This essay offers a critical, historical, and authorial analysis of the intersection of gender and secrecy in William Shakespeare's /Lucrece/. The author of this essay locates within the poem a traditional view in which females are either transparent and virtuous, or duplicitous and promiscuous, with little possibility for greater moral complexity. This dichotomous view emerges in the voices of the narrator and of Lucrece, who considers herself incapable of emotional opacity, and acts in response to her self-perceived transparency. It also marks the editorial response to the poem – in the seventeenth century, as shown by Sasha Roberts, and in the eighteenth, as shown here. The analysis covers little or never explored eighteenth-century responses in print to Shakespeare's poem, including /Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem/ (1768), part of the public uproar over a real-life rape scandal in 1767-1768. Apart from the main narrator of the poem, /Lucrece/ also contains a distinct authorial voice that comments freely on human nature. This brief but broad commentary indiscriminately endows moral complexity, irrespective of gender, thus suggesting that in Shakespeare's /Lucrece/ there are the means both for entrenching traditional notions of secrecy and gender and for undermining them.