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- LUCRECE 23
Early criticism.
a pedestrian piece of verse in the seven-line stanza, followed Spenser’s poem in 1591, and next year there appeared Daniel’s *Complaint of Rosamond*. The uses to which Shakespeare put Daniel’s preceding experiment have already been noticed. Shakespeare employed the stanza again in the narrative poem, *A Lover’s Complaint*, which was first published in 1609 with the *Sonnets*. That piece was probably written very shortly after *Lucrece*.
Though the popularity of *Lucrece* did not equal that of *Venus and Adonis*, and the volume passed through fewer editions during and after Shakespeare’s lifetime, its success on its appearance was well pronounced, and it greatly added to Shakespeare’s reputation among contemporary critics. Some readers, like Francis Meres in his *Palladis Tamia* (1598), the anonymous author of the *Pilgrimage to Parnassus*, and Richard Barnfield in *Poems in Divers Humours*, 1598¹, failed to detect any distinction between *Lucrece* and its predecessor *Venus and Adonis*. But a few observers like Gabriel Harvey were more discriminating, and pointed out that while the earlier poem delighted ‘the younger sort’, *Lucrece* pleased ‘the wiser sort’². Harvey was indeed inclined to exaggerate the serious aspect of the poem and to rank it with *Hamlet*. Drummond of Hawthornden noted that he read the poem in 1606, and a copy figures in
¹ And Shakespeare thou, whose bony-flowing vaine
(pleasing the World) thy Praises doth obtaine,
Whose *Venus* and whose *Lucrece* (sweete and chaste)
Thy name in fame’s immortall Booke have plact.
² Harvey’s words ran:—‘The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis*. But his *Lucrece* and tragedy of *Hamlet*, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort.’ Harvey wrote these words about 1604 in a copy of Speght’s *Chancer* of 1598. They were transcribed by George Steevens (cf. Variorum ed., 1821, vol. ii, p. 369). But the volume containing Harvey’s original draft belonged to Bishop Percy, and was burnt in the fire at Northumberland House, London, which destroyed the bishop’s library in 1780.
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