Critical reaction to Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece is summed up by Robert Miola who observes that:

(it) has been judged an interesting but ungainly child. Most readers, impatient with Tarquin's revolting will and with Lucrece's stylized complaints to Night, Opportunity andTime, agree that such rhetorical exercise impedes movement and stifles dramatic potential. .... Efforts to reevaluate the poem have not vindicated its lumbering movement, its disproportionate parts, and its excessive rhetoric ...

He goes on to point out that the poem actually forms a part of the series of works centring on the ethos of Rome, analysing its values of self (honour and self sacrifice), family and state. (The other works are Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Cymbeline.) It is certainly, as Shakespeare has promised in the introduction to the Venus and Adonis, a 'graver labour'.

The story is told by both Livy and Ovid, and has been treated by many subsequent authors incuding Saint Augustine, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.

Following Gower, Shakespeare concentrates on the rape: other matters, the camp at Ardea, the competition for best wife, the use of Lucrece's body to spark outrage in Rome and the banishment of the Tarquins from Rome followed by the formation of the Roman Republic, are very much subordinated to this main theme (the rape), introduced by a long and detailed analysis of the lust that drives Tarquin to the deed. After the rape, Lucrece's reaction is presented much embellished with rhetorical flourishes (including her addresses to Night, Opportunity and Time and her extended detailed description of a tapestry depicting the fall of Troy, amounting in total to more than four hundred lines, or approximately one third of the total poem). For Lucrece, the central problem is how to restore her integrity as a Roman matron. Her solution, for various reasons enumerated, is to committ suicide.

Shakespeare's interest in Roman literature and history derives from his schooldays during which the study of Latin and Latin authors was preponderant in the syllabus. It may have been the case that, compared to some, Shakespeare had 'little Latin and less Greek', but if one looks at the number of hours spent by schoolboys of this era studying Latin and the Latin classics, it is evident that even the dullest of boys would emerge with a significant knowledge of the language and literature.