[In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1979, Lanham examines The Rape of Lucrece as a commentary on one of its sources, Livy, and as an allegory on the nature of political development in history.]

The Rape of Lucrece has long been considered, when considered at all, only as a warm-up for future dramatic greatness. Tarquin contemplating rape reminds us of Macbeth contemplating murder. Tarquin rape completed reminds us of Othello with "his reputation gone." Lucrece before reminds us of Desdemona; after, of Isabella. The Troy painting which Lucrece makes into a high-class soap opera introduces moods from Troilus and Cressida. Likeness to the Roman plays—setting, flamingly faithful wife, macho warrior-states-men—occurs everywhere. Lucrece's suicide lets in a whiff of Ophelia, and of Romeo and Juliet, too. The dense cosmic imagery reminds us of Antony and Cleopatra. And so on.

I don't want to argue against such prolepsis—obviously the poem invites it. But it also invites a backward glance, sums up as well as prophesies. If it is a warm-up, it is an Ovidian warm-up, complete with compulsive isocolon, chiasmus, polyptoton, and pun. If it provides an alliterative dreamland, it does so in a way that recalls earlier alliterative poetry. If it creates a world of allegorical personification run wild, it does so in traditional medieval ways. These layers of imitation lead us directly to the kind of poem Lucrece is, a "masterpiece" in the old and literal sense of the word, a declaration of poetic mastery. Shakespeare shows us that he has mastered the traditions, Latin and English, which he fell heir to, and what he can do with them. If we allow such a self-conscious display of poetic power, such a show-off advertisement of oneself, as a legitimate poetic genre—and why not? Lucrece may be both prophecy and recollection and still a poem in its own right, perhaps a masterpiece in the usual sense. But whether it is simply a sketchbook of rhetorical and dramatic motifs, or something more than this, an obvious way into the poem starts with its referentiality. On its success as imitation, poetic commentary, art-on-art, will depend both its own poetic status and its value as sketchbook for the plays. I've considered elsewhere the poem as an Ovidian imitation. I want now to consider another aspect of its backward and forward gaze, the commentary on Livy and the nature of politics.

Shakespeare takes from Livy two elements, a famous story—Lucrece's rape and suicide—and the historical moment which follows it—the Roman change, in 509 B.C., from a monarchical to a consular form of government. The masterpiece gesture which transforms Livy, changes "follows it" to "follows from it," argues that these two elements are causally related, that the rape changes Lucrece in a way which fundamentally changes political reality, allegorizes, as we shall see, the birth of politics. The poem in this sense amounts to an extended commentary on Livy. But it is a commentary meant to serve Elizabethan England, a political lesson for England's governing class, more especially perhaps for aristocrats like the poem's dedicatee, the Earl of Southampton. For as one stratum of his multi-generic layering in Lucrece, along with the Ovidian epyllion, the medieval allegory and alliteration games, and the final top layer of poetic masterpiece, Shakespeare offers a political lesson for princes, a speculum principis. How does Shakespeare transform this backward-glancing commentary on Livy into forward-looking political advice? And what kind of advice? The answer lies, obviously, in the poem's two great case-studies of motive, Tarquin and Lucrece.

Lucrece was already, when Shakespeare became involved with her, a well-handled piece of rhetorical baggage. As early as the fifth century, the rhetorian Emporius, under "Praeceptum Deliberativae," discusses for two pages how illustrative she was for what today we might call "the decision-making process." (If you've never heard of Emporius, don't worry. Nobody else has either, apparently. He exists now simply as a few chapters in Hahn's Rhetores Latini Minores [pp. 572 ff.].) But Tarquin was much less a common road and Shakespeare develops him into an allegory of chivalric, rather than Roman, political power. He thus renders the rape an exemplum of chivalric power, a current political lesson. The exemplum is pointed by a flood of chivalric images, especially personifications, which attach military coloration to virtually every act and perception in the poem. This continuous imagery comes to represent the way Tarquin sees the world, his physiology of vision.

Let me give you just one example. When Tarquin, trying to get his courage up, is making an interminable speech to his torch, he reproaches himself in this way:

O shame to knighthood and to shining arms!
O foul dishonour to my household's grave!
O impious act including all foul harms!
A martial man to be soft fancy's slave!
True valour still a true respect should have;
   Then my digression is so vile, so base,
   That it will live engraven in my face.

Yea, though I die, the scandal will survive
And be an eyesore in my golden coat;
Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive
To cipher me how fondly I did dote;
That my posterity, sham'd with the note,
   Shall curse my bones and hold it for no sin
   To wish that I their father had not been.
                                 (ll. 197-210)

His heraldic coat of arms constitutes both his clothing and his face—makes his self isomorphic with his social role. …

The wind does not blow out his torch, it "wars" with it (1. 311). Lucrece seems not a woman but a castle to which he lays siege (1. 221). When he first looks at her face (ll. 50 ff.), he sees a battlefield where Virtue and Beauty fight, in three stanzas of preposterous Clevelandism, a "silent war of lilies and of roses." The journey to Lucrece's chamber becomes a military expedition in which, he tells us, "Affection is my captain," and "Desire my pilot is," and the go/no-go decision presents itself as a choice between "a league" and "invasion." The minor delays and mishaps of his midnight journey "he takes for accidental things of trial," the trial being, of course, the Knight's perpetual trial of his own fortitude. When he sees Lucrece, she is like a "map of death." And to describe the final assault, the poem allegorically subdivides Tarquin's limbs and internal organs into the table of organization and equipment standard for a chivalric army. It goes like this:

Anon his beating heart, alarum striking
Gives the hot charge and bids them do their
 liking.

His drumming heart chears up his burning eye,
His eye commends the leading to his hand,
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride, march'd on to make his
 stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;
   Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand
          did scale,
   Left their round turrets destitute and pale;

They, must'ring to the quiet cabinet
Where their dear governess and lady lies,
Do tell her she is dreadfully beset …
                                    (ll. 433-444)

(If I had time to discuss how Shakespeare expands Livy, I might cite here Livy's somewhat briefer discussion of this episode: "sinistraque manu mulieris pectore oppresso.") And it goes on this way, his hand a "rude ram," her breast an "ivory wall," her heart "a poor citizen," her body a "sweet city," and a "never-conquered fort." Shakespeare makes here not simply the Ovidian point that Militiae species amor est, but that this imagery holds Tarquin prisoner. It constitutes, in fact, his motive for the rape, answers the question the narrator poses when he first introduces Tarquin, but never answers. Why does he do it? In Livy, he falls for her when he sees her. Shakespeare deliberately denies him that glimpse and then after suggesting several possible emulous motives, laconically remarks "But some untimely thought did instigate / His all too timeless speed" (ll. 43-44). The "Untimely thought" comes from the imagery and the world view that it stands for. This view permits only a dominance relationship. Politics, war, love, they all amount to the same thing in this world—attack. Tarquin does what he does because that is all anyone in such a world can do, and this includes every allegorical personification in the poem—fight.

Tarquin is not, of course, supposed to direct this aggression toward Lucrece, and in doing so he destroys himself, commits suicide as effectively, and as dramatically, as Lucrece does later. And chivalry with him. Surely this is Shakespeare's point. Such a code will inevitably be misapplied, turn against itself. It is all over for Tarquin after the rape because when he besmirches his chivalric escutcheon he besmirches all there is to him. Shakespeare is less editorializing here than simply explaining a fundamental power calculus. Tarquin allegorizes a world in which all human relationships are power relationships and in which the self resides entirely in the social role. The two, Shakespeare argues, make an intrinsically unstable combination. As soon as power is misapplied—as it inevitably will be—the social self, and hence the basis of society, will be destroyed. Such a system of political power contains no cybernetic circuitry, no program to correct actions like the rape. Things can only get worse, the positive feedback grow greater and greater, one misapplication of power call forth another in revenge. The chivalric ideal was a military ideal but not, finally, a governing ideal. Within its world, politics, in our sense of the world—that is, behavior with self-correcting circuits built in—was not possible. What else did the Wars of the Roses teach, or the Hundred Years' War?

That rape in this poem means power relationship not sex Shakespeare wants so much to point out that he pointedly evaporates the rape itself, leaving it to float somewhere between lines 686 and 687. And no sexuality lurks anywhere else in the poem either. Just remember Venus trying to seduce Adonis to convince yourself how completely rape here becomes a metaphor for unlawful power and its effect on our sense of self. Lucrece, although she makes much of being a perfect wife, can thus think herself a sexual virgin. In terms of power, that's just what she was.

The poem, after Tarquin leaves, belongs to Lucrece. She undergoes what we must call a comic Fall of Man, or Fall of Person rather, and our attitude toward her falls in the same way. Before Tarquin, Lucrece has been a perfect chivalric woman: her husband's priceless treasure, complacent prize in a Virtuous-Wife contest, Saint of wifely virtue. She may not light our fire so fiercely as Tarquin's, but still our ethical judgment coincides with hers, and with the narrator's dependable moralizing. But immediately after Tarquin drags his post-coital depression off-stage, Lucrece starts to metamorphose from virtuous monument to an hysterical sentimentalist who makes love to grief for the sake of grief. "She wakes her heart by beating on her breast," we're told, and she keeps beating until it ceases to beat back. She does so for an odd reason, though. She assumes from the beginning that she is guilty of what she calls "my cureless crime." But we see no guilt. She is, as both her father and her husband hasten to tell her when they make the scene, entirely guiltless. Since we too see no reason for her guilt-feelings, our point of view increasingly diverges from hers until we end up laughing at her.

Just as the poem offers no overt explanation for Tarquin's rape, it offers no explanation for Lucrece's sudden assumption of guilt. In moral terms, her behavior makes no sense, and we have to seek an explanation elsewhere. We begin to find it, I think, in her sense of self. She needs guilt to play her new role. She has played the virtuous wife until now with total satisfaction. Role and self have been isomorphic. The rape undeniably does sully that role. Lucrece then has to go out and find herself a new role, go shopping for a new self. When she does so, she shows herself as imprisoned by chivalric imagery as Tarquin is. The motivai structure created by the repertoire of chivalric imagery, allows Tarquin to be only a sacker of cities. And poor Lucrece, what can she be, inevitably, but the city that has been sacked? Despoiler and Despoiled are the only two roles chivalric politics permits. She does not find the way to her new role directly, to be sure, but routes herself through apostrophes to "comfort-killing Night," to the "tell tale Day" that will "quote my loathsome trespass in my looks," to "opportunity," whose "guilt is great," and to "Misshappen Time," each outburst more absurdly irrelevant than the last. She finally gets close to her new role when she concludes that since "her house is sacked," "her mansion batter'd," "her sacred temple spotted," and her "fort blemished" (all this in one stanza, 11. 1170 ff.), the logical thing would be to kill herself. Again, the poem offers no explanation for this absurd non-sequitur and we must figure it out for ourselves. Again, too, no moral explanation comes forth, only a dramatic one. If she kills herself that will somehow authenticate her new role, confirm that she really is her new part in the story. But she can't do that without the proper audience, her husband and father, and while waiting for them she finally bethinks herself of the perfect objective correlative for her new role, the Troy painting. She won't be Helen, of course. She's going to play Troy. Logical enough. If you're going to be a sacked city, you might as well be the Sacked City.

After a little preliminary sympathizing with Hecuba, she comes to reflect on the duplicity of Sinon. "As Priam him did cherish, / So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish." (ll. 1546-7). What really was her Troy? Obviously the last stage of hysterical sentimentality, to be sure, but beyond that, too, something genuinely epic in scale. Tarquin despoiled her name and unself-conscious sense of self, the role that was not a role. By coming to see herself as Sacked Troy, she has come to be not only a different self but a different kind of self, one whose role constantly needs authentication, finally, as she sees, the authentication of dying. What happens to Lucrece, then, is what happens when self-consciousness enters the human world. We begin to feel guilty about playing a part that we do not feel to be entirely us. The poem's action really is epic enough to justify the allusion of Troy. After the rape the world has changed.

Human motive, no longer entirely ethical, becomes radically colored by drama. Role-playing becomes a motive in itself; often, as with Lucrece, the motive. People act the way they do just to create reality, not to do anything with it. And they will always get side-tracked from purposive endeavor by this radical need for dramatic imposture, this perpetual temptation to sentimentalize, feel for the fun of feeling. Lest we miss the point, Shakespeare introduces the ludicrous grief-contest between Lucrece's father and her husband:

Then son and father weep with equal strife
Who should weep most, for daughter or for
 wife.
                               (ll. 1790-91)

Shakespeare does not represent their grief as false, any more than Lucrece's is. He makes a more radical statement. All deep feeling partakes of dramatic pleasure. We can bear it because we enjoy it. Shakespeare's Lucrece, like Sterne's Tristram Shandy, counsels that you learn how to bear grief by learning how to enjoy it.

This constitutes our lesson in Lucrece, and the explanation for the poem's extraordinarily self-conscious artifice. For is not this what Shakespeare himself is doing? Maybe (it's not crucial to my argument) what all poetry does? Teach us how to banquet off feeling? The poem's self-conscious artifice, its sustained verbal "excess," finds its explanation just here. It intervenes between us and the action of Lucrece just as dramatic motive always intervenes between our intended purposes and our actual behavior. In Lucrece, style allegorizes behavior. Thus learning to read the poem means coming to terms with this kind of self-conscious dramatic display and seeing its central place in human motivation. And this literary lesson is of course the political lesson of The Rape of Lucrece. To learn to enjoy the poem is to learn to enjoy politics. The poem's continued critical depreciation is, I think, no accident. It reflects the intellectual's characteristic hatred of politics. Intellectuals hate politicians instinctively, the way academics hated Lyndon Johnson, even before Vietnam. They crave an issue-dominated politics; they want, that is, no politics at all. Politics teaches that motive is largely dramatic, that posturing is as important as purpose, and that if you fail to see this—and to enjoy it—you cannot rule in human affairs. Again, lest we miss the point, Shakespeare brings in Brutus, the Brutus who, having survived the Etruscan kings by posing as an imbecile, after Lucrece has sacked her own city, "throws that shallow habit by / Wherein deep policy did him disguise" (ll. 1814-15) and takes command. Brutus seizes the Time and Opportunity which Lucrece can only talk about, and uses her body as a stage prop to set into motion a political revolution and the change from Kings to Consuls.

Thus Shakespeare makes the rape of Lucrece represent the change from a naive sense of self, role and society to a different kind of self and society, a radically dramatic one. The change is exactly reflected in the Anglo-Saxon conception of jurisprudence, and I might use jurisprudence as an example of what I mean. In our system of justice, a lawyer can argue for his client, however unsavory, in good conscience because the system defines the truth not, finally, as something that just exists out there in life but as something finally decided on in the courtroom. In the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice, what really happened is decided by the processes of debate, processes every bit as full of dramatic motive as The Rape of Lucrece. Reality comes through histrionic re-enactment, not around it. The whole system of case-law depends on thinking social reality to be something decided by the court. That decision then becomes a referential reality for the next decision about reality, and so on up the ladder.

Shakespeare's allegory, in The Rape of Lucrece, argues that the same reality prevails in politics. The change from Kings to Consuls changed not only the form of government but the definition of self and of social reality. This change is an epic subject indeed and Shakespeare clearly recognized it as such. But the old epic form depended on the old monarchic kind of political reality. The Troy story could fit in the new Consular, political reality, only in the oblique, indirect, ironic, infinitely self-conscious form which Shakespeare contrived for it in The Rape of Lucrece. And Shakespeare's perception seems to have been borne out. Henceforth, old Epic was possible only, as Milton saw, by reinstating the monarchic definition of social reality. But Shakespeare was moving in the opposite direction, writing an allegorical poem to teach a didactic lesson, if an infinitely tactful one. The monarchic reality, what in this poem appears as the Chivalric reality, was—when you played out its power equations to the end—suicidal. Tarquin is the sacker, Lucrece the sackee and they both kill themselves. Once self-consciousness enters the world, social reality is agreed upon, not inherited forever. And once this is true and you see it, there is no substitute for politics, for hammering out a reality in which issues and dogma often play only a small part and where hypocrisy provides the very instrument through which the self exists. And provides too the cybernetic circuit that any genuinely political power needs, for in a dramatic reality roles can be reconstituted when power abuses them. Hypocrisy can either check such abuse or reconstitute our social reality to fit it, as the case requires. Politics offers a less pure and wholehearted kind of power than chivalry but one which at least can regulate itself. And one which, so rich is our hypocritical resource, can generate a wider range of roles than master and servant.

Shakespeare has reached back to Livy to construct a political lesson for his own time and beyond. Learning how to read Lucrece thus constitutes an essential political education. The poem provides a speculum for all of us who come after princes, for a time when political power is finally an agreed-upon theatrical effect rather than a divinely-certified external reality. It is questionable whether Southampton and his friends got the message. And it's questionable, too, whether even we've gotten it yet.