‘Vntutord lines’

Abstract Continuing the previous chapter’s reading of Shakespeare’s poetry, this chapter reads Lucrece in light of the anthologies in which it was featured. Lucrece is preoccupied with the prospect of being anthologized—quoted, read, and misread—just as Lucrece is terrified by her own afterlife as a rhetorical and pedagogical example. This chapter reads those parallel concerns together, showing how Lucrece offers a critique of humanist education, and the political order attached to it, by way of the women it tended to exclude. But it also shows how Shakespeare used the extractable commonplaces of his poem to suggest new ways of sympathizing with Lucrece, not only in the ekphrases that traffic between subjects and their objectification but also in the commonplaces that stage the efforts of trying, and failing, to understand her anguish.