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INTRODUCTION

THIS piece first appeared at the close of the volume containing the Sonnets, in 1609. No contemporary allusion to it is known; and Shakespeare's authorship rests largely upon its inclusion in this volume. Yet internal evidence connects it closely with the Venus, with the Lucrece, and with the Sonnets themselves. Its theme, like theirs, is derived from phases of relation between men and women which in the dramas he habitually avoided, or which he touched only incidentally, as in Bertram and Viola. The 'lover' is a less innocent Lucrece; her ravisher no Tarquin but a Don Juan, whose weapons are fascination and persuasion. The Lucrece touches the borders of historical tragedy; A Lover's Complaint belongs to the gentler world of literary Pastoral, which Shakespeare-if this be indeed his worknowhere else approached but to set it in annihilating conjunction with his own poetic realism, as in As You Like It, or to entirely transmute and transform it with a supremely beautiful Pastoral of his own, as in The Winter's Tale.

A LOVER'S COMPLAINT

FROM off a hill whose concave womb re-worded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,

My spirits to 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 10
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 peep'd through lattice of sear'd age.

Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne,
Which on it had conceited characters,
Laundering the silken figures in the brine
That season'd woe had pelleted in tears,
And often reading what contents it bears;
As often shrieking undistinguish'd woe,
In clamours of all size, both high and low.

1. re-worded, re-echoed.
2. sistering, neighbouring.
8. hive, a straw bonnet like a

bee-hive.

16. conceited, fanciful.
17. Laundering, washing.

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Sometimes her levell'd eyes their carriage ride,
As they did battery to the spheres intend;
Sometime diverted their poor balls are tied
To the orbed earth; sometimes they do extend
Their view right on; anon their gazes lend
To every place at once, and, nowhere fix'd,
The mind and sight distractedly commix'd.

Her hair, nor loose nor tied in formal plat,
Proclaim'd in her a careless hand of pride;
For some, untuck'd, 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 let not bounty fall
Where want cries some, but where excess begs all.

Of folded schedules had she many a one,

Which she perused, sigh'd, tore, and gave the flood;
Crack'd many a ring of posied gold and bone,
Bidding them find their sepulchres in mud;
Found yet moe letters sadly penn'd in blood,
With sleided silk feat and affectedly
Enswathed, and seal'd to curious secrecy.

These often bathed she in her fluxive eyes,
And often kiss'd, and often 'gan to tear;
Cried O false blood, thou register of lies,
36. maund, basket.
48. sleided, untwisted.

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