SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Figure of Lucrece: Writing Rape," in Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction From Wyatt to Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 141-63.

In the essay that follows, Crewe examines Shakespeare's representation of rape in The Rape of Lucrece.

.. . In more than one sense, Shakespeare is repeating history when he rewrites the narrative of Lucrece. Her story is first related in Livy's larger history of Rome, in which, however, it is not precisely her story, since she is not heard. It is then frequently retold in historical, literary, and other texts. Ovid, Augustine, Chaucer, and Machiavelli may be the most notable repeaters of the Lucrece story before Shakespeare, but they are far from being the only ones. The history of Lucrece thus comes to include the history of its textual repetition.¹

It might be suggested that what motivates or corresponds to this textual repetition is...