The Rape of Lucrece

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the fateful rape and suicide of the legendary Roman noblewoman Lucretia.

Quotes

What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours.

• What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours.
  • Dedication, to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton

• Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
  The eyes of men without an orator.
  • Lines 29–30

• The aim of all is but to nurse the life
  With honour, wealth, and ease, in waning age;
  And in this aim there is such thwarting strife,
  That one for all, or all for one we gage;
  As life for honour in fell battles’ rage;
    Honour for wealth; and oft that wealth doth cost
    The death of all, and all together lost.
  • Lines 141–7

Let fair humanity abhor the deed
That spots and stains love's modest snow-white weed.

• Let fair humanity abhor the deed
  That spots and stains love's modest snow-white weed.
  • Lines 195–6

• What win I if I gain the thing I seek?
  A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
  Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
  Or sells eternity to get a toy?
  • Lines 211–14

• Love thrives not in the heart that shadows dreadeth.
  • Line 270

Into the chamber wickedly he stalks
And gazeth on her yet unstainèd bed.

• Into the chamber wickedly he stalks
  And gazeth on her yet unstainèd bed.
  • Lines 365–6

• Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
  Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss;
  Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,
  Swelling on either side to want his bliss;
  Between whose hills her head entombed is;
    Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
    To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes.
  • Lines 386–92

Pure Chastity is rifled of her store,
And Lust, the thief, far poorer than before.

• Pure Chastity is rifled of her store,
  And Lust, the thief, far poorer than before.
  • Lines 692–3

• And my true eyes have never practis’d how
  To cloak offences with a cunning brow.
  • Lines 748–9

• Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
  Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?
  Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud?
  Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts?
  Or kings be breakers of their own behests?
    But no perfection is so absolute,
    That some impurity doth not pollute.
  • Lines 848–54

• O Opportunity! thy guilt is great,
  ’Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason;
  Thou sett’st the wolf where he the lamb may get;
  Whoever plots the sin, thou point’st the season;
  ’Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason;
    And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him,
    Sits Sin to seize the souls that wander by him.
  Thou mak’st the vestal violate her oath;
  Thou blow’st the fire when temperance is thaw’d;
  Thou smother’st honesty, thou murder’st troth;
  Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd!
  Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud:
    Thou ravisher, thou traitor, thou false thief,
    Thy honey turns to gall, thy joy to grief!
  Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame,
  Thy private feasting to a public fast,
  Thy smoothing titles to a ragged name,
  Thy sugar’d tongue to bitter wormwood taste:
  Thy violent vanities can never last.
    How comes it, then, vile Opportunity,
    Being so bad, such numbers seek for thee?
  When wilt thou be the humble suppliant’s friend,
  And bring him where his suit may be obtain’d?
  When wilt thou sort an hour great strifes to end?
  Or free that soul which wretchedness hath chain’d?
  Give physic to the sick, ease to the pain’d?
    The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee;
    But they ne’er meet with Opportunity.
  The patient dies while the physician sleeps;
  The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds;
  Justice is feasting while the widow weeps;
  Advice is sporting while infection breeds:
  Thou grant’st no time for charitable deeds:
    Wrath, envy, treason, rape, and murder’s rages,
    Thy heinous hours wait on them as their pages.
  When Truth and Virtue have to do with thee,
  A thousand crosses keep them from thy aid:
  They buy thy help; but Sin ne’er gives a fee,
  He gratis comes; and thou art well appaid
  As well to hear as grant what he hath said.
  • Lines 876–913

• Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
  To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light,
  To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
  To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
  To wrong the wronger till he render right,
    To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
    And smear with dust their glittering golden towers;
  To fill with worm-holes stately monuments,
  To feed oblivion with decay of things,
  To blot old books and alter their contents,
  To pluck the quills from ancient ravens’ wings,
  To dry the old oak’s sap and cherish springs,
    To spoil antiquities of hammer’d steel,
    And turn the giddy round of Fortune’s wheel;
  To show the beldam daughters of her daughter,
  To make the child a man, the man a child,
  To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter,
  To tame the unicorn and lion wild,
  To mock the subtle, in themselves beguil’d,
    To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops,
    And waste huge stones with little water-drops.
  • Lines 939–59

Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words;
Sometime ’tis mad and too much talk affords.

• Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words;
  Sometime ’tis mad and too much talk affords.
  • Lines 1105–6

No man inveigh against the wither’d flower,
But chide rough winter that the flower hath kill’d.

• No man inveigh against the wither’d flower,
  But chide rough winter that the flower hath kill’d.
  • Lines 1254–5

• And that deep torture may be called a hell,
  When more is felt than one hath power to tell.
  • Lines 1287–8

• Cloud-kissing Ilion.
  • Line 1370

• Why should the private pleasure of some one
  Become the public plague of many moe?
  Let sin, alone committed, light alone
  Upon his head that hath transgressèd so;
  Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe;
    For one’s offence why should so many fall,
    To plague a private sin in general?
  • Lines 1478–84

About

• The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured, up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them. He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted. The images, which are often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least like: so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it. The speakers are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams. Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story. Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is besides, a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this, in the description of the picture in Tarquin and Lucrece, those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except by words. The invocation to Opportunity in the Tarquin and Lucrece is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is overloaded by them.
  • William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), Poems and Sonnets

See also

• Venus and Adonis