SOURCE: Soellner, Rolf. “Shakespeare's Lucrece and the Garnier-Pembroke Connection.” Shakespeare Studies (1982): 1-20.

In the following excerpt, Soellner examines the similarities between The Rape of Lucrece and several works written or inspired by French writer Robert Garnier. The critic emphasizes the manner in which Shakespeare's poem echoes Garnier's depictions of women who assert their integrity against powerful male figures.

Shakespeare's dedication of Lucrece (1594) to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, raises two major questions, for which the answers given may have been too simple. First, why did Shakespeare dedicate to the Earl a work that contrasts so much with his previous offering Venus and Adonis (1593)? The general explanation is that Shakespeare had promised in the dedication to the earlier poem to perform a “graver labor” for Southampton and that Lucrece fulfilled this promise. We have the word of Gabriel Harvey that Venus and Adonis delighted the “younger sort,” while Lucrece...