Lucrece, sixth edition

The sixth edition of Lucrece was printed by Thomas Snodham for Roger Jackson in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death.

This “Newly Reuised” edition bears a significantly different title page than the five previous editions: the title is changed from “Lucrece” to “The Rape of Lucrece,” and for the first time in an edition of Lucrece or Venus and Adonis, “Mr. William Shakespeare” is identified as the author. The original dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, remains, but Snodham adds a table of contents and marginal notes to the text (as shown in image 3). As the title page suggests, this edition also incorporates some revised readings, such as the insertion of the word “oft” in line 135 as well as the substitution of “if once” for “ay, if” (l. 240), “Blacke” for “The blackest” (l. 354), “fowle” for “prone” (l. 684), and “held” for “hild” (l. 2157). These changes, though seemingly small, affect the meter and sometimes the meaning of the lines in which they occur. It is not clear whether Shakespeare made any of them himself.

Lucrece, first printed in 1594, would eventually reach an eighth edition before 1640, a number that equals Shakespeare's most popular play, Henry IV Part 1. Although Shakespeare is now known primarily as a playwright, in his own time he was equally revered as the author of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, his two sensationally successful Ovidian narrative poems.

At least five copies of this edition survive, at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, the New York Public Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. The title page of the Folger’s copy, shown here, includes a now-illegible provenance marking, likely by a contemporary reader, as well as bookplates of later owners Thomas Fenwick Earsdon and Frank J. Hogan.

To learn more about the plot and early printing history of Lucrece, please visit the Folger's Shakespeare's Works; to read a modernized edition of the poem, see the Folger Shakespeare edition.