SOURCE: Burrow, Colin. Introduction to Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow, pp. 45-73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Burrow provides an overview of The Rape of Lucrece, focusing on the poem's sources, political implications, and its treatment of the topic of rape. Burrow takes issue with those who disparage The Rape of Lucrece as confusing and inconclusive, and he maintains that the poem's primary merit is its willingness to explore “dark but profound questions.”

The Argument, Sources, and Politics.

The story of Lucretia, the chaste wife whose rape precipitated the ejection of the kings from Rome, has been subjected to varieties of interpretation from the earliest period of Roman historiography.¹ Shakespeare could have read versions by Ovid, Livy (or by Livy in Painter's translation), by Dionysius Halicarnassus, Gower, and Chaucer, and any number of popularized versions of these.² Each version differs...