A lover's complaint, Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare canon: Interpreting shared vocabulary

Modern Language Review

Volumn 103, Issue 3, 2008, Pages

  Jackson, MacDonald P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

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EID: 57749143701     PISSN: 00267937     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20467901     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Two studies argued for Shakespeare's authorship and a seventeenth-century date of composition: Kenneth Muir, '"A Lover's Complaint": A Reconsideration', in Shakespeare 1564-1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, ed. by Edward A. Bloom (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), pp. 154-66;
2. MacD. P. Jackson, Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity, University of Auckland Bulletin, 72, English Series, 13 (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1965).
3. The following major editions have appeared: The Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint', ed. by John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986);
4. The Poems, ed. by John Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
5. Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Nelson, 1997);
6. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. by Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7. Throughout this article I quote the Complaint and other works by Shakespeare from the compact edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
8. John Kerrigan returned to the poem in his excellent Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and 'Female Complaint'.A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
9. Fora summary of recent work, plus new essays, see Critical Essays on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint', ed. by Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006);
10. also Catherine Bates, 'The Enigma of A Lover's Complaint', in A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 426-40.
11. Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, 'Did Shakespeare Write A Lover's Complaint? The Jackson Ascription Revisited', in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. by Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 117-40.
12. 'Who Did NOT Write A Lover's Complaint', Shakespeare Yearbook, 15 (2005), 343-82.
13. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Simple page references to Vickers's book are incorporated into my text.
14. The RSC Shakespeare: William Shakespeare. Complete Works, ed. by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), p. 2397.
15. A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, 'Shakespeare's Rare Words: "Lover's Complaint", Cymbeline, and Sonnets', Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 219-24).
16. G. Sarrazin, 'Wortechos bei Shakespeare', Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 33 (1897), 121-65,
17. 'Words' in Sarrazin's tables are essentially different OED headwords or entries in Schmidt's Lexicon. I have used Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary : Third Edition, rev. by Gregor Sarrazin, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1971 ).
18. Jackson, Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity, pp. 8-14.
19. Eliot Slater, 'Shakespeare: Word Links between Poems and Plays', Notes and Queries, 220 (1975), 157-63;
20. The Problem of 'The Reign of King Edward III': A Statistical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): see especially the tables on pp. 158-96.
21. M. W. A. Smith and Hugh Calvert, 'Word-Links as a General Indicator of Chronology of Composition', Notes and Queries, 234 (1989), 338-41.
22. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 131-32.
23. There was a minor flaw in the way that Slater calculated figures 'expected' on a random distribution of links, but this does not seriously affect his conclusions. See MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: 'Pericles' as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 41.
24. 'Literature Online' is available to subscribing institutions at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk. It is now administered by ProQuest UK. Checking collocations with gyves necessitates also searching giues, a common early modern spelling of the noun. When quoting LION texts, which reproduce early manuscripts or printed texts, I have modernized spelling and punctuation, but in making searches I have, of course, been aware of the full range of possible original spellings.
25. Cymbeline, ed. by Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 131, 11. 4. 6n.
26. Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev. by S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964). LION's datings derive from Annals, but one or two plays may sometimes be included erroneously in a period set for searching.
27. This figure is from Vickers, p. 202. The concentration of rare Complaint-Cymbeline words in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure is consistent with Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson's belief that Shakespeare began writing A Lover's Complaint around 1600-03 and prepared it as late as 1609 for inclusion in the Sonnets Quarto.
28. and The Holy Rood (1609),
29. were also anticipated by Shakespeare - in Measure for Measure (1603)
30. and All's Well That Ends Well (1604-05).
31. Muir, '"A Lover's Complaint": A Reconsideration', p. 159.
32. MacD. P. Jackson, 'A Lover's Complaint Revisited', Shakespeare Studies, 32 (2004), 267-94 (p. 283).
33. A quick look through entries for 'salt' in an online Shakespeare concordance (http://www.it. usyd.edu.au/∼matty/Shakespeare/test.html) reveals at least sixteen references to salt tears, while 'salt' and 'season' are juxtaposed again in Much Ado About Nothing, IV. 1. 143,
34. The Merchant of Venice, ed. by M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 159, v. 1. 107 n.
35. Kerrigan, Sonnets, p. 398, 1. 18 n.
36. Jackson, 'A Lover's Complaint Revisited', p. 283.
37. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, pp. 65-66.
38. The Winter's Tale, ed. by J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 100, IV. 4. 193 n.
39. Duncan-Jones, Sonnets, p. 433, 1. 21 n.
40. In The Merry Wives it refers to social standing, which Burrow considered of possible subsidiary relevance to the Complaint context (Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 696, I. 21 n.).
41. Burrow, Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 717, 1. 326 n.
42. MacDonald P. Jackson, 'Shakespeare's Sonnet CXI and John Davies of Hereford's Microcosmos (1603)', Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), 1-10;
43. Duncan-Jones, Sonnets, p. 435, 1. 61 n.
44. But Shakespeare used it forty-three times. Davies has a 'conjuring, proud, remorseless priest | Rend, in fell rage [. .] pompous vestures' (The Holy Rood, 1609).