ABSTRACT
In A Lover's Complaint, Shakespeare registers concerns about a penitent's inability to overcome the effects of sin and emphasizes the importance of private or auricular confession. A Lover's Complaint is indeed Shakespeare's most sustained treatment of the trauma caused by the transformation of penance in Tudor England. As part of the Reformation, the Church of England rejected the sacramental quality and necessity of confession and decentered its place in the lives of the faithful. Shakespeare's advancement of the need for ritualized confession to achieve consolation corresponds to the position of Lancelot Andrewes, whose 1600 sermon entitled Of the Power of Absolution intimates the necessity of priestly absolution. In A Lover's Complaint, Shakespeare directly engages with the emerging controversy regarding auricular confession in the Church of England. Shakespeare reveals that ritual offers a way out from the world of the young man, that it can restore a 'more perjur'd eye," that it can even make whole a 'reconciled maid'.
