A Lover's Complaint Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare canon: interpreting shared vocabulary.(Critical essay)

A Lover's Complaint was published in the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnet and was given its own ascription to 'William Shakespeare', but in recent years several specialists in attribution have questioned its authenticity. Brian Vickers has argued that the true author is John Davies of Hereford. However, the Complaint and Cymbeline use certain rare words in similar contexts, and the links between the two works can best be explained as due to common authorship. Shakespeare's responsibility for the Complaint is further demonstrated by striking vocabulary links between the poem and other Shakespeare plays. 'Literature Online' researches reveal the strength of this association.

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A Lover's Complaint was published in Thomas Thorpe's 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnet and given its own separate attribution to 'William Shakespeare'. Since the 1960s, most scholars and editors have accepted the poem's authenticity. (1) It has attracted some stimulating criticism. (2) But several recent studies have concluded that the Quarto ascription is erroneous. (3) The most comprehensive of these is Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint' and John Davies of Hereford, (4) which argues for Davies's authorship. Vickers's presentation of his case has already persuaded Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen to exclude A Lover's Complaint from their RSC Shakespeare Complete Works. They believe that Vickers has 'devastated' the Quarto claim. (5) think that all these distinguished scholars are wrong and that A Lover's Complaint belongs within the Shakespeare canon.

Vickers makes little attempt to explore links between A Lover's Complaint and Shakespeare's undoubted works, but those that he discusses are explained as due to (a) coincidence, 'Shakespeare and Davies sharing a Jacobean vocabulary' (p. 208), or (b) Davies's having imitated or echoed Shakespeare, or (c) Shakespeare's having been influenced by Davies' A Lover's Complaint which he read after Thorpe had fraudulently included it with Shakespeare's sonnets (p. 213). Thus, citing several triple rhymes shared by A Lover's Complain and The Rape of Lucrece, Vickers argues not that Shakespeare was recycling rhymes from the only other work of his in which triple rhymes were repeatedly needed for the rhyme royal stanzas (ababbcc) that the poems have in common, but that we can detect instead 'the methods of an imitator writing down rhymes in his notebook for future re-use'(p. 198). Any similarities between A Lover's Complaint and Davies's works, on the other hand, are apt to be seen as evidence that Davies wrote the poem.

Here, however, I want to focus on vocabulary, and especially on one set of verbal connections between A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline. They were pointed out in 1987 by A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, who offered a very different explanation of them from that which Vickers prefers. (6) Some background information will clarify my own discussion.

Well over a hundred years ago the fine German scholar Gregor Sarrazin, working from Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon, listed for every play, the two narrative poems, the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint all the words that occur only twice or thrice in Shakespeare's oeuvre and gave references for these other occurrences. (7) His tables demonstrated a strong association between chronological proximity of plays or poems and the numbers of such rare words that they shared. A Lover's Complaint exhibited an overwhelming preponderance of vocabulary links with Shakespeare's seventeenth-century plays. (8) In 1965 I showed that words used in A Lover's Complaint and not more than five times in Shakespeare's canonical works followed the same pattern. (9) Eliot Slater's more refined statistical analysis yielded similar results. He confirmed Sarrazin's and my findings on A Lover's Complaint and, after compiling a card index of all words that Shakespeare used ten or fewer times, recorded a tendency for words considerably less 'rare' than Sarrazin's 'dislegomena' and 'trislegomena' to cluster chronologically. (10)

The fact that A Lover's Complaint s links in vocabulary are so predominantly with his seventeenth-century plays is good evidence that if it is by Shakespeare it is a work of his maturity, not of his youth, but in itself it is not, as Slater supposed, good evidence that Shakespeare was indeed the poem's author. Rare-word links between Shakespeare and works by other writers might display the same tendency to congregate in Shakespeare plays of about the same period of composition. New words were entering the language each year, so that poems or plays written in 1600, let us say, potentially shared items of vocabulary that they could not have shared with poems or plays written around 1590. Conversely, some elements of literary English current around 1590 were passing out of use by 1600. Slater found that a disproportionate number of the rare-word links between the anonymous Edward III (published in 1596 and perhaps first performed as early as 1590) and the Shakespeare canon were with the three parts of Henry VI and other early Shakespeare plays, and concluded that Shakespeare was sole author of Edward III. But M. W. A. Smith and Hugh Calvert showed that Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's James IV exhibit the same concentration of word-links with Shakespeare's earliest plays. (11) In these two cases, the distribution of links to Shakespeare's dramatic canon was governed by chronology rather than authorship.