Narrative poem · c. 1609

Shakespeare’s Lover's Complaint

The short narrative poem printed with the Sonnets in 1609: a young woman by a river tells an old man how a beautiful, serially persuasive young seducer talked her into ruin — and admits, in the poem’s stinging final turn, that she would probably fall again.

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By the Seven Ages editors2 min read

Its authorship was long debated; its rhetoric is dense in the late-Shakespeare manner. Read it as the Sonnets’ dark coda: the seducer described here could be the fair youth seen from the outside, with the charm finally itemized as technique.

Lover's Complaint on screen

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