From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 456-57.
[This section was prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
1594
LVCRECE | LONDON. | Printed by Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, and are | to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound | in Paules Churh-yard. | 1594. -- TITLE PAGE OF FIRST EDITION, 1594.
The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; mean time, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness. Your Lordship's in all duty, -- SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM, 1594, Dedication.
Lucrece, of whom proud Rome hath boasted long
Lately reviv'd to live another age,
And here arriv'd to tell of Tarquin's wrong
Her chaste denial, and the Tyrant's rage,
Acting her passions on our stately stage;
She is remembered, all forgetting me,
Yet I as faire and chaste as e'er was she.
-- DRAYTON, MICHAEL, 1594, Matilda, s. vi.
And Shakespeare, thou, whose hony flowing vaine,
(Pleasing the World) thy Praises cloth containe;
Whose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweet, and chast)
Thy name in Fame's immortall Booke have plac't.
Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever:
Well may the Body die, but Fame die never.
-- BARNFIELD, RICHARD, 1605, Remembrance of some English Poets.
Who loves chaste life, there Lucrece for a teacher:,br>
Who lis't read lust there's Venus and Adonis.
-- FREEMAN, THOMAS, 1614, Runne and a Great Cast.
The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject -- not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, uphill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. . . . A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. . . . There is, besides, a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons. -- HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1817-69, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, p. 244.
The action is retarded by all manner of pretty ingenuities. Lucrece in her agony delivers tirades on Night, on Time, on Opportunity, as if they were theses for a degree in some academy of wit. Still the effect on a reader in the right mood is not that of frigid cleverness; the faults are faults of youth, the poet's pleasurable excitement can be perceived; nay at times we feel the energetic fervour of his heart. Now and again the poetry surprises, not by singularity, but as Keats has said that poetry ought to surprise, by a fine excess; sometimes a line is all gold seven times refined; and there is throughout such evidence of a rich, abounding nature in the writer that we are happy with him even while we recognize the idle errors of his nonage. -- DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. I, p. 437.
The strength of "Lucrece" lies in its graphic and gorgeous descriptions, and in its sometimes microscopic psychological analysis. For the rest, its pathos consists of elaborate and far-fetched rhetoric. The lament of the heroine after the crime has been committed is pure declamation, extremely eloquent no doubt, but copious and artificial as an oration of Cicero's, rich in apostrophes and antitheses. The sorrow of "Collatine and his consorted lords" is portrayed in laboured and quibbling speeches. Shakespeare's knowledge and mastery are most clearly seen in the reflections scattered through the narrative. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. I, p. 71.
If the "Venus" be a pageant of gesture, the "Lucrece" is a drama of emotion. You have the same wealth of imagery, but the images are no longer sunlit and sharply defined. They seem, rather, created by the reflex action of a sleepless brain as it were fantastic symbols shaped from the lying report of tired eyes staring into darkness, and they are no longer used to decorate the outward play of natural desire and reluctance, but to project the shadows of abnormal passion and acute mental distress. -- WYNDHAM, GEORGE, 1898, ed. The Poems of Shakespeare, Introduction, p. xcv.
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