A Lover's Complaint – the poem published as an end-piece to the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets – has to be the most abjected part of the Shakespeare canon: slighted, sidelined, passed over, ignored, and not only by a tradition that, rightly or wrongly, has bestowed a higher critical value on the plays than on the poems, but even by an earlier readership that, if the popularity of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece is anything to go by, prized their ‘mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare’ more highly as a poet than as anything else. In marked contrast to the narrative poems (which went through numerous editions throughout Shakespeare's lifetime and the seventeenth century, inspired hosts of enthusiastic imitations, and, in the case of Venus and Adonis at least, received more allusions than anything else Shakespeare wrote), A Lover's Complaint – which, John Benson's bowdlerized 1640 edition of the Sonnets aside, was not to appear in print again until published by Edmond Malone in 1780, and to which not a single contemporary reference or response has survived – left not a ripple and sank without trace. And, if current popular and scholarly interest in the Sonnets might be thought to make up for the relative neglect of the lyrics in the seventeenth century (there were fewer allusions to the Sonnets than to any other of Shakespeare's works, the only exception being A Lover's Complaint), then such compensation, if that is what it is, has not extended as far as the latter, publications on the Sonnets currently outnumbering those on the Complaint by a ratio of hundreds to one.