Lucrece's Re-Creation
[In the essay below, Bromley claims that, as a figure of her time, Lucrece successfully represents honor and integrity, rather than symbolizing a passive submission to the will of others.]
Lucrece presents some special problems for modern readers because it is about a chaste woman who, having been forcibly raped by the king's son, a friend and comrade of her husband, concludes that she is impure and that she must therefore kill herself. A considerable amount of critical energy has been expended in trying to determine whether Lucrece was defiled and whether she should have reacted differently. It is difficult for many readers to forgive Shakespeare and Lucrece for what they take to be the creation of a false dilemma from which the only release is self-destruction.
It seems to me that Lucrece's corruption by Tarquin's act is a simple fact, accepted by Lucrece and her society and by Shakespeare and his society. If we accept that Lucrece has lost her purity, it follows that she is faced with a real moral dilemma. I believe that Lucrece resolves this dilemma successfully, in a way that simultaneously satisfies her own demands and those of her society. But however we finally judge Lucrece's resolution of her dilemma, we must be certain that we understand it as she understood it and as it is presented in the poem, and this is what many readers have failed to do.
I
The need to account for what is taken to be Lucrece's mistaken response to her situation has led critics to interpret her motives and behavior in ways consistent with their own political or religious views. St. Augustine argued that Lucrece's feelings of guilt suggest that she was a willing victim of the rape.1 He is followed by a long line of critics who read the poem in a Christian context, including D. C. Allen2 and A. C. Hamilton.3 They see Lucrece as condemned by Shakespeare for being too Roman in her values, a woman who confuses guilt and shame and is, in St. Augustine's words, "too greedy of praise." Roy Battenhouse goes even further along these lines, asserting that Lucrece resists Tarquín "as if subconsciously she wished force to work his way, but only after she has had time to excuse herself from responsibility."4 According to Battenhouse, Shakespeare's irony exposes both Lucrece's lust for Tarquín and the lust for revenge which leads her to manipulate her husband and other men into actions which will bring her glory.
Though she puts the poem in a very different context, Coppèlla Kahn also finds irony in Shakespeare's attitude toward Lucrece's Roman values and the suicide motivated by them.5 The values which Kahn emphasizes are those of a patriarchal, patrilinear society; they force Lucrece to see herself as a devalued possession of her husband and prevent her from seeing herself as innocent and pure, as she would in a society in which the Christian ethic prevailed. Like other critics, Kahn refuses to accept Lucrece on her own terms. In my view, the dominant impression created by the poem is not of Lucrece as a pawn in the struggles of men for power and possession, but of Lucrece as a woman who, in the face of the loss of her personal honor and integrity, declares, "I am the mistress of my fate."
Bickford Sylvester6 and, more recently, Jerome Kramer and Judith Kaminsky7 have seen Lucrece, and her suicide, as heroic. But they view Lucrece primarily in opposition to the villain Tarquín, as a figure of virtue in contrast to Tarquin's vice, rather than as a complete, separate, and independent being. Therefore, they fail to perceive that Lucrece undergoes a process of development, that she is an individual capable of purposely creating a new, integrated self to transcend her corruption. They emphasize the ways in which the differences between Lucrece and Tarquín are reflected in the structure and imagery of the poem, rather than Lucrece's own awareness of these differences and the uses she makes of them in understanding and working out her destiny.
Hallett Smith also finds that "the artistic qualities of the poem depend on the contrast between guilt and innocence, and the dramatic and rhetorical means by which the contrast is emphasized."8 He argues that "Shakespeare is not interested in the philosophical and psychological nature of chastity. . . ." Smith has made a major contribution to our understanding of Lucrece by placing it in its literary context as a "complaint" poem. He has provided much of the background information (which I will discuss later) that enables us to appreciate the qualities that set Shakespeare's poem apart from the "complaints" of his contemporaries. This makes it all the more surprising that Smith does not see what is most remarkable about Shakespeare's poem. Through Lucrece, Shakespeare does indeed explore the philosophical and psychological nature of chastity. Far from being a mere mouthpiece for the rhetorical embellishment of an abstract ideal, Lucrece is a complex character who engages in a moral struggle and finds a way to oppose and overcome the evil that entraps her.
Underlying the poem is the common Renaissance belief, expressed repeatedly in patterns of words and images, that all things are balanced against their opposites, which are held in check, and the corollary, that corruption and death are waiting to overbalance virtue and life. There is imperfection and impermanence within man as well as without. Weakness, passion, and evil are always poised to overpower strength, reason, and virtue. Order—within oneself, and in the realms of nature and society—depends on the maintenance of a fragile equilibrium. When Lucrece is raped, she loses the balance of her self. There is never any doubt within the terms set by the poem that she is overwhelmed and corrupted by evil. She responds by an act of suicide which is a rational and successful attempt to restore order within and outside herself.
II
When Lucrece begins, a state of disorder or imbalance already prevails. Tarquin has left his post and neglected his responsibilities to satisfy his lust. Coliatine has unwittingly tempted him by ignoring the restraints of prudence and boasting of Lucrece's superiority over all other women. Like a careless warder, he has "Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state" (1. 16) and dazzled Tarquin, who is impelled to steal his wealth.9 The introductory stanzas end with a paradigmatic couplet: "O rash false heat, wrapp'd in repentant cold, / Thy hasty spring still blasts and ne'er grows old!" (11. 48-49). Real and immediate as the fire within Tarquin is, it is "false," a "lightless fire" (I. 4). Its "embracing flames" (1. 6) will destroy as they ignite, in the instant that potential becomes act and lust is fulfilled. To satisfy lust is to destroy virtue.
Because disorder implies an underlying order, and unruled passion implies moral restraints that have been broken, there are immediate consequences to such an act. There are no neutral moral states; good cannot come from evil. Evil can only destroy, never be fruitful: "Thy hasty spring still blasts and ne'er grows old!" (1. 49). It is not the absence of evil to which one must aspire, however, but restraint, the counterbalancing or overbalancing force of virtue. As the destructive outcome is inherent in Tarquin's plan, so is the need for repentance inherent in the destruction: the "rash false heat" is "wrapp'd in repentant cold" (1. 48).
The balance of opposites is illustrated on the verbal level by the prevalent oxymoron. Tarquin thinks that Collatine was a "niggard Prodigal" (1. 79) in his praise of Lucrece; he is "poorly rich" (1. 97) in her presence, fed by it but still unsatisfied. As he approaches her, Tarquin is "full of foul hope and full of fond mistrust" (1. 284). At times appearances are so deceptive that things are taken to be their opposites, as when life and death are confounded in the sleeping Lucrece "As if between them twain there were no strife, / But that life liv'd in death and death in life" (11. 405-6). When appearances are deceptive, it is easy to deceive oneself. When paradoxes like "loss in gain" and "death in life" are incorporated into propositions, the opportunities for equivocation increase. In a universe of opposites, it is only too easy to take advantage of the dual perspectives that are made possible by equivocation and rationalization, and this is what Tarquin chooses to do. Tarquin argues about his projected act in this way: "Shameful it is,—ay, if the fact be known, / Hateful it is,—there is no hate in loving" (II. 239-40). By the end of the same stanza, Tarquin has abandoned reason altogether: "My will is strong past reason's weak removing: / Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw / Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe" (II. 243-45).
The poem seems to comment, indirectly, on the dangerous power of language in a world where good and evil are so precariously balanced. Tarquin is enflamed not by the sight of the woman Lucrece, as in Shakespeare's sources,10 but by the idea of her, the idea of her chastity, and by the image of her created by Coliatine when he did not "let" to praise Lucrece (1. 10) but was the "publisher" of her beauty (I. 33). Like all virtues, chastity is precarious, and to name it is to suggest its opposite: "Haply that name of 'chaste' unhapp'ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite" (II. 8-9).
But men can reason, consequences can be foreseen, and it is apparent to everyone that "Honour and beauty in the owner's arms / Are weakly fortress'd from a world of harms" (11. 27-28). Tarquin ignores many signs that could serve to guide him. His abandoning of reason in favor of rationalization is emphasized in the stanza that follows the "painted cloth" quotation above (II. 246-53), and this theme occurs repeatedly. Tarquin chooses not to see, not to understand. He ignores the evidence of his senses: the grating of the locks, the shrieks of weasels, the opposing wind, the prick of the needle. "But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him; / He in the worst sense consters their denial" (II. 323-24). His mind's eye, which imagines Collatine and his right, appeals to his heart, but his heart "once corrupted takes the worser part" (I. 294). In denying the better part of himself, in giving up rational control or restraint to satisfy his lust, Tarquin loses himself: "And for himself himself he must forsake" (I. 157).
III
When Tarquin leaves her, Lucrece "bears the load of lust he left behind" (I. 734) in place of her chastity. The difficulty of accepting a definition of chastity as narrow as Lucrece's drives critics to search for ways to deny it, but we are given no reason to question Lucrece's view of the matter. In fact, we are told by the narrator that "she hath lost a dearer thing than life" (1. 687).
It is essential that we see Lucrece as defiled because a central concern of the poem, from the opening lines when Tarquin is "all in post, / Borne by the trustless wings of false desire" (II. 1-2), is the driving force of evil and the need to counterbalance it. Evil infects, and Lucrece is no more immune from it than the "maiden bud" is from the "worm" (1. 848). Her "forced league" with Tarquin "doth force a further strife" (1. 689). Tarquin has no further role in the poem once Lucrece takes up the struggle against herself. In fact, the most important contrast in the poem is not between the lustful Tarquin and the chaste Lucrece, but between the chaste Lucrece and the unchaste Lucrece.
Lucrece is polluted and, like Tarquin, no longer herself. This is her recurrent theme, and her loss of an earlier self is demonstrated by her loss of equilibrium. Lucrece is disquieted. The reticence and quiet harmony that were once a fitting complement to her beauty are now gone. "Frantic with grief," she "breathes . . forth" (I. 762), giving voice to the chaos within her. She rants and curses, unleashing a torrent of words and overlaying image on image without restraint. She rages against such opponents as "Night" and "Time" and "Opportunity" with explosive invective. She exaggerates in her disturbance; she sometimes even sounds foolish: "Time" is "An accessory by thine inclination / To all sins past and all that are to come" (11. 922-23). Lucrece's behavior may seem distasteful to us, but we must bear in mind that she is confronted with an extreme situation. No longer self-contained, she is impelled to connect herself in a new way to a universe that is out of joint. Seeing herself in a different light, caught up in the worldly vicissitudes from which she had previously been protected, she is brought to plead to Night to "Make war against proportion'd course of time" (1. 774).11
Suddenly Lucrece sees herself as a victim of circumstance, subject to the forces of Time and Opportunity. When, earlier, she pleaded with Tarquin, she did not consider such forces. Then she appealed to order, to the man-made conventions within which she lived; she appealed to knighthood, friendship, human law, and good faith. She invoked Tarquin's social position, his relation to his predecessors and his posterity. Then she spoke with "modest eloquence" (1. 563), intermixed not with wails but with sighs, "Which to her oratory adds more grace" (1. 564). Then her feelings were in check, her language formal and controlled, her arguments ordered and reasonable. Repeatedly she urged Tarquin to consider how his behavior conformed to, their common principles and to make the application of law to action which reason demanded.
Now Lucrece is unbalanced. She may be unattractive in her wild grief, but she is moving: "My honey lost, and I a drone-like bee / Have no perfection of my summer left" (11. 836-37). She evokes sympathy, not censure, as she struggles to come to terms with a new reality. Even while she gives way to her emotions, she is beginning to formulate a reasonable response, one which will free her from the situation in which she finds herself. We are surely meant to admire her as she rouses herself from the self-indulgence of curses ("Out idle words, servants to shallow fools," 1. 1016) and moves toward the action that will ultimately bring these curses down on her enemy. The last line of Lucrece speaks of "Tarquin's everlasting banishment," and this action, toward which the poem moves, is the fulfillment of Lucrece's curse: "Let him have time to see his friends his foes, /.. . Let him have time to mark how slow time goes / In time of sorrow . . ." (11. 988-91).
IV
The rest of the poem shows Lucrece's attempts to recreate herself in a "wilderness where are no laws" (1.544). In such a world of "thwarting strife," it is hard to reconcile honor, wealth, and ease with life (11. 141-44). There was a time of grace before, when Tarquin could have retained his control, when his soul was still in command of her subjects, but he chose wrongly. So his "soul's fair temple is defaced" (1. 719) when he leaves Lucrece:
. . . her subjects with foul insurrection
Have batter'd down her consecrated wall,
And by their mortal fault brought in subjection
Her immortality, and made her thrall
To living death and pain perpetual.
(11. 722-25)
It is this fallen state that Lucrece inherits. She no longer feels herself to be an innocent, loyal wife—"Of that true type hath Tarquin rifled me" (1. 1050). Her soul, like Tarquin's, has been violated:
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.
(11. 1170-73)
Lucrece now sees that her redemption depends on her choosing rightly. She must reject the infamy that Tarquin embraced, and her way is clear:
Then let it not be called impiety,
If in this blemish'd fort I make some hole,
Through which I may convey this troubled soul.
(11. 1174-76)
It is difficult to reconcile the headstrong, willful Lucrece portrayed by some critics or the pitiful, passive, deluded Lucrece of others with this woman who follows her logic to its terrible conclusion. There is no irony undercutting her arguments, no alternate course held up for us to weigh against and judge preferable to her choice. Instead, we are shown a courageous and resolute Lucrece who, far from betraying herself, proves her claim that "I am the mistress of my fate" (I. 1069). In choosing honor and fame, Lucrece redeems herself. "So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred, / For in my death 1 murder shameful scorn: / My shame so dead, mine honour is new born" (II. 1188-90). She resists the further spread of evil, to others and within herself, with true resolution. She has won the struggle to regain composure. The self-command she summons is reflected both in the logic of her argument and in the stateliness of her speech as she composes her testament (II. 1198-1204).
In contrast, at his moment of decision, before he entered Lucrece's chamber, Tarquin equivocated and rationalized in an attempt to justify his action. He recognized as blasphemy his appeal for heaven to bless his enterprise; but, purposely blind to moral order, he invoked love and fortune as his gods. "My will is back'd with resolution" (I. 352), he boasted; but this was the "resolution" of headstrong determination, of physical strength and bravado. "Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried; / The blackest sin is cleared with absolution" (II. 353-54). Tarquin consciously abandoned both reason and faith, claiming both ignorance of evil before the fact and exemption from evil after the fact.
Lucrece comes to embody the evil within Tarquin, fulfilling the prophecy about the consequences of his act which he chose to ignore, but she finds a true resolution within herself. Moreover, she makes possible an even greater containment of evil by bequeathing her resolution to her husband. Hers is a resolution which supports not "will," but reason. While Tarquin's loss of himself is immediately heralded by the antipathy of "owls' and wolves' death-boding cries" (I. 165), Lucrece in her misfortune is greeted by her maid with a natural empathy that signals the beginning of a restoration of harmony in Lucrece and in her world. In losing herself, Lucrece has lost her concept of herself, and it is this which she tries to regain by looking at images reflected from without. She reads sorrow and fear in the face of her maid, shame in the face of her groom; and then, looking further, she turns to the painting of the siege of Troy.12
V
In studying the Troy painting, Lucrece looks at an image, a representation, in which, according to the Renaissance ideal, the artist has sought to surpass nature. The concept of an image or symbol transcending life is of central importance here. What Lucrece sees are life-like representations of figures which in turn represent what they are. There is a double consistency in an artist's perfect capturing of features which are themselves perfect expressions of character. Of the portrayals of Ajax and Achilles, Shakespeare says, "The face of either cipher'd either's heart; / Their face their manners most expressly told" (II. 1396-97). Ajax is all force and action; Ulysses, control and command. Other leaders, soldiers, even cowards, show what they are—"and in their rage such signs of rage they bear" (I.1419)—and their appearances are fixed or "captured" by the artist. "Cipher'd" in "The face of either cipher'd either's heart" can mean not only "spelled out" but "symbolized." Because these characters are what they seem, because they are consistent and unified, they can be symbolized in the sense that a part can stand for the whole:
For much imaginary work was there,—
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear.
(11. 1422-24)
It is this kind of unity that Lucrece seeks in searching out a face "where all distress is stell'd" (I. 1444). Distress is "stell'd" in Hecuba not only by being "portrayed" but also by being "fixed" or made permanent. Lucrece does not share Hecuba's quality of immutability. But what Lucrece has, and can lend Hecuba, is her life-force. Unlike Philomela and Hecuba, Lucrece can give voice before she attains the immutability and unity of a symbol. She comforts Philomela with these words: "Poor instrument without a sound, / I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue" (11. 1464-65). Not only can she feel emotion; she can express it and act upon it. In Lucrece, as in Hamlet, the representation of Hecuba's grief is an incitement to action. Like Hamlet, Lucrece has "the motive and the cue for passion" (II.ii.571); she can, in Hamlet's words, "drown the stage with tears / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech"(II.ii.572-73). Lucrece can achieve harmony of feeling, expression, and appearance, then, and she will do so when her audience is gathered.
Lucrece protests, "Why should the private pleasure of some one / Become the public plague of many moe?"(II. 1478-79), but she finds the answer as she moves from the images of Ajax and Ulysses, Nestor and Hecuba, to that of Sinon. Sinon's form is graceful, his face is truthful, and yet he is not what he seems. Lucrece recognizes that Sinon is like Tarquin in harboring evil behind a show of honesty, and that, because of such duplicity, she, like Troy, has been destroyed. In Sinon's image, Lucrece confronts the contradictory, paradoxical nature of reality. The knowledge of the cold that dwells in Sinon's fire leads her to conclude that "These contraries such unity do hold / Only to flatter fools and make them bold" (II. 1558-59).
VI
While it is true that the dishonor she will cause her husband and the doubt cast on the legitimacy of any heirs she may produce are among Lucrece's stated reasons for suicide, it is also the case that these arguments are not elaborated. Instead, we are shown repeatedly how Lucrece's sense of self has been undermined by Tarquin's assault. It has been suggested that Lucrece's sense of self is too limited; but this is largely irrelevant. What is pertinent is the psychological truth in Shakespeare's depiction of a woman who has lost her innocence. Suddenly confronted with truths she had not learned earlier, Lucrece is disoriented. The old certainties are gone, and she has no practiced way to relate to the world around her. We see Lucrece "frantic with grief (I. 762), distant from her maid, ill at ease with her groom, and, in response to the Troy painting, enraged with a passion that drives her to tear at the figure of Sinon with her nails.
Her passion overcomes Lucrece's patience as she compares Sinon to Tarquin, "Whose deed hath made herself herself detest" (I. 1566). Like Sinon and Tarquin, she is now divided against herself. She calls herself a "fool," one who, in her innocence, has failed to see when things were not what they seemed and who now must acknowledge the fruitlessness of her assault on Sinon. Lucrece is brought abruptly back to her immediate situation. At the end of the Troy passage, she is described as very much the victim of inconstant, paradoxical reality: "Short time seems long in sorrow's sharp sustaining: / Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps, / And they that watch see time how slow it creeps" (11. 1573-75).
Though she returns to the present, Lucrece has gained insight from the timeless quality of her experience of the Troy painting. In making the past present, she has seen herself in an historical context. Lucrece realizes that private sin does, in reality, become public plague. She sees that her position is not only private or personal but public and political. She can imagine a role for herself and foresee the consequences of her actions in the future. She both knows herself to be infected with evil and has re-imagined a self whole and free of that evil's influence. Not by concealing, but only by revealing what is within—her corruption and her grief—can Lucrece transcend her own divided nature and gain the unity and immutability of a symbol, "the chaste Lucrece." In doing so, she can contain the spread of evil. In just such a time of contemplation before action, Tarquin chose to ignore the picture of Collatine in his imagination: "My will is strong past reason's weak removing: / Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw / Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe" (II. 243-45).
Relying on reason where Tarquin has rejected it, Lucrece gleans lessons on duplicity and on integrity from "a painted cloth." We see her here in conflict with herself, struggling to understand and overcome her circumstances. Where Tarquin chose to misread the signs around him that might have slowed his rush into action, Lucrece considers carefully and finds confirmation for her plan of action. The act that Lucrece plans is neither the self-promotion that some would make it nor the self-destruction that others see.
VII
Collatine, Lucretius, and the others return to find Lucrece transformed. She is dressed in black, her eyes are red and raw with crying, her color is gone. Her face has become a "map which deep impression bears / Of hard misfortune, carv'd in it with tears" (11. 1712-13). Lucrece has become the heir to Tarquin's "digression," which he predicted "will live engraven in my face" (1. 202). She invokes her husband's aid "For she that was thy Lucrece" (I. 1682). Like Hecuba, Lucrece shows "Time's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's reign" (I. 1451).
What most distinguishes Lucrece at the end of the poem is her control, which she has struggled to attain and now struggles to maintain. Her words are few and measured. Her confession and atonement are placed in the context of her earlier resolve. She is the "pale swan in her wat'ry nest" who delivers "the sad dirge of her certain ending" (II. 1611-12). If there is a sense that she has staged this final scene, this is due not to a defect of her nature but to her careful purpose. It is an expression of her power, her ability to effect action through words. Lucrece begins by calling Tarquin a judge who forbade her to plead in her own behalf. She exposes his equivocation:
His scarlet lust came evidence to swear
That my poor beauty had purloin'd his eyes;
And when the judge is robbed, the prisoner dies.
(II. 1650-52)
Then, in the stanza which begins "O teach me how to make mine own excuse" (1. 1653), she seems to be looking for some loophole in the moral law by which she can escape retribution. But here Lucrece is not only the prisoner; she is the judge, and she is no longer silent. She arouses her husband, who is paralyzed by his grief. Having successfully demanded his attention, she passes her decree: "let the traitor die" (I. 1686). She commands all those in attendance to swear to her that they will carry out her sentence, and they comply, anxious to hear the perpetrator named.
But Lucrece is not yet ready to reveal the name, and she silences the men, asking again if she may be cleared of her offense. They reassure her eagerly, "all at once" (I. 1709) mouthing the excuses she has already rejected. Lucrece turns away from them with a "joyless smile" (I. 1711). We are thus given a clue to the interpretation of Lucrece's character and her behavior. Not only is death not required of Lucrece by the men around her, as Coppélia Kahn insists;13 they show themselves only too ready to give her an easy way out of her dilemma by accepting the compromise of rationalization. Rather than be governed by them, Lucrece asserts her independence. When she freely chooses to take her own life, she is guided by a conception of herself that is not imposed upon her, but is her own creation. It is she, and not the men she summons, who understands the implications of her rape and realizes the extent of Tarquin's tyranny; it is she who feels the necessity of opposing that tyranny. In taking her life, Lucrece suffers the judgment that Tarquin foretold:
O what excuse can my invention make
When thou shalt charge me with so black a deed?
Will not my tongue be mute, my frail joints shake
Mine eyes forgo their light, my false heart bleed?
(II. 225-28)
What Lucrece requires is that her guilt be seen, not as private and therefore pardonable, but as part of the general disorder that must be opposed and resisted. In the Troy painting, Hecuba's transformation by grief had been complete and final: "Of what she was no semblance did remain. / Her blue blood chang'd to black in every vein, / . . . Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead" (11. 1453-56). Lucrece, who lives to reason, speak, and act, escapes such imprisonment and transcends the disordered, divided state that has been her lot since the rape. She becomes a type, not of shame or grief, but of honor. She becomes a symbol, unified and complete, both attaining and representing integrity. Her legacy, as she intends, is her resolution.
VIII
Lucrece's dignity and resolution contrast with the behavior of Lucretius and Collatine after her death. They indulge in the kind of language which effects nothing, which is just so much wind blown about or water flowing without control. Collatine's breath is stifled, not to restrain his grief, but to enable the tide of that grief to swell until it overflows in uncontrolled weeping. Brutus strives to "check the tears" (1. 1817) in Collatine's eyes. For him, the appropriate response to Lucrece's death is to forbear speaking "sportive words and utt'ring foolish things" (I. 1813).
Throughout the poem, "lets" or barriers—restraints—are either used to maintain the control of reason or are swept away by will and passion. Collatine and Lucretius, like Tarquin, are unrestrained. Tarquin purposely misinterprets restraints, turning them into incitements. He interprets the ominous signs he sees on his way to Lucrece's chamber as minor obstacles; they pique his desire and spur him on. When Lucrece begs Tarquin to return to himself and spare her, he warns her, "my uncontrolled tide / Turns not, but swells the higher by this let" (11. 645-46). Language that serves merely to vent emotion must give way, as Lucrece learns, to language that serves to communicate meaning and inspire action. Words that distort meaning can be opposed or restrained by the silence of contemplation, of reason. Col latine and Lucretius waste their forces in the struggle about which of them is more entitled to grieve. But, more important, they ask the wrong questions when they debate to whom Lucrece belonged. Their mistake is in seeing what has happened as personal. Lucrece belongs to no one, and to everyone. As a symbol of resolution and integrity, she is an incitement to the kind of action, demanding singleness of purpose, which will overcome strife and banish evil.
This is what Brutus rightly insists, finding an opportunity for the actions that will lead to the exile of Tarquin. He urges Collatine to replace his watery lamentations with the purposeful words of invocation. He vows to avenge Lucrece, then repeats the vow; then the others also swear to act to avenge her death. In Chaucer and in Ovid, Lucrece's concern as she dies is to "die decently," and she shows care for the modesty of her appearance as she falls.14 In Ovid's version of the story, in contrast to Lucrece's concern for appearances, Lucretius' and Collatine's disregard for appearances when they fling themselves on her body seems meant to underscore the reality of their grief. In Shakespeare's poem it is Brutus who, "burying in Lucrece' wound his folly's show" (1. 1810), sees the way to move from the appearance of grief to the reality of grief expressed, restrained, and ultimately transcended by resolution and then action. The way along this road has been pointed by Lucrece; Seneca reminds us that "to Brutus we owe liberty, to Lucretia we owe Brutus."15
IX
Shakespeare's Lucrece is not a passive, wronged woman, then, but a powerful person who resists evil with an act that leads to the overthrow of a long line of tyrannous kings and the establishment of representative government in Rome. Shakespeare's treatment of Lucrece sets him apart from his contemporaries as surely as do his explorations of other human dilemmas in his sonnets and plays. In their versions of Lucrece's story, Thomas Heywood16 and Thomas Middleton17 are not at all concerned with the moral and psychological consequences of Tarquin's rape of Lucrece. The character of Lucrece is not much more than a symbol in Heywood's play, and her rape is reduced, by Middleton as well as by Heywood, to a metaphor for the license and corruption which permeated the political state of Rome under the Tarquins (and, by implication, Elizabethan England).
Shakespeare also deviates radically from the assumptions about women and morality which underlie other "complaints" of the period. Complaints of fallen women, of which Lucrece is considered an example, are related to the ghost-complaints of The Mirrourfor Magistrates and were very popular in the 1590s.18 In the complaints by Shakespeare's contemporaries, like Thomas Lodge's complaint of Elstred, Anthony Chute's Beauty Dishonoured, about Jane Shore, and Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamund, women are assumed to be especially susceptible to sin. As they are physically weak, so they are morally weak and likely to fall, so much so that Giles Fletcher scorned his fellow poets who thought it worthwhile "To write of women and of women's falls, / Who are too light for to be fortune's balls."19 Women are subject to temptation because of their beauty, and they are likely to yield to temptation because they aspire to fame and fortune. Like The Mirrourfor Magistrates poems, these complaints have a didactic function, warning women that, in spite of the sympathy aroused by their beauty and vulnerability, they will be punished for their sins. The fallen women themselves hope to serve as examples so that other women will be wary of the errors to which their sex inclines them.
Women in these poems do not have dilemmas like Lucrece's: they follow their desires, they sin, and they are punished. Since their sins are inevitable, they do not raise any questions for the women themselves or for the poets who tell their stories. The Lucrece of Heywood and Middleton and the women in other Elizabethan complaints could not resolve a moral dilemma if they were imagined to have one. Rosamund, Jane Shore, and Elstred do not grapple with moral abstractions: they complain. They appeal to poets to tell their stories so that their tragic fates will be remembered with compassion as well as dread. These women cannot discuss and debate moral issues because they have no choices, no power over themselves or others.
Shakespeare's Lucrece, on the other hand, is complex and powerful. She confronts a moral dilemma, exploring the meaning of chastity and its connection to personal honor and integrity. She takes responsibility for her fallen state and resolves her dilemma through an act that restores both personal and social harmony. Within the terms set by Shakespeare's poem, Lucrece's suicide is a positive, constructive, and self-creative act.
Notes
1 St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), I, xix, 83-91.
2D. C. Allen, "Some Observations on 'The Rape of Lucrece,'" Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 89-98.
3 A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 167-85.
4 Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 3-41.
5 Coppélia Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 45-72.
6 Bickford Sylvester, "Natural Mutability and Human Responsibility: Form in Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" College English, 26 (1965), 505-11.
7 Jerome A. Kramer and Judith Kaminsky, "'These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold': Structure in The Rape of Lucrece," Mosaic, 10 (1977), 143-55.
8 Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 113-17.
9 All citations from Lucrece are taken from the Arden edition of The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960).
10 In the sources of Lucrece—Ovid's Fasti, Livy's History of Rome, and Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women—the relevant sections of which are appended to the Arden edition of The Poems, and in the Argument which precedes the poem, Collatine, Tarquin, and the other noblemen suddenly return from Ardea to Rome to test the virtue of their wives. Seeing Collatine's wife, who exceeds the others in virtue, Tarquin, in the words of the Argument, is "inflamed with Lucrece's beauty." For a discussion of Shakespeare's sources, see T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 97-153.
11 In "The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA, 76 (1961), 480-87, Harold Walley discusses Lucrece's lamentations as explorations of questions central to Shakespeare's developing sense of tragedy.
12 A recent study by S. Clark Hulse, "'A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 13-22, illuminates the Troy-painting by considering Shakespeare's use of ecphrasis.
13 Coppélia Kahn, p. 67.
14 This point is made by Goeffrey Bullough in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), 182.
15 Seneca, Moral Essays, V.II, trans, John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 49.
16 Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece, ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950).
17 Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937).
18 Hallett Smith, pp. 102-26.
19 For a discussion of Fletcher and, the complaint tradition see Hallett Smith, "A Woman Killed With Kindness," PMLA, 53 (1938), 145.
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