- description
- # *General character of Lucrece.*
## Overview
This is a subsection titled "*General character of Lucrece.*" from a larger work, providing an analysis of Shakespeare's poem *Lucrece*. It appears within [Chapter II](arke:01KG6S4EKZ5XHHZ4RAQVF0F0FC) of the source document. The subsection discusses the poem's length, writing style, moral reflections, and its relation to Shakespeare's earlier work, *Venus and Adonis*.
## Context
This subsection is extracted from the file [pdf-01KG6Q7Q25RHMFT3SJXPV18VFF.txt](arke:01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA) and is part of the [PDF Workflow Main Test 2026-01-30T00:26:53](arke:01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y) collection. It follows the [Introduction](arke:01KG6S5NXDT480ZV77GA0212G1) and precedes the subsection titled [St. Augustine.](arke:01KG6S5NXDY306XT00436Y9A8B) within [Chapter II](arke:01KG6S4EKZ5XHHZ4RAQVF0F0FC).
## Contents
The subsection provides an overview of *Lucrece*, comparing it to *Venus and Adonis*. It notes that *Lucrece* is significantly longer and written with a more flowing style, suggesting less planning and revision. The author highlights the moral reflections within the poem as a key feature, indicative of Shakespeare's intellectual depth and wide reading. The subsection also critiques the poem's digressions, conceits, and language, suggesting a lack of directness and a tendency towards grandiosity. It also discusses the classical sources of the story of Lucrece, mentioning Livy, Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, and Valerius Maximus.
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- *General character of Lucrece.*
*Lucrece* with its 1855 lines is more than half as long again as *Venus and Adonis* with its 1194 lines. It is written with a flowing pen and shows few signs of careful planning or revision. The most interesting feature of the poem lies in the moral reflections which the poet scatters with a free hand about the narrative. They bear witness to great fertility of mind, to wide reading, and to meditation on life’s complexities. The heroine’s allegorical addresses (ll. 869–1001) to Opportunity, Time’s servant, and to Time, the lackey of Eternity, turn to poetic account philosophic ideas of pith and moment.
In general design and execution, *Lucrece*, despite its superior gravity of tone and topic, exaggerates many of the defects of its forerunner. The digressions are ampler. The longest of them, which describes with spirit the siege of Troy, reaches a total of 217 lines, nearly one-ninth of the whole poem, and, although it is deserving of the critic’s close attention, it delays the progress of the story beyond all artistic law. The conceits are more extravagant and the luxuriant imagery is a thought less fresh and less sharply pointed than in *Venus and Adonis*. Throughout, there is a lack of directness and a tendency to grandiose language where simplicity would prove more effective. Haste may account for some bombastic periphrases. But Shakespeare often seems to fall a passing victim to the faults of which he
to be sold by *Edward White & Thomas Millington*, at the little North door of Paules at the signe of the Gunne. 1594.’ This volume was on sale on the London bookstalls at the same time as the 1594 edition of *Lucrece*. The story of Lucrece is twice mentioned in *Titus* (il. I. 108 and iv. I. 63).
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Classical authorities.
accuses contemporary poets in his *Sonnets*. Ingenuity was wasted in devising ‘what strained touches rhetoric could lend’ to episodes capable of narration in plain words. There is much in the poem which might be condemned in the poet’s own terminology as the ‘helpless smoke of words’.
## II
The theme of Shakespeare’s poem was nearly as well-worn in the literature of Western Europe as that of his first poem *Venus and Adonis*. For more than twenty centuries before Shakespeare was born, the tale of Lucrece was familiar to the western world. Her tragic fate was the accepted illustration of conjugal fidelity, not only through the classical era of Roman history, but through the Middle Ages. The hold that the tale had taken on the popular imagination of Europe survived the Renaissance, and was stimulated by the expansion of interest in the Latin classics.
Among Latin classical authors the story was told in fullest detail by Livy in his *History of Rome* (Bk. i, c. 57–9). Ovid in his poetic *Fasti* (ii. 721–852) gave a somewhat more sympathetic version of the same traditional details which Livy recorded. The main outlines of the legend figured, too, without variation in the contemporary Greek historians, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus, and in their successor, Dio Cassius, as well as in the work of a later Latin historian, Valerius Maximus.’
Dionysius alone tells the story at length. The other writers narrate it very briefly. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, *Antiquitatum Romanarum quae supersunt*, ed. Riessling, vol. ii, Leipzig, 1864; Dio Cassius, *Historia Romana*, ed. Melber, vol. ii, x. 12–18, Leipzig, 1890; Diodorus Siculus, *Bibliotheca Historica*, ed. Dindorf, vol. ii, lib. x. 20–21, Leipzig, 1867; and Valerius Maximus, *Facta et Dicta Memorabilia*, vi. 1. 1. In three papers on Shakespeare’s poem—*Shakespeare’s Lucrece. Eine litterarhistorische Untersuchung*,—which appeared in *Anglia*, Band xxii, pp. 1–32, 343–63, 393–455 (Halle, 1899),
B
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- title
- *General character of Lucrece.*