The story of Lucrece would have been well-known to Elizabethan audiences. Its passive/active linking of her rape/suicide was left largely unquestioned. The presumed choice presented in the poem between death or shame was a foregone conclusion. The theological position counseled choosing shame, of which one could be shriven, over suicide, a mortal sin. Preferring death implied that rape was necessarily, regardless of the purity of mind, a pollution of the body's chastity, an effect which could not be undone. The Elizabethan audience could imagine, and perhaps praise, a woman's choosing a public transformation of unchastity through death, over the private shame of bodily pollution, however technically virtuous of mind she remains. A gap opens up here socially between an audience's deploying of a secular discourse within the larger theological context. The former produces a reading of female space as that which needed to be kept enclosed, unseen, pure—within a larger, allegedly protective male space. The latter, however, produces a reading that condemns Lucrece's actions as, in St. Augustine's view, a failure to see

that while the sanctity of the soul remains even when the body is violated, the sanctity of the body is not lost; and that in like manner, the sanctity of the body is lost when the sanctity of the soul is violated, though the body itself remains intact.⁶

Shakespeare's text intriguingly anticipates and conflates these two readings. Lucrece's choice of suicide is not presented as the automatic secular choice it was assumed to be. The process of her reaching her decision is represented as a discursively critical task in which she challenges the casting of her rape as bodily pollution. The Elizabethan audience was potentially being made aware of its emphatically split reading: that she courageously chose and acted on a theologically incorrect reading, for which she could not be held responsible given the Roman setting of the story.