CRITICISM

Camino, Mercedes Maroto. “‘That Map Which Deep Impression Bears’: The Politics of Conquest in Shakespeare's Lucrece.” In Shakespeare: World Views, edited by Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden, and Madge Mitton, pp. 124-45. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

Discusses The Rape of Lucrece as a narrative space inscribed by patriarchal power, in which both sexual and political conquests represent various elements of masculinity.

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

Studies the use of narrative techniques in the poem, focusing in particular on the poem's primary narrator and the ways in which the reader becomes implicated in the narration of the poem.

Hughes, Ted. “Conception and Gestation of the Equation's Tragic Myth: the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Lucrece.” In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, pp. 49-94. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1992.

Offers a plot summary of The Rape of Lucrece, highlights Shakespeare's use of religious language and imagery, and compares the poem to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.

Kramer, Jerome A., and Judith Kaminsky. “‘These Contraries Such Unity do Hold’: Structure in The Rape of Lucrece.” Mosaic X, no. 4 (summer 1977): 143-55.

Maintains that the structural patterning in the poem is complex and carefully designed, and that its use of action and reaction and point and counterpoint, as well as its exploitation of antitheses, paradoxes, and irony, all contribute significantly to the poem's construction and to its resulting formal excellence.

Simone, R. Thomas. Shakespeare and Lucrece: A Study of the Poem and Its Relation to the Plays. Salzburg, Austria: Insitut für Englische Sprache und Literature, Universität Salzburg, 1974, 228 p.

Book-length analysis of The Rape of Lucrece, centering on Shakespeare's sources, interpretation of the poem, and the place of the poem within the Shakespearean canon.