Lucrece (or The Rape of Lucrece) (1594) was William Shakespeare’s follow-up to his previous non-theatrical poem, Venus and Adonis (1593). Both were dedicated to his patron, Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton. While it was customary for artists to seek patronage from wealthy art lovers, and then to dedicate completed works to them with fulsome praise, Shakespeare goes well beyond this standard in his introduction. He writes “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end … What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours….” Some have taken the lavish nature of this dedication as proof of a homosexual affair, but there is no reason to suspect that there was a stronger relationship between the two men than mere sponsorship, and perhaps genuine friendship. Others have speculated, and I am drawn to this theory myself, that the Earl was the fair-haired youth of the Sonnets, whom Shakespeare famously compared to a summer’s day.

Both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were published after Shakespeare had begun to establish himself as a dramatist; certainly the Henry VI trilogy, and possibly a few other plays had already found favor with the public. Why then the hiatus from playwriting? Two reasons: first of all, 1593 and 1594 saw severe outbreaks of the plague, and all the theaters were closed as a health precaution. (Imagine COVID in the days before face masks and hand gel. Only a hundred times worse.) However, even if the theaters had remained open, Shakespeare would almost certainly have tried his hand at narrative poetry anyway for the simple explanation that it carried a prestige that stage plays in those days did not. It’s hard for us to believe today, but while staged comedy and drama might have been popular, it was considered a low form of entertainment, and writers of plays were no more respected in that day than television writers are in ours. In any case, the investment in time and effort paid off for young Shakespeare; the pamphlets were a publishing sensation, going through several printings and making him a household name among the intelligentsia of London.

Following the dedication is a prose section titled The Argument, which is actually more of a summary of the story as well as some background information. This was hardly necessary — Shakespeare’s audience would have known the story from Roman history of Lucretia’s treatment at the hands of the dictator Tarquinus very well; many no doubt would have read it in school in the original Latin, as did the Bard himself. In any case, the plot is extremely simple: Tarquinus Sextus is the son of Rome’s king, and he rapes the lady Lucretia, wife of an influential citizen and famous throughout Rome for her virtuous ways. Her suicide inspires her husband and his friends to overthrow the dictatorship, which brought to Rome, if not true democracy, at least a republic which lasted four hundred years, until Julius Caesar declared himself emperor.

Interesting side note: one of the friends leading the revolt against Tarquinus was named Brutus. He was an ancestor of the same Marcus Brutus who murdered Julius Caesar centuries later, as depicted in the famous Shakespeare play. The assassins in that play depended upon this historical symmetry for their conspiracy — they knew that the citizens of Rome would not accept Caesar’s assassination without the ancestral credibility brought by Marcus Brutus and his association with history.

Because Shakespeare was writing for a British audience, he anglicized the names.

• Lucretia = Lucrece
• Tarquinus = Tarquin
• Collatinus =  Collatine (rhymes with “mine”)

In ancient Rome, family names and place names are often tied together. For example, Collatia (or Collatium) is the ancestral home of the Collatinus clan. Also, frequently women were named after their fathers: Lucretia was the daughter of Spurius Lucretius, prefect of Rome.

References to the tale of Lucretia occur several times in Shakespeare’s work: there are echoes of it in Titus Andronicus when a virtuous maid is raped by powerful princes, and in Cymbeline when a man steals into a lady’s bedchamber to destroy her reputation. Other plays, such as Macbeth, refer to the legend as well.

Another Roman legend incorporated in the poem is the myth of Philomel, who was raped, then had her tongue cut out so she couldn’t tell anyone. (This element also appeared in Titus Andronicus.) The legend ends with the woman transformed by the gods into a nightingale.

Many English speakers reading about the historical characters named Brutus have joked about the “brutal” connotations of the name. In fact, I discovered in my research for this poem, “Brutus” was actually a nickname, or “cognomen” as it is known in Latin. Apparently the Brutus in this story was a distant relative of the Tarquins (so was Lucretia’s husband Collatinus) named Lucius Junius, and he adopted an unintelligent demeanor as a way of preventing his powerful relatives from growing suspicious or jealous of him. The ruse worked; he became known as Lucius Junius the Stupid (“Brutus” in Latin.) This did not prevent him from holding key government positions under the Tarquins; certainly not the first or last time in history that a leader’s relative with a reputation for stupidity was not disqualified from a career in politics!

In fact subsequent events prove that he was far from stupid. Within a year the Tarquins were driven into exile, and Brutus and Collatinus were named first consuls of the new Roman Republic. It seems that he had been biding his time waiting for the perfect opportunity to seize power, and the unfortunate events surrounding his kinswoman Lucretia were just what he was waiting for.