SOURCE: “The Rape of Lucrece,” in Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies, Heinemann, 1973, pp. 187-203.

[In the following essay, Muir briefly describes the structure of The Rape of Lucrece, connects the poem to such later Shakespearean plays as Measure for Measure, and reviews the scholarly responses to the poem's themes and imagery.]

Lucrece was the ‘graver labour’ promised by Shakespeare in the Dedication to Venus and Adonis. It is written in rhyme royal, the stanza form employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and by Sackville in his Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates, and it has a slower, graver movement than the six-line stanza of Venus and Adonis. There may have been a draft in the six-line stanza of Venus and Adonis, since Suckling quoted several stanzas in this form.

In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare had written of a chaste youth repelling the assaults of an amorous goddess. In the companion poem he writes of a chaste wife violated by a lustful guest. Adonis is successful in preserving his chastity, but he is slain by a boar, and bewailed by Venus; Lucrece, unable to endure the shame, commits suicide.

By providing a prose ‘argument’—concerned partly with previous events—Shakespeare was able to plunge into the middle of the story, and to concentrate on the struggle in Tarquin's mind before the rape, on Lucrece's appeal to him to spare her, and on her lament afterwards.

Lucrece is interesting as a forerunner and there are many links between it and later plays. One of the most significant is with Macbeth. Just before the murder of Duncan, Macbeth has a soliloquy describing an imaginary dagger which seems to lead him to Duncan's chamber, inciting him to the deed. The speech continues:

          Now o'er the one half world,
Nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and withered murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel the wolf
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.

Shakespeare's mind went back some twelve years to the earlier scene in Lucrece, to that other deed of darkness—a rape being a symbolic murder. Many editors have observed that a large number of details of the two scenes are identical, whether because Shakespeare was consciously drawing on his narrative poem, or because the various scenic properties are natural concomitants of the violent deeds—the starless night, the noise of owls and wolves:

Now stole upon the time the dead of night,
When heavy sleep had clos'd up mortal eyes;
No comfortable star did lend his light,
No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries;
Now serves the season that they may surprise
          The silly lambs. Pure thoughts are dead and still,
          While lust and murder wake to stain and kill.

Baldwin points out¹ that this is partly derived from Ovid's description of the rape beginning Nox erat, and this would send Shakespeare's mind to a similar passage in Virgil, Book IV, describing Dido's sleeplessness in the toils of love.²

More significant than the background of the two scenes is the fact that Tarquin is, in a sense, the first of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Richard III is a tragic villain, conscious of the evil he commits, but not seeking to repent until the last act of the play. Tarquin is fully conscious of the sin he contemplates and the first 51 stanzas are devoted to the conflict in his mind before he definitely succumbs to evil. In this respect he is much closer to Macbeth than he is to Richard.

Like Angelo, whose passions are aroused by the sight of the novice, Isabella, Tarquin is sexually stirred by the reputed chastity of the heroine:

Haply that name of ‘chaste’ unhaply set
This bateless edge on his keen appetite …
Perchance his boast of Lucrece' sovereignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king;
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be.
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
His high-pitched thoughts that meaner men should vaunt
That golden hap which their superiors want.

When Tarquin goes to his bedroom, he weighs ‘the sundry dangers of his will's obtaining’. He realizes, as Macbeth was later to realize, that he is liable to forfeit the things that should accompany old age, ‘As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends’, but his desire brushes these unpleasant facts on one side.

And when great treasure is the meed proposed,
Though death be adjunct, there's no death supposed.
Those that much covet are with gain so fond
That what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so, by hoping more, they have but less;
Or, gaining more, the profit of excess
          Is but to surfeit, and such grief sustain
          That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.
So that in vent'ring ill, we leave to be
The things we are for that which we expect;
And this ambitious foul infirmity,
In having much, torments us with defect
Of that we have; so then we do neglect
          The thing we have and, all for want of wit,
          Make something nothing by augmenting it.

(It will be noted that considered as poetry such passages of argumentation are inferior to the passages of description in the poem.)

Even when Tarquin leaps from his bed to go to Lucrece's chamber, he is still ‘madly tossed between desire and dread’, but ‘honest fear’ is ‘bewitched with lust's foul charm’. He upbraids his own lust. He knows perfectly well that he should ‘offer pure incense to so pure a shrine’, and that ‘fair humanity’ abhors the deed he contemplates. He knows that it is a shame to knighthood, a slur on his own ancestry, a disgrace to bravery, and a scandal to his descendants.

What win I if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?
Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown,
Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?

Moreover, Collatinus, Lucrece's husband, is not his enemy, but his dear friend and kinsmen. So Macbeth reminds himself that he is Duncan's kinsman. Then, like Lady Macbeth, telling her husband that it is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil, Tarquin answers his own scruples:

Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw
Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.

St Thomas Aquinas says somewhere that no man can deliberately choose evil; he has first to delude himself that the choice is good for him. So, in the disputation between frozen conscience and hot-burning will, Tarquin persuades himself that the temporary possession of Lucrece is a ‘good’ which outweighs all other considerations. ‘What is vile shows like a virtuous deed’.

I have stressed the importance of Tarquin as a forerunner of later dramatization of sin, although the demands of the narrative form, while allowing for more direct commentary by the poet, are different from those of the drama; and Shakespeare never forgets that he is writing a narrative poem.

The next section of the poem (stanzas 52-98) deals with the debate between Tarquin and Lucrece and the actual violation by means of blackmail. He tells her that if he kills her under the pretence that he had caught her committing adultery with a servant, her reputation will be blasted, her children will be bastardized, and her husband will suffer more than if she submits to Tarquin's will:

But if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend:
The fault unknown is as a thought unacted;
A little harm done to a great good end
For lawful policy remains enacted.

The choice for Lucrece is not a simple one between death and dishonour, but between death and apparent dishonour on the one hand, and life and secret dishonour on the other. The arguments Lucrece uses to plead with Tarquin are those he had himself used. She appeals to religion, knighthood, friendship, pity, laws human and divine, hospitality, his own royal birth since the man who rules a country should be able to govern his passions.

After the rape and Tarquin's departure, Shakespeare switches attention from criminal to victim, and from victim to criminal, in alternate lines, and it has the effect of alternating shots in a film.

She bears the load of lust he left behind,
And he the burthen of a guilty mind.
He like a thievish dog creeps sadly hence,
She like a wearied lamb lies panting there;
He scowls and hates himself for his offence,
She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear.
He faintly flies, sweating with guilty fear;
          She stays, exclaiming on the direful night;
          He runs, and chides his vanish'd loath'd delight.
He thence departs a heavy convertite,
She there remains a hopeless castaway;
He in his speed looks for the morning light;
She prays she never may behold the day.

Coleridge said that in Lucrece Shakespeare ‘gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind’. The evidence for this is mostly contained in the long soliloquy in which the heroine rails at Night and Time and Opportunity (stanzas 113-147). It is a foretaste of the tirades of the early Histories, and it looks forward to the soliloquies of the mature plays. It exemplifies Shakespeare's amazing facility of expression, and his daring virtuosity in utilizing and displaying all the resources of rhetoric, and contains passages as great as anything in Elizabethan non-dramatic poetry.

Lucrece begins with an invocation of Night, in which there is an accumulation of epithets and images. Night is associated with hell, with tragedies performed on the Elizabethan stage, with chaos, prostitution, death, conspiracy, fog, poison, sickness and impurity, because Night was an accomplice of Tarquin in his crime. This leads Lucrece to a reflection on his hypocrisy, the contrast between the virtue he talked of and the deed he committed. This is followed by a whole catalogue of examples of similar contrasts, all convential, but obtaining their effect by accumulation: worm in the bud, cuckoo in the nest, toads fouling fountains, misers who suffer from gout, unruly blasts in the spring, weeds growing side by side with flowers, the adder hissing while birds are singing. This again leads on to a diatribe against Opportunity, probably suggested by these remarks of Erasmus:²

So much force has opportunity as to turn honesty into dishonesty, debt into wealth, pleasure into heaviness, a benefit into a curse, and vice versa; and, in short, it changes the nature of everything.

But Shakespeare is concerned only with the evil effects of Opportunity, not with their opposite. Opportunity is the cause of treachery, fornication, murder, incest, nay

          all sins past, and all that are to come
From the creation to the general doom.

Opportunity is Time's servant, as Time is copesmate of Night; so Lucrece proceeds to address Time, ‘Thou ceaseless lackey to Eternity’, in lines partly inspired by the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Time, though he is the destroyer and overturner of the works of man and nature, is also the power which brings truth to light; and Lucrece appeals to him to overthrow Tarquin and bring him to despair.

T.W. Baldwin, in his account of what he calls the literary genetics of Lucrece, has a number of examples of Shakespeare's method of composition in the stanzas we have been discussing. Perhaps the neatest example is the stanza about the miser.³

The aged man that coffers up his gold
Is plagu'd with cramps and gouts and painful fits,
And scarce hath eyes his treasure to behold,
But like still-pining Tantalus he sits,
And useless barns the harvest of his wits,
          Having no other pleasure of his gain,
          But torment that it cannot cure his pain.

Ovid refers briefly to the story of Tantalus in the Metamorphoses (IV), and in a note on the passage (probably in the edition used by Shakespeare) Regius suggests that Tantalus is a type of avarice. The connection between the story of Tantalus and avarice is also brought out in Horace's first satire, a passage quoted by Erasmus in his Adagia. The same point is made in one of Sidney's sonnets, but that Erasmus was the source is supported by another quotation from one of Horace's odes:

magnas inter opes inops.

If Shakespeare knew the ode, or looked it up, he would know that the stanza which this line concludes runs:

contemptae dominus splendidior rei,
quam si quicquid arat impiger Apulus
occultare meis dicerer horreis …

Baldwin does not point out that these granaries are the link between avarice and the parable of the covetous rich man in the Bible, Luke XII. The rich man proposed building greater barns only to be told ‘O fool, this night will they fetch thy soul from thee’. On this parable, the Genevan version has the marginal note:

Christ condemneth the arrogancy of the rich worldlings, who as though they had God locked up in their coffers and barns, set their whole felicity in their goods, not considering that God gave them life and also can take it away when he will.

The coffers and barns, used as nouns in this note, are taken over by Shakespeare and used as verbs:

The aged man that coffers up his gold …
And useless barns the harvest of his wits.

The 31 stanzas describing the painting of the destruction of Troy are partly based on Virgil's account in the first two books of the Aeneid; but, as Professor Root has shown,⁴ the Virgilian account is amplified by details derived from the 13th book of the Metamorphoses in which Ovid describes the contest between Ajax and Ulysses, and gives an account of Hestor and Hecuba. The order of the scene—Ajax, Ulysses, Nestor, Hecuba—is the same as Ovid's. The idea of introducing the painting was perhaps suggested by the similar device in Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamund, in which the heroine, just before her seduction, contemplates a casket decorated with mythological pictures, given her by her royal lover.

Nine of the stanzas describe the crafty Sinon, who is compared by Lucrece to Tarquin. Both men united ‘outward truth and inward guile … saintly seeming and diabolical purpose’:

For even as subtle Sinon here is painted,
So sober-sad, so weary, and so mild,
As if with grief or travail he had fainted,
To me came Tarquin armed; so beguil'd
With outward honesty, but yet defil'd
          With inward vice. As Priam him did cherish,
          So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish.

Shakespeare knew from his reading of Livy, although curiously enough he did not mention it, that Tarquin had engaged in a stratagem which makes the comparison with Sinon more relevant. Like Sinon, he had gone to the besieged inhabitants of Gabii

as a suppliant outcast, with a forged tale of woe, and displaying in his person the marks of cruel usage, Tarquin had roused their sympathy, and secured a welcome he turned to account by conspiring against his friends and benefactors, and compassing their speedy destruction.

Lucrece also inveighs against Helen and Paris, whose lust was the cause of the war. She asks:

Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe?
Let sin, alone committed, light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressed so;
Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe.
          For one's offence why should so many fall,
          To plague a private sin in general.

These stanzas are also interesting on two other grounds. They throw light on Shakespeare's views on painting which he shared with most of his contemporaries. In Venus and Adonis, there is a stanza describing Adonis's horse:

Look when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
          So did this horse excel a common one
          In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone.

So in the painting of Troy Lucrece admires the way

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

The panoramic view of the siege is filled with hundreds of vivid details which seem to be painted from life; but Lucrece (or Shakespeare) admires the psychological truth even more than outward verisimilitude—the ashy lights in dying eyes, other eyes seen through loopholes, and eyes in the distance looking sad, pale cowards with trembling paces, the triumphant faces of great commanders, the art of physiognomy in the portraits of Ajax and Ulysses, Nestor's beard wagging up and down, and Hecuba gazing on Priam's wounds:

In her the painter had anatomiz'd
Time's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's reign;
Her cheeks with chaps and wrinkles were disguis'd;
Of what she was no semblance did remain:
Her blue blood chang'd to black in every vein,
Wanting the spring that those shrunk pipes had fed,
Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead.

These stanzas also show that Shakespeare's attitude to the Trojan war did not change substantially during the next ten years. His treatment of the subject in the Dido play in Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida is essentially the same. It may well be that the time-theme, which is so prominent in Troilus and Cressida, was suggested by Lucrece's tirade against time which comes just before the description of the painting.

It is true that in the Sonnets we have a forerunner of the Troilus situation—an obsessive concern with the power of Time and a realization of the vulnerability of constancy. But in Lucrece, written before many of the Sonnets, the heroine's tirade against Time precedes, as we have seen, the description of the painting of Troy. Time is described as ‘carrier of grisly care’, ‘eater of youth’, ‘virtue's snare’ and ‘the ceaseless lackey to eternity’. Some of the imagery used in the poem links up with four famous speeches in Troilus and Cressida:

Thou grant'st no time for charitable deeds …

(l. 908)

Time's glory is to calm contending kings …

(l. 939)

To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
And smear with dust their glitt'ring golden towers …

(ll. 944-5)

To feed oblivion with decay of things …

(l. 947)

Let him have time a beggar's orts to crave,
And time to see one that by alms doth live
Disdain to him disdained scraps to give.

(ll. 985-7)

Ulysses's speech on Time is spoken in answer to Achilles's question: ‘What, are my deeds forgot?’ And in the course of his reply Ulysses mentions ‘good deeds past’, the scraps which are ‘alms for oblivion’, the charity which is subject to ‘envious and calumniating time’, and the ‘gilt o'er-dusted’ which is no longer praised. In the next act, when Troilus parts from Cressida, he makes use of Lucrece's epithet:

Injurious time now with a robber's haste
Crams his rich thievery up, be knows not how:
As many farewells as be stars in heaven,
With distinct breath and consign'd kisses to them,
He fumbles up into a loose adieu,
And scants us with a single famish'd kiss,
Distasted with the salt of broken tears.

(IV. iv. 44-50)

Here we have the same image of Time with a wallet, and also the cooking imagery first pointed out by Walter Whiter,⁵ to the significance of which we shall have occasion to return. When Ulysses prophesies the destruction of Troy, Hector replies:⁶

                                                            the end crowns all,
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.

The fourth speech having links with the lines quoted from Lucrece is spoken by Troilus after he has witnessed Cressida's unfaithfulness:

The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics
Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed.

(V. ii. 158-60)

Some of the food images in Lucrece and the Sonnets are connected with the Ovidian idea of devouring Time; the remainder associate sexual desire with feeding, and its satisfaction with surfeiting. The association is a natural extension of the various meanings of the word appetite. Tarquin considers that

                                                  the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit;

his lust is compared to the ‘sharp hunger’ of a lion; and he is described after his crime as ‘surfeit-taking’:

His taste delicious, in digestion souring,
Devours his will, that liv'd by foul devouring.

A few lines later, we have another image of surfeiting:⁷

Drunken Desire must vomit his recept,
Ere he can see his own abomination.

There are some twenty-five food images in Lucrece and more than three times that number in Troilus and Cressida. In the poem there is a link between the Time imagery and the Food imagery: Time is not merely a devourer, but also a bloody tyrant; and the ravisher is not merely a devourer of innocence, but a tyrant as well.

The analogy between love and war is to be found in the work of numerous poets between Ovid and Shakespeare. In one of Ovid's Elegies, there is a detailed comparison between the lover and the soldier:⁸

Lovers are always at war, with Cupid watching the ramparts:
Atticus, take it from me: lovers are always at war.
What's the right age for love?—the same as that for a soldier.
What the captains demand, agressiveness, ardor of spirit,
That's what a pretty girl wants when a man's on the hunt.
The soldier's service is long; but send a girl on before him,
And the unfaltering lover plods the road without end.

In the middle ages, the siege of Love's castle was common enough; and it is natural that Tarquin should be compared to a soldier entering a breach in the walls, that Shakespeare should speak of honour and beauty being ‘weakly fortressed’; that in the account of the actual rape, Tarquin's hand should be compared to a ‘Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall’; that Lucrece's breasts should be called ‘round turrets’; that her white face should look like a flag of surrender; and that Tarquin should say he comes to scale her ‘never-conquer'd fort’. As Professor Allen points out,⁹ the image is turned against Tarquin when, after the crime, his soul complains that her walls have been demolished by his deed:

She says her subjects with foul insurrection
Have battered down her consecrated wall,
And by their mortal fault brought in subjection
Her immortality, and made her thrall
To living death and pain perpetual.

Whereas the walls of Tarquin's soul are battered down—we are reminded of the sonnet ‘Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth, Hemmed by these rebel powers that thee array’—the house of Lucrece's soul is sacked,

Her mansion batter'd by the enemy,
Her sacred temple spotted, spoil'd, corrupted,
Grossly engirt with daring infamy.

She wishes therefore to leave her body—‘this blemish'd fort’—by killing herself.

Brutus, at the end of the poem, comments on Lucrece's suicide:

Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself that should have slain her foe.

Is Brutus right? Professor Don Cameron Allen in the article to which I have referred (Shakespeare Survey 15), shows how there was a long controversy about Lucrece's suicide which dates back to the Fathers of the Church. Tertullian praised her as a ‘splendid example of domestic virtue’. But St Augustine argued that ‘if suicide is extenuated, adultery is proved … If she was adulterous, why is she praised? If she was chaste, why was she killed?’

Camerarius expressed the same idea in verse (as translated by an Elizabethan poet)

Were that unchaste mate welcome to thy bed,
Lucrece, thy lust was justly punished.
But if foul force defil'd thine honest bed,
His only rage should have been punished.

A really chaste woman would have died rather than surrender.

Professor Allen thinks that Shakespeare read the story of Lucrece in its Christian context. ‘Lucrece should have defended herself to the death, or, having been forced, lived free of blame with a guiltless conscience’.

Professor Roy Battenhouse in his Shakespearean Tragedy (1969) likewise argues that the poet was writing from St Augustine's standpoint. The ‘pearly sweat’ on Lucrece's ‘hand that is lying the outside the coverlet’ is a sign of her unchaste nature. When Tarquin warns her that if she refuses to yield, he will use force, ‘deny she does—as if subconsciously she wished force to work his way’. Surely, Battenhouse continues,

if Lucrece really wishes rescue, she has plenty of time to cry out for it; for Shakespeare, in contrast to Ovid, makes much of Tarquin's long dallying. And surely there are servants in the house to answer calls for help … Shakespeare is but giving his reader time to realize that actually Lucrece's resort to complaints is her way of escaping from calling for help.

Her grief is put down to her fear ‘for loss of social status’. Her suicide is ‘paganism's dark substitute for the Christian Passion story’.

Such an interpretation seems to conflict with the obvious meaning of the text, and is not really supported by the fact that Middleton in his feeble imitation of Shakespeare makes the ghost of Lucrece come from hell.

Both Allen and Battenhouse seem to leave out of account, or at least to gloss over, the reason for Lucrece's capitulation, and also the reasons she gives for her suicide. It was not fear of death that made her give up the struggle, but fear for her reputation after death. For Tarquin blackmailed her with the threat that he would kill her and a servant and say he had caught her in the act of adultery. When one considers the high value set by the Elizabethans on reputation, and also that this story would be more damaging to her husband than her actual rape, one can see that in the circumstances Lucrece's duty was not clear, even if she had been in a position to think clearly. Just before she kills herself, Lucrece asks the bystanders:

What is the quality of my offence,
Being constrain'd with dreadful circumstance?
May my pure mind with the foul act dispense,
My low-declined honour to advance?
May any terms acquit me from this chance?
          The poisoned fountain clears itself again;
          And why not I from this compelled stain?

She is assured by Brutus and Collatine that

Her body's stain her mind untained clears.

But she cannot accept this assurance:

“No, no,” quoth she, “no dame hereafter living
By my excuse shall claim excuse's giving”.

She felt, rightly or wrongly, that she could only prove that she had not consented to rape—that the rape was not half-desired—if she refused to go on living. She wished to set an example to women who came after, who might pretend that they had been forced when they had welcomed the opportunity of committing adultery with a clear conscience. I am reminded of two modern French plays. In Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie N'Aura Pas Lieu, Hector asks Paris if Helen consented to the rape. Paris replies that all women in such circumstances resist, but they afterwards consent with enthusiasm. The other play is André Roussin's farce, La petite hutte, in which the heroine allows herself to be seduced by a supposed native of the isle on which she is shipwrecked, ostensibly to save the life of her husband, who has been tied up by the native. Roussin makes clear that her real motive, or at least her unconscious motive, is different from her avowed one.

On the whole, it must be admitted, Lucrece has been less popular among the critics as well as with the general reader than Venus and Adonis. It lacks something of the freshness of the earlier poem. It is as though Shakespeare felt hampered by the necessity of producing a graver labour for his patron. It is obvious that he took immense pains with it. He showed that he could surpass all his contemporaries in the tragic lament. It is better than Daniel, better even than Spenser. It is a beautifully composed poem. It could be used to illustrate a text-book on rhetorical devices. Every stanza exhibits a rhetorical figure. Shakespeare ransacked the work of his predecessors and amplified the various themes and topics in accordance with the best critical opinion. The verse is for the most part melodious and varied, the rhymes unforced except some of the feminine ones. There are some lines as magnificent as any he ever wrote, and even when they are not magnificent, they frequently exhibit considerable art. For example, if one takes the commonest of all rhetorical figures—alliteration—one finds that Shakespeare never overdoes it.

To blot old books and alter their contents …
Thy violent vanities can never last …
Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light …
Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep …
For men have marble, women waxen minds …

The two halves of the line are frequently bound together by this subtle, and not obtrusive, alliteration.

It could be argued that although the poem is less attractive than Venus and Adonis, it shows greater dramatic power. It remains a narrative poem, a ‘complaint’ (one of the most popular forms in the 1590s); but Shakespeare would never have made a play on the subject, as Heywood was afterwards to do. How sound his instinct was can be seen from Obey's Viol de Lucrèce which is very closely based on Shakespeare's poem. Obey, indeed, translates many of Shakespeare's stanzas and puts them into the mouth of his chorus. The play is impressive in its way; but the long period between the rape and the suicide in which we see a voluble and suffering innocence is pathetic rather than tragic, and static rather than dramatic.

Notes

1. T.W. Baldwin, The Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (1950) p. 118.

2. Baldwin, op. cit., p. 136.

3. Baldwin, op. cit., p. 133.

4. R.K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903), p. 35.

5. A Specimen of a Commentary (1794), p. 136.

6. IV. v. 224-6.

7. Lucrece, ll. 138-9, 421-2, 699-700, 703-4.

8. Tr. Rolfe Humphries.

9. Shakespeare Survey 15, p. 94.