SOURCE: "Lucrece! What Hath Your Conceited Painter Wrought?," in Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches, edited by Harry R. Garvin, Bucknell University Press, 1980, pp. 13-30.

In the essay that follows, Truax discusses the painting that Lucrece describes immediately before her suicidea painting that depicts the Trojan war, launched in order to revenge the rape of Helen.

Midway through Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1593), shortly following the brutal assault by Tarquin, comes a passage about a uniquely crafted painting. Although references to painting and sculpture are frequent in Shakespeare's plays and poems, this one passage contains by far the longest and most complex allusion to art. It consists of two hundred lines (1366-1568), about one ninth of the entire poem, and therefore affords the best opportunity to investigate how Shakespeare may have perceived painting as an art form and to hypothesize to what extent he was influenced either directly...