A Lover's Complaint - Authorship Debate

Authorship Debate

Despite its appearance in the published collection of the sonnets, critics have often doubted attribution to Shakespeare. The Lover's Complaint contains many words and forms not found elsewhere in Shakespeare, including several archaisms and Latinisms, and is sometimes regarded as rhythmically and structurally awkward. Conversely, other critics have a high regard for the poem's quality – Edmond Malone called it 'beautiful' – and see thematic parallels to situations in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. The poem can, along the lines of John Kerrigan in Motives of Woe, be regarded as an appropriate coda to the sonnets, with its narrative triangle of young woman, elderly man, and seductive suitor paralleling a similar triangle in the sonnets themselves. John Mackinnon Robertson published a study in 1917 claiming that George Chapman wrote the poem, as well as originating Timon of Athens. However, a scholarly consensus emerged in the 20th century that the poem was Shakespeare's, in particular in notable studies by Kenneth Muir, Eliot Slater and MacDonald P. Jackson.