{"id":"01KG6S6SF5WBKQNQZFBTQRDP6P","cid":"bafkreidu44rahsgwj4ye45jpohxbzigqh6er5b5pvhpyqjwjyyizla7hwy","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":3259,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.288Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 1","source_file":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","start_line":3236,"text":"Sisteenth-century developments.\n\nAmong early Christian authors St. Augustine retold the legend in his *Civitas Dei* (Bk. i, ch. 16–19). He commented with some independence on the ethical significance of Lucrece’s self-slaughter, which he deemed unjustified by the circumstances of the case.\n\nThe tale found a place in the most widely-read storybook of the Middle Ages, the *Gesta Romanorum*, and by the fourteenth century it had become a stock topic among poets and novelists. Of the great authors of the Italian Renaissance Boccaccio was the earliest to utilize it. He narrated it in his Latin prose treatise *De Claris Mulieribus*. It was doubtless Boccaccio’s example that first recommended it to imaginative writers in England. Chaucer and Gower both turned the story into English verse, Chaucer in his *Legend of Good Women* (§ 5, ll. 1680–885) and Gower in his *Confessio Amantis* (Bk. vii. 4754–5130). Both Chaucer and Gower closely followed Ovid, but derived a few touches from Livy. Half a century later Lydgate noticed the legend in his *Fall of Princes* (Bk. iii, ch. 5). When the Middle Ages closed, Lucrece was a recognized heroine of English poetry.\n\nThe sixteenth century saw a further increase in the popularity of the topic, both in England and on the continent of Europe. It was a favourite theme in Italy both for Latin and Italian epigrams and sonnets. The Italian prose-writer, Bandello, dealt with it in his collection of novels, which, first appearing in 1554, at once attained a classical repute. Bandello’s fiction was quickly translated into French. The revived drama of the Renaissance found in Lucrece’s fate a fit subject for tragedy, and plays in which the Roman matron is the heroine were penned, not in France alone, but, more\n\nDr. Wilhelm Ewig has treated of the sources with much learning, but he has not exhausted the interesting topic.\n\n<!-- [Page 150](arke:01KG6QCCZEC1H39ENTFD1NPHFS) -->\nLUCRECE 11\ncurious to relate, in Germany. One of Hans Sachs’ dramas bears the title ‘Ein schön spil von der geschicht der Edlin Römerin Lucretia’ (Strassburg, 1550). In France there was performed at the Court at Gaillon, in the presence of the king, Charles IX, on September 29, 1566, a short tragedy in alexandrines (with choruses in other metres) by one Nicolas Filleul of Rouen, which bore the title: ‘Lucrece, Tragédie avec des Chœurs’. The plot follows the classical lines. But Lucrece’s nurse, an original character, is introduced to offer her mistress consolation and to dissuade her from self-slaughter. In Spain the tale was equally familiar, and about 1590 a celebrated poet, Don Juan de Arguijo, after writing of Venus and Adonis, summed up the current knowledge in the Peninsula concerning Lucrece in an effective sonnet, which is often quoted in anthologies of Spanish poetry.\n\nMeanwhile the story was running its course anew in popular English literature. In the same year as the French tragedy of *Lucrece* was produced at Gaillon, William Painter included a paraphrase of Livy’s version in his massive collection of popular fiction entitled *The Palace of Pleasure*. In the years that immediately followed, the tale was made the subject of at least two ballads, which have not survived. In 1568 there was licensed to John Allde, by the Stationers’ Company’s Register (cf. i. 379), ‘a ballet called “The grevious complaynt of Lucrece”, and in 1570 there was licensed to James Roberts ‘A ballad of the Death of Lucryssia’ (i. 416). A third ballad of Lucrece, of which no copy is now known, was, according to Warton, printed in 1576.\n\nThe tale’s popularity in Elizabethan England.\n3 2\n\n1 This piece is printed in a rare volume called *Les Théâtres de Gaillon*, A French tragedy by the well-known dramatist, Alexandre Hardy, written a little later, bears the title ‘Lucrece, ou l’adulteur puni’, but this play does not deal with the story of the Roman matron, but with an imaginary adulteress of Spain. Hardy’s tragedy was first published in 1616.\n\n<!-- [Page 151](arke:01KG6QCD563V5V95CXS9AKP71N) -->\n12\n","title":"Chunk 1"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6S5NXKDSXXAJA1YPECM2B6","peer_type":"subsection","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6S6SF4EJCEBM1RPQWQ5MN0","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:49.637Z","ts":"2026-01-30T06:24:55.358Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}