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. Lucrece was a potent pro-republican symbol in the writings of humanists and reformers in Continental Europe from the fourteenth century onward.

More locally, the story found expression in a variety of English popular media in the years leading up to 1605. A series of Lucrece poems appeared, two of which were written, perhaps not coincidentally, by dramatists, including 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 significantly earlier. 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 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 topic that has been explored 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.

Thematically, it seems likely that the lost Lucretia 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.