William Shakespeare

The Rape of Lucrece Annotated William Shakespeare

The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a graver work. Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece lacks the humorous tone of the earlier poem. Lucrece draws on the story described in both Ovid's Fasti and Livy's history of Rome. In 509 BC, Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin, the king of Rome, raped Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, one of the king's aristocratic retainers. As a result, Lucrece committed suicide. Her body was paraded in the Roman Forum by the king's nephew. This incited a full-scale revolt against the Tarquins led by Lucius Junius Brutus, the banishment of the royal family, and the founding of the Roman republic.