In this magnum opus, Britain's most distinguished scholar of 16th-century and 17th-century literature restores Shakespeare's poetic language to its rightful primacy.

When the king's son hears the chastity of one of his father's advisors praised, he sets out to sully her name, with tragic consequences.

William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets are read against the background of concepts of the soul during the early modern period. This approach provides new insights into concepts of interiority and performance as well as a new understanding of the soliloquy in both poetry and drama.

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Roman noblewoman Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a "graver labour". Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece has a serious tone throughout.The poem begins with a prose dedication addressed directly to the Earl of Southampton, which begins, "The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end." It refers to the poem as a pamphlet, which describes the form of its original publication of 1594.The dedication is followed by "The Argument", a prose paragraph that summarizes the historical context of