In 1609, Thomas Thorpe published a little volume that, as the title page put it, contained “SHAKE-SPEARES Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted.” Thorpe had, perfectly properly, recorded his ownership of the text by entering it in the Stationers’ Register in May. An early modern reader who worked her way past the volume's enigmatic dedication to “M^R. W.H.” and through the 154 sonnets of the sequence would have turned the leaf and found, unexpectedly, that a further work had been included: “A Louers complaint. BY WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE,” a long poem of 329 lines in forty-seven stanzas narrating the lament of a woman abandoned by her lover.

No one takes seriously any doubts about Shakespeare's authorship of the Sonnets, but in spite of the fierce advocacy of some and its usual inclusion in collected editions of Shakespeare's works, “A Lover's Complaint” has regularly attracted doubters. The poem is dull, overwrought, unengaging. It has very few of the characteristics that we confidently and often carelessly identify as Shakespearean. I have found it a struggle to get through it each and every time I have had to read it. Of course Shakespeare might write badly—but could he write this badly? It is true that both the poem and the question of its authorship have often been ignored, for as Gordon Crosse wrote in 1920, “Nobody cares to discuss who wrote a work which nobody cares to read” (quoted on 127). But, even though Thorpe's volume marked the poem for circulation as Shakespeare's and early modern readers were hence fairly unlikely to have thought otherwise, and even though our concept of the cultural consumption of texts has moved away from an obsessive concern with an originating author, there is plainly a need, driven not least by the cultural dominance of Shakespeare as writer, to examine whether the claims for Shakespeare's authorship in this case really stand up. A Shakespeare who wrote “A Lover's Complaint” is intriguingly different from one who did not, not only because its inclusion requires us to rethink the poetic quality we irrevocably associate with him but also because the poem's modes of thought change the way we might understand Shakespeare to think.

With the availability of extensive searchable databases of early modern writing and with a new sophistication in the questions we can put to texts to test authorship, the evidence that Shakespeare wrote “A Lover's Complaint” needed proper reexamination. In 2002, Brian Vickers demolished the recent claim that Shakespeare was the author of another long, dull poem, showing that A Funerall Elegye for William Peter was, most probably, written by John Ford (“Counterfeiting” Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's “Funerall Elegye” [Cambridge, 2002]). Attribution in these circumstances can be proved only to a high degree of probability, never to a point of absolute certainty. In this new study, Vickers shows, in an equally substantial and exhaustive study, that the assumptions of the veracity of Thorpe's ascription of “A Lover's Complaint” to Shakespeare were based on painfully weak evidence and that it was (most probably) written by a minor early modern poet and major early modern master of calligraphic skills, John Davies of Hereford. There is, of course, no means of showing whether Thorpe included the poem in the belief that it was by Shakespeare or whether he foisted it off as Shakespeare's to bulk out a fairly slim volume. Error or fraud it may have been, but just as some of the early modern plays published with Shakespeare's name on the title page, such as The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy, have never seriously entered the canon, now “A Lover's Complaint” can be dropped, too. And now, with considerable relief, I need never worry about reading the poem again.

Vickers's approach to his task covers a wide range of modes of analysis. On the one hand is the careful accumulation of minute details of similarities between the poem and the substantial corpus of Davies’ other poems: the use of rare words not found in Shakespeare or in other poets, the frequency of use of common words, the occurrence of rhetorical figures, the parallels of distinctive metaphors, the proportion of the poem's rhyme pairs that Shakespeare never used but that Davies did. On the other is the analysis of the poem's concerns, its influences, and its didactic mode—fields in which the poem's indebtedness to Edmund Spenser and to a set of moral imperatives that are not found in Shakespeare but that are found abundantly in Davies add to the conviction with which the new ascription can be made. Throughout, as one would expect, Vickers works with an energy, rigor, and thoroughness—as well as with an equally characteristic aggression in dismissing the scholarly and logical failings of others—that cumulatively make his case with a forensic precision. It seems remarkably improbable that anyone will now make contrary claims again.

Placing “A Lover's Complaint” firmly in the canon of Davies’ work is one thing, but Vickers tends to undervalue the ways in which the task of reading the poem might still require going back to and implicitly accepting the mode of presentation Thorpe created for the poem as Shakespeare’s. As John Kerrigan showed when editing both the Sonnets and “A Lover's Complaint” for the New Penguin Shakespeare in 1986, it is possible to see the two as not merely adjacent but as integrated, interconnected in ways that have nothing necessarily to do with authorship. Vickers is a little too dismissive, as well, of Kerrigan's anthology of poems of female complaint, Motives of Woe (Oxford, 1991), which traced the long history of the genre, a kind of writing that, after “A Lover's Complaint,” owed as much to the apparent presence of Shakespeare within its corpus as to those poets that preceded Davies. While his ignoring of such concerns does not diminish Vickers's achievement here, the new attribution of the poem does not remove the need to understand how “A Lover's Complaint” might have been read and might be read within the 1609 volume, for all that it can also now be read within a corpus of its author's poems.

The work on A Funerall Elegye has led Vickers to undertake the task of a new edition of the works of John Ford. With luck, however, this new study will not lead him to edit John Davies of Hereford, who, for all Vickers's fine endeavors in placing him in his complex cultural networks and in spite of this new addition to his canon, stays an irredeemably marginal figure.