ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Shakespeare shows a fascination with seduction, and in many of his poems and plays he explores seduction's many permutations from the point of view of both the seducer and his or her object of desire. Written by Shakespeare in the first decade of the 17th century, most recent authorities agree, A Lover's Complaint offers his most sustained and penetrating exploration of the subject. Seduction is also central to Shakespeare's two early narrative poems, which makes atemping D.J. Snider's suggestion in 1922 that these two poems and A Lover's Complaint compose a trilogy and that A Lover's Complaint 'gives another phase of Shakespeare's treatment of love'. For a poem about seduction, A Lover's Complaint seems often to have failed to seduce its readers. Its critical history is spotted with complaints about its arcane diction, its distracting nonce words, its convoluted syntax and imagery, its inconsistency of tone, and its lack of dramatic tension.
