““Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece , where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus , but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece . The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro.””
