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LUCRECE
The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries;
Till with her own white fleece her voice controll’d
Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet *fold*.
Elsewhere Shakespeare borrows from Ovid words which escaped Chaucer’s notice. His insistence on the ‘snow-white’ of Lucrece’s ‘dimpled chin’ (420) and his comparison of her hair to ‘golden threads’ (400) echo the ‘niueusque color flauique capilli’ (*Fasti*, ii. 763) of Ovid’s heroine. Ovid’s *Fasti* was not translated into English before 1640. But there is little doubt that Ovid was accessible to Shakespeare in the original.
At the same time there are touches in Shakespeare’s *Lucrece* which suggest that he assimilated a few of Livy’s phrases direct. Painter, in the version which he introduced into his *Palace of Pleasure*, very loosely paraphrased the Latin historian, and it is unlikely that Shakespeare gained all his knowledge of Livy there. The lucid ‘argument’ in prose which Shakespeare prefixed to the poem catches Livy’s perspicuous manner more exactly than mere dependence on Painter would have allowed. The lines (437–41 and 463) in which Shakespeare pointedly describes how Tarquin’s hand rests on Lucrece’s breast follow Livy’s phrase, ‘sinistraque manu mulieris pectore oppresso.’ The hint is given in Ovid, and Painter merely states that Tarquin keeps Lucrece ‘doune with his lefte hande’. At one point Shakespeare corrects an obvious misapprehension of Painter—a fact which further confutes the theory of exclusive indebtedness to him. Livy, like Ovid, assigns to Tarquin the threat that in case of Lucrece’s resistance he will charge her with misconduct with a slave. Neither Latin writer gives the word ‘slave’ any epithet, and whether the man is in Tarquin’s or in Lucrece’s service is left undetermined. Painter makes Tarquin refer to a slave of his own household. Shakespeare assigns the slave to Lucrece’s
The smaller debt to Livy.
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