Poetry · 1594
The Rape of Lucrece
Tarquin rides through the night from the Roman camp at Ardea to Collatium, on the strength of a husband's boasting about his wife's virtue at a supper the evening before. What follows — the long debate with himself outside her chamber, the assault, and Lucrece's summoning of her husband and father to hear her accusation before she kills herself in front of them — turns on speeches rather than on action, and ends with Brutus lifting the knife from her body and the Tarquins driven out of Rome.
Shakespeare published the poem in 1594, the year after Venus and Adonis and during the same closure of the London theatres by plague, with a warm dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. It is written in rhyme royal, and is prefaced by The Argument, a prose summary of the history behind it.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the dedication, The Argument, and the complete poem.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1564–1616 · Renaissance
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and by the 1590s was established in London as an actor, playwright, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), the theatre company for which he wrote nearly all of his plays and whose Globe Theatre he part-owned. His 154 sonnets, addressed variously to a young man and to a "dark lady" whose identities remain unknown, were published in 1609, likely without his direct involvement, though most are thought to have been written more than a decade earlier and circulated privately among friends. Alongside the sonnets and two long narrative poems, he wrote or co-wrote roughly three dozen plays across every major dramatic genre of his day, a body of work whose influence on English literature and language has no real parallel. He retired to Stratford-upon-Avon in his later years and died there at fifty-two.
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