“That which thou hast done“

For much of this century scholars believed that the first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (1609) was a pirated text, published without Shakespeare's knowledge or approval. That raised doubts about the authenticity of A Lover's Complaint and the authority of the sonnet order. Over the last decade, however, a consensus has begun to emerge that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint—probably during the early years of the seventeenth century—and revised it just prior to publication, while he was writing Cymbeline. New evidence has also emerged making it more than likely that Shakespeare arranged the 1609 sequence of poems for publication. ¹