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- 14
LUCRECE
The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries ;
Till with her own white fleece her voice controlPd
Entombs her outcry in her lips' sweet /<?/^.
Elsewhere
Shakespeare
borrows from
Ovid
words
whichescaped
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
fiauique
capilli'(/v?j-ft,
ii.
7^^) of
Ovid's
heroine.
Ov'id^s
Fastiwas not
translated
into
English before
1
540.
But there
is
little
doubt
that
Ovid
was
accessible
to
Shakespeare
in
the
original.
The
smaller
At
the
SLime
time
there
are
touches
in
Shakespeare'sIt
Livy.'°
Lucrece
which
suggest that he
assimilated
a
few
of
Livy'sphrases
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
per-
spicuous manner
more
exactly than
mere
dependence
on
Painter
would
have
allowed. The
lines
(437-41
and
4(^3)
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'sresistance
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
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