SOURCE: "Hyperbolic Desire: Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 202-24.

[In the following essay, Willbern investigates the interplay of theme and narrative structure in The Rape of Lucrece, focusing on the poetics of erotic desire and on writing as a form of violation.]

Her maid is gone, and she prepares to write,
First hovering o'er the paper with her quill;
Conceit and grief an eager combat fight,
What wit sets down is blotted straight with
 will:
This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill.
    Much like a press of people at a door,
    Throng her inventions, which shall go
           before
                                (1296-1302)¹

This moment of anxious composition belongs to Lucrece, as she considers how to inform her husband Collatine of her rape by Tarquin. The Narrator shares the moment as well, sympathizing not only with the victim's plight but also with the poet's occupation, addressing questions of style that face any writer.

Implicit in this stanza is an aesthetic of narrative invention that controls the reading of Lucrece I will present in this essay.

From the conventional allegorical combat between "conceit and grief (or, loosely, invention and passion) and the standard opposition between "wit" and "will," Shakespeare's description of writing moves to questions of style ("curious-good" versus "blunt") and into a personification of composition itself. The final simile, of poetic inventions as people, indicates how I will read the poem. I intend to treat the personae of Shakespeare's Lucrece not as characters ("people at a door") but as rhetorical and psychological constructs ("inventions"), thereby describing circulations of desire through the poem as independent of, and prior to, those nominal agents that conventionally articulate them. In effect I will conflate "Tarquin," "Lucrece," and "Collatine" into one superagent whose actions and reactions trace the psycho-logic of desire itself.

As a dramatic poem Lucrece enacts an elementary psychology: the sudden emergence of obsessive desire, its progression into action, and the physical and emotional consequences. While relating a classic story of violation and revenge, the poem simultaneously explores primary issues of imaginative conception and linguistic creation. Poetic convention, such as the narrative "complaint" and the humanist tradition of rhetorical "copiousness," allowed Shakespeare free license for hyperbole, for extended investigations of linguistic possibility unsuitable in dramatic monologue to dialogue. Paradoxically, being limited to the printed page provided Shakespeare an authorized occasion for elaborate and intensive poetic excess. Constructed thus midway between poem and drama, Lucrece's collocation within both genres makes it easier to erase the superficial convention of dramatis personae and to treat literary characters who enact paradramatic scenes as linguistic representations of intellectual and emotional states. The poem thus becomes a dramatic narrative of self-division, or fragmented self-representation. Such an interpretive perspective derives, of course, from much earlier conventions, such as medieval allegory and psychomachia, and contemporary Renaissance practice of extended allegory.²

Collapsing the poem's fictional agents into a circulating flux of desire displaces critical emphasis from character to event, where the event becomes not a narrative of rape but a fantasy of violation: of ideals imagined and debased, wounds inflicted and suffered, taboos broken, thresholds crossed. Such a style of interpretation considers the poem as an intrapsychic debate, or a before-and-after design of a powerful desire followed from impulse to drive to fulfillment to reaction. "Tarquin" and "Lucrece" thus become reciprocal and inseparable aspects of the same trajectory of lust and guilt: they trace a hyperbolic curve, a rise and fall, of desire itself. (Although in the interest of readability I will maintain the convention of referring to "Tarquin" and "Lucrece" as dramatic characters, the names always carry invisible quotation marks.)

The figure of hyperbolic desire can be illustrated by the geometric design of the hyperbola. The ascending curve is occupied by "Tarquin," and "Lucrece" occupies the descending curve: the mirrored rise and fall of desire.

That the action of Lucrece occurs simultaneously on external and internal planes is clear from the beginning, when Collatine's urge to idealize spurs Tarquin's lust to debase. This structure is reinforced by the language of the poem, as when Lucrece's house retires, "every one to rest themselves … , / Save thieves and cares and troubled minds that wake" (125-26). External agents (thieves) parallel internal events (cares and troubled minds)—"As one of which doth Tarquin lie revolving" (127). Tarquin here exists coequally as both (outer) agent and (inner) impulse. A similar moment extends into allegory, when "pure thoughts are dead and still, / While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill" (163-67). The description reciprocally portrays both Lucrece and Tarquin, partially allegorized into sleeping Purity and wakeful Lust, while it reflects the psychology of dreaming and the release of repressed inpulses.³

A durable tradition of medieval psychomachia underlies Shakespeare's quasi-allegorical dynamic of passion, as when Tarquin is "madly toss'd between desire and dread" and leaps vigorously from his bed to strike his phallic "falchion" on a stone flint to ignite the torch that lights his way to Lucrece's chamber (169-82), or when he is momentarily disabled by "disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will" (246-47). Here the tradition of psychomachia blends with conventional Petrarchan conceits, vividly hyperbolized. Yet Shakespeare always does more than merely employ conventions: he explores and ultimately exhausts them.

Within his thought her heavenly image sits.
And in the self-same seat sits Collatine.
That eye which looks on her confounds his
 wits;
That eye which him beholds, as more divine,
Unto a view so false will not incline,
   But with a pure appeal seeks to the heart,
   Which once corrupted takes the worser
          part:

And therein heartens up his servile powers,
Who flatter'd by their leader's jocund show,
Stuff up his lust, as minutes fill up hours;
And as their captain, so their pride doth grow,
Paying more slavish tribute than they owe.

By reprobate desire thus madly led,
The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece' bed.
                              (288-301)

These stanzas describe a passage from idealization to violation that is abrupt and linear, emerging from a confusion of self and other, Lucrece and Collatine, thought and object. Preceding his outward action, Tarquin looks within, where he discovers a version of Collatine's "sky of delight" (12): the idealized Lucrece. She is already occupied, however, by Collatine. This highly sublimated primal scene seeks denial in "a pure appeal," but base eroticism is already released and quickly transforms mental images into physical arousal, as Tarquin's lust is "stuffed up" with blood in growing "pride."⁴ Quick shifts from imagination to arousal to motion sketch the genesis of a basic drive that propels Tarquin along his linear course: "The locks between her chamber and his will, / Each one by him enforc'd" (302-3). Here is the rape played out in symbols both Shakespearean and Freudian; the device continues with the conventional sexual tropes of glove and needle (316-22).⁵

A keen delineation of desire's hyperbola is in two stanzas of the poem that prefigure similar erotic trajectories elsewhere in Shakespeare:

O deeper sin than bottomless conceit
Can comprehend in still imagination!
Drunken desire must vomit his receipt,
Ere he can see his own abomination.
While lust is in his pride no exclamation
   Can curb his heat or rein his rash desire,
   Till, like a jade, self-will himself doth tire.

And then with lank and lean discolour'd
 cheek,
With heavy eye, knit brow, and strengthless
 pace,
Feeble desire, all recreant, poor and meek,
Like to a bankrout beggar wails his case.
The flesh being proud, desire doth fight with
 grace;
  For there it revels, and when that decays,
  The guilty rebel for remission prays.
                                    (701-14)

The model of oral appetite, prominent throughout Lucrece, vividly evokes the brute pleasures of sheer gratification, contrasted with the "abominable" perceptions of post-satisfaction guilt. The two stanzas present a metamorphosis of similes: the conventional equine image of unrestrained lust modulates by means of attributes shared by man and beast (cheek, eye, brow, pace) into the human image of the beggar, his spirit spent. Desire's hyperbola is quickly sketched by pride (rise) and decay (fall). Another stark "Before-and-After" contrast recurs in The Merchant of Venice, yet with a major difference: the uncurbed "jade" of the above stanzas exhausts himself through his own efforts, whereas the prodigal ship (by convention feminine) in the passage below is enfeebled by the harsh elements of "the strumpet wind":

                       All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.
How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay—
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return
With over-weather' d ribs and ragged sails—
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet
 wind!
         (The Merchant of Venice, 2.6.12-18)

Here the hyperbola is only suggested, traced from initial spirited prodigality, through embrace, to lean beggardom. Shakespeare's most famous and most complex elaboration of desire's hyperbola is in sonnet 129 (though the geometric figure is faint):

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad,—
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.
   All this the world well knows, yet none
            knows well
   To shun the heaven that leads men to this
            hell.

The sonnet well describes the lust-maddened Tarquin, "fancy's slave" (200), who damns himself through his blind drive toward the hellish heaven of Lucrece. For Tarquin enlists in the army of passions: "Affection is my captain, and he leadeth" (271). His march to Lucrece's chamber begins with the illusion of orderly direction, but soon the metaphor of martial leadership collapses into the bestial rush of compulsion: "But nothing can affection's course control. / Or stop the headlong fury of his speed" (500-501). No longer following an impulse, Tarquin is now impelled. Like Macbeth he is carried by his own intent (Macbeth, 1.7.26); like Othello he is swept up in the compulsive current of his rash desire (Othello, 3.3.460-67). The model of Affection shifts from allegorical persona to psychological drive. Shakespeare later echoes this sense of "affection" in Leontes' violent and obscure ravings in The Winter's Tale:

Affection! thy intention stabs the center:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams;—how can this
 be?
                                           (1.2.138ff.)

Considered within the context of Lucrece, these lines suggest the consanguinity of lust and fantasy, desire and dream, but they also evoke intersecting images of rape and suicide ("stabs the center"), or of an outerdirected passion that reflexively returns to injure its source.

At the source of Tarquin's affection, or the erotic compulsion that culminates in the rape of Lucrece (the object of his affection), lies the idealization of her boastful husband, Collatine. Sublimely constellating Lucrece in the "sky of his delight," he "unlock'd the treasure of his happy state" in Tarquin's tent (12-15). As the Narrator questions, "Why is Collatine the publisher / Of that rich jewel he could keep unknown / From thievish ears, because it is his own?" (33-35). An answer to this question is that the impulse to idealistic display derives precisely from the pleasure of possession: as the proud owner of such a gem, Collatine cannot hide its virtue under a bushel. Shining in his private constellation, her "pure aspects did him peculiar duties" (14). The term "peculiar" carries its etymology of pecus, livestock: that portion of a herd given to the herdsman; it is thus related to pecunia (cattle, money).⁶ Such contamination of virtue by possession is the first "rape of Lucrece," as she is seized (rapire, to seize) by Collatine's imagination and displayed for the admiration of others. His fantasy of ownership leads to the verbal exhibition that fires Tarquin's lust. Recent feminist readers have focused on this point, calling Collatine's boasting "an act of excess that is a rhetorical analogue to Tarquin's sexual will." "Rape," concludes Nancy Vickers, "is the price Lucrece pays for having been described."⁷ Collatine's boasting amid his comrades is an imaginative sharing of his wealth while arousing jealousy and envy. In effect, he offers his ideal possession to the potentially lewd admiration of his companions. The offshoot of such admiration is embodied in the lascivious Tarquin, who enacts the implicit climax of Collatine's discourse. Tarquin carries the shadowy subtext of a message sent posthaste from Collatine: "From besieged Ardea all in post / Borne by the trustless wings of false desire" (1-2). Although deep and invisible here at the beginning, the pun on "post" gradually surfaces as the poem develops its parallels with imagination and writing and becomes manifest in the echoes of Lucrece's message on the outside of her letter to Collatine after the rape: "Her letter now is seal'd, and on it writ / 'At Ardea to my lord with more than haste.' / The post attends" (1330-32).⁸

The observation that Tarquin consummates Collatine's discourse restates as a structural principle the Narrator's opinion that Tarquin acts, literally, at Collatine's suggestion: "Perchance his boast of Lucrece's sovereignty / Suggested this proud issue of a king" (36-37). In Elizabethan vocabulary the transitive verb "suggest" carried a stronger sense than it has today: it meant "urge" "prompt," "motivate," often to questionable acts (see sonnet 144). From this perspective, the poem has a structure similar to Measure for Measure, where a presumably virtuous agent (the Duke) employs a lustful substitute (Angelo) as a tool to debase an idealized woman (Isabella). Tarquin represents the displaced enactment of an unconscious wish, or "suggestion," proceeding from Collatine. The poem gestures toward this signification when Tarquin worries, "If Collatine dream of my intent" (218-20). The rape enacts the trauma of debasement that shadows the dream of idealization. "Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried" (353). It is an axiom of psychoanalysis that idealization requires denial or repression, and that what is repressed will return, usually in another form. As the Narrator of Lucrece asserts: "No perfection is so absolute / That some impurity does not pollute" (853-54). The maxim carries both internal and external senses. It states that impurity endangers perfection from without, as the Narrator continues to warn: "With virtue breeds, iniquity devours" (872). And it implies that impurity already resides within perfection: no ideal is unalloyed. Here is the ambivalent psychology of idealization. It is just such a thought—that some impurity pollutes his divine Desdemona—that maddens Othello and drives him to a murder that is also a symbolic rape. In a world of imperfect relationships, any idealization of an other requires denial of conflicting characteristic, thus intensifying an unstable ambivalence. If the ideal cracks, repressed energies erupt through the flaw. When Cordelia is not Lear's perfect child and nurturer, she becomes a monster of ingratitude. When Desdemona is not Othello's faithful angel, she becomes a lying whore. When Imogen is not Posthumous's innocent Diana, she becomes a vicious devil. Idealization demands denial, yet what is denied inevitably reasserts itself as the dark ghost of the paragon, the satyr to Hyperion (to use Hamlet's terms).

Within the intrapsychic circulations of unconscious desire configured by the nominal agents of Lucrece, every external misdeed is an internal trespass, and every violation is a self-violation. As soon as he "yields to [Collatine's] suggestion," Tarquin finds his "single state of man" divided, so that "himself himself he must forsake" (Macbeth, 1.3.134-42; Lucrece, 156-60). He "pawn[s] his honour to obtain his lust," and at the moment he commits the rape, "his soul's fair temple is defaced," becoming a "spotted princess" (719-23). These terms precisely prefigure Lucrece's response to her rape, where "her sacred temple [is] spotted, spoil'd, corrupted" (1172). As Tarquin rapes Lucrece, he also rapes himself.⁹ Beyond her standard typology of wifely virtue, "Lucrece" represents an internal figure, an icon of classical purity and integrity, as well as a female image of the Christian soul. Psycholanalytically she represents an internalized image of maternal perfection, whose vehement consecration to virtue is motivated by the pressures of Oedipal desire. What Lucrece demonstrates is the frailty and failure of the repression of such desires.

Tarquin's rape of Lucrece represents self-violation on several levels. It is a crime against his own integrity and valor, against the Roman state ("Rome herself … doth stand disgrac'd" [1833]), against his sworn friendship with Collatine, and against Collatine's honor as embodied by Lucrece: her chastity was her husband's possession, therefore its theft and enjoyment is an assault on him (834-40). Under the strict fictions of patriarchy, rape is a type of theft: an act of envious rivalry between men.¹⁰ On the site of her death, Collatine and Lucretius (her father) dispute the primary right of grief: '"Woe, woe,'" quoth Collatine, '"she was my wife; / I ow'd her, and 'tis mine that she hath kill'd'"(1802-3).

The theme of self-division pervades the figures of both Tarquin and Lucrece. From the beginning the duplicity of Tarquin as friend and betrayer, visitor and violator, augurs a psychological double-ness: "Tarquin comes to Lucrece as two persons."¹¹ Reciprocally, Lucrece's responses to the rape demonstrate analogous self-divisions, as she debates suicide ("with herself is she in mutiny" [1153]; see also ), and implicitly imagines the act as self-rape: "To kill myself … alack what were it, / But with my body my poor soul's pollution?" (1156-57). When she finally does kill herself, her act formally reenacts the rape (and not merely through the sexual symbolism of the dagger).¹² As she stabs herself, Lucrece exclaims of Tarquin, "He, he, fair lords, 'tis he / That guides this hand to give this wound to me" (1721-22). Lucrece's climactic posture culminates in an exact identification with her rapist, in a poetic implication of the binary consanguinity of victim and aggressor. The implicit coaction denotes a symbolic coitus that leads to an actual and figurative commingling of bloods, as Lucrece's blood, "bubbling from her breast," divides into two streams and encircles her body like an island (1737-43).¹³ Some is red (Lucrece's pure blood) and some is black (defiled by Tarquin); but the two, red and black, are not in separate streams (as some critics mistakenly read). The emblem is not simply of division but also of confluence; not simply opposition but also identity: a literal consanguinity. Lucrece, in the last half of the poem, includes and encloses Tarquin, who has vanished from the narrative as manifest agent. In terms of our geometric mnemonic of the hyperbola, "Lucrece" takes over where "Tarquin" leaves off: her agency subsumes her shame and his guilt.

"Tarquin" and "Lucrece" thus figure as a binary unit, a balanced pair of apparent opposites that mirror an identity. Such structural symmetry informs the elaborate rhetorical balancing of those stanzas immediately following the (absent) scene of the rape (736-49). After Tarquin leaves Lucrece's bed, he "bear[s] away the wound that nothing healeth" (731). She has been wounded (externally), and he bears the wound (internally). "She bears the load of lust he left behind, / And he the burden of a guilty mind" (734-35). Although Tarquin now disappears from the poem, his "guilty mind" is not in fact borne away: it remains behind, now reposited in Lucrece, who immediately bewails her "offence," "disgrace," "sin," "guilt," and "shame," and who launches into her hyperbolic tirades against, Night, Opportunity, and Time. Referring to "the iterative transferrai of these topics from Tarquin to Lucrece," A. Robin Bowers remarks that "the traditional de casibus theme has become internalized … to include the notion of de casibus mentium."¹⁴

The inclusion of "Tarquin" by "Lucrece" changes the language and style of the poem. Simply, the rape effects a violent epiphany. The poem initially presents an idealized, virtually virginal Lucrece,¹⁵ who can neither discern nor imagine any duplicity in her sudden guest. She is an innocent reader, unable to gloss the "subtle shining secrecies" of Tarquin's false book (99-105). After the rape a new darkly erotic language reveals carnal contamination, as when she images Night as a demonic ravisher who smothers the sun in poisonous mists "ere he arrive his noontide prick" (764-84), yet wishes that night would never end, in an ironic performance of the traditional lover's wish ("Lente, lente, currite noctis equi")¹⁶ After the rape her eyes are opened to the ways of the world: she can now read signs of deceit in the Troy-painting whose visages she scans—especially Sinon, the traitor who convinced the Trojans to admit the wooden horse. Her new knowledge positions her in an unfamiliar post-sexual context. Suffused by a complex of arousal and guilt, she becomes momentarily caught in a thick interchange of looks, thoughts, and blushes in her encounter with the "sour-fac'd groom" who provided direct contact with her husband: the first agent to whom she entrusts her "confession." During their brief encounter she imagines that he perceives her guilt, and he, though ignorant of her stain, responds to her embarrassment with a blush, which she augments by reciprocation:

His kindled duty kindled her mistrust,
That two red fires in both their faces blazed;
She thought he blush'd, as knowing Tarquin's lust,
And blushing with him, wistly on him gazed.
Her earnest eye did make him more amazed;
    The more she saw the blood his cheeks
           replenish,
    The more she thought he spied in her
           some blemish.
                                  (1352-58)

Contrasted with her prior innocent inability to read Tarquin's libidinous look, this post-sexual gaze combines guilt, self-suspicion, and projection. Violently she has been transported into a new register of erotic imagination: she is now possessed by knowledge, where before she was "unknown" (34). This brutal fracture of her conventionally virtuous relationship to Collatine creates a sudden and poignant estrangement when they meet, at Lucrece's mysterious summons:

He hath no power to ask her how she fares;
   Both stood like old acquaintances in a
           trance,
   Met far from home, wond'ring each
           other's chance.
                                   (1594-96)

The power of this alienation derives unconsciously from the sudden awareness of the other's sexual knowledge, the wish/fear that she knows and is known, the ambivalent recognition of Oedipal history.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
                 (Yeats, "Leda and the Swan")

The example of Yeats's modern revision of another classic rape resituates the event in terms of a Freudian epistemological trauma. One way to describe the Oedipus complex is to say that "knowing" the mother sexually means to know that she has a sexual history, to recognize her as erotically experienced and available—to others and therefore potentially to oneself. Such a discovery or admission carries the awareness of rivalry (the knowledge of prior possenssion). When this recognition is coupled with fantasies of the primal scene, the sudden awareness of maternal sexuality becomes a kind of erotic epistemological assault, like a rape. Or, one could theorize that shifting the image of the mother from a position of idealized and solitary possession to a position of debased and shared rivalry (with the father, with other men), can be felt as a violent disruption. Violently participating in this transition from what Lacan called the Imaginary Register to what he called the Symbolic, the child in fantasy can simultaneously act out and enjoy sexual participation, while punishing this newly conceived image of the mother through assault and death—consequences that then can also be avenged by rebelling against, and casting out, the father.

The dynamic of this post-sexual knowledge is vividly portrayed in Lucrece's studied reading of the Troy-painting.¹⁷ The rhetorical energies of this set piece simultaneously dilate outward from the formal debates of Tarquin and Lucrece into the large-scale scene of the Rape of Helen and the Sack of Troy, while they contract and distance the trauma of Lucrece into the static realm of (apparent) pictorial representation. Whereas before Lucrece could read nothing beyond the bland civilities of Tarquin, now she perceives affect and motive in the pictured faces of the Greeks and Trojans: Ajax's "blunt rage and rigour," the "deep regard and smiling government" in the look of "sly Ulysses" (1394-1400), and especially "despairing Hecuba" who becomes a mirroring figure.

In her the painter had anatomiz'd
Time's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's
 reign;
Her cheeks with chops and wrinkles were
 disguis'd:
Of what she was no semblance did remain.
Her blue blood chang'd to black in every
 vein,
  Wanting the spring that those shrunk
         pipes had fed,
  Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead.
                                  (1450-56)

Here the post-sexual image of Lucrece is reflected in the ruined maternal figure of Hecuba (herself a morbid reflection of the mirrored face the poet imagines in the initial sequence of the Sonnets). Lucrece identifies with Hecuba and speaks for her: '"Poor instrument,' quoth she, 'without a sound, / I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue'" (1464-65). This identification serves several functions: it provides Lucrece with a character she can imitate, and it offers her an option beyond lamentation—revenge. Her typology shifts from patient Penelope, through victimized Persephone, to vindictive Philomela. Immediately after her identification with victim and avenger, she turns her imagination to Helen:

Show me the strumpet that began this stir,
That with my nails her beauty I may tear!
They heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur
This load of wrath that burning Troy doth
 bear.
                                    (1471-74)

A metaphor of pregnancy expresses the genesis of Lucrece's own wrath from the "load of lust" that Tarquin left her (734). Yet insofar as the woman receives the initial blame, an implicit identity of Lucrece, Helen, and Troy emerges. Helen becomes a debased image of Lucrece, a woman upon whose questionable virtue empires turn. When Lucrece transfers her "load of lust" to Troy's "load of wrath," she identifies with Troy, a city invaded and violated by male deceit. Next she identifies with Priam, as the master of Troy (1546-47). Lucrece's stream of confluent identifications (Hecuba, Helen, Troy, Priam) follows her previous relation to Night, whom she first blames but soon conjures and identifies with, as "the silver-shining Queen" who would also be raped by Tarquin, himself "night's child," thereby becoming Lucrece's "co-partner" in victimage (785-89). The complexity of this particular con-fusion—Tarquin would rape his own mother (Night), if he were her (Night)—produces one of the most intense cross-identifications within the flux of shifting representations in this poem.

The momentary consanguinity of Lucrece and Helen, "the strumpet that began this stir," developed in later decades into a subterranean, libertine counterimage of Lucrece as sexually experienced, bawdy, even whorish. Tracing the evolution of this counter-image in Aretino, Carew (his notorious pornographic poem "A Rapture"), and anonymous authors, Saad El-Gabalawy notes the vigorous translation of this emblem of virtue into a defense of lust. Through its desublimation of erotic (romantic) convention, this strain of seventeenth-century libertinism effected "a kind of metamorphosis in the figure of Lucrece, transforming the virtuous matron into a coquette."¹⁸

Further shifting cross-identifications within the poem parallel the figures of Sinon and Priam as iterative representations of Tarquin and Collatine: Sinon/Tarquin is the deceitful traitor, and Priam/Collatine is the master of the "sweet city" that is Troy/Lucrece. Just as Collatine's story inflames Tarquin to ruin Lucrece, so Sinon's narrative burns Troy:

The well-skill'd workman this mild image
 drew
For perjur'd Sinon, whose enchanting story
The credulous old Priam after slew;
Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining
 glory
Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
And little stars shot from their fixed places,
When their glass fell, wherein they view'd
 their faces.
                                    (1520-26)

The language echoes the initial rhetorical contest wherein Collatine's praise of Lucrece inflamed (his agent) Tarquin to "bear the lightless fire" that would pluck chaste Lucrece from the "sky of his delight" (4-12). Since the inflammatory narrative belongs to Sinon and to Collatine, our reading to the Troy-piece becomes knotted. Sinon clearly represents Tarquin, but he also represents Collatine. Whereas Sinon talks the giant Greek horse within the walls of Troy, Collatine talks Tarquin into Lucrece. In both cases a deceitful male rhetorician introduces an engine of ruin into a presumably well-fortified (feminine) city. The result is a violent debasement: the collapse of a pure constellation and the fracture of the mirror of idealization.¹⁹

Even before her confrontation with the Troy-piece, Lucrece's latent connection to its history is marked by her typology as Penelope, the spinner-weaver who waits with virtuous patience for her husband's return from war, though she is besieged by suitors. This story also carries a climactic chapter whereby the husband tests his wife by visiting her as a disguised substitute. The Troy-piece can thus be seen as Lucrece's production, or a projection of the poem's fantasies about marriage, war, fidelity, trust, disguise, and language onto a mute screen that mirrors unspoken motives of the poem itself. When Lucrece addresses the painting, she gives it voice, in a stark schematic of the basic aesthetic division between poem and drama that Shakespeare explores and entertains in Lucrece. Whereas the poem has no visual enactment (Shakespeare has only page, not stage), the painting has neither voice nor text.

The emblem of mute display that rouses others to voice and action finds its ultimate locus in Lucrece's body. After Collatine, Lucretius (her father) and Brutus have sworn on the bloody knife pulled from Lucrece's body to avenge her shame and purge Rome of Tarquin kings, they propose to carry the corpse into the streets, "To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / and so to publish Tarquin's foul offence" (1851-52). On the statement of this intention, the poem abruptly ends. The ritual vindictive gesture rests on a crude signification whereby res ipsa, the body, represents the crime done to it. Lucrece's corpse is simultaneously an icon of violation and of purity. Her wound symbolizes both her suicide and Tarquin's offense: the Rape of Lucrece objectified, both as suffered and as inflicted. This public display of her wound is an ultimate seizure and display of her body within a masculine system of signification: it is the final rape. It is also the culminating publication of Collatine's "rich jewel he should keep unknown" (34), now known to all Rome. Ovid's phrase (which Shakespeare read) suggests a deeper, carnal meaning: "vulnus inane patet" (Ovid, Fasti).²⁰ Literally, "the gaping wound lies open, is exposed." Thus reduced to passive display of her wound—her void or vacancy—Lucrece becomes a vaginal signifier, an empty "inanity" made sensible by the vigorous admirations, lewd or legitimate, of men who possess her.

The crude carnal significance of this display of violated virtue returns the poem to the paradox of praise, for chastity praised is immediately chastity defiled. Just as the essence of true virginity is that the virgin is wholly unknown (e.g., veiled), the deep nature of chastity is that it is never announced. To praise chastity already enters the virtue in the lists of its opposition: it calls it into question, admits alternatives, and thereby (to use the language of the Sonnets) admits impediments. Praising chastity is implicitly equivalent to testing it: Lucrece plays out this dynamic of tribute and trial through the cooperative agencies of Collatine and Tarquin.

One of the best examples of hyperbole in Lucrece is a stanza devoted to Lucrece asleep on her pillow:

Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
Coz'ning the pillow of a lawful kiss;
Who therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,
Swelling on either side to want his bliss:
Between whose hills her head entombed is,
   Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
   To be admir'd of lewd unhallowed eyes.
                                  (386-92)

Among conventional critical evaluations of this sort of poetic excess, Douglas Bush's objection is typical. "Such a conceit as this," he writes, "is in Marlowe's worst vein. … As often in the early plays, the author has quite forgotten the situation; he is holding the subject at arm's length, turning it round, saying as much as he can about every side of it. Almost every line gives evidence of a self-conscious pride in rhetorical skill."²¹ It is of course just such pride in rhetorical skill that is the central subject of Lucrece, in matter and in form, beginning with Collatine's proud praise,²² The vigorous manipulation of the subject that Bush describes is hardly a forgetting of the situation; it is the situation. Moreover, the elaborate hyperbole of the pillow inscribes in miniature the complex motivations that prefigure the rape itself. The sleeping Lucrece, in all innocence, prevents her pillow from its "lawful kiss." Such deprivation results in anger, division, and swelling, as a response to the "want" (lack) of "bliss." Thus surrounded by an emblem of angry arousal, both erotic and violent, Lucrece is rhetorically murdered, transformed into a tomb, "a virtuous monument." She is then subjected to the lewd admiration not only of Tarquin (who is gazing on her at this moment) but also of the reader, before whose eyes Shakespeare's highly eroticized rhetoric will exhibit all of Lucrece's charms: her hair, her breasts, "her azure veins, her alabaster skin, / Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin" (400-420). This elaborate inventory of Lucrece's various beauties idealizes her while it simultaneously dehumanizes her; it is another rhetorical appropriation, or "rape," analogous to Collatine's public exhibition of his pure jewel. As the pillow's swelling mimics Tarquin's arousal, it becomes a displaced expression of his "will," a symbol of his erotic gaze: "But will is deaf … ; / Only he hath an eye to gaze on beauty" (495-96). Here is lewd admiration reduced to its anatomical organ: the phallic gaze, the monocular phallus.

The stanza enacts a model of the poem itself. It condenses a pattern of denial and frustration that Joel Fineman discovers through the narrative, a "logic of 'let' that links Lucrece to Tarquin and that makes Lucrece responsible for her rape by virtue of the energetic and energizing resistance that she offers to it."²³ The dynamic of deprivation and arousal that Fineman describes accords with the trajectory of hyperbolic desire, and when characterized in "Lucrece," this dynamic acknowledges responsibility. When Collatine arrives home, summoned by Lucrece's letter, her first words allude to her own culpability: '"Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, / Where no excuse can give the fault amending'" (1613-14). She then proceeds to confess that "in the interest of thy bed / A stranger came" (1619-20). These at best ambiguous phrases twist the nature of her victimage, so that the crime is not initially rape but infidelity.

In her lament to Night, Lucrece earlier described her position as both agent and victim:

"Make me not object to the tell-tale day:
The light will show character'd in my brow
The story of sweet chastity's decay,
The impious breach of holy wedlock vow;
Yea, the illiterate that know not how
   To cipher what is writ in learned books,
   Will quote my loathsome trespass in my
           looks."
                                   (806-12)

The ambiguous diction, through which such terms as "decay," "breach," and "trespass" are both objective and subjective, active and passive, constructs a Lucrece whose rape is literally her "fault": it is a flaw, written in her face and on her body. "Poor women's faces," the Narrator opines, "are their own faults' books" (1253). Lucrece's face is from the beginning an ambivalent ground of shame and arousal, demarcated by that blatantly ambivalent physical sign, the blush.

When virtue bragg'd, beauty would blush for
 shame;
   When beauty boasted blushes, in despite
   Virtue would stain that o'er with silver
           white.
                                    (54-6)

This conventional contest between heraldic signs of purity and beauty, that "silent war of lilies and of roses" (71), now transmutes into a darker image of the stain on a white surface an implicit sign of writing.

Her maid is gone, and she prepares to write,
First hovering o'er the paper with her quill;
Conceit and grief an eager combat fight,
What wit sets down is blotted straight with
 will:
This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill.
    Much like a press of people at a door,
    Throng her inventions, which shall go
           before.
                                (1296-1302)

Lucrece's writing posture emulates her rape. This stanza precisely delineates the process of the rape, both as endured event and as composed narrative. The image of Lucrece "hovering o'er the paper with her quill" exactly mirrors Tarquin "shak[ing] aloft his Roman blade … like a falcon tow'ring in the skies" above the subject whose purity he means to stain, to "blot" with his "will." The pressure of invention at Lucrece's door reflects Tarquin's insistent drive to cross her threshold. These postures of rapist and victim replicate an original moment, I conjecture: the posture of Shakespeare at the instant of composition. Though deeply buried, linguistic associations further connect the rape with the process of writing. For instance, to silence her outcries, Tarquin wraps Lucrece's face in her bed linen: "For with the nightly linen that she wears / He pens her piteous clamours in her head" (680-81). (Paper in Shakespeare's time was made primarily from linen: see Othello.) The effort of her tears to cleanse the stain of Tarquin's lust then becomes a wish to erase her shame from the historical record.

Precisely this intersection of rape and writing may return us to the figure of the hyperbola, and to the missing moment at the climax or apex, for the poem traditionally known as The Rape of Lucrece does not in fact describe that event.²⁴ The actual rape, insofar as it may be surmised or projected, occurs literally between stanzas, in lines 683-84. Our geometric figure draws a blank at this moment. Of course, issues of propriety and decorum pertain here, but these are not exhaustive explanations. The Rape of Lucrece is not about rape but about the motivations and feelings that precede and succeed the event. It is a "before-and-after" design, pivoting on a central act that is not described (in this design it resembles Macbeth). The pivotal moment divides "before" from "after": it marks a gap or fault, intersection or union, violation or disjuncture; it highlights a moment of fusion that also forces separation, the illusory division between inside and outside, idealized and debased, sacred and taboo; it is like a membrane that joins primary oppositions, that marks—like the use of walls, doors, and gloves in Shakespeare's poem—the fecund interval, the threshold of Oedipal sexuality.

My metaphor becomes transparent: it is the hymen, especially as elaborated by Derrida in his philosophical reverie out of Plato by Mallarmé, in which he analogizes crossing the threshold of the hymen to blotting the virginal blank page with writing. Mallarmé provides the fertile text: "La scene n'illustre que l'idée, pas une action effective, dans un hymen (d'oú procède le Rêve), vicieux mais sacré, entre le désir et l'accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir: ici devançant, là remémorant, au futur, au passé, sous une apparence fausse de présent. Tel opère le Mime, dont le jeu se borne à une allusion perpétuelle sans briser la glace: il installe, ainsi, un milieu, pur, de fictin."²⁵ While the precise relevance of these symbolist meditations to Shakespeare's poem may be obscure, Mallarmé's rich confusion (idea and action, sacred and vicious) and his potent evocation of a medium, or space between, that separates yet connects desire and gratification, past and future, through an illusory present, apply to those images of motivation and of writing that Shakespeare explores in Lucrece and elsewhere, in terms of rape. From the grimly absurd scene in Titus Andronicus of the mutilated Lavinia writing "stuprum" ("rape") in the sand with her stumps, through the tragic melodrama of Othello's efforts to keep Desdemona's "most goodly book" free of the grimy term "whore," to the parody of rape and debased reputation by a "Iachimo-in-the-box" in Cymbeline, Shakespeare correlated the themes of despoiled innocence and inscription. Lucrece may be his most extended investigation of the hinge of this correlation: an elaborate study of the mediating moment between innocence and knowledge, purity and corruption, unity and disintegration. Lucrece is constructed on the principle of the climactic hinge, the sharp shift in direction from desire ("Tarquin") to consequence ("Lucrece"). Its pivotal point is literally absent (in terms of literary representation), yet crucially present as a structural principle. It is a moment of traumatic deprivation—for both Lucrece and Tarquin—and simultaneously a moment of sudden plenitude: desire is satisfied, delay terminated, the hyperbolic trajectory given final shape. "Hymen" embodies both membrane and marriage. Derrida's ornate, hyperbolic rhetoric suggests the power of this conceit: "The hymen," he writes, "the consummation of differends, the continuity and confusion of the coitus, merges with what it seems to be derived from:"

the hymen as protective screen, the jewel box of virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the hystera, stands between the inside and the outside of a woman, and consequently between desire and fulfillment. It is neither desire nor pleasure but in between the two. Neither future nor present, but between the two. It is the hymen that desire dreams of piercing, of bursting, in an act of violence that is (at the same time or somewhere between) love and murder.

(212-13)

Derrida's aggressive eroticization of Mallarmé translates the hymeneal conceit into those two arenas that Shakespeare hyperbolizes in Lucrece: the mirroring hyperbolas of desire traced by (1) the fantasy of rape, and (2) the act of composition. It is as though when writing what we now call The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare married the hyperbolic description of rape (the body's praise and violation) with hyperbole itself, or with the act of composition. The image of Lucrece at her writing desk, hovering over her paper while inventions "press" her, not only imitates the scene of rape: it also replicates a primal scene of Shakespearean composition.

The violent intersection of "Tarquin" and "Lucrece," as a primal scene of composition, enacts an energetic collision between genderized aspects of the Shakespearean imagination: the "dramatic" (male) and the "poetic" (female). The two agents of Lucrece personify traditional divisions: male/female, active/passive, sadistic/masochistic, doing/being. Linear action (Tarquin's line) is masculine, whereas convoluted verbal display (Lucrece's lines) is feminine.²⁶ Whereas Tarquin demonstrates his identity through action, Lucrece discovers her identity through reflection (e.g., the Troy-piece). Tarquin acts, while Lucrece reacts. Such conventional gender division is in fact a manifest subject of Lucrece. It is evident in the characters, in the narrated action, in the figure of desire's hyperbola, and expressly examined in two stanzas in the middle of the poem:

For men have marble, women waxen, minds,
And therefore are they form'd as marble will;
The weak oppress'd, th' impression of strange
 kinds
Is form'd 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 stamp'd the semblance of a
         devil.
Their smoothness, like a goodly champaign
 plain,
Lays open all the little worms that creep;

Though men can cover them with bold
       stern looks,
Poor women's faces are their own faults'
       books.
                            (1240-53)

Through such Neoplatonic psychology, the Narrator imposes his own logic and morality on the poem. The thoughts echo Spenser's Garden of Adonis, and are echoed in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Theseus warns Hermia that her subjection to her father is "but as a form in wax / By him imprinted" (1.1.49-50). As Katharine Maus notes, the metaphor, by insisting on absolute female passivity, effectively removes all agency from Lucrece. If she has no will of her own, Maus asks, "then what can Tarquin have violated?" The rape of passive women by active men then becomes "in the nature of things," and Tarquin's assault is "excusable" (75). The passage implicitly suggests rape, but explicitly it describes inscription: not marring but marking. Beyond the Narrator's conventional complacency about gender relations lies a powerful metaphor of compliance: the equation of writing and rape.²⁷

Shakespeare's Lucrece, then, is not merely about a classic rape, or about the hymeneal intervals between wish, deed, and response, but also about the process of writing—or of imaginatively conceiving a traumatic act and inscribing that conception on the page. Inscription leaves a permanent mark, or stain—unlike the vital yet ephemeral voices and gestures of a staged play. It is essentially emblematic that Shakespeare's two intended poetic publications conclude with images of stains and indelible memory the blood-stained purple anemone in Venus and Adonis (1165-88) and the bloody corpse of Lucrece. Both are emblems of innocence remarked by lust; both enter cultural mythology as images of victimized virtue, polluted yet consecrated, violently memorialized as monuments of chastity defiled.

If Shakespeare imagined publication as leaving a permanent mark, and if his imagination of that mark was characterized by a sadomasochistic con-fusion of figure and disfigurement, love and violence—that is, by a fantasy of rape—then his conspicuous indifference to, or ambivalence about, publication acquires new significance. It may be that writing, for Shakespeare—when fixed in published form—did not represent a purely positive emblem of textual procreativity that would "bear his memory" through time (sonnet 1). Shakespeare' s is no mere erotics of poetry. His potent coupling of rape and remembrance suggests publication as a kind of violation: an arrest of the imagination, an insult to time, a blot on the stream of (dramatic) creativity. Such speculation is a grand—indeed, hyperbolic—conjecture. That reading Shakespeare should tease us into such thoughts is a major motive for our continued study of him.

Notes

¹The Poems, e d. F. T. Prince (London; Methuen, 1960). All subsequent quotations from Lucrece are from this Arden edition.

²The best Renaissance representative of this style of narrative psychodramatic allegory is Spenser. For an excellent description of the Spenserian background against which Lucrece is most profitably read, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), especially chap. 5, "The Faerie Queene: Allegory, Iconography, and the Human Body."

³Macbeth is the richest dramatic parallel here, to the point of exact echoes. As Macbeth moves "with Tarquin's ravishing strides" toward the bloody business of regicide, he occupies the identical arena of dream and allegory, enacting Lust and "Murther" (Macbeth, 2.1.49-56). M. C. Bradbrook calls Tarquin's soliloquies "a first cartoon for the study of Macbeth": see Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chalte & Windus, 1951), p. 112. For an extensive mapping of the dreamscape of Macbeth, see my essay, "Phantasmagoric Macbeth, English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 520-49.

⁴ Shakespeare's language is manifestly bawdy here. "Pride" has frequent connotations of male arousal, and the physiology of tumescence is clear (see also and , where the signification is exact). "These terms darkly suggest," writes Saad El-Gabalawy, that Tarquin "is being led along by his own erect sexual organ" ("The Ethical Question of Lucrece: A Case of Rape," Mosaic 12 [1979]: 80). Katharine Eisaman Maus also hears the echoes: see "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 74.

⁵ Joel Fineman notes how Shakespeare's description of Lucrece's rape is displaced onto the details of Tarquin's progress toward her room, which he terms "a kind of pornographic effictio": see Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in The Sonnets (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), p. 39.

⁶ Eric Partridge, Origins, s.v. The term is infrequent in Shakespeare, and its contexts are suggestive. For instance, Iago to Othello on the fraternity of cuckolds: "There's millions now alive / That nightly lies in those unproper beds / Which they dare swear peculiar" (Othello, 4.1.67-69). Or Pompey the Bawd to Mistress Overdone on Claudio's crime of unlicensed fornication: "But what's his offence?" she asks "Groping for trouts in a peculiar river," he replies (Measure for Measure, 1.2.83-84). Shakespeare uses the Latin pecus in Love's Labors Lost (4.2.92).

⁷ Catharine Stimpson, "Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape," in Ruth Lenz, Gayle Greene, Carol Neely, eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 58; Nancy Vickers, "The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1985), p. 102. Stimpson and Vickers also review the parallel structure in Cymbeline, as a parody of the dynamic of rape and male rivalry.

⁸ A recent essay by Joel Fineman is a tour de force elaboration of reciprocal and recursive "postings" in the poem. Fineman traces the themes of self-conscious writing from the level of microscopic literariness (the "porno-graphic" "erotic theater" of textuality) to the level of macroscopic poststructuralist theory of the construction of the literary subject. See "Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape," Representations 10 (1987): 25-76.1 read Fineman's article after I had completed my own essay.

⁹ See Sam Hynes, "The Rape of Tarquin," Shakespeare Quarterly (1959): 451-53. Hynes also notes the parallels of Tarquin's internal insurrection with Macbeth's. A. C. Hamilton notes that "Tarquin's desire for Lucrece turns into a desire to destroy himself through sin"; see The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), p. 174.

¹⁰ See Coppélia Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 58-60.

¹¹ Jerome Kramer and Judith Kaminsky, '"These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold' : Structure in The Rape of Lucrece" Mosaic 10 (1977): 143-55.

¹² The symbolism, frequently noted in current criticism, is hardly Freudian. Shakespeare takes pains to establish it in Romeo and Juliet, and it echoes through Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. For erotic depictions of Lucrece's suicide, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucrece: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982). Discussing Lucas Cranach's early-sixteenth-century drawing of a naked, placid Lucrece pressing a long dagger into her abdomen, Donaldson quotes Michel Leiris's L'Age d'homme (1939): "Elle s'apprêtant à annuler l'effet du viol qu'elle a subi, par un geste pareil" (p. 17 n. 36). An intemperate yet intriguing reading comes from Roy Battenhouse, who termed Lucrece's suicide "martyrdom in an obsceene mode, a religious 'dying' which Shakespeare hints, figuratively, is a kind of masturbatory self-rape" (Shakespearean Tragedy [1957], p. 28).

¹³ Renaissance physiologies of sex, derived from classic and medieval theories of conception and "humours," held that procreation resulted from an actual commingling of "spirits" or bloods during coitus. For Shakespearean echoes, see Leontes's obsessions in The Winter's Tale: "Too hot, too hot! / To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods" (1.2.108-9).

¹⁴ "Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece." Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 16-18. From a different perspective, Laura Bromley remarks that "Lucrece comes to embody the evil within Tarquin, fulfilling the prophecy about the consequences of his act which he chose to ignore" ("Lucrece's Recreation," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 [1983]: 205).

¹⁵ Kahn cites the Roman tradition of Vesta and the concept of "the virginal wife" (p. 50).

¹⁶ Ovid, Amores, 1.13.40. The topos is a familiar one in Renaissance poetry. Shakespeare locates the wish in its conventional romantic context in Romeo and Juliet.

¹⁷ The representational status of this artifact, be it painting or weaving, remains indeterminate. See Harold Walley, "The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA 76 (1961): 480-87; and S. Clark Hulse, '"A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's Lucrece" Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 13-22.

¹⁸ "The Ethical Question of Lucrece," Mosaic, 12 (1979), 82-6.

¹⁹ Fineman has an elegant and powerful paragraph on this stanza: see "Shakespeare's Will," p. 59.

²⁰ Quoted in Prince, ed., The Poems, p. 199.

²¹Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 152.

²² Recent criticism addresses the central issue of rhetorical figures as a direct topic of the poem: excellent recent articles are those by Maus ("Taking Tropes Seriously"), Fineman ("Shakespeare's Will"), and Heather Dubrow, "The Rape of Clio: Attitudes to History in Shakespeare's Lucrece," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 425-41. Although Maus begins by asserting that Lucrece is about "two people making important decisions" (67), her essay demonstrates how the two characters of Lucrece and Tarquin use and abuse metaphors to rationalize intentions and conclusions already formed. As I read her essay, she considers Lucrece and Tarquin not finally as characters but as enactments of stylized tropes, or literalized figures.

The essays by Maus and Fineman proceed from fundamentally different cirtical assumptions and perspectives, yet together they provide the best contemporary discussions of the functions of figurative language in the poem.

²³Shakespeare's Perjured Eve, p. 41.

²⁴ The published title during Shakespeare's lifetime was simply Lucrece. An editor augmented the title in the quarto of 1616; tradition retains the emendation. As Fineman points out, however, the running title on the original page headings is "The Rape of Lucrece"—thereby admitting an ambiguity of subjective and objective genitive ("Shakespeare's Will," p. 72 n.21).

²⁵ "The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. This is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction." Mallarmé, "Mimique," quoted in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. xx, xxii. For Derrida's commentary on the passage, see pp. 209-22.

²⁶ Two essays address, though in different ways, this genderized division. Kramer and Kaminsky ("These Contraries") cite the opposition between Tarquin's aggressive and Lucrece's exhaustive tirades, noting that Tarquin strides in linear motive while Lucrece wanders through her rooms (153). Heather Dubrow ("The Rape of Clio") examines sex roles as delineated in the poem in terms of history: Lucrece responds passively and is thereby "victimized into history"; Tarquin is the active agent of historical (epic) inscription. For an alternative view of Lucrece as an active heroine, see Bromley, "Iconography and Rhetoric."

²⁷ Hulse speculates that the marble/wax image is "a model for the rape itself: that is, Tarquin … stamps his evil in the wax that is Lucrece" ('"A Piece of Skilful Painting,'" p. 20). More than simply a model of evil marking innocence, however, the image pertains to writing itself. The association of writing and rape is a theme of Fineman's essay, addressed most directly in a long footnote in which he considers the interchangeability of "the violence of desire and the desire of violence": see "Shakespeare's Will," pp. 70-71.