SOURCE: “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 304-26.
In the following essay, Newman remarks that on first examination, The Rape of Lucrece appears to be a poem about the patriarchal victimization of women. However, Newman proposes that a closer look reveals the poem's subtext of Philomela's violent revenge against her rapist—a story which presents an independent response from women to the male society that dominates them.
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