[In the following essay, Wilson surveys critical attempts to redeem The Rape of Lucrece from critical disapproval by examining the richness of its narrative technique.]

The Rape of Lucrece occupies an uncertain position in Shakespeare's canon. Generally neglected by students of the plays, and seemingly lacking the verbal magic of the sonnets, Lucrece most commonly has been relegated to the immeritorious categories of early, apprentice, experimental, passed-beyond, or failed. Perhaps few scholars would employ the last category explicitly, whatever their unspoken judgment, though the Arden editor of the narrative poems, F. T. Prince, chooses it without equivocation.¹Lucrece normally has not been incorporated into analyses of Shakespearean drama and does not often figure in teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates. Nonetheless, there have been several positive efforts to recuperate Lucrece into a considered view of Shakespeare's canon as an admired (if overshadowed) preparatory work that either brilliantly encodes aspects of a complex rhetorical tradition or else manifests ghostly affinities with the plays, proleptically suggesting the shape of things to come.

These attempts at recuperation fall into four groups, overlapping and not exclusive, each one of which, canceling the temptations to harsh judgment and neglect, provides a reason for taking Lucrece seriously. First, it has been possible to argue that it demands critical judgment in terms of something that it is not (or is only by an aesthetic analogy), a work of visual art. According to this argument, the extended, vividly detailed ekphrasis (lines 1366-1570) of a "piece / Of skilful painting" depicting Troy's final moments provides the fulcrum upon which Lucrece turns. The motivation behind the ekphrastic tradition was, as S. Clark Hulse notes, "to surpass the limits of your material and achieve the perfection of the rival art."² Although the ekphrastic extends through only slightly over two hundred lines, it can become a basis for valuing the poem as a whole. "Shakespeare's art," one critic observes, "represents the fullest and most complex triumph of the ekphrasis in its ambitious rhetorical function."³ Second, F. T. Prince's austere judgment aside, it has been possible to approach Lucrece as, relative to its time and place, a kind of masterpiece: a work that shows its command of literary and rhetorical traditions, its absolute mastery of each convention available to the writing of an epyllion.⁴ Third, it is relatively easy to find thematic anticipations of the plays in Lucrece. Lucrece's suicide alone links the narrative poem to several plays including Othello the hero of which, like Lucrece, elects to die upon a story. Its sombre atmosphere of gloomy nightstalking reminds one of Macbeth: a remembrance heightened by Macbeth's precise comparison of murder's personification ("withered murder") moving ghost-like towards his prey to Tarquin's "ravishing strides" (II.i.55). The subject matter of the famous ekphrasis anticipates the Player King's narrative in Hamlet. And, as Richard Lanham observes, "the dense cosmic imagery" of the poem may remind one of Antony and Cleopatra.⁵ The thematic links are numerous and multiform. Fourth, the strongest argument available for the recuperation of Lucrece to a worthy canonical position would seem to be that, while ostensibly a narrative poem, it must be, in some powerful sense, a drama. It exhibits "close affiliations" with Shakespeare's plays, Harold R. Walley argues, and "its predominant concerns betray the hand of a poet whose preoccupations are basically those of a dramatist."⁶ Viewed from that conflationary angle, Lucrece may easily be seen as "an examination of what constitutes tragedy and an explanation of how it operates. It is a rationale for tragedy … which underlies the whole of Shakespearean tragedy."⁷

Other kinds of argument are possible, including the biographical-psychological-cultural reduction that sees (or asserts) Shakespeare's mind-personality-zeitgeist playing through, and dominating, all of his work into unitary object of investigation, but the four indicated above represent lines of argument that have been common during the past twenty years. The various efforts to recuperate Lucrece either isolate aspects of the narrative (rhetorical conventions, the formal ekphrasis) and claim Shakespeare's mastery of those aspects as a basis for revaluing the poem or they assimilate it to something else (a work of visual art, a drama) and make the plea that it be judged, henceforth, on these freshly revealed and supplementary terms. This essay does not dissociate itself from this common scholarly ambition. Lucrece deserves recuperation since, if for no other reason, it will be more interesting for all students of Shakespeare if this can be done. Lucrece is, one must feel certain, inadequately captured in such judgments as F. T. Prince's mordant dismissal. If recuperation is possible, then it will, evidently, follow generally either the procedure of singling out some aspect of the poem to constitute the basis for a fresh analysis or that of assimilating the poem to the plays themselves or to some sub-classification of them (the tragedies, say, or the Roman plays). This essay will differ from the ordinary directions of scholarly ambition only in its argument that the most sufficient method, and the most exciting, by which to recuperate Lucrece is narrative analysis. Lucrece is a compendium (an encyclopedia, or perhaps a seminary) of the conventions that constitute the embedded narratives, many and frequent, of the plays.

Repeatedly in the plays, characters tell stories. They become, in the midst of the dramatic action, narrators who, while the action is suspended or abandoned, narrate stories that project distinct, extra-dramatic at the very least, places and time-schemes. These narratives, embedded within the dramatic action, are told for many reasons and in many modes. The narrative voices are individual and highly differentiated. Hence an obvious, though not traditional, way of viewing the plays is to see them as conceptual spaces in which stories are told. Shakespeare's plays, to borrow a phrase from Tzvetan Todorov, create a realm of narrativemen.⁸ These embedded narratives all possess dramatic functions, but these functions are not what make them narratives.⁹ The many stories, told in such varying and distinct manners, that interweave Shakespeare's plays do more than serve the dramatic action and cannot be given a full account merely with respect to their dramatic functions. In order to understand their narrative status, one must examine their constitutive conventions. There must be something about them, as stories being told, that can be grasped as narrative qua narrative. No matter in what dramatic context they appear nor what dramatic functions they possess, these conventions will always be narrative: subject to narrative analysis and explicable in the terms of narrative traditions.¹⁰

The frequent recurrence of narrative within Shakespeare's plays should not be surprising if one considers the kind of education that writers in the Renaissance received: that education was essentially narrative, whether historical or fictional (and the distinction between the two kinds, as readers of Don Quixote will recognize, was not always as certain as it has seemed to subsequent periods), into the privileged literary mode.¹¹ Furthermore, it would be apparent even to a confirmed believer in the dramatic nature of Shakespeare's plays (pure drama, written by a man of the theater for the theater, a practical playwright whose plays are marvelously actable, and so forth) that the sources of these plays are mostly narrative. It has been argued that narrative pattern, as well as (the more obvious) themes, characters, and episodes, carry over from the sources to provide a "deep structure" for the action.¹² In any case, it would seem that whatever dramatic transformations Shakespeare worked upon his sources (dross into gold, mere flesh into things rich and strange), much of them remain including determinable aspects of their narrative nature. The argument of this paper, however, is specifically that Shakespeare wrote many narratives for his characters to tell, embedded them within the dramatic action, and in so doing created an important dimension for his plays. It would not seem to be the demands of plays, as plays, nor any idea of drama, theater, or production, that informs Shakespeare's embedded narratives, but only a comprehensive narrative understanding. Shakespeare's narratives in the plays are remarkable, but they are not so because of a non-narrative pressure from the direction of drama. Granted the Renaissance education in narrative, and assuming that someone as immensely literary as Shakespeare would have known the dominant achievements of his time, then it does not seem strange that Shakespeare should have written the embedded narratives out of a knowledge of how narratives are told, what they are good for, the purposes they serve (many and complex), and how they are heard. How well Shakespeare did understand narrative conventions may be seen in the construction of Lucrece. It is a superbly compelling work and its intricate narrativity foreshadows the manner in which the narratives of the plays are written.

In Lucrece, Shakespeare takes an old story and, in retelling it, greatly varies, intensifies, and expands it.

The story of Lucrece was already, when Shakespeare took it up, a "well-handled piece of rhetorical baggage."¹³ It had been told by Ovid in the Fasti, by Chaucer in The Legende of Good Women, and by Painter in the Pallace of Pleasure, to name only three.¹⁴ The story requires 131 lines for Ovid to tell, 205 for Chaucer, and about three pages in Painter's prose version. Shakespeare elaborates the story in 1,855 lines. The pre-Shakespearean versions are essentially terse narratives of events (which are significant in themselves because they precipitated the overthrow of the Tarquins, ended the institution of kingship in Rome, and made possible the growth of consular government within the Republic) with some commentary, neither univocal nor always unmuddled, with regard to the paradoxical nature of Lucrece's suicide. Shakespeare extends the possibilities of the traditional story using most, if not precisely all, of the elaborative strategies made available by the sixteenth-century rhetorical topocosm. The diversity and range of his elaboration is impressive. Lucrece provides a lesson in the complex tactics by which rhetoric enables a writer both to intensify, and to defer, the teleo-graphic simplicities of old stories. Most importantly, two significant changes in Shakespeare's treatment of his inherited materials stand out.

First, Shakespeare transforms the inherited story by the means of a sustained elaboration, a virtuoso display of the rhetorical principle of copia. The primary vehicle of this transformation is the interior monologue, a familiar convention of the complaint, but the scope and variety of the reworking are manifest in the narrative's every part. The result of Shakespeare's transformation of the inherited story is (what it had never been before) a psychological narrative with a strong emphasis upon characterization. Second, he makes the narrative a comment upon the shortcomings, or the missed opportunities, of the previous versions and, as such, a comment upon narrative itself. There is, thus, in Lucrece a strong element of self-conscious reflexivity (which should not surprise any reader of Shakespeare who has thought about what happens in such plays as Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or The Tempest). Though interior monologue occupies the rhetorical foreground, the transformation of the traditional story into a psychological narrative depends largely upon Shakespeare's command of the conventions of characterization available to sixteenth-century writers of narrative.

The conventions of characterization that dominate Lucrece are identical to those that function within the embedded narratives of the plays. Shakespeare's narratives typically build up a sense of place and time that is different from that of the dramatic action itself and then turn inwards towards a character's perception of events. In the plays, the inward movement often turns upon a character who does not exist outside of the embedded narrative; a focalizing character who has, that is, no role in the dramatic action itself and who appears nowhere else in the play. In Lucrece, the poem's narrative voice focalizes upon Lucrece's experience, but also upon that of Tarquin whose mind is split by dilemmatic conflict as he prepares to rape Lucrece, he is the kingly rapist who, it has been observed, rapes himself.¹⁵ Moreover, the range of focalization in Lucrece also includes a number of characters embedded within Lucrece's own narrative which she tells herself about the fall of Troy and the responses to Lucrece's narrative version of her own story by her narratees, Collatine, Lucretius, and Brutus. The systematic emphasis upon the potential of characterization as a means to focalize a narrative (by investing it with an inside, an expressible experience) marks Shakespeare's narrative technique throughout his canon.

Two interactive constitutive narrative conventions underlie Shakespeare's creation of narrative. Shakespeare's narratives are normally both augmentative and culminative: they pile up details and they move towards a climactic moment.¹⁶ First, all the embedded narratives develop an outward expansiveness (which goes beyond the simple need for exposition, either as background or as allusion) to establish a scene, often fairly complete, which is somewhere else, somewhere other than the scene of the dramatic action within which the narrative is being told. Second, the narratives culminate in an inward turn, a movement within the narrative to focalize upon a character that occurs somewhere else. Shakespeare's narratives are set elsewhere (though not always in the past) and are strongly focalized upon an absent character's experience. Hence the distinction which Genette has made clear in the analysis of modern narrative between voice and focalization applies to Shakespeare's command of narrative.¹⁷ The narrator and the internal, or intradiegetic, characterization (which provides the narrative's focalization: the basis for its distinct grasp of incident, experience, and consciousness) are kept distinct. It is upon the focalized experience of a character, created by the character who narrates, that the embedded narratives turn. In A Midsummer Night's Dream (II. i. 122-37), the tale of the changeling boy's mother is told in Titania's voice (for Oberon's ears), but it is focalized upon the experience of the boy's mother. The focalization is wholly upon the dead votaress. (It would be a much less precise account to say that in MND the tale of the changeling boy's mother is told from Titania's point-of-view.)

The outward expansiveness is augmentative, or dilatory, in nature: details build a scene different from the one in which the narrator speaks, and it is a scene often rich in complex visual imagery, but it is non-dramatic. Thus the embedded narratives seem to make the dramatic action more substantial. They vary it, deepen it (lending substance to the "four or five most vile and ragged foils") and bring to bear the resources of the mind's-eye. Paradoxically, the embedded narratives also call attention to the nature of the drama itself. The action of the play becomes more real, being deepened, and less real, being framed. This is the point explicity made by the Chorus in Henry V. As a narrator, the Chorus deepens the action of the play (calling to mind, for instance, the "vasty fields of France"), makes it more real through the potential of the imagination to visualize, yet makes it less real by framing it within narrative conventions. The other embedded narratives work similarly: for example, Horatio's second narrative (I. i. 113-25) that takes his narratees (Marcellus and Bernardo) back to the "most high and palmy state of Rome," or Hotspur's second narrative (i Henry IV, I. iii. 95-111) that swings abruptly from the courtly confines of power to the Severn and the wild energies of battle.

The inward turn of Shakespearean narrative brings into the foreground a character (an essentially non-dramatic characterization) and focalizes upon its experience. The narrative creates an expanded scene and then interprets it through the perception of a character within that scene. Augmentation and culmination, outward expansiveness and inward turn, interact. The focalization of an embedded narrative can be quite minimal (a line or two, a single state of feeling, a trait or two at most), but it can be extremely forceful, vivid, and even empathetic as it catches the internal character in a moment of strong reaction. This culminative moment brings into the foreground the perceptions and feelings of a character within, and in response to, the expanded scene of action that the narrative has created. (There is a haunting, Borgesian quality of reflexivity in this narrative process: a character develops a characterization, a narrative-man makes a man.) Much as the expanded scene of the embedded narrative seems momentarily to frame (from within) the dramatic action, the internal characterization seems, however briefly, to frame the scene.

Hostpur's two narratives in the third scene of 1 Henry IV are illustrative. The first narrative establishes the scene at Holmedon immediately after the battle and it turns upon the "popingay" courtier's experience of the battle which is a distant, verbalized experience. It is essentially a literary experience, unlike Hotspur's own, and unlike that which any of his narratees (Blunt, Worcester, Northumberland, and King Henry) might have had. The courtier talks, Hotspur sneers, so "like a waiting gentlewoman." In his second narrative, the scene expands outwards to the personal combat between Mortimer and Glendower, but it focalizes upon the terror felt by the observer who runs fearfully from the combat to hide his curly head in the "hollow bank" of the Severn. The affrighted observer, whose experience focalizes the scene, is actually the Severn personified. A forcefully characterized personification must seem, to anyone who has read the sonnets at least, a distinctively Shakespearean technique. (The threats that Beauty and Summer's Breath painfully confront in sonnet 65 come to mind.) In Coriolanus, when Menenius tells the story of the rebellion in the body, his narrative focalizes the Belly's experience of the body as a whole. Horatio's second narrative turns upon the experience of the "most star" (the moon) who is "sick almost to doomsday with eclipse" in anticipation of Caesar's assassination. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra tells Dolabella the story of Antony's exercise of his heroic virtues and Antony becomes, within the expanded scene of her narrative, a personification, an island-striding Titan past "the size of dreaming" (V. ii. 77-92) whose more-than-human bounty contrasts to, and shames, Caesar's own landlord's experience of the world.

The example of Titania's narrative suffices to clarify the point. Titania narrates the story of the changeling boy's mother in order to explain to Oberon why she sets upon the boy a value exceeding that of Oberon's fairy kingdom itself (I. i. 122-37). Her narrative expands outwards to India ("The spiced Indian air") and the commerce of merchant ships upon the Indian Ocean, but then swiftly turns inwards to the characterization of the boy's mother, Titania's votaress. The boy's mother perceives the merchant ships in the spirit of comedy, though also with the eyes of metaphor. She is moved to laughter by the clumsy motions of the ships and the swollen sails ("big-bellied with the wanton wind") and, herself pregnant, responds to the ships with comic imitation. Her naturally awkward gait allows her to become a merchant ship made pregnant by the wind. It is the dead woman's metaphorical experience of the expanded Indian scene, not Titania's own, that focalizes the narrative.

In Lucrece, the narrative voice focalizes upon the experience of both Lucrece and Tarquin. It does this in dissimilar ways by employing distinct literary traditions for character development. Furthermore, in the two narratives that Lucrece tells there are multiple inward turns that involve correlative reactions in the immediate narratees. In Lucrece's first narrative, when she is her own narratee, her reaction to the events of Troy's destruction corresponds to Hecuba's own which has been chosen, in the first place, to symbolize, or externalize, her own grief at her loss of chastity. The inward turn towards a strong focalization upon a character internal to the narrative is many-leveled and intricate. As a procedure in characterization, it strongly anticipates the embedded narratives within the plays.

As Tarquin approaches Lucrece's bed, his mind is divided between two opposed values: the desire to satisfy his sexual appetite upon the lovely and virtuous woman (whose virtue is part of her sexual appeal) and the desire to keep his reputation as a soldier untarnished, to pass it on to his children as something that they will cherish. The narrative voice of the poem observes, "Here pale with fear he doth premeditate / The dangers of his loathsome enterprise" (lines 183-84). A few lines further on, Tarquin himself reflects, "O what excuse can my invention make / When thou shalt charge me with so black a deed?" (lines 225-26). And the narrative voice comments, "Thus graceless holds he disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will, / And with good thoughts makes dispensation, / Urging the worser sense for vantage still" (lines 246-49). This interior discourse, in which Tarquin feels himself split between the opposed values of sexual satisfaction and honor, is carried on in the form of a monologue for several hundred lines. The method of deepening characterization through a psychomachia, or dilemmatic meditation expressed in an interior monologue, is a powerful Ovidian technique for narrative development: probably the most useful, as well as the most widely used, convention of characterization available to a Renaissance writer.¹⁸ This method splits a character's awareness between values and dramatizes the conflict in a rhetorically structured interior monologue during the course of which, typically, a rationalization on one side ("Urging the worser sense for vantage still") weighs down the claims of rationality on the other. Lanham argues that Tarquin's motive, essentially symbolic, is "at the same time narcissistic and self-dividing, suicidal" such that his "self might be said to "split apart."¹⁹ This shifts the problem to the level of interpretive exercise in which one may inquire what the split, or its two halves, means, but the mere presence of a split, some structure of self-division, seems evident. (If, as Brian Vickers argues, epideictic rhetoric provides the models, as well as the purposes, of Renaissance characterization, it is also the case that Ovidian split awareness makes available the distinctive formal strategy.)²⁰

The narrative models for split awareness may be discerned in several characterizations in The Metamorphoses, such as that of Myrrha, in which a radical division between opposed values (love of her father, in Myrrha's case, against love of decorum) structures the consciousness of the character and prompts the distinctive monologue. In medieval and Renaissance literature, examples are commonplace. From Chrétien de Troyes (at least) split awareness constitutes the major narrative convention for characterization. It is important to observe that split awareness, frequently exemplified in the plays, is a narrative convention before it is a dramatic one. The comparison between Tarquin and Othello (two warriors, both men of honor and also criminals) has appealed to a number of scholars, but other examples are plentiful: Macbeth, split between ambition and honor, or Claudius, his consciousness split between what he would pray for and what he cannot relinquish, conspicuously stand out.

Shakespeare deepens Lucrece's characterization by the use of interior monologue and rhetorical device. After having been raped, Lucrece reflects upon the conditions of her downfall: Night, Opportunity, and Time. These are traditional topoi for rhetorical display, not only within the form of the complaint, and evident ways for a writer to satisfy the demands made by the principle of copia upon his virtuosity, but they are also genuine vehicles for the manifestation of subjectivity. This radical two-sidedness in the Ovidian interior monologue points towards what must be seen as a meta-rule of characterization: whether in a medieval romance or a modern novel, any manifestation of subjectivity in the form of a monologue, no matter how abstract the topic, deepens characterization. The dilemmatic force of split awareness is less apparent than in the case of Tarquin, but it is forceful, compellingly so, as Lucrece brings herself, through her meditations, to the conviction that suicide is the only recourse left to her if she is to preserve her honor.

In making an argument that draws a parallel between the interior monologues of the two characters, Jerome A. Kramaer and Judith Kaminsky observe that, in Lucrece, "Special emphasis is given to two ideas, fragmentation of the self and the perception and use of externals, both objects and persons."²¹ The phrase "fragmentation of the self may overstate what is essentially a double split only (incorporating into the model of characterization a number of Jungian notions, suggestive but anachronistic), but it vigorously makes the basic point that neither Tarquin nor Lucrece, nor indeed any complex Renaissance character, is psychologically unitary. The "perception of externals" must include concepts, such as night or time, as well as physical objects. It seems clearly to fall within the Ovidian convention of employing a speciously convincing rationalization on one side of the split awareness: an object (fact, activity, or concept) can support such a rationalization, as Ovid's Myrrha appeals to the behavior of animals to justify her lust for her father. In Lucrece the convention of split awareness, both as division of the character's mind and as rationalization calling upon an external object, is most clearly seen in Lucrece's empathetic scrutiny of the "piece / Of skilful painting" (1366-67) that depicts the sorrows of Troy. Not only does the ekphrasis extend Lucrece's characterization, as an external object which she perceives and correlates to her own state of mind, but it also extends the range of characterization itself since it introduces, as characters created within the ekphrasis, Hecuba and Sinon, who not only externalize the relationship between Lucrece and Tarquin but also, as characters, experience the events of their narrative. The ekphrasis actualizes a complex narrative juncture in Lucrece in which a number of discrete conventions are brought into play.

The second significant change that Shakespeare works upon the old story lies in the playfulness with which he treats it. Lucrece is, of course, an immensely serious tale written in rhyme royal, but, like any story, it is open to the possibilities of narrative play. To call Shakespeare's narrative procedures "playful," whether in Lucrece or in the plays themselves, is only to make a formal point concerning the evident level of authorial self-consciousness. Shakespeare's narratives reflect an understanding of narrative conventions; an understanding, that is, of their conditions, their scope and their inherent literariness. It has become commonplace, in contemporary literary theory, to call such an explicit emphasis upon the way in which a story is being told "metafictional," "self-representational," or "narcissistic": all designations of textual playfulness.²² Shakespeare's narrative playfulness expresses itself through two conventions (or meta-conventions): recursiveness and reflexivity.

Recursiveness literally indicates a rerunning. A narrative rerunning exists when the story is picked up additional times and retold, in modified versions, in order to create both an incremental effect, as the story becomes more familiar through restatement, and an aesthetic effect, as the narrator's command of the story-materials becomes increasingly apparent. For example, the story that is told in Romeo and Juliet occurs in three versions with two untold versions indicated in the final scene. First, there is a prologue (a narrative sonnet), then there is the action of the play itself, then there is the summary of the action that Friar Lawrence narrates, there is also the letter which Lawrence has written and which Prince Escalus reads (V. iii. 285), and finally there is the prediction that the story will never be forgotten. It will be retold again and again in the extra-textual future. The recursive treatment of the story in Romeo and Juliet corresponds to the four versions of the Ghost's story in Hamlet's retellings and, quite strikingly, to the narrative strategies of Lucrece itself. It seems the case that recursiveness, normally more obliquely constituted, plays a significant role in Shakespeare's treatment of story.²³ The purposes of recursiveness in Shakespearean narrative are complex, but it must seem evident that they are not dramatic: calling attention to versions of the story creates incremental and aesthetic effects which have nothing, as such, to do with the development of the dramatic action and which, on the contrary, necessarily display Shakespeare's command of the story-materials and his narrative craftiness.

The second meta-convention, reflexivity, seems even more apparent in Shakespeare's writing. Reflexivity has both a dramatic and a narrative expression. In either case, the definition is the same: reflexivity is the semiotic means (gesture, diacritical mark, verbal formula, meta-commentary) by which attention is called to the nature of an act. The act itself becomes its own subject and purpose. To paint a picture of oneself painting a picture or even more forcefully, as Velázquez does in Las Meninas, to paint oneself painting the very picture in which one is painting, or to paint a pipe, as Magritte does, and then to label it with the phrase, "This is not a pipe," are self-consciously reflexive acts. To write a sonnet that calls attention to itself as a sonnet, as both Shakespeare and Sidney do, or to write a play that self-consciously asserts its existence as a play, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and elsewhere, are powerfully reflexive acts. Narrative reflexivity is that dimension of narrative that acknowledges itself as narrative.²⁴ A reflexive narrative act, then, comments narrative upon its own reflexive craft, the conventions of narrative, the techniques that are being employed, or even upon its own limitations. The Chorus in Henry V calls attention to the inadequacies of drama and, in so doing, to the greater capacity of narrative to fill in background, set scenes, supply detail, and to engage the imagination. Richard II's allusions to the de casibus tradition (the sad stories of the death of kings) which is also the form of his own story, and his final soliloquy in which he transforms his own existence into fiction, specifically into a de casibus narrative (V.v. 1-66), are all essentially reflexive. Reflexivity occurs frequently and strikingly in Shakespeare's plays. Considered solely in its narrative dimension, Shakespeare's use of this metaconvention suggests his profound awareness of the many ways in which a story may be told (its potential for indefinite transcription) and the ways in which it may be deformed (compressed, modified, refocused, shared out between distinct narrators) for narrative effect.

Lucrece begins with a prose summary of the story, proceeds to a telling (which is, of course, a retelling), then gives the central character an occasion to tell the story over again to an attentive audience. Finally, the narrative concludes with the determination to "publish" Tarquin's offense in Rome: to tell the story, in an indefinite series of retellings, yet again. The down-razing consequences of the ultimate, but unnarrated, telling are suggested in the final two lines of Lucrece: "The Romans plausibly did give consent / To Tarquin's everlasting banishment" ("plausibly" clearly indicates "with applause, i.e., with a general acclamation").²⁵ Furthermore, Lucrece contains several suggestions that the story might have been told, and might still be told, in other ways by other narrators. Lucrece, as Heather Dubrow observes, is "packed" with allusions to language and to "various types of storytelling." Since Lucrece explicitly fears that she may become a character in ballads and nursery tales, the reader is invited, Dubrow argues, "to compare hi story-writing with other forms of story-telling."²⁶

A number of points can be made concerning this recursiveness. First, the actual narrative tells a different version of the story than does the prose summary. The "Argument" is, as T. W. Baldwin demonstrates, close to the Fasti and to Livy.²⁷ Prince comments that the "result is a passage of English prose modelled on Latin, and completely different from any of Shakespeare's dramatic prose."²⁸ Second, the main narrative is expanded, as this paper has attempted to show, by inward turns towards characterization on multiple levels.

Third, there are actually two highly divergent versions of the story available in the narrative as Shakespeare tells it: the narrative voice contains, not merely its own version of the incidents, but also what Lucrece herself can tell and what Tarquin could tell. In part, Tarquin manages to overpower Lucrece's resistance by threatening her with a possible narrative. He could make it known, he tells her, that she had cooperated:

So they surviving husband shall remain
The scornful mark of every open eye;
Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain,
Thy issue blurr'd with nameless bastardy.
And thou, the author of their obloquy,
   Shalt have thy trepass cited up in rhymes
   And sung by children in succeeding times.
                                    (519-25)

And Lucrece reflects, after having been raped, that "The nurse to still her child will tell my story" (813). Clearly, the potential to narrate, the fear of which occupies her mind, can be nearly as compelling as an actual narrative. In the plays, characters also dread the power of a hostile narrative: Cleopatra fears the stories that could be told, and how they might be told, for it is not merely the "quick comedians" in Rome whom she dreads, but the "scald rhymers" as well (AC, V.ii.215-16); Hamlet fears the "wounded name" that he will leave behind him, "Things standing thus unknown" in the absence of a positive narrative (Hamlet, V.ii.355-56).

Fourth, there are narrative hints that the story could be told in still other ways and, it might be, in means other than words. Thus Lucrece, in the course of her apostrophe to Night, pleads that she should not become the

               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)

A negative version of her story might be read in her face with such clarity that even unlettered people, for whom books are uninterpretable, would understand it. Similarly, in the account of the ekphrasis, Lucrece is said not merely to lend words to the characters within the painting but to "borrow" their looks (1498). In either case, the appearance of her face tells a version of a story (hers and that of Troy) and, however incomplete one must assume this to be, the point remains certain that other versions of any story are possible and words (even if they are the most forceful, always a "miracle" with the might to outlast all other monuments) are not the only medium of semiotic exchange. The face, too, is a compendium, a blazon, of signs that signify.²⁹ The ekphrasis itself underscores this point: the painting "tells" a story, one that Lucrece can renarrativize, and which might again be told in her merely physical "looks."

Fifth, Lucrece's own version of the story has an overwhelming effect upon her narratees, which implies how the story might be heard if only it could be heard with fresh ears: "stone-still, astonish'd" (1730) Collatine, Lucretius, and Brutus attend the closure of her narrative which ends with her shouting Tarquin's name and killing herself in the same instant. As does Othello, Lucrece dies upon a narrative: the end of life marks narrative closure.

The internal variations upon the inherited story indicate that Shakespeare was fully aware of how many ways it, like any other story, could be told. Lucrece makes evident that previous versions have underplayed the story's narrative potential. Shakespeare demonstrates his narrative mastery throughout Lucrece. Since it calls attention both to narrative potential and to variation, the story-recursiveness of the narrative contributes to this self-consciousness, but so do a large number of specific rhetorical devices. Indeed, the rhetorical elaboration, the very copia of the narrative, calls attention to its position as a self-conscious retelling of an inherited story: its implicit claim to be regarded as a masterpiece. Tarquin thinks within a divided consciousness, but he also thinks, as Lanham points out, in "heraldic pageants." A network of images that describe "treasons, leagues, and maps accompanies him to Lucrece's chamber and what he sees when he arrives is, again, not Lucrece but a miasma of feudal value-symbols, worlds unconquered, himself a foul usurper, Lucrece first a rich statue and then, and in overpowering detail, a castle which he, as diabolic hero, must storm, possess, sack."³⁰ The language makes sense, Lanham adds, only if rhetoric, and in particular feudal rhetoric, is the actual subject of the poem. It is certainly one subject: rhetoric constitutes the reflexive level of discourse that brings into focus the act of narration (with all, in terms of knowledge, consciousness, intention, command, and ambition, that such acts entail) and states, forcefully though obliquely, the narrative's claim to masterfulness.

The reflexive power of Shakespeare's rhetorical command seems evident throughout Lucrece. The immense distance, created by many specific rhetorical conventions, that opens between the narrative (in this retelling) and the story self-consciously acknowledges the master that has made it possible. Whatever the story seems to have been about, that which has traditionally filled the foreground in other narrative versions (malign intent, violence, rape, suicide, revolution), Lucrece concerns essentially itself: its own language, its rhetorical command, its comment upon historiography, its act of narration, and the distance between itself and the ground of its potential in the mere story. This narrative narcissism manifests itself everywhere.³¹

Consider the opening stanza. Lucrece begins in contrast to the "Argument" and to all previous versions by suppressing the background.³² Sextus Tarquinius enters abruptly into the narrative unfolding without any account having been given of the inspiration he has taken from Collantinus's own unwise account of his wife's beauty and virtue. Tarquin hastens to Collatium from Ardea "all in post" with a precise intention. He is "lust-breathed" and bears the "lightless fire, / Which in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire" (4-5). Prince notes that the line is "good in itself but shows "how the stanza encourages prolixity."³³ Prolixity (or copia) might rather seem to be the point. If the "lightless fire" ("smouldering, dark, hidden" as Prince glosses it) suggests Tarquin's lust, then the "pale embers" seem to imply his hidden genitalia. The likelihood of this equation draws support from commonsense: given the present tense, where else might lust smoldering hide as it waits (it "lurks") the chance to "aspire"? The aspiration of lust must suggest, to the extent that the image carries any physical implication, the rising of tumescence. The galactic distance that Shakespeare's rhetorical mastery opens up, even in the initial stanza, between story and narrative retelling, between the incidents and the manner in which they are being narrativized, self-consciously calls attention to that mastery. Reflexivity pervades the narrative. The rape itself, the central violent incident of the story, occurs within ellipsis (860-66). That absence poses, with cool confidence, the narrative transaction both as game and as challenge.

The most striking instance of reflexivity enters into the narrative when Lucrece, concluding her long interior monologue (focused upon the three rhetorical topoi), looks around for something "external" that could be made to parallel her sense of anguish, loss, and down-fall. In the painting in which the fall of Troy is depicted, Lucrece discovers a correlative to her own tragedy. Thus the ekphrasis, as was argued above, extends the convention of an inward turn towards internal characterization (by introducing Hecuba and Sinon) and intensifies Lucrece's own characterization. Furthermore, it accomplishes something peculiarly narrative in function. Like the embedded narratives of the plays, the ekphrasis invokes a story different from that which may be inferred from the narrative in which the ekphrasis itself occurs. An embedded narrative is always intrusive and normally heterodiegetic, or external to the main narrative or dramatic line. It shifts the narratees and (indirectly) the audience or readers to another place and time: a narrative elsewhere and elsewhen. An embedded narrative, always disruptive, creates a profoundly anachronic effect.

In the plays, this narrative anachronism interrupts the chronological on-goingness of the dramatic action (which, in Shakespeare, is uni-directional, end-pointed, and teleo-graphic) and supplies the only perturbation of temporal order that Shakespeare permits. In Hamlet, for example, the Player King's narration of Aeneas's tale to Dido (Il.ii) plunges Hamlet, the Player King himself, and the audience into the dark, archaic world of classical legend, the deadly firestorms of Troy's final moments. The evident parallels on the level of theme and characterization (Pyrrhus, like Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras, is a son avenging his father) provide yet another mirror to Hamlet's own dilemma and widen the sphere of the revenge motif, but the story is discontinuous with, even alien to, the world of Hamlet. It is exactly as if the narratees were thrust headlong into another world, following another time-scheme, and asked to make of it what they might. Indeed, as Martínez-Bonati observes, the story constitutes the world of a narrative.³⁴ It maps, at least, the minimal possibility for worldhood within a narrative. Thus the embedded narratives perturb the dramatic actions that contain them by the intrusion of a different story, an alien deictic field,³⁵ and, considered macrosemantically, a further fictional world.³⁶ Similarly, the ekphrasis in Lucrece intrudes upon the Roman world of the narrative, breaks open Lucrece's own story, and thrusts Lucrece (her own narratee) as well as the reader into a different time and space, elsewhen and elsewhere. Furthermore, since the creation of narrative anachrony is a profoundly reflexive act, one cannot experience anachrony without attempting to measure the gap that has opened between story and narrative.

All stories can be told in different ways, for a variety of diverse effects, and all stories can be made to reflect one another or even to contain one another. One narrative recalls another (whether in the play of allusiveness or along the implacable fields of intertextuality), bears upon another, can even become another, as the story of Troy becomes, in being contained by, the story of Lucrece or of Hamlet. Perhaps it is this narrative complexity, in part at least, that leads Ian Donaldson to remark that Lucrece "raises more questions than it manages to answer."³⁷ One of the questions that Lucrece raises concerns the function of narrative in Shakespeare's plays and the relation of those plays to the intricate narrative poem with which, in 1594, he made his public claim to literary mastery. The narrative infoldings of Lucrece publish the mark of all Shakespearean story-telling. Narratives catch, hold, illude, and frequently delude their narratees. These transactions, everywhere apparent in Lucrece, point forward to the important, if ordinarily overlooked, role of narrative in the plays: its distinctive conventions, its pervasiveness, its forcefulness, and its playfulness.

Notes

¹ William Shakespeare, The Poems, e d. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. xxxiii-iv. For a recent overview of the critical positions that have been taken towards Lucrece, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece," SQ 37, 1 (Spring, 1986): 66-82. In this paper, all references to The Rape of Lucrece will be to F. T. Prince's edition; references to Hamlet will be to the Arden edition, edited by Harold Jenkins (London and New York: Methuen, 1982); references to other plays will be to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1961). Line references will be given parenthetically.

² S. Clark Hulse, "A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's 'Lucrece'," ShS 31 (1978): 18.

³ David Ronsand, '"Troyes Painted Woes': Shakespeare and The Pictorial Imagination," HUSL 8 (1980): 81. Maus's discussion of the visual element in Lucrece is particularly interesting; see "Taking Tropes Seriously," pp. 79-82.

⁴ Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in The Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 82-110. The intricate, self-conscious rhetoricity of Lucrece has become, since Lanham's study at least, commonly acknowledged. It would be difficult to overestimate Shakespeare's literary self-consciousness. In a brilliant essay on Renaissance historiography as this appears in Lucrece, Heather Dubrow argues for Shakespeare's self-conscious exploration of "the problem of reading and writing history." See "The Rape of Clio: Attitudes to History in Shakespeare's Lucrece," ELR 16, 3 (Autumn 1986): 425-41. This essay appears, in revised form, in Dubrow's Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987).

⁵ Richard A. Lanham, "The Politics of Lucrece," HUSL 8 (1980): 66.

⁶ Harold R. Walley, "The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA 76, 1 (1961): 480.

⁷ Walley, p. 487.

⁸ Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 70.

⁹ Most of the dramatic functions of narrative are self-evident. However, the constitutive conventions of the embedded narratives are distinct from their dramatic functions. Even if they function superbly in the plays (and with the most overwhelming effects), they are, nonetheless, narratives and open to narrative analysis. Considered only in terms of their dramatic functions, the embedded narratives serve to characterize (the Nurse's plain style, Hotspur's altilogua, Hamlet's biting paronomasia, and so forth), to provide needed exposition and to summarize action. No doubt, there are other dramatic functions but, however many, they may be clearly distinguished from the conventions that ground their narrativity.

¹⁰ For a detailed examination of narrative in Hamlet, see R. Wilson, "Narratives, Narrators and Narratees in Hamlet," HSt 6, 1 and 2 (Summer / Winter 1984): 30-40.

¹¹ Studies of Renaissance education indicate the importance given to rhetoric. The emphasis upon narrative would seem to have been a consequence of the great models of the past having been themselves narratives. Sister Miriam Joseph observes that the "boys would memorize Ovid's Metamorphoses at the rate of twelve lines a week, five hundred lines a year, for two or more years" (Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947], p. 10). The theoretical disputes of the sixteenth-century centered around narrative, in particular the narrative poetry of Ariosto and Tasso. Sidney, in the Defence, clearly has narrative in mind, and Spenser, in the "Letter" to Raleigh, leaves no doubt that he perceives that his narrative task is to meet the standards of, and to make his claims within, a context (created by "all the antique poets historical") of previous narrative. Neither his stanza nor his metrics as such, judging from the "Letter," seem to have caused Spenser anxiety.

¹² See Joan Rees, "Hamlet: A Note on Structure," HSt 3, 2 (Winter 1981): 112-16. In her Shakespeare and The Story: Aspects of Creation (London: Athlone Press, 1978), Rees studies the narrative forms of the dramatic action; that is, how structural aspects of the narrative sources survive their dramatic transformations. In Renaissance From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), Stephen Greenblatt has a great deal to say concerning the Renaissance understanding of narrative purposes, the intellectual conditions that make narrative possible, and Shakespeare's grasp of narrative, particularly in Othello, as a powerful tool for psychological and conceptual construction (and reconstruction). However, the embedded narratives, qua narrative, have not been investigated. For a partial exception, see Chand Sunil, '"A Tale Told': Shakespeare's Exploration of The Narrative Mode in Venus and Adonis, Othello and The Falstaff Plays," unpublished dissertation (Kent State Univ. 1982).

¹³ Lanham, "Politics," p. 67.

¹⁴ The multiple versions of the story, in both narrative and pictorial crystallizations, have been analyzed in Ian Donaldson's The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). See also, Maus notes brilliantly that the "pell-mell momentum of the original Latin story becomes a marginal effect" in Lucrece. See "Taking Tropes Seriously," p. 67.

¹⁵ Sam Hynes, "The Rape of Tarquin," SQ 10, 3 (Summer 1959):453. Donaldson comments (catching explicitly the Shakespearean mood) that, in Lucrece, rape is presented as both a destructive and as a self-destructive act.

¹⁶ One could argue that "dilatory" would be a more acceptable term than "augmentative" since it bears within it the full weight of Renaissance rhetorical instruction. However, from the standpoint of contemporary narrative analysis, it also carries a baggage of largely anachronistic connotations. There is little doubt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have thought about "dilating" the narrative potential of a story matrix. In a series of interconnected essays, Patricia Parker has investigated the concept of dilation in Renaissance rhetoric and narrative. See "Shakespeare and Rhetoric: 'Dilation' and 'Delation' in Othello," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and The Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54-74. See also ,

¹⁷ The critical terminology of this discussion generally follows that developed for narrative analysis by Gérard Genette. See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980). For further discussion of the narcological model, see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), and Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to The Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1985). The vocabulary of narratology is, no doubt, "bristling," as Robert Alter comments [The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. x], but it is extremely useful in that it accounts for certain conceptual distinctions far better than does the critical vocabulary of "normal" Anglo-American literary scholarship. For example, the term "focalization," originally deriving from film criticism, simply does more conceptual work, as I argue in the body of this essay, than does the more familiar expression "point-of-view." The term "focalization" (in the example cited) accounts for the distinction between Titania's voice and the dead votaress's experience.

¹⁸ For discussions of Ovidian conventions, particularly that of split awareness, in Renaissance characterization, see Edward Milowicki and R. Wilson, "'Character' in Paradise Lost: Milton's Literary Formalism," MiltonS 14 (1980):75-94, and Wilson, "Drawing New Lessons from Old Masters: The Concept of 'Character' in The Quijote," MP 78, 2 (November 1980): 117-38.

¹⁹ Lanham, Motives, p. 99.

²⁰ Brian Vickers, "Epideictic and Epic in The Renaissance," NLH 14, 3 (Spring 1983):529-37.

²¹ Jerome A Kramaer and Judith Kaminsky, '"These Such Unity Do Hold': Structure in The Rape of Lucrece," Mosaic 10, 4 (1977): 149.

²² In The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), Frank Kermode speaks of the literary text itself as "playful" (p. 17). Playfulness, when it is perceived as a deliberate textual strategy, has been designated by a number of critical terms, of which "metafiction" is merely one of the more common. See especially Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Univ. Press, 1980; rpt. London: Methuen, 1984), and Allen Thiher, Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Post-modern Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984). For further citations of books and articles relevant to the concepts of play and game in the study of literature, see James A. G. Marino, "An Annotated Bibliography to Play and Literature," CRCL 12, 2 (June 1985): 306-58.

²³ "Story" has become one of the founding concepts of contemporary narrative analysis. The distinction between story and discourse, between a what and a how, seems basic to the formal analysis of literature and perhaps to common sense as well. Although it is implicit in Aristotle's Poetics, contemporary formulations derive from the work of the Russian Formalists. Their distinction between fabula (story-stuff) and sjužet (plot) made possible, among other things, the analysis of narrative according to models of textual codes and grammars. (Discourse, in this perspective, is invariably a matter of dilation: a regulated drawing out of story potential by means of codes, conventions, grammars, and rhetorics.) For a discussion of the concept of "story" as an analytic tool, see R. Wilson, "Narrative Allusiveness: The Interplay of Stories in two Renaissance Writers, Spenser and Cervantes," ESC 12, 2 (June 1986): 138-62.

²⁴ Reflexivity is that literary act by which a text refers to itself either explicitly (by self-reference) or implicitly (by genre or convention reference). It is one aspect of metafiction but not the only one. Some of the most interesting recent discussion of the concept of reflexivity may be found in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godei, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). However, one must bear in mind Hofstadter conflates reflexivity and recursiveness: only the latter term appears in his index. In subsequent writing in Scientific American, Hofstadter makes the distinction and adds reflexivity to his vocabulary. See, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

²⁵ F. T. Prince, ed., The Poems, p. 149, lines 1854-55 and n.

²⁶ Dubrow, "The Rape of Clio," p. 439.

²⁷ T. W. Baldwin, On The Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 108-12.

²⁸ Prince, p. 65.

²⁹ On the signifying force of the blazon, see Nancy Vickers, '"The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Parker and Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and The Question of Theory, pp. 95-115.

³⁰ Lanham, Motives, pp. 97, 100.

³¹ "Narcissistic" is Linda Hutcheon's term for meta-fictional self-consciousness. See her Narcissistic Narrative. I employ it here in a similar neutral, non-evaluative sense. The extension of her argument in this paper entails that terms such as "metafiction" or "narcissistic" are essentially transhistorical, and that they are not adequately exemplified by reference to modern literature alone.

³² Dubrow discusses the opening of Lucrece in the context of Renaissance historiography; see "The Rape of Clio," pp. 428, 433-36.

³³ Prince, p. 67, fn. 5.

³⁴ Felix Martínez-Bonati, "The Act of Writing Fiction," NLH 11, 3 (Spring 1980): 425-34, esp. n. 4.

³⁵ Uri Margolin, "Narrative and Indexicality: A Tentative Framework," JLS 13, 3 (1984): 181-204.

³⁶ The concept of a "fictional world" has been much discussed in recent literary theory. For a discussion that summarizes the different positions and provides a comprehensive bibliography, see Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986). Two valuable discussions, not cited in Pavel's bibliography, are Doreen Maitre's Literature and Possible Worlds (London: Middlesex Polytechnic Press, 1983) and Lubomir Dole el's "Towards Typology of Fictional Worlds," Tamking Review 14 (1984 / 85): 261-76. The argument of this paper has been that the disruptive, anachronic effects of the embedded narratives stem from the perception of distinct worldhood (spatiotemporal difference), however incomplete, that these narratives create. For further discussion, see Wilson, "Narrative Allusiveness."

³⁷Rapes, p. 49. Donaldson begins his discussion of Lucrece by noting that it "never quite adds up to a coherent whole, or to a totally compelling human drama" (p. 40). Profound disagreement characterizes the history of Lucrece's reception. For a study of criticism of Lucrece since Hyder Rollins's Variorum edition (1983), see Robert Bernard Di Giovanni, "Shakespeare's Lucrece: A Topical Evaluation of and Supplement to The Scholarship and Criticism Since 1936," unpublished dissertation (Univ. of Michigan, 1971). See also,