CRITICISM

Camino, Mercedes Maroto. “‘Smoke of Words’: Lucrece and The Voicing of Rape.” In “The Stage Am I”: Raping Lucrece in Early Modern England, pp. 50-64. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

Describes Lucrece as a representative of the silenced female that functioned merely as an object of economic exchange in Renaissance society.

Freund, Elizabeth. “‘I See a Voice’: The Desire for Representation and the Rape of Voice.” In Strands Afar Remote: Israeli Perspectives on Shakespeare, edited by Avraham Oz, pp. 62-85. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.

Compares the use of the aural versus the visual as a means of domination in The Rape of Lucrece, Troilus and Cressida, and a music video by the singer Madonna.

Hart, Jonathan. “Narratorial Strategies in The Rape of Lucrece.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 32, No. 1 (Winter 1992): 59-77.

Examines Shakespeare's use of a variety of voices—Tarquin's, Lucrece's, and an anonymous narrator's—to entangle the reader in this story of “love, lust, and violence.”

Kietzman, Mary Jo. “‘What Is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?’ Lucrece's Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic Agency.” Modern Philology 97, No. 1 (August 1999): 21-45.

Compares The Rape of Lucrece with Hamlet principally through the generic device of the “complaint”—a monologue usually delivered in solitude.

Montgomery, Robert L., Jr. “Shakespeare's Gaudy: The Method of The Rape of Lucrece.” In Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, edited by Thomas P. Harrison, Archibald A. Hill, Ernest C. Mossner, and James Sledd, pp. 25-36. Austin: The University of Texas, 1967.

Asserts that The Rape of Lucrece is intentionally nondramatic and that its heavily rhetorical language is instead meant to reveal the emotions of the characters.

Plant, Sarah. “Shakespeare's Lucrece as Chaste Bee.” Cahiers Élisabéthains, 49 (April 1996): 51-57.

Contends that Shakespeare connects Lucrece with the popular Elizabethan image of a bee as a symbol not only of chastity but of temperance and rational governance; further, Plant suggests that once Lucrece is raped, she sees herself as diminished into an expendable drone.

Platt, Michael. “The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands.” Centennial Review 19, No. 2 (1975): 59-79.

Argues that through Lucrece's rape and the resulting founding of the Republic of Rome, Shakespeare tried to reinterpret the history of Rome and, more specifically, to characterize the Roman sense of self and of virtue.

Quay, Sara E. “‘Lucrece the Chaste’: The Construction of Rape in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.” Modern Language Studies 25, No. 2 (Spring 1995): 3-17.

Questions feminist readings of The Rape of Lucrece which focus on the repercussions of the rape and instead looks at the ways in which Shakespeare's Lucrece is defined and made vulnerable, or “rapable,” by her society.

Scholz, Susanne. “Textualizing the Body Politic: National Identity and the Female Body in The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 132 (1996): 103-13.

Presents Shakespeare's Lucrece as a model of the Renaissance notion that a woman's economic and political worth was dependent upon her chastity.