SOURCE: Montgomery, Robert L., Jr. “Shakespeare's Gaudy: The Method of The Rape of Lucrece.” In Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, edited by Thomas P. Harrison, Archibald A. Hill, Ernest C. Mossner, and James Sledd, pp. 25-36. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1967.

In the following essay, Montgomery studies Shakespeare's abundant use of formal, patterned rhetoric in The Rape of Lucrece, maintaining that through this extravagant rhetoric Shakespeare shifted the reader's perspective, established mood, explored the psychology of his characters, moralized, and suggested a philosophical framework for the poem.

Whatever Shakespeare made of the legend of Lucrece, it is not a story in the usual sense, and it is not dramatic. His treatment of what Ovid, Livy, Chaucer, and Painter passed on to him is an expansion and reshaping into major points of emphasis of elements which their versions handle briefly.¹ He takes what his sources (along...