Shakespeare's belated Lucrece

Shakespeare’s retelling of the old Lucretia story in The Rape of Lucrece is marked by belatedness. Written in the wake of many classical, medieval and Renaissance writers, the poem follows a long literary tradition. It moreover confronts a debate, initiated by Augustine, about Lucretia’s role in the rape, the morality of her suicide and the legend’s larger historical significance. By the sixteenth century, Lucretia had also become a popular motif in the visual arts. For Shakespeare as a latecomer to the age-old preoccupation with Lucretia, this entails an awareness of both the danger and the potential the story holds. My essay is concerned with Shakespeare’s approach to the moral debate about Lucretia. This approach depends, first of all, on the privileged access his poem offers to Lucrece’s private thoughts and emotions, but also on the way his Lucrece enters into dialogue with many themes and motifs employed in earlier versions of her story, with the contemporary genre of the female complaint and with representations of Lucretia in the visual arts. Shakespeare’s poem dramatizes the attempt to rehabilitate Lucrece’s character and establish her authority over her story. At the same time, it emphasizes the contested nature of this authority.