Shakespeare Survey

The admirable criticism to be found in the Introductions to some recent editions of Shakespeare’s works demonstrates the virtues of orthodox scholarly method as a basis for first-rate critical thought; happily, these virtues are also to be found at large in some of this year’s other publications. Ian Donald-son’s The Rapes of Lucretia offers a lucid, direct, and admirably succinct narrative, accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist. That it does so speaks for the skill and judgement of the author, who surveys a wide and difficult field: literature in several languages and from Roman times to the French Revolution, paintings from Botticelli to David, and some complex issues of cultural and intellectual history. Donaldson’s concern, as his subtitle declares, is with ‘a myth and its transformations’, and for him Shakespeare forms only a part – if an important part – of his whole account. For Shakespearians, on the other hand, the whole book may be viewed as leading up to and then receding from The Rape of Lucrece, putting Shakespeare’s poem in the context of European painting and a certain strand of European literature and cultural history.