In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a "graver work".
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The seven-line stanza began to go out of fashion during the Elizabethan era but it was still used by John Davys in Orchestra and by William Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece.
George Stevens, finding an analogy in The Rape of Lucrece, glosses it as "entitled (ie, ennobled) by these things." Nicolaus Delius has it "established in thy gifts, with right of possession." Sidney Lee has "ennobled in thee", reversing the relationship between beloved and "parts."
The Tragedy of the Rape of Lucrece (1608), which chronicles the rise and fall of Tarquin as presented by a "merry lord", Valerius, who lightens the gloom of the situation by singing comic songs