THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

poem relies far more on formal soliloquy, static declamation, and rhetorical complaint than did Venus and Adonis. Its
narrative movement from Tarquin’s plotting of his assault through its realization to Lucrece’s exemplary death is
purposefully staggered by sections which offer analyses of, and metaphors for, characters’ motives, pangs, and
passions.
Lucrece’s resolute response to her violation follows the high Roman fashion of an assertion of personal integrity in
the face of disaster: having eloquently denounced her ravisher, she commits suicide. The no less dignified lament of
the unnamed female narrator of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, however, looks less to Roman models than to the late
medieval and Tudor tradition of the ‘complaint’. The poem, published as an addendum to Shakespeare’s Sonnets in
1609, represents the confession of a straw-hatted country girl who has come to recognize ‘the patterns of [her former
lover’s] foul beguiling’. She has been taken in by his protests of love, his presents, his ‘deep-brained sonnets’, and,
above all, by his tears; now, in the agony of her desertion she is throwing his love-tokens and the torn remains of his
letters into a river. In one sense she resembles the ‘poor soul’ of Desdemona’s ‘song of willow’; in another, she is a
refiguration of the suicidal Ophelia. More crucially, Shakespeare’s original readers would probably have recognized
that in placing the poem at the end of his Sonnets he was reflecting on the shape of Daniel’s Delia which had been
published in 1592 with the addition of ‘The Complaint of Rosamond’, an account of the seduction and destruction of
Henry II’s mistress, ‘the Fair Rosamond’. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ can also be taken as a particularly bitter coda to the
Sonnets, one which provides a poignant trans-sexual echo of the concern in some of the most striking of the later
poems with confusion, frustration, sexual betrayal, and seduction.
Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets have generally been recognized as falling into three distinct groups. The first 126 are
addressed to a ‘fair youth’; the next 26 refer to a new association with the ‘Dark Lady’; the last two give a new twist
to the erotic theme by playing fancifully with stories of Cupid and the loss of his (phallic) ‘brand’. These unmarked
divisions contain within them subgroups (sonnets 1-17, for example, encourage the youth to marry, while sonnets 76-
86 are disturbed by the threat posed by a rival poet). In the later poems the ambiguous relationship between the
narrator, the young man, and the Dark Lady takes on the nature of an emotional triangle in which, as sonnet 144
suggests, the narrator is torn not only between ‘Two loves ... of comfort and despair’ but also between the love for the
young man and the love for the woman who appears to have seduced him. If these later poems suggest a confusion of
motive and an emotional turmoil, they also serve to remind readers that the overall sequence of the Sonnets neither
traces an autobiographical pattern nor implies a line of narrative development. Although the ‘Dark Lady’ poems
clearly imply a series of dislocated reactions and shifting viewpoints, the ostensibly adulatory poems addressed to the
young man ought also to be seen
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as heterogeneous, and occasionally fraught interrogations of the language and perception of love. Shakespeare both
reorders and confounds Petrarchan conventions. In two sonnets, addressed respectively to the man and to the woman -
numbers 21 (‘So is it not with me as with that Muse, | Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse’) and 130 (‘My
mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) - the old hyperboles applied to human beauty are qualified and questioned.
Elsewhere the poet transfers exaggerated praise from the ‘mistress’ of earlier sonnet sequences to a ‘master’. The
‘lovely boy’ is famously compared to a summer’s day (18); he, the ambiguous ‘master-mistress’ of the poet’s passion,
has a woman's face, ‘with Nature’s own hand painted’ (20); he is the ‘Lord of my love’ to whom the poet is a vassal
(26); he is the Muse ‘that pour’st into my verse | Thine own sweet argument’ (38), and he ennobles the humble poet
with a love that is ‘better than high birth ... | Richer than wealth, prouder than garments cost’ (91). Where sonnet 54
sees poetry as the distiller of truth, sonnet 55 proudly claims that ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments | Of princes
shall outlive this powerful rhyme’, and sonnet 81 announces that his name ‘from hence immortal life shall have’, we
neither learn the boy’s name nor do we have a precise idea of what he looks like.
Nevertheless, time and mortality haunt the first 126 poems. In sonnet 12 (‘When I do count the clock that tells the
time’) the poet relates arbitrary human measurements of time to those of the biological clock before resorting, almost
in desperation, to a plea for procreation as the only defence against death. In the superbly controlled sonnet 64,
however, love itself has to be defined against the steady pressure of individual, political, and geographical change:
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;