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LUCRECE
the table ‘of his English books Anno 1611’. Minor indications that the work was familiar to students abound. Fragments of two lines (1086–7) are quoted in the disjointed contemporary scribble which defaces the outside leaf of an early manuscript copy of some of Bacon’s tracts in the Duke of Northumberland’s library at Alnwick; the words were probably written down very early in the seventeenth century.¹
Plagiarisms.
To poets and dramatists of the early seventeenth century the work especially appealed. It at once received the flattery of imitation or actual plagiarism. As early as 1595 Richard Barnfield, an inveterate imitator of Shakespeare, transferred many phrases to his Cassandra. In 1600 Samuel Nicholson incorporated lines without acknowledgement in his poem of Avolastus—procedure which was followed with even greater boldness by Robert Baron in his Fortune’s Tennis Ball just fifty years later. Reminiscences of the great apostrophe to Opportunity are met with in Marston’s play of The Malcontent, 1604, and in Ford’s Lady’s Trial, 1638. Shakespeare’s friend, Thomas Heywood, produced a five-act tragedy called The Rape of Lucrece in 1608, the year following the appearance of the fourth edition of Shakespeare’s poem. But Heywood’s play is a chronicle drama covering much wider ground than Sextus Tarquinius’ outrage. Lucrece’s tragic experience is merely one of many legendary disasters which occupy Heywood’s pen, and the
Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece.
¹ Shakespeare’s name is repeated many times, in various forms, on this outside leaf, together with the titles of two of his plays, Rychard the Second and Rychard the Third. The crude excerpt from Lucrece runs:—‘reuealing day through euery Crany peepes and see.’ The careless scribble has little significance, and was possibly the work of a scribe testing a new pen. No attention need be paid to the arguments which would treat the manuscript rigmarole as evidence of Bacon’s responsibility for Shakespeare’s works. The MS. has been twice reprinted lately, by Mr. T. Le Marchant Douse, who takes a sensible view of the problem offered by the scribble, and by Mr. Thomas Burgoyne, who is inclined to take the incoherences seriously.
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