This essay explores rhetorical and cosmetic deception in William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and John Trussell’s Raptus I Helenae. The First Rape of Faire Hellen (1595). The essay focuses on instances of ‘colouring’ and ‘cloaking’ in the poems, terms used by contemporary rhetoricians to describe their art, to show how tensions between rhetorical skill and anxieties related to rhetorical deception are played out. Shakespeare and Trussell both employ narratorial commentary together with cloaking imagery to mark the rapists’ rhetorical dissembling as morally despicable, whereas other strategies are used to portray the women’s rhetorical and cosmetic cloaking and colouring as more defensible, if not completely unambiguous, forms of self-representation.