William Basse
Basse's most famous poem is his "enormously popular sixteen-line elegy on Shakespeare":
The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. 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 compose a "graver labour". Accordingly, "The Rape of Lucrece" has a serious tone throughout.