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“[The] extraordinarily violent instincts whose aim it is to bring about sexual union would be repeating something that had once occurred by chance and had since become established as being advantageous.”
“For men have marble, women waxen, minds,And therefore are they formed as marble will;The weak oppressed, the impression of strange kindsIs formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill.Then call them not the authors of their ill,No more than wax shall be accounted evilWherein is stamped the semblance of a devil.”
The story of Lucretia and her brutal rape by prince Sextus Tarquinius (aka Tarquin), the son of the last of the Roman kings, has permeated the collective mythos over a span of centuries. Having taken place approximately in 509 BCE, one of the first descriptions of the event was by the Roman historian Livy in his work Ab Urbe Condita, written between 29 and 9 BCE. Since then, it has been revisited and examined by numerous historians, theologians, novelists, and playwrights. Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, a narrative poem from 1594, may have been a complementary piece to Venus and Adonis, written the previous year. These were years during which the large number of plague deaths in London resulted in long periods of public theaters being closed, leading the playwright to turn to poetry. While both poems touch profoundly upon the theme of a