If the title isn’t content warning enough… CW: sexual assault and suicide
Another narrative poem from the master playwright. A tale of the sex scandal that undid the Roman monarchy. And also a ten-page description of a painting…
Yes, the poem is salacious, but Shakespeare isn’t just slapping together a potboiler. Expanding a three page story from Livy’s History of Rome to one-hundred pages, Shakespeare gives us his famous psychological monologues. Here we have early glimpses of the pen that would bring us Brutus and Hamlet’s soul searching.
Sources
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems
The History of Rome, by Titius Livius
Fasti, by Ovid
