ABSTRACT
It is possible to detect a certain plaintive tone even in contemporary critical scholarship on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint that no longer seeks to oust the poem from the Shakespearean canon and takes seriously the task of explicating its complexities. Joan Rees's complaint is motivated less by the poem's failure to put rhetoric in its place than the young man. The distinction between objet petit a and its imaginary clothing is invoked in the subsequent details of the maiden's initial portrait of the young man. Lacan wrote most extensively on the gaze as objet petit a, taut his theory gives a certain privilege to another version of it, the voice. In the Graph of Desire, printed in his seminar on Hamlet and in 'The Subversion of the Subject,' the voice is singled out as the remnant left over from the symbolic territorialization of the body, speech as sound and tone without meaning.
