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- LUCRECE
9
accuses
contemporary
poets in
his
Sonnets,
Ingenuity
was
wasted
in devising
<
what
strained
touches
rhetoric couldlend
' 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-
The
story.
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
Classical
detail
by Livy
in his
History
of
Rome
(Bk.
i,
c.
f
7-9). Ovid
^"''^°"""-
in his poetic Fasti
(ii.
7
2
1-8
5-
2)
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, Antlquitatum
Romanarum
quaeiupersunt, ed.
Riessling,
vol.
ii,
Leipzig,
lU^
; Dio Cassius, Hhtoria Romana,ed.
Melber,
vol.
ii,
x.
ii-i8, Leipzig, 185)05 Diodorus
Siculus,
-B'thliotheca
Htstorka^ ed. Dindorf,
vol.
ii, lib. x.
lo-zi, Leipzig, 18(^7; and
Valerius
Maximus,
Facta
et
Dicta
Memorabilia^
vi.
I.
I.
In three papers on
Shakespeare's
PO^"^
—
Shakespeare's
Lucrece. Eine
litterarhistorische Untersuchung^
—
which
appeared in Anglia^
Band
xxii, pp. 1-32, 3+5-(^3, 35)3-45'5
(Halle,
189^),
6
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