SOURCE: "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 66-82.

[In the following essay, Maus analyzes The Rape of Lucrece as Shakespeare's literalization of a violent metaphor.]

Around 1601 Gabriel Harvey, writing in the margin of his copy of Chaucer, remarked that Shakespeare's "Lucrece, and his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them, to please the wiser sort." His remark suggests that The Rape of Lucrece helped establish Shakespeare's seriousness as a poet, a suggestion borne out by the popularity of the poem in its own time and the enthusiastic praise it received from many of Shakespeare's contemporaries.¹The Rape of Lucrece has fared less well at the hands of modern critics, however, who persistently object to its elaborate rhetoric. "Action in Lucrece is smothered in poetry," Richard Wilbur complains. Douglas Bush deplores the poem's "incessant conceits" and "endless rhetorical digressions"; Ian Donaldson the way "the poem repeatedly begins to analyse the nature of a moral predicament, only to break off abruptly, diverting us into an extended metaphor, lament, or topical digression." J. W. Lever surmises that "the opportunities for conscious eloquence tempted Shakespeare's facility and led to a piling up of tropes." Even Coppélia Kahn, who argues convincingly for the significance of some of the poem's major concerns, sees the "rhetorical setpieces" as distracting from "the poem's insistent concern with relationshiop between sex and power."² For all five critics, the rhetoric of The Rape of Lucrece conceals, confuses, overwhelms. In this essay I shall explore the decorum of poetic language in The Rape of Lucrece. I shall argue that both protagonists construe particular metaphors as if they were literally true, drawing apparently unwarranted conclusions from them, and that the narrative voice displays the same literalizing tendencies. I shall go on to show how and why the use and abuse of tropes should become such an important issue in The Rape of Lucrece.

I

As Ovid and Livy recount it, the story of Lucretia's violation by Tarquin Sextus and her subsequent suicide is full of impetuous action, sudden violence, unexpected revelations. But in Shakespeare's version the pell-mell momentum of the original Latin story becomes a marginal effect, conveyed in a prefatory "Argument." "The same night he treacherously stealeth into her chamber, violently ravished her, and early in the morning speedeth away. Lucrece, in this lamentable plight, hastily dispatcheth messengers. …"³ By contrast the poem proper concentrates not upon action but upon what happens in the interstices between the "important" moments: what Tarquin thinks on his way down the hall to Lucrece's bedroom; how Lucrece occupies herself between the time she sends off her messenger and Collatine's return.

Shakespeare's poem is essentially an account, punctuated by terrible violence, of two people making important decisions. As Ian Donaldson declares, "No other version of the Lucretia story explores more minutely or with greater psychological insight the mental processes of the two major characters, their inconsistent waverings to and fro, before they bring themselves finally and reluctantly to action."⁴ And the plot of Lucrece results from these choices. This is not a story in which factors beyond human control play a part. Nothing seems simply inevitable; the poem teases the reader with alternative possibilities. What if Collatine had kept his good fortune to himself? What if Tarquin's conscience had overcome his lust, instead of vice versa? What if the blazing beauty of the sleeping Lucrece had blinded Tarquin permanently, instead of only temporarily? "Then Collatine again, by Lucrece' side, / In his clear bed might have reposèd still" (ll. 381-82What if Collatine had arrived to save Lucrece at the last moment? What if Lucrece had resolved to kill Tarquin rather than herself?

Neither character's choices seem to reflect his or her best interests, and Tarquin and Lucrece must constantly resist the temptation to behave logically. So their decision-making becomes not the activity of a moment but a continuously repeated process. Tarquin rides from Ardea apparently already determined upon rape, but he must re-examine and re-justify his intentions, both to himself and to Lucrece, making the same decision again and again until he finally stamps out his torch and leaps upon his victim. Lucrece likewise resolves on suicide shortly after Tarquin's departure but must continue to debate the wisdom of this course even after her mind is supposedly made up.

The difficult process of decision-making is, for both characters, inseparable from their employment of a few crucial metaphors. For Tarquin, the crucial metaphor is a military one. Faced with the competing and mutually exclusive claims of honor and desire, the intolerable conflict between "frozen conscience and hot-burning will," he imposes a version of martial order: "Affection is my captain, and he leadeth; / … / My heart shall never countermand mine eye" (ll. 271-76). Since, for Tarquin, "love is war," he believes that he can employ whatever tactics he must to take Lucrece's fort, offering the enemy no quarter:

His drumming heart cheers up his burning
  eye,
His eye commends the leading to his hand;
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
  Smoking with pride, marched on to make his
stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land.
                                     (ll. 435-39)

The attraction of this metaphor is that, at least temporarily, it allows Tarquin to depict a rash and lawless act as coordinated and disciplined. The rape appeals to him because he conceives it as an integrative act, one that requires an elaborate but nonetheless ordered division of labor among the parts of the body. The irony, of course, is that the crime exacerbates rather than heals his fragmentation and self-torment, rendering him worse after the "cure" than he had been before.⁵

Tarquin's characteristic mode of self-justification does not involve arguing directly for the rightness of his action. Rather, he elaborates metaphors that allow him to establish a clear, if perverse, hierarchy of priorities, and then strenuously resists any attempts either to expand the interpretive possibilities of the tropes or to suggest ways in which the analogies might be faulty. Both forms of resistance appear most clearly in his response to Lucrece's pleas for mercy, pleas that essentially set up metaphors to rival his own. Lucrece likens her tears to an ocean beating upon Tarquin's "rocky and wrack-threatening heart"; he appropriates and reverses the image by claiming that his "uncontrollèd tide / Turns not, but swells the higher by this let" (ll. 645-46). Lucrece then attempts, unsuccessfully, to accept Tarquin's version of the metaphor but to modify its significance:

'Thou art,' quoth she, 'a sea, a sovereign
  king;
And, lo, there falls into thy boundless flood
Black lust, dishonor, shame, misgoverning,
Who seek to stain the ocean of thy blood.'
                                  (ll. 652-55)

While Tarquin thinks of himself as a warrior, Lucrece tries to remind him of his responsibilities as a monarch; her account of his psychological state replaces the metaphor of military hierarchy he favors with the metaphor of a civil order temporarily disrupted:

'I sue for exiled majesty's repeal;
Let him return, and flatt'ring thoughts retire.
His true respect will prison false desire. …'
                                     (ll. 640-42)

Thus, on the one hand, Tarquin's literal-minded application of a trope helps him convince himself to commit a crime with full awareness of its gravity and its consequences. On the other hand, as Lucrece reminds us, his particular use of metaphor is hardly inevitable; there are alternative ways of representing his psychological upheaval and his decision.

The close relationship between tropes and moral choices is more fully elaborated after the rape, when the narrative focus shifts to Lucrece. Her dilemma is more complex and more controversial than Tarquin's. Classical writers had celebrated Lucretia for her indomitability, but Christians often condemned her suicide. In The City of God (Bks. XVI-XX) Augustine initiates the criticism and defines its terms. In the Augustinian view, if Lucretia is indeed raped by Tarquin she cannot be guilty of inchastity. Augustine maintains that, since the virtues are properties of the will, acts one commits under duress cannot affect one's virtue. Chastity, he insists, is an attitude of the mind and not a physical accident. But Lucretia's innocence of sexual crime ironically exacerbates the sinfulness of her suicide, which for Augustine is the murder of a guiltless person. Not all Christian commentators agree with Augustine's reasoning, but the effect of the casuistical tradition as Shakespeare inherits it is to establish Lucretia's motives for suicide as an important issue for moral scrutiny.⁶ And Shakespeare's Lucrece does indeed provide lengthy justification for her behavior.

What are we to think of Lucrece? Is she guilty of anything, and if so, of what? Coppélia Kahn has argued that Lucrece's suicide is the necessary consequence of her position as female chattel in a patriarchal society.⁷ This thesis, however, does not seem entirely adequate either to the classical Lucretia or to the character as Shakespeare conceives her. For Ovid, Lucretia is distinguished not by her quintessential femininity but by her admirable "masculine" spirit: she is "animi matrona virilis" (Fasti II, 847.) In Shakespeare's poem, too, Lucrece's actions do not quite accord with her declarations that she is merely Collatine's property. "For me, I am the mistress of my fate," she maintains (1. 1069), and in a sense she is right. She makes her decision for suicide without consulting the men whom she supposes her owners; when her husband and father protest her innocence, insisting upon the moral difference between rape and adultery, she refuses to accept their verdict.⁸ The reaction of Collatine and his followers to Lucrece's self-immolation is bewilderment: they are left "Stonestill, astonished with this deadly deed" (1. 1730). Far from being the culturally acceptable thing to do in a patriarchal society, Lucrece's suicide shocks the Roman men; its supererogatory character is precisely what makes it seem both heroic and troubling, sublime and confused, to its witnesses and to the reader.

In fact, Lucrece's suicide is the consequence of her enforced participation in the same vision that motivates Tarquin.⁹ The reasons she cannot accept Augustine's reasoning, urged upon her as it is by her male relatives, are adumbrated when she explains to herself and the reader her justification for suicide:

'To kill myself,' quoth she, 'alack, what were it
But with my body my poor soul's pollution?
They that lose half with greater patience bear it
Than they whose whole is swallowed in
  confusion.
That mother tries a merciless conclusion
   Who, having two sweet babes, when
          death takes one,
   Will slay the other and be nurse to none.'

'My body or my soul, which was the dearer
When the one, pure, the other made divine?
Whose love of either to myself was nearer
When both were kept for heaven and
 Collatine?
Ay me! the bark pilled from the lofty pine,
   His leaves will wither and his sap decay:
   So must my soul, her bark being pilled
           away.'

'Her house is sacked, her quiet interrupted,
Her mansion battered by the enemy;
Her sacred temple spotted, spoiled, corrupted,
Grossly engirt with daring infamy.
Then let it not be called impiety
   If in this blemished fort I make some hole
   Through which I may convey this
          troubled soul.'
                             (11. 1156-76)

In order to find Augustine's argument plausible one must accept two axioms. First, one must be willing to admit a conceptual distinction between the body and the soul. Lucrece declares this separation here and elsewhere: "Though my gross blood be stained with this abuse, / Immaculate and spotless is my mind" (ll. 1655-56). But, in addition, one must also grant the priority of the soul over the body, as Augustine does explicitly and as Lucrece's male relatives do implicitly when they insist that "Her body's stain her mind untainted clears" (1. 1710). Lucrece, however, balks at the second assumption. "My body or my soul, which was the dearer?" (1. 1163). This is not a merely rhetorical question. What she yearns for is her condition before the rape when there was no need to make a choice between the body and the soul. She finds the conflict between them impossible to endure, but refuses to privilege one element and resolve the conflict.

Lucrece thinks about her body in terms of metaphors: house, fortress, mansion, temple, tree bark.¹⁰ Essentially, these metaphors emphasize the protective and enclosing function of the body—the way the body surrounds the soul and wards off danger. Once the house is sacked and battered, the inhabitant suffers, regardless of her guilt or innocence; this is one of the lessons of the Troy picture before which Lucrece will stand later in the poem. The significance of these metaphors for Lucrece's thinking becomes clear when one remembers the alternative image employed by a different female character threatened with sexual violence:

                 Fool do not boast,
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although this corporal
 rind
Thou hast immanacled, while Heaven sees
 good.
                         (Comus, 11. 662-65)

Milton's Lady thinks of the body as a "rind," an excresence, and thus possesses an Augustinian assurance of moral invulnerability to physical outrage. Lucrece's apparently similar image of the body as the bark around a pine stresses, instead, the vital reliance of the tree upon its protective cover.

Why does Lucrece not adopt the kind of imagery available to the Lady in Comus? Why is she drawn to metaphors that imply the dependence of the soul upon the body? Although Coppélia Kahn's account of Lucrece's moral reasoning is partial, she is right to focus upon the significance of gender. Lucrece's virtues are feminine ones: purity, constancy, integrity. In the violent, contradictory, and changeable world of pre-republican Rome, these virtues survive only in a carefully restricted environment. The tragedy, according to Shakespeare, issues originally from the fatal rashness of Lucrece's husband Collatine, a male Pandora, who "Unlocked the treasure of his happy state" to his kinsman Tarquin (1. 16) displaying "that rich jewel he should keep unknown" (1. 34). The image implies that Lucrece, like Pandora's treasure, needs to be kept in a box. Early in the poem Lucrece's virtue is clearly linked to her lack of experience: "unstained thoughts do seldom dream on evil; / Birds never limed no secret bushes fear" (ll. 87-88). Tarquin, tearing aside the bedcurtain, also tears away the moral and intellectual veils that had sheltered her innocence. Her rape calls into question—violates—her faith in the existence of values she had taken for granted, values she invokes in her appeal to her implacable opponent: "knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship's oath, / … /… holy human law and common troth" (ll. 569-71). In her apostrophe to Opportunity after Tarquin's departure, Lucrece indicates her new awareness of the way the unavoidable presence of evil complicates and adulterates virtue:

'Unruly blasts wait on the tender spring;
Unwholesome weeds take root with precious
 flow'rs;
The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing;
What Virtue breeds Iniquity devours.'
                                  (ll. 869-72)

Her despair after the rape is despair for an irredeemably lost simplicity, a simplicity inconsistent with the experience of injustice, conflict, and duplicity.

Retreat from new and painful consciousness is as impossible for Lucrece as is physical retreat. When she awakens to find Tarquin in her bedroom, her first impulse is to close her eyes, but the vision within is as terrifying as the vision without:

She dares not look; yet, winking, there
  appears
Quick-shifting antics ugly in her eyes.
Such shadows are the weak brain's forgeries,
   Who, angry that the eyes fly from their
          lights,
   In darkness daunts them with more
            dreadful sights.
                                (ll. 458-62)

In Shakespeare's Rome, where the men engage with the "real world" and women remain indoors, Lucrece's dilemma is a matter of the way female virtue is defined; but her problem is not necessarily an exclusively feminine one. Perhaps Gabriel Harvey thinks of Lucrece in connection with Hamlet because both play and poem feature protagonists whose innocence is destroyed when they are forced to recognize other people's wickedness.

Nonetheless, Lucrece tries to reconstruct a vision of unity by asserting interdependence and consistency whenever she can. The soul and body, appearances and realities, her interests and Collatine's, must be forced into harmony. Even when the existence of contradiction is impossible to ignore, she tries to formulate a law to regulate the conflict. As she meditates before the picture of the attractive but duplicitous Sinon, she reaches the patently false but entirely characteristic conclusion that virtuous-looking exteriors always betoken vicious souls. What she cannot tolerate is the possibility that there are no constants, that the relationship between body and soul is simply arbitrary. Thus her suicide can be seen as a desperate attempt to resist the possibilities of contradiction and inconsistency to which Tarquin's violence has introduced her.

The suicide, however—comprehensible though it might be—is ironically fraught with the very contradictions Lucrece seeks to avoid. She "revenges" herself upon Tarquin by completing the assault he had begun, plunging the phallic knife into the "sheath" of her breast (1. 1723; in Latin, "sheath" is vagina). She insists upon her sacrifice for Collatine even as she ignores his wishes; she proves her innocence by exacting the penalty for guilt; she broadcasts and validates her utterance even while silencing herself more effectively than had Tarquin with the bedclothes. What Lucrece's death ultimately displays is not a willed unity but a tragic dividedness, as her blood separates into pure red and contaminated black streams, and the black stream in turn into a "congealèd-face" and a "wat'ry rigoll." Like Tarquin, then, Lucrece uses crucial metaphors to organize and integrate her moral thinking, refusing to acknowledge the subversive alternatives the poem so plentifully supplies.

II

What is happening when Tarquin compares himself to an army scaling Lucrece's fort, or when Lucrece imagines her body as a battered mansion? The usual assumption would be that these metaphors express states of mind. Both characters prefer metaphors which render their moral choices plausible. Thus Lucrece, who initially finds attractive the metaphor of the body and soul as "two babes" because the figure suggests the equality of body and soul, soon remarks that this metaphor makes her decision for suicide seem irrational. She answers her own objections not by confronting them directly, but by shifting to other, more congenial metaphors.

Nonetheless, the characters' rhetoric often seems as much constitutive as symptomatic, creating as well as expressing their states of mind. Tarquin's prosopopoeia, his personification of fears and desires and of parts of the body as independent entities, is one indication of his moral disarray. But the trope also contributes to that disarray by implying that the personified impulses may take their own courses without reference to his intentions. Phrases like "my heart shall never countermand mine eye" or "affection is my captain, and he leadeth" suppress the fact of choice and allow Tarquin to avoid, at least temporarily, full recognition of his own culpability.

Lucrece's language similarly seems to determine the course of her reasoning. When Lucrece indicts Night, Opportunity, and Time after the rape, she employs both prosopopoeia and metalepsis, a rhetorical figure related to metaphor in which the remote is substituted for the obvious. Addressing "hateful, vaporous, and foggy Night," insisting that "thou art guilty of my cureless crime" (ll. 771-72), she simultaneously displaces responsibility from Tarquin and creates a plausible alternative culprit. By mystifying the fact of Tarquin's guilt, these tropes make it easier for Lucrece eventually to convict herself of a sin she has not committed.

In other ways, too, Lucrece's language persistently obscures the crucial question of agency: does the possessive pronoun in "my cureless crime" or "my life's foul deed" imply that she has committed an evil action or that an evil action has been committed against her? When she imagines that "The orator, to deck his oratory, / Will couple my reproach to Tarquin's shame" (ll. 815-16), is she using the word "reproach" to mean "complaint" or to mean "blameworthiness"? Her ambiguities have literally fatal consequences.

The problematic relationship between language and psychological state is suggested when Lucrece, after a night spent crying out against her wrong, sends a messenger to Collatine and must wait for his return. In the interval she finds herself frustrated and bored:

The weary time she cannot entertain,
For now 'tis stale to sigh, to weep and groan.
So woe hath wearied woe, moan tirèd moan,
 That she her plaints a little while doth stay,
 Pausing for means to mourn some newer
 way.
                              (ll. 1361-65)

As Richard Lanham has noted, Lucrece's grief is not entirely spontaneous, but requires that she have something to say.¹¹ She turns to a representation of the Trojan war for relief, not because it offers her the possibility of consolation, but because its novelty inspires her with new ways to describe and understand, and thus to experience her despair. This is not to say that discourse creates her grief. Her language is not prior to her psychological state in any simple way. Lucrece's model is Philomela, the raped bird-woman who not only suffers sexual outrage but who also makes it the constant subject of her utterance; and Lucrece remembers that in order to sing, Philomela must lean against a thorn, inflicting and re-inflicting upon herself Tereus's unwelcome penetration. The pain demands representation, but the representation requires the experience, even the deliberate exacerbation, of pain; the relation between emotion and speech seems more a perverse reciprocity than a simple relation of cause and effect. And it is a difficult cycle, constantly subject to disruption and blockage. Lucrece stutters when she attempts to plead with Tarquin, struggles through several drafts of her letter to Collatine, and stammers again when he finally arrives, interrupting both her story and her revelation of the culprit with "many accents and delays, / Untimely breathings, sick and short assays" (ll. 1719-20). Collatine likewise is struck mute upon his homecoming and babbles incoherently after Lucrece's suicide. On the one hand, grief and fear interrupt discourse, which inevitably seems an inadequate vehicle for feeling. On the other hand, grief and fear motivate discourse; Lucrece acquires her own voice in the poem only at the moment when she is faced with violence.

III

This intimacy between the characters' metaphors and their decisions, and between their language and their psychological states, may seem unsurprising. Shakespeare's contemporary, George Puttenham, remarks that tropes "alter and affect the mind by alteration of sense," and Francis Bacon that "men believe that their reason governs words, but it is also true that words react on the understanding."¹² It would be wrong, however, to regard The Rape of Lucrece as merely an anatomy of unfortunate individuals confused by the idols of the marketplace. The crucial metaphors of the poem are not the exclusive property of the characters, but are invoked throughout the narrative.

For example, Tarquin's military trope is not his alone. It pervades The Rape of Lucrece from the moment Tarquin leaves the siege of Ardea to lay siege to his kinsman's wife, through Lucrece's extended meditation upon the sack of Troy, to Lucius Junius Brutus's final revolutionary vow. Nor is the conviction that body and soul are inseparable merely a whim of the protagonists; Shakespeare's rhetoric asserts it constantly. The vividness of the psychomachiae in Lucrece depends upon the metaphoric embodiment of mental events:

And then with lank and lean discolored cheek,
With heavy eye, knit brow, and strengthless
 pace,
Feeble Desire, all recreant, poor, and meek,
Like to a bankrout beggar wails his case.
                                  (ll. 708-11)

The very term "will" that, for Augustine, signifies detachment from and transcendence of the physical, becomes crucial in Lucrece precisely because of its ambiguity, the paronomastic possibility of invoking both "desire" and "genitalia" at the same time. Tarquin conflates mental and physical when he tells Lucrece that "thou with patience must my will abide" (1. 486); but so does the third-person narrative when it describes Tarquin's "disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will' (ll. 246-47). The words "lust" and "pride" are similarly ambiguous. When Tarquin overcomes his initial indecision and begins to force his way toward Lucrece's bedchamber, Shakespeare writes that his "servile powers … stuff up his lust" (ll. 295-97), describing at the same time the physiology of erection and the psychology of resolution.

Lucrece is likewise delineated in terms that minimize the difference between body and soul; she is the "fair fair" (1. 346), the virtuous and beautiful woman whose internal and external loveliness is denoted by the same word. In a characteristic passage Shakespeare writes of Lucrece's breasts: "Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew / And him by oath they truly honorèd" (ll.409-10). The "bearing yoke" is, literally, Collatine's weight during sexual intercourse. But metaphorically it is the yoke of marriage, the jugum coniugalis, the wifely obligation of loyalty to the husband. The distinction between these two meanings of "bearing yoke," one physical or literal, one spiritual or metaphoric, is difficult to maintain in this context, however, when Lucrece is represented by synecdoche: not she but her breasts have taken an oath.

Other tropes likewise help render the protagonists' convictions plausible. Synecdoche and personification are not only invoked by Tarquin, but are also applied to him:

The curtains being close, about he walks,
Rolling his greedy eyeballs in his head.
By their high treason is his heart misled,
    Which gives the watchword to his hand
           full soon. …
                                (ll. 367-70)

Oxymorons like "modest wanton" reinforce Lucrece's paradoxical sense of herself as both guilty and innocent; so does the poem's very attempt to exculpate her:

For men have marble, women waxen minds,
And therefore are they formed as marble will.
The weak oppressed, th'impression of strange kinds
Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill.
Then call them not the authors of their ill,
   No more than wax shall be accounted evil
   Wherein is stamped the semblance of a
           devil.

Their smoothness, like a goodly champain plain,
Lays open all the little worms that creep;
In men, as in a rough-grown grove, remain
Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep.
Though crystal walls each little mote will
 peep.
   Though men can cover crimes with bold
          stern looks,
   Poor women's faces are their own faults'
          books.
                                       (ll. 1240-53)

This passage seems to begin by denying Lucrece's guilt on Augustinian grounds; the victim of another's crime is not to blame. But the metaphor of the wax is a tricky one. It absolves Lucrece by construing her passivity as absolute. If Lucrece does not possess a will of her own, intentions and preferences of her own—if she is pure malleability—then what can Tarquin have violated? And if all male influence upon women is conceived as the irresistible pressure of hard substance upon soft, then rape is hardly outrageous; it is almost in the nature of things. This "defense" of Lucrece, in other words, by denying her the status of a moral agent, not only deprives her of her best claim to innocence but makes Tarquin's assault seem excusable.

Moreover, in the second stanza the smoothness and softness of the metaphoric wax produces an important swerve in the direction of the argument, which begins to treat of feminine openness: "Through crystal walls each little mote will peep. … / Poor women's faces are their own faults' books." Women's bodies are transparent; their "faults" not things stamped upon them from without but peeping from within. Blamelessness becomes blame. By the end of the second stanza the narrator, under the sway of his trope, is asserting precisely that unfortunate intimacy between body and soul which proves crucial in Lucrece's decision for suicide. When Ian Donaldson complains that The Rape of Lucrece does not make clear "what moral universe [the characters] inhabit,"¹³ his uncertainty perhaps derives from the fact that the narrative employs, in the same dubious ways, metaphors that are rendered questionable when the protagonists use them to justify their actions. The poem seems to collude with both protagonists in their "errors."

IV

An analysis that centers upon characterization, then, cannot fully explain how and why metaphor is so problematic in The Rape of Lucrece. The problem is larger than the characters, and has to do with the way poetic language functions in Lucrece.

We have already seen that the protagonists' violence and heroism are the result of their construing tropes in their strong form; that is, not as assertions of resemblance, but of identity. Love is not merely like war; it is war. Lucrece's body is not merely like a fortress; the analogy can be extended in unlimited and surprising directions. Significantly, the tropes the protagonists take so literally are not Shakespeare's inventions, but part of the traditional vocabulary of Elizabethan love poetry, as it is inherited from Petrarch and Ovid, from canzoniere and Italian sonneteers, and developed by Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, and many others. The configuration of characters—warrior-lover, absent husband, chaste-but-desirable woman—is likewise conventional, as is the poem's attention not to the exigencies of plot but to the elaborate analysis of extreme and often irrational emotional reactions.

But a comparison with Spenser makes clear the way The Rape of Lucrece deviates from this tradition:

Gaynst such strong castles needeth greater
  might
Then those small forts which ye were wont
  belay:
Such haughty minds enur'd to hardy fight
Disdayne to yield unto the first assay.
Bring therefore all the forces that ye may,
And lay incessant battery to her heart,
Playnts, prayers, vows, ruth, sorrow and
  desmay,
Those engines can the proudest love convert.
                         (Amoretti xiv, 5-12)

The wit here lies in the contrast between the violent analogies Spenser invokes and the gentle means he proposes to employ; and innumerable poems by other authors feature bashful soldier-lovers thoroughly routed by a stern glance from their fair adversaries. The differences between making love and making war, and between women and fortresses, are as important to these poems as are their similarities. In The Rape of Lucrece, on the other hand, Tarquin and Lucrece enact the violence that in a sonnet sequence is restricted to the figurative and the imaginary. When Tarquin steals up to Lucrece's bed, this is how Shakespeare describes what he sees:

Her hair like golden threads played with her
 breath—
O modest wantons, wanton modesty!
Showing life's triumph in the map of death,
And death's dim look in life's mortality.
Each in her sleep themselves so beautify
As if between them twain there were no strife,
But that life lived in death, and death in life.
                                   (ll. 400-406)

There is nothing especially original in the ordinary sense about these images. The "hair like golden threads," the death-mimicking sleep, the exclamation upon the beloved's mysterious combination of purity and desirability, the fascination with her breath: all are commonplace in the erotic poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries. What distinguishes Shakespeare's rhetoric is its unusual appositeness to the events narrated in the poem. Lucrece is a "modest wanton" here because while sleeping, she is simultaneously chaste and careless; but in a few stanzas the formulation will take on a new kind of appropriateness for a woman divided between untainted mind and outraged body. The play on life and death, mortality and immortality, looks forward to Lucretia's controversial insistence upon suicide and her consequent eternal fame. The situation—the lover hovering over a beautiful woman, seizing the opportunity for intimacies she would not tolerate when awake—had recommended itself to Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Sidney.¹⁴ The difference is that in the Decameron the rape is a fiction invented by a male voyeur, in Orlando Furioso the impotence of the would-be violator renders sexual assault impossible, in The Old Arcadia a mob of "clownish villians" interrupts the proceedings, and in Astrophel and Stella rape is a momentary fantasy—Astrophel actually steals only a kiss from the virtuous Stella, and flees terrified by her anger. In The Rape of Lucrece, by contrast, the violent possibilities suggested in the rhetoric are inexorably realized. The facts of the narrative lend an unexpected urgency to apparently conventional rhetorical formulae and situations.

In its way of actualizing conventional imagery, The Rape of Lucrece resembles other early Shakespearean tragedy. Writing on synecdoche and mutilation in Titus Andronicus, Albert Tricomi describes "the shackling of the metaphoric imagination to the literal reality of the play's events";¹⁵ and Leonard Forster remarks of Romeo and Juliet:

the enmity of the Montagues and Capulets makes the cliché of the 'dear enemy' into a concrete predicament; the whole drama is devoted to bringing the cliché to life, and others are similarly enacted. The petrarchistic lover 'died' at his lady's kiss: Romeo in the vault actually does so.¹⁶

Many critics of sixteenth-century English literature have noted the way poets of the 1580s and 1590s simultaneously employ and modify the conventions of love poetry, aware on the one hand that the very wit and intensity of the inherited mode are liable to degenerate into a facile deployment of ossified paradoxes and hackneyed imagery, and on the other hand unwilling to abandon the advantages of the older style, especially its efficacy as a means of rendering complex psychological and metaphysical states in a relatively restricted number of highly charged images.¹⁷ The early Shakespeare seems characteristically to rehabilitate the conventional language of desire by unleashing its violent potential. In The Rape of Lucrece the literalized metaphors that provide the rationale for the protagonists' choices are also the source of the poem's rhetorical energy. The interests of the characters and the interests of the poet coincide in a disconcerting way; Shakespeare like his protagonists takes tropes seriously.

In Lucrece, however, Shakespeare seems determined not only to exploit the benefits of this form of rhetorical rehabilitation but also to reveal its considerable moral and epistemological drawbacks. Jerome Kramer and Judith Kaminsky have remarked upon "how dense the poem is in contrast, paradox, and dichotomy."¹⁸ This is true not only in the sense that these critics describe—i.e., in the sense that the imagery of conflict appropriately pervades a tragedy of unresolvably competing interests—but also in the sense that particular images tend to collide in ways that point up their mutual incommensurability.

For example, in the elaborate description of Lucrece's face early in the poem—red and white, beauty and virtue—the (pastoral) field of flowers and the (epic) field of war strive for predominance in time-honored Petrarchan fashion. But there is nothing natural, inevitable, or even stable about either the correspondences or the rivalries. Initially white is associated with virtue, red with beauty. Later red becomes virtue's color, white becomes beauty's. Meanwhile their relationship to one another is further complicated by the ambiguous prescription that "the red should fence the white" (1. 63); is the "fencing" a protective shielding (developing the defensive metaphor from the previous line) or is it a mutual sparring which continues the metaphors of antagonism from the earlier part of the stanza? The elements of the paradox remain tensely opposed—"oft they interchange each other's seat" (1. 70)—but meanwhile the terms of the opposition shift in a bewildering way. The colors of Lucrece's complexion seem to "stand for" her important qualities as the devices on a heraldic shield represent the traits of its owner;¹⁹ but the relationship between symbol and substance is mutable and apparently arbitrary.

This shiftiness is characteristic of The Rape of Lucrece. Analogies are no sooner invoked than they begin to collapse and must be replaced by others, often with different implications. As Tarquin approaches the bed, Lucrece, still hidden behind the bedcurtains, is described as a "silver moon" (1. 371)—lovely, cool, and chaste as Cynthia—but as Tarquin draws the curtains in the next line she becomes a "fair and fiery-pointed sun / Rushing from forth a cloud" to dazzle Tarquin's gaze (ll. 373-74). The effect of the passage is to undermine any sense that a particular metaphor might be authoritative or exhaustive. Lucrece may be a moon in one sense or at one moment, a sun in another sense or at another moment. Again and again the relationship between tenor and vehicle is made to seem provisional and tenuous, sometimes even contradictory or paradoxical. As he debates his chosen course early in the poem, Tarquin "doth despise / His naked armor of still-slaughtered lust" (ll. 187-88). Since Tarquin uses his phallus as a weapon the metaphor of armor seems appropriate; but the paradoxes of the formulation simultaneously point up the metaphor's limitations. One who wears armor is not naked, one who is slaughtered has no need of armor, and while the epithet "still-slaughtered" makes sense applied to a flaccid penis it does not make sense applied to a soldier.

Even when the terms of the metaphoric correspondence seem obvious, interpretive problems arise. Tarquin, on his way to Lucrece's bedchamber, finds one of her gloves and pricks himself on a needle that has been stuck through it. This constitutes, clearly enough, a proleptic allegory of Tarquin's fate; his rape of Lucrece is also a self-wounding. He cannot handle the phallic instrument without hurting himself. But the precise significance of the episode is surprisingly difficult to define exactly. The narrator describes the needle as in effect warning Tarquin of Lucrece' s refusal to tolerate outrage, "As who should say, 'This glove to wanton tricks / Is not inured'" (ll. 320-21). But insofar as the glove and the needle are tropes of the sexual organs the episode reinforces our sense not of Lucrece's resistance but of her penetrability. And Tarquin imposes yet a third construction upon his experience:

'So, so,' quoth he, 'these lets attend the time,
Like little frosts that sometime threat the
  spring
To add a more rejoicing to the prime
And give the sneapèd birds more cause to
 sing.'
                                      (ll. 330-33)

In another context the leaps from trope to trope, the play of interpretive possibilities, might seem merely witty. In The Rape of Lucrece, the fact that the metaphors are so closely linked to the tragic action makes such leaps disconcerting and complicates the pleasure one takes in rhetorical virtuousity. Both Tarquin and Lucrece as well as the narrator, as we have seen, privilege particular tropes—they treat them as if they were unqualifiedly true, using them as guides to judgment and to action. But this valorization seems fraught with difficulties in a poem that emphasizes the limitations of its metaphors and advertises a variety of interpretive options even for tropes the significance of which might seem obvious.

V

It seems reasonable, therefore, to try to escape the problems of figurative language by exploring alternative forms of representation. The Rape of Lucrece suggests two such alternatives: the summary, relatively nonfigural prose of the "Argument," and naturalistic visual depiction as exemplified by the painting of Troy that Lucrece confronts late in the poem. The advantages and shortcomings of the prose argument are fairly obvious. What it gains in clarity and brevity it loses in power and completeness; it tells more of the tale than the poem can, but it fails to convey any sense of the protagonists' motives or their inner lives. It is a way of rendering different phenomena, not a better or more reliable way of rendering the same phenomena.

The possibilities of visual art seem more promising. Lucrece's concern with the relative merits of visual and verbal representation is one manifestation of its rhetorical self-consciousness. In his standard school-text, De Copia, Erasmus explains that enargeia or vividness, the primary characteristic of eloquence, is obtained

when in order to amplify or adorn or delight we do not set forth a thing simply, but display it to view as if it were portrayed in colors in a picture, so that it would seem that we have painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read.²⁰

Most Renaissance rhetoricians agree with classical authorities that metaphor is the most effective way of rendering visual effects by verbal means; when Richard Sherry claims that "none sheweth the thing before our eyes more evidently" than metaphor, he is echoing Aristotle and Cicero. The "darkness" and "doubleness" of tropes, the substitutions of improper names for proper ones, paradoxically "give pleasant light," as Henry Peacham claims, "removing unprofitable and odious obscurity."²¹

Nonetheless, even a poem as charged with metaphor as The Rape of Lucrece inevitably lacks the visual dimension of a painting or a dramatic production. The deficiency seems important in Lucrece because throughout the poem vision is associated with the manifest, the immediate, the unqeustionably real. "To see sad sights moves more than hear them told," the narrator informs us (1. 1324); Tarquin in the grip of passion tells Lucrece that " … Will is deaf and hears no heedful friends: / Only he hath an eye to gaze on Beauty" (ll. 495-96). Both characters convince themselves of the reality of their moral lapses by fantasizing that those lapses are somehow visible: Tarquin believes that his "digression … will live engraven in my face" (ll. 202-3); Lucrece that the decay of chastity "will show, charactered in my brow" (1. 807). After the rape she exclaims:

'O unseen shame, invisible disgrace!
O unfelt sore, crest-wounding private scar!
Reproach is stamped in Collatinus' face,
And Tarquin's eye may read the mot afar.'
                                       (ll. 827-30)

Lucrece begins by acknowledging the indetectability of the crime, but after two lines she is proclaiming its conspicuousness. The outrage seems real to her only insofar as it may be seen—thus she arranges to advertise it, assuming that the display of her bleeding body will constitute an immediately convincing proof of her violated innocence.

However, no sooner does the poem insist upon the superior certainty and cogency of the visible than it qualifies that privilege. Perhaps "Beauty itself doth of itself persuade / The eyes of men without an orator" (ll. 29-30); but Shakespeare's Tarquin, unlike Ovid's or Livy's, is inflamed not by the sight of Lucrece but by a report of her. And the reliability of visual evidence is impugned almost as often as it is invoked. Lucrece's face reveals her nature; but Tarquin's majestic demeanor turns out to be fraudulent. The inarticulate "honest looks" of the groom who attends Lucrece are subject to misinterpretation; his mistress construes his bashful blush as a reproach.

The question of the relation between visual and verbal representation is posed especially acutely near the end of the poem, as the violated Lucrece confronts a picture of Troy, a massive and varied panorama of violation.²² For Lucrece and for Shakespeare the sack of Troy is a culturally primal event; not only the birth of Western literature but the founding of both Rome and Britain follow, according to legend, upon the Trojan diaspora. After "sigh has wearied sigh, moan wearied moan" the painting provides Lucrece "means to mourn some newer way"—harking back to origins, and seeming at first to offer a welcome alternative to the complications of rhetoric.

For the task of the "conceited painter" initially seems to be a relatively simple one, the precise depiction of a scene that contains a wide variety of human possibility: virtue and vice, courage and timidity. Nothing about the process as it is described in the early stanzas seems difficult or surprising. The great commanders are graceful and majestic, the youths quick and dexterous, the cowards pale and trembling. Faces, often deceptive in the world of Lucrece, seem trustworthy here: "blunt rage and rigor" roll appropriately in Ajax's eye; Ulysses's "mild glance" shows "deep regard and smiling government."

The face of either ciphered either's heart;
Their face their manners most expressly told.
                                 (ll. 1396-97)

But visual representation soon begins to seem more problematic. It becomes obvious that the scene does not represent a transcript of anything that was ever actually before someone's eyes. The events of years crowd into the same picture. Trojan boys are shown mustering for battle and simultaneously being killed on the field; the sack of Troy occurs alongside the capture of Sinon the day before; and the picture features Hector and Achilles, long dead by the end of the war. If The Rape of Lucrece seems to be narrative striving for a missing visual element, the painting described in the poem seems to yearn for the missing dimension of temporality, and to usurp the privileges of narrative by displaying successive episodes in a deceptive present.²³

In other ways as well, the "realism" of the painting seems increasingly artificial. The men listening to Nestor's speech are portrayed according to the laws of perspective:

Here one man's hand leaned on another's
 head,
His nose being shadowed by his neighbor's
 ear;
Here one, being thronged, bears back, all
 boll'n and red;
Another, smothered, seems to pelt and swear.
                                 (ll. 1415-18)

Shakespeare's apparently naive, "literal" description of the painted crowd as a collection of grotesquely amputated shapes emphasizes the difference between a naturalistic rendering and "things as they really are." Technical concerns may even dictate content rather than vice versa. Achilles, whom one would expect to occupy a place near the center of the painting, is artfully relegated to the margins:

… for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Griped in an armèd hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
    A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head
    Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
                                (ll. 1424-28)

Synecdoche is as powerful a device for the painter, it seems, as for the poet. "The eye of mind," the spectator's imagination, must supply what is not or cannot be represented, most obviously perhaps for the identification of the despairing Hecuba, distorted by suffering—"Of what she was no semblance did remain"—or of the harmless-seeming Sinon. These two figures, victim and aggressor, represent the painter's ultimate achievement, which turns out to involve not the establishment of an easy correspondence between the visible and the real, but a thorough subversion of that correspondence.

For the reader, of course, this painting has always been patently a verbal rather than a visual construct, and thus cannot very well function as an "alternative" to rhetoric. It is conceivable that a character might be allowed what the reader is denied: an escape from linguistic traps to a representational mode of superior reliability. Significantly, however, Lucrece finds the painting helpful not because it provides a respite from, or a corrective to, the complexity of figurative language but because it functions much as her rhetoric functions, employing similar techniques and encouraging similar confusions.

The tragedy of The Rape of Lucrece is that the dangers of metaphor prove inescapable for Tarquin, for Lucrece, and for the narrative voice. Whether or not rhetoric is inevitably problematic is a different issue. At the end of the poem Lucius Junius Brutus, supposed an idiot, unexpectedly seizes the initiative. Known for linguistic irresponsibility, "for sportive words and uttering foolish things" (1. 1813), he suddenly emerges as an articulate public figure urging revenge and revolution. But it is too late to learn whether his invocations, vows, and protestations constitute an alternative, more straightforward rhetoric—a language that might reflect and affect the world in a new way—or whether Brutus merely displaces the same old problems into a new sphere.

The foregoing analysis may suggest why The Rape of Lucrece so often frustrates modern critics. Its rhetoric indeed seems to "get in the way," interfering with rather than facilitating a clear view of characters, events, and moral dilemmas. I would suggest, however, that the obtrusiveness and unreliability of language in The Rape of Lucrece is not evidence of Shakespearean incompetence, but rather of an acute and profoundly uneasy self-consciousness about poetic techniques and resources.

Notes

¹ Gabriel Harvey's comment is reprinted in The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, ed. O. J. Campbell (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), pp. 305-6. For a complete account of the reception of The Rape of Lucrece, see Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. 447-57.

² Richard Wilbur, "The Narrative Poems: Introduction," in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 1404; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 152, 154; Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 40; J. W. Lever, "Shakespeare's Narrative Poems," A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, eds. K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 125; Coppélia Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 45. In The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 94-110, Richard Lanham approaches Shakespeare's elaborate and self-conscious rhetoric more sympathetically, but eventually he merely transfers to the characters the faults other critics ascribe to the poet. I shall discuss the limitations of this line of argument later in this essay.

³ All Rape of Lucrece citations are quoted from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (London: Penguin, 1969).

⁴ Donaldson, p. 44.

⁵ Some critics have remarked upon the way Shakespeare presents Tarquin's rape as a self-violation; Sam Hynes, "The Rape of Tarquin," Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 451-53; Donaldson, p. 52.

⁶ For accounts of the Christian response to the legend of Lucretia see Donaldson, pp. 21-39, and D. C. Allen, "Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 89-91. It is not clear that Shakespeare read Augustine on Lucretia, though most modern critics assume he was aware of the Augustinian position. D. C. Allen, Coppélia Kahn, and Ian Donaldson all discuss Shakespeare's reaction to the Augustinian critique of Lucretia, as does Roy Battenhouse in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 3-41.

⁷ Kahn, 45-72. For a more optimistic (in my opinion, over-optimistic) description of the way Lucrece is changed by the rape, see Laura G. Bromley, "Lucrece's Re-Creation," SQ, 34 (1983), 200-211.

⁸ Shakespeare obtains his account of the male relatives' reaction from Livy: "consolantur aegram animi avertendo noxam ab coacta in auctorem delicti; mentem peccare, non corpus, et unde consilium afuerit, culpam abesse." Ab Urbe condita I, LVIII, 9-10. Coppélia Kahn is incorrect when she asserts that a focus upon intentions rather than consequences is a specifically Christian innovation; the pagan Livy could have gotten his moral intuitions from the Stoics or the Aristotelians.

⁹ For a different account of some of the similarities and differences between Lucrece and Tarquin see Jerome Kramer and Judith Kaminsky, "'These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold': Structure in The Rape of Lucrece," Mosaic, 10 (1977), 145-55.

¹⁰ Leonard Barkan discusses the way a number of Shakespeare's contemporaries use the metaphor of the house for the body in Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 134-74.

¹¹ Lanham, p. 104.

¹² George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (1936; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 176; Francis Bacon, The New Organon UK, in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Odyssey, 1968), p. 341. Many modern philosophers and literary theorists discuss the truth-value of metaphor and its role in human understanding. Important formulations include: Max Black, "Metaphor," Proceedings of the Aristoelian Society, 55 (1954-55), 273-94; Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," New Literary History, 6 (1974), 5-74; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 50-95; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 216-313 and "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 141-57; Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," On Metaphor, pp. 29-46; Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," On Metaphor, pp. 11-45; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). Though versions of the issues these writers address seem important in The Rape of Lucrece, it is impossible to align the poem with a theory of metaphoric meaning. Shakespeare is concerned not with the nature of metaphor in general, but with the way a powerfully seductive figurative language may function in particular circumstances.

¹³ Donaldson, p. 45.

¹⁴ Ariosto, Orlando Furioso Canto 8, pp. 42-43; Boccaccio, Decameron, 2, 9 (one of the sources for Cymbeline); Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, Bk. 3 and "Second Song," Astrophel and Stella. The New Arcadia deletes Musidorus's attempt to rape the sleeping Pamela.

¹⁵ Albert H. Tricomi, "The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus," SS, 27 (1974), 19.

¹⁶ Forster, The Icy Fire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 51.

¹⁷ See inter alia Forster; Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 221, 422; J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. 53-71, 96-100, 274-77; Louis L. Martz, "The Amoretti: Most Goodly Temperature," Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 146-68; Douglas Peterson, The English Lyric From Wyatt to Donne (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 164-284.

¹⁸ Kramer and Kaminsky, p. 145.

¹⁹ Muriel Bradbrook discusses heraldic imagery here and elsewhere in Lucrece in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), pp. 110-16.

²⁰ "[Enargeia] utemur quoties vel amplificandi, vel ornadi, vel delectandi gratia, rem non simpliciter exponemus, sed ceu coloribus expressam in tabula spectandam proponemus, ut nos depinxisse, non narrasse, lector spectasse, non legisse videatur" (my translation). Erasmus, De utraque verborum ac rerum copia, in Opera omnia (Basel, 1540), I, 66. For an illuminating discussion of Erasmus's rhetorical theory see Terence Cave, "Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century," L'Esprit Createur, 16, 4 (1976), 5-19.

²¹ Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. Herbert Hildebrand (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1961), p. 40. Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, III, ii, 13; Cicero, De Oratore, III, xl, 160-61. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. William Crane (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1954), p. 13.

²² Clark Hulse discusses this episode perceptively in Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 175-94. Hulse shares my interest in the verbal representation of visual art in Lucrece, but his discussion takes a different course. He argues that Lucrece acquires consciousness of herself as a tragic figure while she meditates before the painting. In my view, though Lucrece uses the painting to help herself understand her situation, the fact that both she and Tarquin constantly reaffirm choices makes it difficult to isolate critical moments of change or development in this way. Certainly Lucrece' s selection of a painting is partly determined by conclusions she wishes to reach, in fact already has reached. She would have a different set of interpretive options if, for example, she chose to confront a painting of the rape of the Sabines, an event in which the sexual violation of women bears a different relation to the destruction and foundation of civilizations.

²³ The representation of successive episodes in the same painting or tapestry is common in medieval and Renaissance art. Nelson Goodman discusses the convention and some of its permutations in "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony," On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 99-115. The relevant point for Lucrece is not that the painter has employed unsual means but merely that the power of his realism depends upon the effective deployment of convention.