SOURCE: “The Rape of Lucrece,” in Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies, Heinemann, 1973, pp. 187-203.

In the following essay, Muir briefly describes the structure of The Rape of Lucrece, connects the poem to such later Shakespearean plays as Measure for Measure, and reviews the scholarly responses to the poem's themes and imagery.

Lucrece was the ‘graver labour’ promised by Shakespeare in the Dedication to Venus and Adonis. It is written in rhyme royal, the stanza form employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and by Sackville in his Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates, and it has a slower, graver movement than the six-line stanza of Venus and Adonis. There may have been a draft in the six-line stanza of Venus and Adonis, since Suckling quoted several stanzas in this form.

In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare had written of a chaste youth repelling the assaults of an amorous...