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- LUCRECE 17
Shakespeare again enlarges the restricted bounds of the classical tale by introducing a sympathizing handmaiden. Such a subsidiary character (1212–302) is unknown to Ovid or Livy. This new episode coincides, possibly by accident, with a scene in the French tragedy of *Lucrece* of 1566. No other parallel is met with. Shakespeare makes effective use of the woman’s ‘heaviness’ when she is summoned by her mistress after the latter resolves to slay herself. In the French drama Lucrece’s nurse feelingly endeavours to dissuade her from her purpose.
The appeal to personified Opportunity (ll. 869 sq.) seems an original device of Shakespeare, but the succeeding apostrophe to Time (ll. 939 sq.) covers ground which many poets had occupied before. Two English poets, Thomas Watson in *Hecatompathia* (1582, Sonnets xlvii and lxxvii), and Giles Fletcher in *Licia* (1593, Sonnet xxviii), anticipated at many points Shakespeare’s catalogue of Time’s varied activities. Watson acknowledged that his lines were borrowed from the Italian Serafino and Fletcher imitated the Neapolitan Latinist Angerianus; while both Serafino and Angerianus owed much on their part to Ovid’s pathetic lament in *Tristia* (iv. 6. 1–10). Shakespeare doubtless obtained all the suggestion that he needed from his fellow countrymen. That Shakespeare knew Watson’s reflections on the topic seems proved by his verbatim quotation of one of them in *Much Ado about Nothing* (i. 1. 271): ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.’ Similarly there are plain indications in Shakespeare’s *Sonnets* that Fletcher’s *Licia* was familiar to him.¹
In Ovid, *Ars Amatoria*, i. 131 sq., Ulysses, for Calypso’s amusement, paints the like scene with a wand on the sand of the sea-shore and describes his sketch in terms very like those in the *Heroides*. But, although Ovid offered hints for Shakespeare’s picture, Vergil supplied the precise design.
¹ Cf. *Elixabethan Sonnets*, Introd. by the present writer, vol. i, p. lxxxiii, and vol. ii, p. 348; *Life of Shakespeare*, 5th edition, pp. 81 n. 2, 117 n. 2, and 229 n. 1.
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