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Article: A Lover's Complaint revisited.
- Article from:
- Shakespeare Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Associated University Presses. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A LOVER'S COMPLAINT was first published in 1609 at the end of Thomas Thorpe's famous quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Until the early 1960s this narrative poem of 329 iambic pentameter lines had been neglected by Shakespeareans, who tended to reject it as spurious or disdain it as an unsatisfactory product of Shakespeare's youth. Then Kenneth Muir and MacD. P. Jackson independently argued in favor of the poem's authenticity and a seventeenth-century composition date. (1) Most editors have accepted their case, which has been supplemented by other scholars. (2)
Muir and Jackson overlooked one signficant point. Samuel Daniel's sonnet sequence Delia ...