Lucretia

Historical Records

St. John’s College ms. Acc.v.E.4, college Computus Hebdomalis:

fol. 6 v. (18-24th February 1605)

The tragoedy of Lucretia publickly acted xjth of ffebruary with good commedacon [marginal note reads "Shrouemunday"]
And dyverse strangers interteyned in respect thereof

folio 7 (25 Feburary-3 March)

Impositi pro tragoedia Luretjae 3 li. 17 s. 8 d. praeter 22 s. 4 d. in pecuijs solutis
In Decrementis xj s. ix d. ob.

(Quoted by Elliott-Nelson, REED Oxford I.281)

Theatrical Provenance

Produced at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1604-1605. Probably written in Latin.

Probable Genre(s)

Latin (?) Tragedy (Harbage)

Narrative Sources and Analogues

Given that the vast majority of university productions were reworkings of classical materials written in Latin, the play almost certainly featured a version of the story of Lucretia, the Roman matron whose rape by Sextus Tarquinus and subsequent suicide precipitated the fall of Rome's last king and the establishment of the Roman Republic in the sixth century B.C.

The Lucretia story enjoyed broad popularity in Renaissance culture from the fourteenth century onward, first appearing in pro-republican contexts in humanist and reformist writings in Italy and elsewhere on the Continent (see particularly Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking). More locally, however, the story found expression in a variety of English popular media in the years leading up to 1605, most instantiations of which were closely linked to the stage. Two Lucrece poems by popular London dramatists appeared in the 1590s: Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece (1594) and Thomas Middleton's Ghost of Lucrece (1600). The story found more direct expression in drama, as well, in Thomas Heywood's Red Bull blockbuster The Rape of Lucrece , first published in 1608 but, like much of Heywood's work, probably written and performed significantly earlier, even potentially appearing as early as 1594 (see Holladay, "Robert Browne and the Date of Heywood's "Lucrece"). The popularity of Heywood's play, and the new attention it brought to the Lucrece story, is attested not only by its progress through a remarkable five editions before 1642, but also by a spate of imitations and references it spawned in other works, ranging from its mention as the center of brief meta-theatrical joke in Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle to its replication in miniature in the subplot of the rape of Antonio's wife in Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy (1606) to its full-scale reworking in Fletcher's Valentinian (1614). The widespread popularity of the Lucrece story in these urban dramatic contexts points to the possibility of an intriguing connection between university and public theater in 1605, a connection that has already been noted with regards to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Matthew Gwinne's Latin pageant Tres Sibyllae, performed for James at St. John's in the same year. This connection, alongside Gwinne's authorship, two years earlier, of Nero, a Latin tragedy with similar themes of tyranny and sexual misconduct, might be taken as (highly tentative) evidence of his authorship.

Thematically, dramatizations of the Lucrece story vary wildly in their commitments, falling anywhere on the spectrum from intensely affective investigations of Lucrece's plight (Shakespeare) to more explicitly political accounts of the shift from monarchy to republic. If, as seems likely, the anonymous author of Lucretia was inspired by Lucrece's popularity on the public stage would have followed Heywood's play and other period "rape tragedies" (i.e. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (1619), or in their depiction of "tyrants" whose moral bankruptcy crosses a line when it interferes with the domestic arrangements of subjects.