SOURCE: "'These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold': Structure in The Rape of Lucrece" in MOSAIC: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. X, No. 4, Summer, 1977, pp. 143-55.

In the essay below, Kramer and Kaminsky consider the "apparent dualities " that govern the structure of Lucrece, and claim that the poem has been too quickly dismissed as a flawed and overly rhetorical work.

Post-Coleridgean criticism of Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece has accepted as axiomatic the view that this poem, both in itself and as forecast of greater tragic writing, is truly the product of grave labor. In discussing the Sonnets, Coleridge spoke of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works as being "characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought" and, with particular reference to Lucrece, of Shakespeare's intensely applied "assimilative and modifying faculties."¹ In our time Douglas Bush, though unhappy with the poem's ample rhetoric and consequent lack of...