Critical Essays on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint

Suffering Ecstasy

Shirley Sharon-Zisser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351947350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Despite the outpour of interpretations, from critics of all schools, on Shakespeare's dramatic works and other poetic works, A Lover's Complaint has been almost totally ignored by criticism. This collection of essays is designed to bring to the poem the attention it deserves for its beauty, its aesthetic, psychological and conceptual complexity, and its representation of its cultural moment. A series of readings of A Lover's Complaint, particularly engaging with issues of psychoanalysis and gender, the volume cumulatively builds a detailed picture of the poem, its reception, and its critical neglect. The essays in the volume, by leading Shakespeareans, open up this important text before scholars, and together generate the long-overdue critical conversation about the many intriguing facets of the poem.

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

Patrick Cheney

In A Lover's Complaint, Shakespeare offers his most concentrated fiction about the relation between poetry and theater.¹ Among Shakespeare's poems—and even among his plays—his third and last narrative poem is valuable for its lucid narration of a story directly about the cultural function and social interchange between 'deep-brained sonnets' (209) and 'tragic shows' (308). Since recent scholarship concludes that Shakespeare composed this poem in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it joins its companion piece in the famed 1609 quarto, the Sonnets, in calling into question the dominant models regarding the presence of the poems within a predominantly theatrical career.² By recalling what recent editors of Shakespeare's poems emphasize, that Shakespeare was working on A Lover's Complaint at the time that he was composing such 'mature' plays as Hamlet, Measure for Measure, All's Well, and Cymbeline—that indeed he was redeploying the very discourse from the plays—we might come to find his fiction about the professional relation between poetry and theater late in his career of considerable value.³

As with the Sonnets, admittedly here we do not know what Shakespeare's intentions were. We do not know why he composed this poem or whether he authorized its publication. In other words, A Lover's Complaint is another work situated on the 'borderline between the published and the privately concealed': 'What makes the volume of Shake-speares Sonnets unique is the extent to which its every element can be seen [to] ... invite from its readers a deliberate interplay between reading the collection for the life as a private manuscript record of a secret love, and reading it as a monumental printed work' (Burrow, 'Life' 38, 42). While some readers will be more comfortable operating on the manuscript side of the border, in this essay we might acknowledge the question but attend to what does appear in print. Precisely because of the question over the poem as a work of the print poet, we might find the direct representation of poetry and theater here all the more noteworthy.⁴

The Fiction of Sonnet and Show

Briefly, the fiction in A Lover's Complaint tells of a male narrator hearing and seeing a 'fickle maid full pale' (5). She reaches into her 'maund' or basket (36), pulls out 'folded schedules' and 'many a ring of posied gold and bone' (43, 45), '[t]ear[s]' the 'papers', and 'break[s] ... rings a-twain' (6), throwing both sets of artifacts into 'a river ... / Upon whose weeping margent she was set' (38-39). The narrator then sees a 'reverend man' (57), once 'Of court, of city' (59) but now a cowherd 'graz[ing] ... his cattle nigh' (57), draw near 'this afflicted fancy' (61) to inquire 'the grounds and motives of her woe' (63). The country maid tells the cowherd a story that takes us through the final word of the poem. In her story, the maid narrates how a young man with the sophistication of a courtier seduces her with an exquisite physical beauty and a compelling internal character that are served by two modes of literary art: the 'deep-brained sonnets' that the maid receives from the young man; and the 'tragic shows' that he performs to win her sympathy. At the core of her story, the maid quotes the young man's own rhetoric of courtship (177-280), including his haunting tale about seducing a nun (232-66), in what constitutes one of Shakespeare's most spectacular versifications of a dangerous sexual theater.

The story about sonnets and shows—situated in 'the familiar Shakespearean territory of sexual betrayal' (Roe, ed. 73)—is even more complex. As part of his seductive performance, the young courtier tells the maid that the sonnets he has given her are compositions he has received from girls he has seduced previously (204-10), leading most critics to assume that these compositions are the ones the maid throws in the river (e.g., Kerrigan, Motives 46). Yet Colin Burrow rightly complicates this assumption: 'they are a little less transparent than that' ('Life' 28). Burrow goes on to emphasize that,

[s]eeing these objects does not give access to the emotions behind a love affair in material form ... Shakespeare's poems objects do not reveal emotions; they encrypt them intriguingly, and start his readers on a quest for mind. An object is held up as something which offers a point of access to an experience, but the experience which it signifies, and whatever those mysterious 'deep-brained sonnets' actually relate, is withheld from us (28)

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

We may extend this principle to the second half of the literary compound, 'shows.' The maid describes the youth as a tragic playwright when she accuses him of performing 'a plenitude of subtle matter,' which, 'Applied to cautels [deceits], all strange forms receives,'

Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,
Or sounding paleness; and he takes and leaves,
In either's aptness as it best deceives,
To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and sound at tragic shows.

(A Lover's Complaint 302-308)

To 'turn white and sound at tragic shows' evidently means to stage a dangerously chaste theater empty of artistic and moral integrity. As we shall see, this is not the only theatrical discourse in the poem but rather part of a larger network from the place of the stage. If in a simple reading Shakespeare genders the author of the sonnets female, in an equally simple reading he genders the author of tragedy male. While readers might feel inclined to sympathize with the maid, and thereby to blame the youth for his theatricality, John Kerrigan has encouraged us to press the verity of the maid herself: 'Shakespeare indicates that the "context" of the maid's "utterance" [the opening echo that the narrator hears resounding through the hills] pre-emptively endangers what is said. The received landscape of complaint (realm of Spenser, William Browne) takes a "voice" and makes it "doble'" (Motives 44). While Kerrigan warns that we 'should resist the prompting of '"doble" either wholly to credit what she says or to judge her account mendacious' (44), he nonetheless opens the maid to further scrutiny. For instance, she is the one to unleash theater into the discourse of the poem as a site of sexual falsehood, prompting us to wonder how she knows about this particular domain. Like the dyer's hand in Shakespeare's famous sonnet on the theater (111), perhaps her nature is subdued to what it works in.

In short, in A Lover's Complaint both poetry and theater are potentially double-voiced and double-gendered. As the phrases for these twin forms of production suggest—'deep-brained sonnets" and 'tragic shows'—Shakespeare presents the forms authored and gendered as themselves in opposition, even in conflict. The genre of Petrarchan poetry in which men and women are complicit is fundamentally a subjective, mental, and internal art ('deep-brained'), while the Senecan tragedic genre in which men and women are also complicit is fundamentally a material, performative, and external one ('show').⁵ Despite the poem's phrases for the two arts, however, we can extend the principle of doubleness to their status in the narrative. Since we are not privy to the contents of the 'deep-brained sonnets', as Burrow observes, they appear paradoxically as materialized texts; similarly, the 'tragic shows', for all their superficiality, penetrate the brain deeply, as the narrative reveals.

Critical Contexts

The workings and implications of the opposing doubleness of content, form, gender, and authorship for poetry and theater require some patience to sort out, but that shall be our goal in this essay. Surprisingly, critics have neglected the topic. They have, however, touched its perimeters. Most comment on the presence of 'deep-brained sonnets' in a collection of verse titled Shake-speares Sonnets (as does Burrow), prompting fruitful detail about the connections between the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (see Bell; Laws): both poems present narratives of sexual infidelity that feature three erotically related principals in a tragedic triangle, consisting of two men and a woman. By contrast, while most critics discuss the theater through comparisons with the plays, and occasionally identify the young man as an 'actor,' only Kerrigan has probed more deeply.⁶ Discussing the commonplace intertextuality with Spenser's complaints, both The Ruines of Time (which opens in similar terms) and Spenser's contributions to Jan Ver der Noot's Theatre for Wordlings, Kerrigan observes: 'Like Spenser's Rome, ... [the maid] inhabits a "theatre for worldlings'" (Motives 42), to the extent that 'early readers, attuned to the theatricality of the [complaint] genre, might have thought in terms of a well-known playwright writing for the paper-stage' (43). Later, Kerrigan notes 'the impact of the larger [complaint] genre upon drama'—for instance, The Mirror for Magistrates upon 'Renaissance tragedy' —even raising the question 'about the stage worthiness of grief': 'complaint is problematic because stagey before it is staged' (55-56). What is left to do is to locate theater, along with poetry, in the discourse of the poem itself and to speculate more fully what it might mean for this 'well-known playwright' to be 'writing for th[is particular] ... paper-stage.'⁷

Shakespearean Authorship: Ovid and Marlowe

We may contextualize Shakespeare's double-voiced fiction in terms of the new figure of the Ovidian poet-playwright. One way to read Shakespeare's fiction is as a self-conscious narrative about the arts of poetry and theater in his own Ovidian career.⁸ Even more directly than in his two early experiments in narrative poetry, in this late one Shakespeare makes his fiction about the incompatibility of the sexes and the deadly nature of desire obtain to his writing career.⁹

Moreover, as in Venus and Lucrece, in A Lover's Complaint Shakespeare presents Ovidianism as distinctly Mariovian. Although recent scholarship and criticism neglect Marlowe's presence in the poem, we know too much about Shakespeare's ongoing struggle with Marlowe's ghost to follow suit.¹⁰ Critics can observe that 'Thomas Whythorne and George Gascoigne both wrote poems of courtship and seduction to numerous Elizabethan women' (Bell 463), but we might also recall that this mode is virtually Marlowe's signature, especially in his poetry, from Ovid's Elegies to 'The Passionate Shepherd' to Hero and Leander. The country maid's voice at times sounds Marlovian, recalling the narrator's voice in Hero and Leander: 'For when we rage, advice is often seen / By blunting us to make our wits more keen' (160-61). More particularly, the young courtier's seduction of 'a nun, / Or sister sanctified, of holiest note' (232-33), echoes Leander's elaborate seduction of 'Venus' nun' in Marlowe's Ovidian narrative (1.45); indeed, the stories are remarkably similar in outline. But it is the young courtier himself, an Ovidian figure of desire deploying both poetry and theater, who most compellingly conjures up the perturbed spirit of Christopher Marlowe, his Ovidian career, and what it serves: a counter-Virgilian nationhood—that is, a nonpatriotic form of nationalism that subverts royal power with libertas (Amores 3.15.9; Ovid's Elegies 3.14.9).¹¹

If we wonder how Shakespeare's portrait of a heterosexual male bent on female seduction could conjure up a self-avowed writer of homoeroticism, we might recall that Kerrigan traces the complaint in the early modern period to a 'common language' (one that we are historicizing in terms of Marlowe), and he speaks of 'the sexual ambivalence in A Lover's Complaint, citing 'the youth's face, a bower for Venus, his voice "maiden tongued'" (ed. 20-21). Moreover, the young courtier is not merely androgynous; he attracts both men and women: 'he did in the general bosom reign / Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted' (127-28). If this figure's artistic forms are both double-voiced, so is their author.

By attending to the conjun...

Table of contents

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