Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece"

Abstract

There is at present a tendency in some criticism to argue that Lucrece is one of many women in sixteenth- and seventeenth century literature who, as Deborah G. Burks puts it in a recent essay, "have internalized th[e] sense of their own culpability for men's assaults on them." In this paper, Daalder states that Burks' reading is wrong. If the lines Burks focuses on are, instead, read as belonging to the stanza as a whole, they form part of a statement in which Lucrece unequivocally and clearheadedly accuses her attacker.