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INTRODUCTION

THE RAPE OF LUCRECE was first published in 1594, with the following title :

LUCRECE.

LONDON. | Printed by Richard Field, for John Harrison, and are | to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound | in Paules Church-yard. 1594.

The running title is 'The Rape of Lucrece.'

Subsequent editions were issued in 1598, 1600, 1607, without substantial change; a number of variations, of little importance, occur in the fifth and sixth, which appeared in 1616 and 1624.

The date of composition is not doubtful. It falls within the year which followed the publication of the Venus and Adonis in 1593. In dedicating that 'first heir of his invention' to his patron Southampton, Shakespeare foreshadowed a 'graver labour' to which he promised to devote all idle hours,' for Southampton's honour. This graver labour, itself dedicated to Southampton, was unquestionably the Lucrece. The terms of the dedication show that the relation of patron and protégé had ripened into one of warm and admiring friendship on both sides.

For the rest, it is plain that Shakespeare's second poem was composed with more serious concentration of power than his first. But we must not exaggerate the clear division between the two into a gulf. It is

idle to suggest that the Lucrece was the poet's 'atonement' for the Venus. Its deeper tones denote no revolt or recantation, merely a resolve to give his work a fuller consonance with his own nature, to make it utter the richer harmonies of his music as well as its liquid and mellow soprano song. The story had a still older tradition in English than that of Adonis. Lucrece had been a mediæval type before she became one of the saints of Humanism. Chaucer had paraphrased her tale from Ovid,1 and the comparison of the traits in it which Chaucer chose and left with those which Shakespeare retains and omits, offers a critical problem analogous to that presented by their treatment of the story of Troilus. But while in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare is completely emancipated from the Chaucerian spell, and ruthlessly shatters the romantic world Chaucer had built up, it is here the influence of Chaucer's Troilus itself which, enforced by more immediate, contemporary, influences, colours Shakespeare's handling of the austerer 'tragedy' of Rome. He now employs the rich and harmonious stanza of seven lines, already familiar to Elizabethan poetry,2 which Chaucer used with complete mastery in the Troilus, but had already discarded for the more flexible and nervous couplet in The Legende of Good Women. To it too we may attribute the predominance of rhetoric of dialogue, soliloquy, apostrophe -in a tale where action is of more account than persuasion. The first two books of Chaucer's Troilus move amid scarcely interrupted scenes of persuasion and discourse. Troilus pleads with Pandarus, Pan

1 In The Legende of Good Women; he expressly quotes 'Ovid and Tytus Livius' as his authorities. The story in Ovid (Fasti, ii. 685 f.) occupies some

140 verses; in Chaucer 200.

2 It had been quite recently used by Daniel in his Complaint of Rosamond, and by Greene in his Maiden's Dream. L.

darus with Creseide. Whereas his Tarquin permits no hour of civil amenities to be interposed irrelevantly between his purpose and its execution, but has no sooner burst into Lucretia's house than he 'stalks' into her chamber. Shakespeare, on the other hand, expands with evident delight Ovid's hint of Lucrece's hospitable courtesy into a dramatic scene charged with pathetic suggestion, the more so because we see it as reflected in the wavering mind of Tarquin, somewhat as we see the 'golden opinions' of men reflected in the wavering mind of Macbeth :—

Quoth he, 'She took me kindly by the hand,
And gazed for tidings in my eager eyes,

Fearing some hard news from the warlike band,
Where her beloved Collatinus lies,' etc.

More poignantly still, we are reminded of Othello's anguished cry as he hangs over the sleeping Desdemona -'Put out the light, and then put out the light,'-by Tarquin's bitter apostrophe to the torch which is about to light him to his victim :—

Fair torch, burn out thy light, and lend it not
To darken her whose light excelleth thine.

Of this long inward debate, neither Ovid's Tarquin nor Chaucer's knows anything. It is true that the dramatic execution is still far from Shakespearean : neither Tarquin nor Lucrece is bodied forth with convincing vitality; but the play of rhetoric is several degrees more remote than in the Venus from the curious ingenuities and idle elegances of arabesque ; if incomplete as a presentation of life, it is woven of living material; we have to do, as an excellent critic of these poems has lately said, with 'a drama of emotion,' no longer with a pageant of gesture.'

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