Jennifer Laws, University of Otago

From being largely ignored by early readers and critics, Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint has in recent years attracted some attention. Questions of authorship and approximate dating may have been exhaustively worked through, but many other problems remain, not the least being the poem's generic status and its relationship (if any) to the sonnets in the 1609 volume.¹ These last two aspects are, I believe, intimately connected, for an appreciation of the generic complexities inherent in the narrative poem can illuminate its function within the volume as a whole.

The importance of genre in the interpretation of texts has became a commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism. Many scholars have pointed out that in all periods the various genres are distinguished from one another not only by form and subject matter but by the values and attitudes that accrue to specific groupings; and so the choice...