Judith and Lucrece: Reading Shakespeare Between Copy and Work

Issues of scale and category are becoming increasingly urgent within early modern studies, particularly for those who work on book history or the material text. This essay considers how the scale of study shapes what we read and enables different kinds of interpretive work. The essay examines a copy of William Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece which was at some point in the seventeenth century bound with Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’ older poem, The Historie of Judith, to create a boutique publication concerned with female agency and sexual assault. By placing this volume within a series of increasingly expansive interpretive frames, the essay explores the volume’s idiosyncratic interest as a case study, but also asks how the poems respond when they are reconceived in less isolated analytical categories. The essay begins by reading the two poems simply as texts brought together. It then considers the material evidence of this particular volume before turning to the category of the “edition,” and finally reading Lucrece as a “work” that was published in many editions. At stake throughout is the central question of what it means to read a poem at this critical moment. [B.H.]