SOURCE: "Pleasing the Wiser Sort: Ethics and Genre in Lucrece and Hamlet" in The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1994, pp. 99-119.

In the following essay, Roe discusses the internal conflicts that precede Lucrece 's suicide, and claims they are drawn from the paradoxical nature of the ideal of chastity and link her to the character of Hamlet.

'The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them to please the wiser sort.¹

A curious feature of Harvey's commendation is that he should twin Hamlet with The Rape of Lucrece while finding no companion play for Venus and Adonis. There are various explanations for this, some of them straightforward, others less so. In noting literary achievement Harvey sticks mainly to poets rather than dramatists, and it is as a poet that he recommends Shakespeare. Hamlet, though...