Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on critical attention on A Lover's Complaint as one of Shakespeare's narrative poems and as a significant companion piece to the Sonnets. The aesthetic, psychological, and conceptual complexities of A Lover's Complaint and its representativeness of its cultural moment deserve more critical reflection and unfolding than has hitherto been granted. The book seeks to generate further discussion of this important Shakespearean text. It works to provide a complex outlook on the complaint's formal intricacies and cultural resonances—of interest at once to critics working on the early modern period and to scholars invested in literary and psychoanalytical theory. The book remarks that 'more has been written' on the issue of the Sonnets' relation to Shakespeare's life than on the biographical dimension of any other Shakespearean text.