SOURCE: Pincombe, Mike. “Sackville Tragicus: A Case of Poetic Identity.” In Sixteenth-Century Identities, edited by A. J. Piesse, pp. 112-32. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Pincombe analyzes “Complaint” in order to show that Sackville's goal was to become a serious writer of tragedy.

To the general reader, Thomas Sackville presents a very curious case of poetic identity. By that I mean that he is is more or less identical with Thomas Norton, with whom he wrote the ‘first English tragedy’: Gorboduc (first printed 1565). Few casual readers of this play (if there are any) can tell the two poets apart; and many trained literary scholars, I suspect, would be hard pressed to identify those parts of the play written by Sackville and those by Norton (even after they had been told which were which). Matters are made worse by the unenviable reputation Gorboduc has won...