. This takes up the next 15 stanzas, by which time we get a fairly good idea of how attractive he is, but also how aware he himself is of this, and how he has seduced or charmed many others. The young woman now quotes the young man, and so for the next 15 stanzas we actually hear him speak to her, and witness his wooing technique, which entails freely admitting to his many sexual adventures and now handing over to the young woman gifts and tokens of affection he himself had received from other women, including those of a nun who had rejected the offers of marriage from many high ranking courtiers, but at the last fell for him too. The young woman, he argues towards her, was even stronger in her resistance to him than a woman who had dedicated her life to God, and this made her the most worthy and desirable of them all, and so he now implores her to accept him. For the remaining seven stanzas the young woman reverts to her own voice and relates to the old man, who has effectively become her confessor, that, moved by the young man's tears, she then gave in to him. In the remarkable last stanza she exclaims 'O!' five times, listing all the young man's deceptive wiles, his poisonous tears, his fake passion, his empty gestures, and then, in a twist that startles our eyes and ears, concludes that all of this "Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, And new pervert a reconciled maid." In other words: I'd fall for him allover again. Much has rightly been made of this, since it presents us with a young man who is so magnetic, so lovely, so roundly gorgeous and irresistible, that all the pain of betrayal and loss of dignity and – so the implication – fall from social grace he causes is worth it, just for the pleasure and delight of having been with him. Which of course immediately begs the question: what, then, brings this on? Whom and what is William Shakespeare here talking about, and why? That it is William Shakespeare who wrote A Lover's Complaint is now once again mostly accepted as certain. It had never really been questioned until the beginning of the 20th century when some scholars started to argue that the style and the vocabulary were too elaborate, in places too clumsy, in places too 'Latinate' and laboured to be Shakespeare's. This by the end of the 20th century had been more or less refuted by statistical analysis and stylometric examination of the text, and the debate had been declared effectively closed, only for it to be reopened again by Professor Brian Vickers, a Shakespeare scholar at ETH Zurich and a fellow of the British Academy, who in 2007 published a book that argues A Lover's Complaint must be the work of a man called John Davies of Hereford. It is not a view that has taken hold though, and other scholars – including Macdonald P Jackson who has done extensive analysis of Shakespeare's works have been critical of Vickers's methodology, and so today there is now a fairly broad consensus again that the work is indeed Shakespeare's. Macdonal P Jackson, incidentally, is someone we have mentioned on a number of occasions on this podcast and will revisit once more when looking more closely at the dating of the sonnets. Assuming then this to be so, that William Shakespeare is indeed the author of A Lover's Complaint, the parallel between the young man in the poem and the young man of the sonnets is immediately obvious and striking. The way the young woman talks about him in many ways matches the way Shakespeare describes his young lover, and this then yields a new, or rather an already extant but now newly acute conundrum: The 'lover' in any poem called A Lover's Complaint, would ordinarily be the person who complains. This here is not entirely impossible, since 'lover' is a term that was also used for women. But rarely. At the end of As You Like It, Act V, Scene 2, Rosalind, still dressed as a young man, sees Silvius and Phoebe approach and says, "Look, here comes a lover of mine and a lover of hers," clearly referring to him and to her as 'lover'. But the scene, as the whole play, is so charged with sexual ambiguity and the context one of Rosalind, as Ganymede, promising to sort everything out by the morrow, that it can hardly be seen as typical usage. In A Lover's Complaint the person we would most readily identify as a 'lover' is the young man, and so it could be argued, of course, that this is not the complaint of a lover – though that, admitting the applicability of the word 'lover' to a woman as well – but primarily a complaint about a lover. This also would be unusual and it also would draw attention to itself for being so. And for this, it could also be considered clumsy poetising. Unless, of course, William Shakespeare, who is by the time the collection gets published the principal poetic playwright of the English language, knows what he's doing and constructs a slightly elaborate but for that no less effective device of framing the complaint with an unnamed speaker who then disappears from sight and mind. The unnamed speaker in the first person of a poem is usually assumed to be the poet, and so our very first thought would ordinarily be: it is the poet who is the lover and whose complaint we are about to hear. Not so. He relates how a young woman relates her complaint to an old man. But the complaint is about a lover just like the lover of Shakespeare, the poet and first speaker. So it is not altogether adventurous to surmise that William Shakespeare is really the lover whose complaint we are hearing through the voice of an innocent maid – an ideal – who, however, far from regretting what she has done comes to the unconventional conclusion: he was worth it. It'd do it all again. It's a sentiment entirely congruent with our Will, who in nothing, of course, bears any resemblance to the young woman other than in his persistent love for a young man whose many faults and deceptions and petulances and demands he is fully aware of. What the poem leaves entirely unanswered, because entirely unasked, is what role, if any, William Shakespeare's mistress, the Dark Lady, plays in all this. None of the characters in the poem resemble her, and no link can be drawn from A Lover's Complaint to her, at all. The coda to the collection makes no reference to her. And this perhaps – but 'perhaps' here as so often is an operative qualifier – points towards something the collection itself seems to suggest by its very composition, which is entirely unbalanced: namely, that the person who truly matters is the Fair Youth. Out of the 154 sonnets, 126 either directly, or indirectly address, or are written about or composed in the context of, a young man. You will hear people argue that only a small number of them make it explicit that they are written to or about a man and therefore purportedly "could be addressed to either a male or female" as one particular edition puts it, though it is a contention that crops up every so often here and there. All you need to do though is read them in context and you realise that the majority of the sonnets in this are clearly and obviously and unambiguously to or about a man. And the sonnets themselves make it beyond question clear that Shakespeare writes many, many sonnets to the same young man. Sonnet 76, halfway through the series asks the question "Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change?" And answers it directly: "O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument;" and with this, I rest my case. Whether this young man is real or not may be another question and it's one we've dealt with in detail in the special episode dedicated to him – to my mind he as good as certain is– but The Fair Youth is not a phantasm, he is very much the lead figure of the first 126 sonnets. 25 of the poems only are either directly addressed to, or written about, the Dark Lady, and here much the same applies: you will come across all kinds of arguments that these may be different mistresses or that some of these poems may not be addressed to or about a woman at all, but no sooner do you look at them as a coherent group and in context than you find that that is basically nonsense. And so roughly 16% of the sonnets relate to the mistress, the Dark Lady. One poem only, Sonnet 145, deviates from all the others by being written in iambic tetrameter, meaning that its lines contain eight syllables instead of the usual ten or eleven of an iambic pentameter, and there is a broad consensus nowadays that it refers not to the Dark Lady but to Anne, Shakespeare's wife. And then there are the two allegorical poems at the end, which, as we saw when discussing them, fulfil much of the function of what in other collections is either an anacreontic poem or an ode to pave the way for the Complaint. Clearly the great majority of the poems concern themselves with this Fair Youth, and bearing in mind the emotional as well as sexual journey the relationship goes through over several years, and the note on which it 'ends' which is with two unspoken, unread, because unwritten, lines that are deliberately kept absent from Sonnet 126, it may not need to surprise us that this end piece of the collection brings us back to him, not to the Dark Lady. Where by we also want to bear in mind always, of course, as we have mentioned on several occasions, that the Dark Lady Sonnets overlap with the Fair Youth Sonnets, in other words, chronologically they don't sit after the Fair Youth Sonnets, but run concurrently wi Does this mean the Dark Lady is insignificant? Far from it, she clearly matters greatly to William Shakespeare, otherwise the poems concerning her would not exist. But A Lover's Complaint appears to confirm what Sonnets 110 and 116 strongly suggest: in the young man, William Shakespeare has found "A god in love, to whom I am confined," one with whom he considers himself in "a marriage of true minds," and to this he will not "admit impediments." The young lover for William Shakespeare, much as the young lover for the maid in A Lover's Complaint, has a lot to answer for, but much as for the maid, for our Will he is also worth every bit the trouble he be. And that leads me to conclude, and to concur with those who similarly suggest, that the lover in A Lover's Complaint is really William Shakespeare. |
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From off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistring 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. Upon her head a platted hive of straw, Which fortified her visage from the sun, Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw The carcass of a beauty spent and done; Time had not scythed all that youth begun, Nor youth all quit, but spite of heaven’s fell rage Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age. Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne, Which on it had conceited characters, Laundering the silken figures in the brine That seasoned woe had pelleted in tears, And often reading what contents it bears; As often shrieking undistinguished woe, In clamours of all size, both high and low. Sometimes her levelled eyes their carriage ride, As they did battery to the spheres intend; Sometime diverted their poor balls are tied To th’orbed earth; sometimes they do extend Their view right on; anon their gazes lend To every place at once, and nowhere fixed, The mind and sight distractedly commixed. Her hair, nor loose nor tied in formal plat, Proclaimed in her a careless hand of pride; For some untucked descended her sheaved hat, Hanging her pale and pined cheek beside; Some in her threaden fillet still did bide, And, true to bondage, would not break from thence, Though slackly braided in loose negligence. 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 lets not bounty fall Where want cries ‘some’, but where excess begs ‘all’. 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 sepulchres in mud; Found yet mo letters sadly penned in blood, With sleided silk, feat and affectedly Enswathed, and sealed to curious secrecy. These often bathed she in her fluxive eyes, And often kissed, and often gave to tear; Cried, ‘O false blood, thou register of lies, What unapproved witness dost thou bear! Ink would have seemed more black and damned here!’ This said, in top of rage the lines she rents, Big discontent so breaking their contents. 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 observed as they flew, Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew; And, privileged by age, desires to know In brief the grounds and motives of her woe. So slides he down upon his grained bat, And comely distant sits he by her side, When he again desires her, being sat, Her grievance with his hearing to divide: If that from him there may be aught applied Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage, ’Tis promised in the charity of age. ‘Father,’ she says, ‘though in me you behold The injury of many a blasting hour, Let it not tell your judgement I am old, Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power. 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. ‘But woe is me! Too early I attended A youthful suit; it was to gain my grace; O one by nature’s outwards so commended, That maiden’s eyes stuck over all his face, Love lacked a dwelling and made him her place; And when in his fair parts she did abide, She was new lodged and newly deified. ‘His browny locks did hang in crooked curls, And every light occasion of the wind Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls, What’s sweet to do, to do will aptly find, Each eye that saw him did enchant the mind: For on his visage was in little drawn, What largeness thinks in paradise was sawn. ‘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. ‘His qualities were beauteous as his form, For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free; Yet if men moved him, was he such a storm As oft twixt May and April is to see, When winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be. His rudeness so with his authorised youth Did livery falseness in a pride of truth. ‘Well could he ride, and often men would say That horse his mettle from his rider takes, Proud of subjection, noble by the sway, What rounds, what bounds, what course, what stop he makes! And controversy hence a question takes, Whether the horse by him became his deed, Or he his manage by th’well-doing steed. ‘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. ‘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, ‘That he did in the general bosom reign Of young, of 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. ‘Many there were that did his picture get To serve their eyes, and in it put their mind, Like fools that in th’imagination set The goodly objects which abroad they find Of lands and mansions, theirs in thought assigned, And labouring in moe pleasures to bestow them, Than the true gouty landlord which doth owe them. ‘So many have, that never touched his hand, Sweetly supposed them mistress of his heart. My woeful self that did in freedom stand, And was my own fee-simple (not in part) 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. ‘Yet did I not, as some my equals did, Demand of him, nor being desired yielded, Finding myself in honour so forbid, With safest distance I mine honour shielded. Experience for me many bulwarks builded Of proofs new-bleeding, which remained the foil Of this false jewel, and his amorous spoil. ‘But ah! Who ever shunned by precedent The destined ill she must herself assay, Or forced examples gainst her own content, To put the by-passed perils in her way? Counsel may stop a while what will not stay: For when we rage, advice is often seen By blunting us to make our wills more keen. ‘Nor gives it satisfaction to our blood, That we must curb it upon others’ proof, To be forbode the sweets that seems so good, For fear of harms that preach in our behoof. O appetite, from judgement stand aloof! The one a palate hath that needs will taste, Though reason weep and cry, “It is thy last.” ‘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. ‘And long upon these terms I held my city, Till thus he ’gan besiege me: “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 never invite, nor never woo. ‘“All my offences that abroad you see 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. ‘“Among the many that mine eyes have seen, Not one whose flame my heart so much as warmed, Or my affection put to th’smallest teen, Or any of my leisures ever charmed: Harm have I done to them, but never was harmed; Kept hearts in liveries, but mine own was free, And reigned commanding in his monarchy. ‘“Look here what tributes wounded fancies sent me, 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, but fighting outwardly. ‘“And, lo! behold these talents of their hair, With twisted metal amorously empleached, I have received from many a several fair, Their kind acceptance weepingly beseeched, With th’annexions of fair gems enriched, And deep-brained sonnets that did amplify Each stone’s dear nature, worth and quality. ‘“The diamond, why twas beautiful and hard, Whereto his invised properties did tend, The deep green emerald, in whose fresh regard Weak sights their sickly radiance do amend; The heaven-hued sapphire and the opal blend With objects manifold; each several stone, With wit well blazoned smiled, or made some moan. ‘“Lo, all these trophies of affections hot, Of pensived and subdued desires the tender, Nature hath charged me that I hoard them not, But yield them up where I myself must render, That is, to you, my origin and ender: For these of force must your oblations be, Since I their altar, you empatron me. ‘“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, Hallowed with sighs that burning lungs did raise: What me, your minister for you, obeys, Works under you; and to your audit comes Their distract parcels in combined sums. ‘“Lo, this device was sent me from a nun, Or sister sanctified of holiest note, Which late her noble suit in court did shun, Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote; For she was sought by spirits of richest coat, But kept cold distance, and did thence remove To spend her living in eternal love. ‘“But O, my sweet, what labour is’t to leave The thing we have not, mastering what not strives, Planing the place which did no form receive, Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves, She that her fame so to herself contrives, The scars of battle scapeth by the flight, And makes her absence valiant, not her might. ‘“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. ‘“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 oer them, and you oer me being strong, Must for your victory us all congest, As compound love to physic your cold breast. ‘“My parts had power to charm a sacred nun, Who, disciplined and dieted in grace, Believed her eyes when they t’assail begun, All vows and consecrations giving place. O most potential love! Vow, bond, nor space, In thee hath neither sting, knot, nor confine, For thou art all and all things else are thine. ‘“When thou impressest, what are precepts worth Of stale example? When thou wilt inflame, How coldly those impediments stand forth, Of wealth, of filial fear, law, kindred, fame! Love’s arms are peace, gainst rule, gainst sense, gainst shame, And sweetens, in the suffering pangs it bears, The aloes of all forces, shocks and fears. ‘“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 battery 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.” ‘This said, his watery eyes he did dismount, Whose sights till then were levelled on my face; Each cheek a river running from a fount With brinish current downward flowed apace. O how the channel to the stream gave grace! Who, glazed with crystal gate the glowing roses That flame through water which their hue encloses. ‘O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear! But with the inundation of the eyes What rocky heart to water will not wear? What breast so cold that is not warmed here? O cleft effect! Cold modesty, hot wrath, Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath. ‘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 difference bore: His poisoned me, and mine did him restore. ‘In him a plenitude of subtle matter, Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives, Of burning blushes, or of weeping water, Or swooning 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 swoon at tragic shows, ‘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 burned in heart-wished luxury, He preached pure maid, and praised cold chastity. ‘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. ‘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.’ |
[Annotations of the poem to follow]
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To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!