“Over Her Dead Body”: print, plaint, and painting in Shakespeare’s Lucrece

Speaker: Prof. David Scott Kastan

Venue: Online, Tencent Meeting: 253 323 366, passcode: 2025

Abstract: In the spring of 1594, a long narrative poem by Shakespeare was published and advertised for sale in London. The title page called it Lucrece. Now the poem is usually known as The Rape of Lucrece, though it was only in 1616 (in its sixth edition) that this became the poem’s title. Perhaps this talk should be called much ado about a title, but it seems to me to offer a way to help us think about the strange poem that is about both rape and revolution, set in the legendary Roman past as the monarchy is overthrown and “the state government changed from kings to consuls.”