Where Venus is quicksilver, Lucrece is marble: long rhetorical arias of temptation, violation, grief, and resolve.
It is demanding reading, closer to tragedy than to narrative entertainment, and it anticipates Macbeth’s anatomy of a mind talking itself into atrocity. The poem gives Lucrece herself the voice the legend usually denies her.
Rape of Lucrece on stage
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Rape of Lucrece on screen
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Reading Rape of Lucrece this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.