This habilitation project focuses on the representation of authorship and authority as contested issues in Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece and the 1609 first edition of the Sonnets, which includes the poem “A Lover’s Complaint” of uncertain authorship at the end. The study considers these poems as texts by which Shakespeare seeks to establish his position as literary author (rather than author of dramatic works), but also as texts which reflect the problems and negotiations involved in authorial self-creation.