Lucrece, the heroine of Shakespeare’s second brief epic and the human opposite of his foolish and frustrated Venus, had long been for men, and hence for their wives, a gracious yet tragic example of married love. During most of the Middle Ages, she was placed on the short-list of wives and widows celebrated for their chastity and faith; sometimes she was bracketed with the patriotic Judith, whose established purity helped to disestablish a tyrant. In Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, she takes her place in the assembly of the virtuous, but Chaucer was only presenting in English a directory of ladies already consecrated in decency by the master poets across the Channel. If we want to see her on parade, we have only to turn through the books of Eustache Deschamps:

This is an impressive procession even though one may have his doubts about the credentials of some of the marchers. But no matter what our reservations, Judith is here and so is Hecuba, the queen whose tragedy softens the despair of Shakespeare’s Lucrece.