ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint is a poetic theorization of the psychic condition which psychoanalysis came to call female masochism. Masochistic satisfaction may be semantically articulated, as in the reference to the 'suffering ecstasy' of the woman in the poem or even to a feature of her appearance being 'true to bondage'. Contemporary scholarship on the poem recurrently notes the dejected state of its female protagonist. The chapter outlines A Lover's Complaint's meticulous poeticization of the rhetorical and psychological coordinates of the perversion of 'suffering ecstasy,' or masochism. It examines the way in which the text of A Lover's Complaint manifests the structure of an orifice carved out within language by a masochistic drive. The chapter demonstrates how A Lover's Complaint is not only a textual orifice from which an elemental signifier leaps at a significant moment of a masochistic subject's psychic trajectory.
