The Rape of Lucrece

Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are the only works that Shakespeare seems to have shepherded through the printing process. Both owe a good deal to Ovid , the Classical poet whose writings Shakespeare encountered repeatedly in school. These two poems are the only works for…

…Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to him. It has also been argued, albeit inconclusively, that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to him. If so, the earlier sonnets, urging marriage, must have been written before the beginning (in 1595) of Southampton’s intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon, one of…

…and Livy for his poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In Julius Caesar (1599–1600), Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07), and Coriolanus (c. 1608), he developed Plutarchan biography into drama that, though Elizabethan in structure, is Classical in tone. Shakespeare clearly did not accept all the precepts of English humanism at face…

…recounted in Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.