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Article: Shakespeare's Hector and Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece.(Essays)
- Article from:
- ANQ
- Article date:
- March 22, 2005
- Author:
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In Shakespeare's Troilus And Cressida (ca. 1601-02), Achilles, after watching his Myrmidons kill Hector, orders his soldiers to cry out that "Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain" (5.9.14). (1) The passage is significant because it both refers to Achilles's defeat in Homer's The Iliad and reinterprets that same history as a sham. Thomas Heywood's play The Rape of Lucrece (1608) further erases Homer's original by accepting Shakespeare's version of events as legitimate history. Trapped by Collatine and Brutus, Sextus, the ravisher of Lucrece, asks that he not meet Hector's fate:
Had puissant Hector by Achillis,
Dide in single monomachie, Achillis
Had been ...