[In the following overview of The Rape of Lucrece, Donaldson contends that Shakespeare's depiction of the Lucrece story is morally ambiguous because it vacillates between Roman and Christian viewpoints.]

What goes wrong with Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece? Despite many local subtleties and felicities, the poem never quite adds up to a coherent whole, or to a totally compelling human drama. There is a sense—so rare in Shakespeare's work as to be doubly remarkable—that the central moral complexities of the story are in some ways curiously evaded, while the simpler outlying issues are decoratively elaborated. The poem repeatedly begins to analyse the nature of a moral predicament, only to break off abruptly, diverting us into an extended metaphor, lament, or topical digression. Like its two principal characters, the poem seems alternately to scrutinize and retreat from problems, to debate and to grow weary of debate. The issues are talked around, but seldom through. Yet there are frequent reminders of how complex these issues are:

'Let my good name, that senseless reputation,
For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted;
If that be made a theme for disputation,
The branches of another root are rotted,
And undeserv'd reproach to him allotted
   That is as clear from this attaint of mine
   As I ere this was pure to Collatine.'
                                      (820-6)

"'If that be made a theme for disputation …"': by Shakespeare's day, 'a theme for disputation' is precisely what the classical Lucretia's reputation had become, her conduct with Sextus Tarquinius and her decision to take her own life being matters that were sometimes formally debated pro and contra.¹ Casting apprehensively into the future, Shakespeare's Lucrece unwittingly forecasts the fate thatwas indeed to overtake her own 'good name'. Her words have something of the same ironically prophetic force as those of Troilus and Cressida when they exchange their vows ('true swains in love shall in the world to come/ Approve their truth by Troilus …' etc. III.ii.l69ff.), reminding us of the ways in which hopes and reputations are affected by the passage of time. Yet where Shakespeare's poem stands in relation to the familiar 'disputation' about the classical Lucretia, whether his own Lucrece is intended to be seen as a wholly admiring or as a partly critical portrait, are matters which are far from clear.

In one sense, perhaps, this open-endedness might be thought not to matter very much; it might even be said to be the poem's strength. The processes of a poem are not identical with the processes of logical argument, and it should not surprise us if Shakespeare does not approach the moral problems of the Lucretia story in the unremittingly logical manner of an Augustine. Shakespeare seems in fact to be less interested in arguing a particular case within the poem than in exploring the states of mind from which argumentation springs. More specifically, he dramatizes the difficulties which people have in pursuing their thoughts logically and consecutively while under the stress of suffering or sexual passion—stress that creates dilemmas which (ironically particularly demand the elucidation of steady thought. Tarquin and Lucrece, both separately and together, try to argue through their predicaments, and are constantly frustrated. The questions that Tarquin puts to himself before the rape seem circular, incapable of resolution, scarcely even questions so much as signs of internal agitation:

Thus, graceless, holds he disputation
'Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning
  will …
                                           (246-7)

Tarquin's 'disputation' is something less than disputation, a wretched worrying to and fro, ultimately shortcircuited by a blind decision to act. 'I have debated, even in my soul', Tarquin announces to the hapless Lucrece (498), but the debate has in fact long since been abandoned: 'Then, childish fear avaunt! debating die!' (274). The debate has been between rational and sub-rational forces (represented by 'will', and the memory of Lucrece's sighs and graces: 'All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth' (268)). After the rape, Lucrece also 'holds disputation', attempting forlornly to debate her way out of her dilemmas:

So she, deep-drenched in a sea of care,
Holds disputation with each thing she views,
And to herself all sorrow doth compare;
No object but her passion's strength renews,
And as one shifts, another straight ensues.
   Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no
          words;
   Sometimes 'tis mad and too much talk
          affords.
                                         (1100-6)

This disputation is (again) a state of anxiety, not a process of ratiocination. Lucrece is unable to think things through, unable also to cease from thought. Whether she is speechless, whether she is garrulous, language is inadequate to express her grief.

'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools!
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators!
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools,
Debate where leisure serves with dull
 debaters;
To trembling clients be you mediators.
    For me, I force not argument a straw,
    Since that my case is past the help of
            law.'
                                      (1016-22)

Yet though Lucrece dismisses 'idle words', it is to idle words that she constantly returns: talk is her main solace and occupation. Unlike the sorrowing Hecuba in the painting of fallen Troy ('so much grief and not a tongue' (1463)), unlike the raped and tongueless Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Lucrece talks of her griefs, but her talk seems to get her nowhere.²

In Livy's and Ovid's versions of the Lucretia story, Shakespeare may well have noticed a recurring stress on the superiority of deeds to words. In Livy's narrative the initial argument amongst the men concerning the virtue of their wives is cut short by Collatinus, who tells his companions that there is no point in sitting about debating the issue when they can resolve their differences by the simple action of riding off to Rome: Collatinus negat verbis opus esse. Ovid develops this sentiment: Non opus est verbis credite rebus ait: 'No need of words! Trust deeds!' cries Collatinus, and the men take to their horses. One of the larger ironies of the story is of course the fact that the deeds which follow this confident cry are more various and more complex than the innocent Collatinus realizes: they are to include the rape and suicide of his own wife and the later expulsion of the Tarquins. Brutus in Livy's account urges the Romans to leave their idle lamentations (inertium querellarum) and act like men. The Romans respond by rising against the Tarquins and driving them from Rome, at last abandoning speech for action. In Shakespeare's poem, this climax is very subdued, as is the entire political dimension of the story. The banishment of the Tarquins is mentioned briefly in the final stanza of the poem, almost as a narrative afterthought. Shakespeare does not give us a story of tirumphant action. Whenever in Shakespeare's poem deeds seem preferable to words, it is only as the lesser of two evils. Tarquin decides to rape Lucrece, and Lucrece decides to take her own life, yet neither of these actions seems to have been proved to be logically or morally defensible; they are undertaken rather out of a kind of despair, because they seem the only effective way of ending the whole wearisome and seemingly interminable processes of debate:

This helpless smoke of words doth me no
  right.
    The remedy indeed to do me good
    Is to let forth my foul defiled blood.
                                       (1027-9)

It is a typical irony in the poem that these words initiate in Lucrece's mind a further series of doubts about the wisdom of suicide and a further 'smoke of words' before she finally puts an end to her own life. Longing for the simplicity of action, Shakespeare's characters find themselves entangled in a web of words.

Shakespeare's achievement in dealing with the traditional story is to have opened up a new interior world of shifting doubts, hesitations, anxieties, anticipations, and griefs. No other version of the Lucretia story explores more minutely or with greater psychological insight the mental processes of the two major characters, their inconsistent waverings to and fro, before they bring themselves finally and reluctantly to action. Yet this subtlety is achieved at a certain cost. In so vividly dramatizing Tarquin's and Lucrece's moral uncertainties, Shakespeare introduces a fatal element of moral uncertainty into the poem itself. It is not simply a matter of Shakespeare allowing us to feel (as he does, say, with Antony and Cleopatra) that the characters' behaviour may in some way transcend or invalidate common standards of moral judgement, or that a purely adjudicative response to their actions is somehow beside the point. There is instead a deeper feeling of irresolution in the poem, a wavering between different criteria for judgement, a sense that Shakespeare, while sharing some of his contemporaries' doubts about the way in which Lucrece chose to act, is attempting— not altogether successfully—to retell Lucrece's story in a manner which is by and large approbatory. The poem veers from incipient criticism of Lucrece towards a muted celebration of her actions, yet the treatment of the story remains curiously problematical. For all the poem's delicacy of psychological insight, Shakespeare has not quite managed to achieve what elsewhere he so often achieves with such arresting effect: he does not take moral repossession of the older story, confidently charging it with new depth and intricacy of significance.

I

The post-Augustinian debate about the character of the classical Lucretia turned essentially upon one point. How was Lucretia to be judged: by the moral standards of ancient Rome, or by those of Christianity? The most thorough-going critics of Lucretia, such as William Tyndale, took a very severe line, condemning her as a woman who had sadly failed to live up to the standards of Christianity. 'She sought her own glory in her chastity, and not God's,' wrote Tyndale sternly, as if to imply that, if only she had made a decent effort, Lucretia ought to have been able to anticipate the wishes and precepts of the Christian God.³ Others took a more tolerant and relativistic view of the matter, conceding that Lucretia did not behave in the manner to be expected of a modern Christian, but arguing none the less that she behaved courageously and unexceptionably according to the highest moral standards of her time. This was the attitude, for example, of Pierre Bayle, and many writers before him. One of the difficulties of Shakespeare's poem is that it is never made clear whether we are to judge the actions of the characters by Roman or by Christian standards; nor is it even clear what kind of moral universe they inhabit. Christian terminology and Christian thinking constantly recur throughout the poem. There is talk of heaven and hell, of saints and sinners and angels and devils, of grace and gracelessness. 'The blackest sin is clear'd with absolution,' says Tarquin (354), as he finally decides to rape Lucrece, and both Tarquin and Lucrece express anxiety about the salvation of their immortal souls. It is tempting to say that such Christian references do not affect the coherence of the poem, but merely enlarge its suggestive power; that only a literal-minded reader would baulk at Shakespeare's 'timeless' fusion of Roman and Christian worlds. 'It is not a Roman thought', noted an early twentieth-century editor of the poem dutifully against a stanza in which Lucrece meditates the possible perdition of her soul, and the comment is swept aside as unimaginative quibbling by the recent Arden editor: 'It is indeed a Christian thought; but Shakespeare's whole procedure precludes historical accuracy, and we would rather have his Elizabethan interpretations of Roman character and thought than reconstructions by more scholarly minds.'⁴ Yet the matter is not quite as simple as that. The Christian references in the poem are not casual anachronisms like the chiming clock in Julius Caesar, nor can they be said to amount to anything as systematic as 'Elizabethan interpretations of Roman character and thought'. What Shakespeare actually gives us is an alternation between Roman and Christian viewpoints, which generates constant uncertainty as to the way in which the poem is to be read.

Some of the difficulties can be seen in a passage such as the following:

He thence departs a heavy convertite,
She there remains a hopeless castaway;
He in his speed looks for the morning light;
She prays she never may behold the day.
'For day,' quoth she 'Night's scapes doth
  open lay;
    And my true eyes have never practis'd how
    To cloak offences with a cunning brow.'
'They think not but that every eye can see
The same disgrace which they themselves
 behold;
And therefore would they still in darkness be,
To have their unseen sin remain untold;
For they their guilt with weeping will unfold,
    And grave, like water that doth eat in
           steel,
    Upon my cheeks what helpless shame I
          feel.'
                                  (743-56)

Two conflicting ethics are in evidence. … [We] might say that Lucrece is thinking here (on the one hand) in terms of a shame culture. She worries about 'disgrace' and 'helpless shame', about the searching eyes and opinions of other people, where a Christian might worry about the searching eye of God. What she dreads is public dishonour, the possibility of the act becoming known; hence she longs that the dawn will never come. This way of thought takes her naturally in the direction of suicide. Yet the passage invites us simultaneously to think of Lucrece's dilemma in terms of a guilt culture. Tarquin is a 'convertite', a penitent; Lucrece is a 'castaway', the common theological term for a lost soul; she is vexed by thoughts of 'guilt' and of 'unseen sin'. Lucrece's plight is 'hopeless' in the sense that she has the misfortune to live half a millennium before the birth of Christ, and can therefore think only of pagan solutions to her problem; yet the Christian terminology goes deeper than that, imbuing Lucrece with a Christian sensibility (a sensibility which will lead her in due course to doubt the wisdom of suicide) and suggesting moreover her possible moral implication in what has occurred. Whether Lucrece is to be seen as merely dishonoured by the rape or as more deeply and spiritually affected is not simply a question for 'more scholarly minds': it is a central human question which needs to be answered if we are to understand the nature of Lucrece's distress and the inner logic of her suicide.

On this point, however, the poem wavers, as Lucrece herself wavers. For the classical Lucretia, suicide is not a matter for wavering or for debate; her decision is swift and sure. Though the suicide at first surprises and distresses her menfolk, its propriety is never questioned. For Shakespeare's Lucrece, the matter is otherwise. The story is no longer one of moral certainties, though critics often assume it is.⁵ Lucrece seems unsure of the moral consequences both of rape and of suicide, hesitantly debating her way towards death. Once again, the simpler code of honour is complicated by never, Christian, considerations:

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

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

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

'Then let it not be call'd impiety': Lucrece has an uneasy awareness of the way in which her suicide may be regarded from other cultural and religious viewpoints, seeming almost to anticipate Augustine's objection that a woman who kills herself after rape puts her immortal soul in jeopardy. The whole debate is quite un-Roman in the way it considers the relationship of souls and bodies. Yet the Augustinian point is no sooner glimpsed than dismissed by means of a curious analogy. The soul 'must' in any case decay now as a result of the assault upon the body, just as a pine tree must decay when the bark is peeled; hence, Lucrece argues, there is surely no harm in speeding it on its way. The logic is hardly compelling; and the view of the inevitable effect of Tarquin's act upon Lucrece's soul seems at odds with the view which Lucrece herself (echoing Livy's) Lucretia) puts to the men later in the poem:

'Though my gross blood be stain'd with this
 abuse,
Immaculate and spotless is my mind;
That was not forc'd; that never was inclin'd
    To accessary yieldings, but still pure
    Doth in her poison'd closet yet endure.'
                                            (1655-9)

Does Tarquin's rape merely affect Lucrece's body, or do its consequences extend further, threatening the mind and soul? The analogy of the pine tree and that of the 'poison'd closet' point in opposing directions, the first suggesting that body and soul inevitably react together, the second that the body alone is affected.⁶

A third analogy gives yet another view of the matter. Lucrece is again contemplating suicide, and this time rejecting it as a vain solution to her problems:

'Poor helpless help, the treasure stol'n away,
To burn the guiltless casket where it lay!'
                                       (1056-7)

The 'casket' is the body, which is 'guiltless' in the sense that it is ungilded, of small value, and in the further sense that it is innocent, without guilt. This time it is implied that the body is unaffected by what has happened; instead it is an inner 'treasure', something of infinitely greater value, that has vanished. Not only is this analogy at odds with the other two; it is also, morally speaking, less sophisticated. A thousand years before the time of Shakespeare, St. Augustine had argued that a woman's virtue 'is not a treasure which can be stolen without the mind's consent' in the act of rape. True virtue, he argued, is not like a material possession at all; it is a quality that resides in the will, withstanding physical accidents and disasters.⁷ The poem's shifting analogies seem to reflect other shifts between Roman and Christian ways of thought, a basic indecisiveness over the story's central moral issues. How, if at all, is Lucrece affected morally by the rape? Is her suicide an act of authentic heroism, or just the result of muddled thinking? How is the idea of Lucrece's tragic loss ('the treasure stol'n away') to be reconciled with the idea that essentially she is untouched by the rape, that her chaste mind 'doth… yet endure'? Morally and metaphysically, the poem raises more questions than it manages to answer.

II

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, the questions are never dull. And it is typical of the unevenness of the poem that the simple notion of Lucrece's stolen 'treasure' should form part of a larger and much subtler fabric of ideas on the subject of ownership, possession, and theft. One of the central themes in The Rape of Lucrece is that of the precariousness of all forms of possession, material and immaterial: of beauty, virtue, happiness, fortune, love, and ultimately life itself. As in Venus and Adonis, there is a recurring sense that nothing perfect will last:

… no perfection is so absolute
That some impurity doth not pollute.
                                      (853-4)

The more perfect the possession, the more fragile its existence, the more vulnerable its state. Tarquin may wish to rape Lucrece (Shakespeare suggests) precisely because she is so chaste, so invitingly, arousingly, perfect. And was not Collatine himself at fault, for having bragged so rashly of his wife's perfections?

For he the night before, in Tarquin's tent,
Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state—
What priceless wealth the heavens had him
 lent
In the possession of his beauteous mate;
Reck'ning his fortune at such high-proud rate
   That kings might be espoused to more
           fame,
   But king nor peer to such a peerless
           dame.

O happiness enjoy'd but of a few!
And, if possess'd, as soon decayed and done
As is the morning silver-melting dew
Against the golden splendour of the sun!
An expired date, cancell'd ere well begun:
   Honour and beauty, in the owner's arms,
   Are weakly fortress'd from a world of
          harms.

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apologies be made
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is Collatine the publisher
   Of that rich jewel he should keep
           unknown
   From thievish ears, because it is his own?
                                       (15-35)

Shakespeare sets in train here a complex sequence of ideas on the subject of possession. The ultimate possessors of Lucrece's 'treasure', as the passage makes clear, are 'the heavens'; she is merely 'lent' to Collatine, who fails to realize the true value and the ultimate revocability of the gift. At the end of the poem Collatine and Lucretius are to contend childishly for the possession of the dead Lucrece and for the right to mourn her most:

The one doth call her his, the other his,
Yet neither may possess the claim they lay.
The father says, 'She's mine.' 'O mine she
 is!'
Replies her husband. 'Do not take away
My sorrow's interest; let no mourner say
   He weeps for her, for she was only mine,
   And only must be wail'd by Collatine.'
                                         (1793-9)

The squabble highlights the absurdity of Collatine's (and Lucretius') notions of 'possession'. Through his recklessness, Collatine loses his wife and 'the treasure of his happy state', and even as he laments his loss fails to understand what has happend and why. In one respect, Collatine's situation resembles that of Tarquin, who is after 'possession' of Lucrece in the narrower, sexual sense of that word, and who is similarly bewildered by loss. Tarquin is caught in the circular sequences of lust that Shakespeare describes again in Sonnet 129:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proff, and prov'd, a very woe. …

For Tarquin, 'great treasure is the meed proposed' (132), yet he loses both what he expects to gain and what he already has. As he meditates the rape, the poem moves to some general moral reflections which anticipate a thought that is to return insistently in Macbeth:

Those that much covet are with gain so fond
That what they have not, that which they
 possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so, by hoping more, they have but less. …

So that in vent'ring ill we leave to be
The things we are for that which we expect;
And this ambitious foul infirmity,
In having much, torments us with defect
Of that we have; so then we do neglect
    The thing we have and, all for want of wit,
    Make something nothing by augmenting it.
                             (134-7, 148-54)

The moral applies both to Tarquin and to Collatine. Remembering the traditional outcome of the story, we may also see that it applies, beyond the formal framework of the poem, to Tarquin's father, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who (as the poem's Argument reminds us) had unlawfully 'possessed himself of the kingdom', only to lose it through his son's (and his own) rashness. That 'great treasure' on which Tarquin gambles is not merely Lucrece; it is also Rome.

But Tarquin has lost something more important than either Lucrece or Rome. The vital loss is not material but spiritual. Quid victor gaudes? haec te victoria perdet, wrote Ovid, playing upon [the] parado x… that Tarquin's rape of Lucretia is, as it were, a reflexive act, finally more damaging to himself than to Lucretia. 'Why, victor, do you rejoice? This victory will ruin you.' Shakespeare intensifies this paradox by suggesting that Tarquin's most important loss (the ultimate perdition) is that of his soul:

Ev'n in this thought through the dark night he
  stealeth,
A captive victor that hath lost in gain;
Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will despite of cure remain,
Leaving his spoil perplex'd in greater pain.
    She bears the load of lust he left behind,
    And he the burden of a guilty mind.
                                    (729-35)

'A captive victor that hath lost in gain': even as he echoes Ovid, Shakespeare deepens the resonance of the Ovidian idea. The reflexiveness of Tarquin's action is further emphasized by another and more remarkable image. Shakespeare pictures Tarquin's soul as a 'princess' who has been assaulted and 'spotted' by Tarquin's own crime against Lucrece (715-28). The effect of the personification is striking. As one critic has suggested, it is almost as though, in a spiritual sense, Tarquin had raped himself.⁸ Rape is seen not merely as a destructive, but also as a self-destructive, act.

The 'treasure' which Tarquin loses is ultimately his own soul. But what is the treasure which Lucrece loses? Here again one becomes aware of a disequilibrium in the poem.

But she hath lost a dearer thing than life,
And he hath won what he would lose again.
                                    (687-8)

Despite the symmetry of these lines, Shakespeare appears to be invoking two quite different concepts of gain and loss, which in turn imply two quite different ethics. For what Lucrece seems essentially to have lost is her honour and good name, while what Tarquin has gained is a sense of guilt and probability of damnation. The qualitative differences between these two ethics are not always kept distinct in Shakespeare's poem. The difference between being dishonoured and being damned, a matter so scrupulously explored in a play such as Measure for Measure, is never vitally experienced in The Rape of Lucrece; nor is the notion of the 'fate worse than death' firmly challenged in human terms as it is in that play.

ISABELLA O were it but my life!
       I'd throw it down for your deliverance
       As frankly as a pin.
CLAUDIO                 Thanks, dear Isabel.
              (Measure for Measure, III .i. 105-7)

At once we feel the sting of a more urgent, more deeply dramatic, exchange. 'Thanks, dear Isabel': in the very curtness of Claudio's response (such hypothetical readiness for heroism is of little comfort to a man condemned to death) we glimpse a sensibility that apprehends in a fuller sense what it may mean to die, that views a little warily the notion that a woman's honour may be 'a dearer thing than life', that values life more richly than a pin.

III

Near the end of the poem, however, we hear a voice that speaks with another kind of curtness. As Collatine and Lucretius fretfully and proprietorially lament over the body of Lucrece, Brutus calls them sharply to order:

'Why Collatine, is woe the cure for woe?
Do wounds help wounds, or grief help
 grievous deeds?
Is it revenge to give thyself a blow,
For his foul act by whom thy fair wife
 bleeds?
Such childish humour from weak minds
 proceeds.
 Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
 To slay herself that should have slain her
 foe.'
                                      (1821-7)

The dead Lucrece is here rebuked almost as sharply as are Collatine and Lucretius. The final couplet of the stanza introduces yet another doubt as to the logic of Lucrece's suicide, though from quite another moral standpoint. Brutus' voice is that of brusque and savage worldly wisdom. Suicide, Brutus implies, is no answer to Lucrece's dilemma; the only answer would have been for her to have struck back at her assailant. Brutus' comment is never expanded, nor is it ever countered. It is simply allowed to hang in the air, registering, yet not resolving, one further doubt about Lucrece's conduct and ahout the legitimacy of the notion of 'a fate worse than death'.

'Do wounds help wounds?': Brutus's words also help to stimulate quite another kind of doubt. In the earliest versions of the Lucretia story… much play is made with the notion of knives and of wounding. Tarquin threatens Lucretia with a knife, and it is with a knife that Lucretia gives herself her fatal wound; on this knife Brutus and the other men swear solemnly to drive the Tarquins from Rome. As many of the painters were to perceive, the story seems to propose a sequence of dependent threats and wounds: one violent deed prompts another, one knife turns against another, Lucretia's death being the signal for revenge and for weapons to move against the Tarquins. Shakespeare's Lucrece refers to such a sequence when she suggests that it is Tarquin, and not she herself, who guides her dagger:

She utters this: 'He, he, fair lords, 'tis he,
That guides this hand to give this wound to me'
                                       (1721-2)

and again when she says, preparing to wound herself fatally, 'How Tarquin must be us'd, read it in me' (1195). But Shakespeare is interested in the notion of wounding in a wider and more complex sense. Wounds, the poem suggests, are not always literal and physical. Lucrece sees that Collatine has been wounded by the rape without so much as realizing it:

'O unseen shame! invisible disgrace!
O unfelt sore! crest-wounding, private scar!
Reproach is stamp'd in Collatinus' face,
And Tarquin's eye may read the mot afar,
How he in peace is wounded, not in war.
                                   (827-31)

Tarquin, too, is invisibly wounded:

Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will despite of cure remain.
                                        (731-2)

After Lucrece's suicide, as Collatine and Lucretius compete with each other in grief, it is Brutus (Brutus, whom we have seen 'Burying in Lucrece' wound his folly's show' (1810)) who calls them to their senses: 'Do wounds help wounds?' Brutus is of course summoning the men to their act of revenge. But the words he chooses are curious, seeming as they do to challenge the whole intricate series of retributive acts upon which the story is built. They may unwittingly remind us of what Shakespeare has shown us throughout the poem: that there are metaphorical and spiritual wounds that are deeper and more lasting than fleshly wounds, wounds 'that nothing healeth': and that there are other ways of dealing with grief than through violent retribution and blood vengeance. Christian considerations are beginning to impinge upon the pagan story, new complications and ethical possibilities are briefly glimpsed. Yet the moment is soon gone, and the story is back on its familiar lines. Shakespeare, after all, was to respect the traditional shape of the story more than many other writers were to do, or possibly to find it artistically more intractable. Though Shakespeare's imagination seems repeatedly to have perceived the deficiencies of the moral premisses on which the older story was built, it is to these premises and to the familiar narrative pattern of the story that he ultimately returns.

Early work though it is, The Rape of Lucrece is a poem of remarkable yet sporadic brilliance. The power of Shakespeare's poetic intelligence is always in evidence; yet the intelligence is restless, unsettled. The poem gives a constant sense of problems perceived but not solved; of 'disputations' which are neither concluded, nor, on the other hand, finely poised in their inconclusiveness. It is as though Shakespeare has begun to Christianize the old story, begun to question in an Augustinian fashion the logic and wisdom of its central actions, only to shut off such questions, being finally content to allow the story to drift down its traditional narrative course. Yet the current of the story is disturbed. Behind the lengthy rhetorical laments of the poem, one senses some uncertainty in Shakespeare's handling in particular of the principal issue of the poem, that of the proper course of action for a 'dishonoured' woman to take; an issue to which he was to return with greater thoughtfulness in the work of his maturity.

Notes

¹ Quotations from Peter Alexander's edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London and Glasgow, 1951).

² On the rhetorical elements in the poem, see Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London, 1976), ch. 4.

³ William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1527-8), in Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Revd. Henry Walter (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1848), p. 183.

⁴ F. T. Prince, ed., The Poems, Arden edn. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 119, responding to Pooler in his edition of 1911.

⁵ See, for example, Hallett Smith: 'There is no temptation, no testing of Lucrece, except in the matter of honest fame; her good name and her husband's honour must be preserved, and her decision is a heroically simple one. The poem is an expansion of a simple situation in which a readily recognized and accepted ideal is outraged' (Elizabethan Poetry (University of Michigan, 1968), p. 116). Cf. Bickford Sylvester, 'Natural Mutability and Human Responsibility: Form in Shakespeare's Lucrece', College English, xxvi (1964-5), 505-11: 'each protagonist has before him a clearly-perceived ethical ideal which engages in a running debate with his fleshly weakness'. The issues are not as simple as either of these statements implies.

⁶ Supporting the 'poison'd closet' image are those of the impure 'chest' at 11. 760-1 and of the 'polluted prison' at 11. 1725-6.

⁷ Augustine, The City of God, trs. Henry Bettenson, ed. David Knowles, bk. 1, ch. 29, p. 40.

⁸ Sam Hynes, 'The Rape of Tarquin', Shakespeare Quarterly, x (1959), 451-3. Cf. Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (London, 1956; repr. 1967), p. 272. J. Quarles's 'continuation' of Shakespeare's poem, Tarquin Banished: or, the Reward of Lust (appended to the 1655 London edn. of The Rape of Lucrece) makes much of the reflexive nature of the story. 'Lucretia, ah Lucretia! thou didst finde/ A raped body,/ a raped minde,' says the banished Tarquin, soliloquizing in a 'shadie grove'. Tarquin is visited by a flock of nightingales who proceed to sing him to death and then pick out his eyes: 'From which sad story we may well infer,/ That Philomel abhors a Ravisher' (pp. 10, 12). Quarles is not concerned, however, with the idea of spiritual retribution.