ABSTRACT

Shakespeare's Henry V can give commands because his right to do so has already been established. Shakespeare's Sonnet 35 refers to 'Authorizing thy trespass with compare', and its pun crystallizes the characteristics of what I am terming authorizers. Shakespeare's own famous cast of them ranges from Antiochus's warning to the witches' temptation of Macbeth to Touchstone's joke about the mustard. And the supporting cast of critics who have analyzed this form includes folklorists, psychologists, linguists, and literary critics. Shakespeare's plays and poems are crammed with instances of storytelling that function as authorizers. The chapter proposes the Shakespeare's authorizers yet again demonstrates the interactive connections among his dramatic and non-dramatic texts, encouraging us to read A Lover's Complaint, like the sonnets and narrative poems, together with the plays. As Burrow observes in his important recent edition of Shakespeare's poems, 'The poems, like the plays, meditate on relations between rhetoric, persuasion, self-persuasion, gender, politics, action, and passion.