SOURCE: "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen, 1985, pp. 95-115.

[Below, Vickers examines the rhetoric of The Rape of Lucrece as depicting male political struggles enacted on the female body.]

When, in Sonnet 106, Shakespeare's speaker alludes to "the blazon of sweet beauty's best" (5) he identifies "blazon" with "descriptions of the fairest wights" (2), with poetic portraits "in praise of ladies dead and lovely knights" (4).' He then goes on to qualify "blazon," to suggest that it is an outdated poetic mode standing in contrast to a present, paradoxically silent, one: "For we which now behold these present days / Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise" (13-14). The term "blazon" derives both from the French blasonner and from the English "to blaze" ("to proclaim as with a trumpet, to publish, and, by extension, to defame or celebrate").² Its usage was firmly rooted in two specific descriptive traditions, the one heraldic and the other poetic. A blazon was, first, a conventional heraldic description of a shield, and, second, a conventional poetic description of an object praised or blamed by a rhetorician-poet. The most celebrated examples of French poetic blazon were the Blasons anatomiques du corps femenin (1543), a collective work in which each poem praised a separate part of the female body, each poet literally spoke either "of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye," or "of brow" (6). Within the English tradition, poetic blazon typically consisted of a catalogue listing each of these particular beauties, their sum constituting an exquisite, if none the less troubling, totality; their rhetoric inscribing them in a Petrarchan world of "ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection."³ Shakespeare's speaker implies that blazon's inventory of fragmented and reified parts—a strategy in some senses inherent to any descriptive project but, in its exaggerated form, characteristic of Petrarch and the Petrarchans—falls short of re-presenting present beauty: "I see their antique pen would have express'd/Even such a beauty as you master now" (7-8, my italics): "They had not skill enough your worth to sing" (12).⁴ Before a new manifestation of "sweet beauty's best," either a new language of descriptive praise must be invented or a new awareness of the celebratory power of silence acknowledged.

This essay looks not to what that new descriptive language might be, but rather centers on reading the old language of blazon, on examining the limits—indeed the dangers—o f that inherited, insufficient, descriptive rhetoric. It centers therefore on a narrative, Lucrece (1594), that is set in motion by a descriptive occasion, by a competition between husbands each blazoning his wife. By situating blazon within a story, Shakespeare's narrative provides a locus for reading this specific mode of description not as isolated icon, but rather as motivated discourse positioned within a specific context that produces and consumes it. Lucrece thus reveals the rhetorical strategies that descriptive occasions generate, and underlines the potential consequences of being female matter for male oratory. The canonical legacy of description in praise of beauty is, after all, a legacy shaped predominantly by the male imagination for the male imagination; it is, in large part, the product of men talking to men about women. In Lucrece, occasion, rhetoric, and result are all informed by, and thus inscribe, a battle between men that is first figuratively and then literally fought on the fields of woman's "celebrated" body. Here, metaphors commonly read as signs of a battle between the sexes emerge rather from a homosocial struggle, in this case a male rivalry, which positions a third (female) term in a median space from which it is initially used and finally eliminated.⁵ The plotting of such a "libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy" of description then permits speculation as to how descriptive rhetoric, to cite Hélène Cixous, has "more than confiscated" woman's body, has turned her into "the uncanny stranger on display."6

"To display"—from the Latin displicare (to scatter and, later, to unfold as in unfolding a banner to view)—is "to spread something out, to exhibit it to be seen, and, by extension, to exhibit it ostentatiously." In the "display of heraldry" it signifies "to lay or place a human or animal form with the limbs extended"; in the "display of rhetoric," "to set forth in representation, to depict, to describe." Description, then, is a gesture of display, a separating off and a signaling of particulars destined to make visible that which is described. Its object or matter is thus submitted to a double powerrelation inherent in the gesture itself: on the one hand, the describer controls, possesses, and uses that matter to his own ends; and, on the other, his reader/listener is extended the privilege or pleasure of "seeing." In Sonnet 102, Shakespeare's speaker initially argues that he loves "not less" though he may "less the show appear" (2) and then elaborates: "That love is merchandiz'd whose rich esteeming/The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere" (3-4). The speaker, in contrast, resists the ornaments of hyperbolic praise so as not to "dull" (both "to bore" and "to diminish") his beloved with fashionable, common verse. By rejecting the mode of blazon, the display of "the fairest wights" through the itemization of their ideal parts and the equation of those parts to "all things rare" (Sonnet 21, 1.7), he would avoid the trap of "proud compare" (Sonnet 21, 1.5); he would resist the temptation to confer divine properties on mortal flesh, to convert "heaven itself into a rhetorical "ornament" (Sonnet 21, 1.3). Sonnet 130, in enumerating examples of what it calls "false compare" (14), once more refuses each element of the descriptive code rejected in Sonnet 21; and it too reserves a privileged status for a misguided simile of the heavenly category: "My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun" (1). Shakespeare's speaker, who, "true in love," would "truly write" (Sonnet 21, 1.9), thus challenges typically Petrarchan description on at least two related levels: first, he argues, its hyperbolic display implies a boast; and second, the extravagance of that boast implies a lie. Were one to take Petrarch and his followers at their word, the motives of their rhetoric would at the very least seem questionable: "I will not praise," writes the poet-critic, "that purpose not to sell" (Sonnet 21, 1.14).

By introducing the concept of merchandizing into the economy of description, Shakespeare's speaker, moreover, transforms the direct line one would expect to unite lover and beloved into a triangle. Here a lyric "I" does not privately speak to a lyric "you" but rather, by "publishing" his love, interjects a third term: "I" speaks "you" to an audience that, it is hoped, will in turn purchase "you." The relationship so constructed involves an active buyer, an active seller, and a passive object for sale. Within this context it is only logical that canonical descriptions of "you," descriptions characterized as embedded in the hyperbolic language of salesmanship, would be wholly inappropriate to one who "truly loves" either an anti-Petrarchan "dark lady" or an anti-Petrarchan "master mistress." For, on the one hand, unless "I" intends to give or to sell "you," which he does not, any indulgence in false or proud comparison in the presence of a third person dangerously flirts with theft; it is a foolish miscalculation. And, on the other, any "seller's praise" does violence to "you" in that it converts "you" into an object, albeit precious, of exchange. The violent nature of such an appropriation, moreover, is all the more effectively unmasked when a male "I" celebrates a male "you," for the male beloved is thus incongruously placed in a "normalized" female position, that of a commodity in the traffic between men.⁷

It is not surprising, then, that in his figuration of an "other" voice, a voice not actively engaged in buying or selling, the speaker would turn to the silenced voice of the "Other," to Philomela: "Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue,/Because I would not dull you with my song" (Sonnet 102, II. 13-14). Although referring to a Philomela already metamorphosed into a nightingale, into a bird that sings in the spring but not in the summer night when the "wild music" of other birds "burthens every bough" (11), the speaker none the less acknowledges the pathos of her preceding story: her songs are "mournful hymns" (10). For Philomela, a raped and mutilated woman, has no tongue to hold; it was cut out by her rapist so that she could not speak in blame. The "speech" of Philomela, then, as Patricia Joplin has brilliantly argued, is a speech lost to the violence inherent in the traffic in women, a speech to be painfully reconstituted through the "voice of the shuttle."⁸ It is not without irony, then, that here a male speaker appropriates that voice in a maneuver that is, at least at some level, a strategy of winning favor within the world of men. It is through his humble silence, his modest rhetoric, that he would set himself apart from other male speakers, that he would triumph over the flock of Petrarchan versifiers. Anxiously confronting the impoverished language of praise and its troubling implications, the speaker who would be different confronts the threat of his own inarticulateness by espousing the female figure of silencing, the violated voice of the raped woman.

Lucrece opens as Tarquin, the son of a usurper king, leaves the Roman military encampment outside of the city of Ardea. His hasty departure was inspired, the narrator hypothesizes, by Collatine's laudatory description of his wife, Lucrece. A relative, friend, and fellow soldier of Collatine, Tarquin has determined that he must possess his comrade's chaste and beautiful wife. When he arrives at Collatium, Lucrece welcomes him and provides him with lodging. During the night he rapes her and leaves. Lucrece's grief takes the form of a series of laments and a lengthy meditation on a "skilful painting" (1387) of the fall of Troy in which she seeks an image sufficient to mirror her suffering. She sends for Collatine, and, when he and his men arrive, she tells them about the rape, swears them to revenge, names the rapist, and commits suicide. Brutus seizes the moment to call for the banishment of Tarquin, and, inspired by the display of Lucrece's body, the Romans consent. Indeed, Roman history recounts their reaction as a revolt: they overthrow the government of Tarquin's father, and replace a monarchy with a republic. Collatine and Brutus, notably, are its first consuls. Shakespeare's poem is clearly divided by the rape: in the first half, the motives and meditations of the rapist dominate; in the second, the lamentations of the victim. Both place lengthy descriptions in the foreground; but the first, where the extensive blazons of Lucrece appear, constitutes the textual ground of this study.

The initiating event in Lucrece is a contest. The poem's opening focus is on "lust-breathed Tarquin" (3) as he speeds away from the Roman camp; but within the space of one stanza that focus shifts to present a flashback revealing the origins of his uncontrollable desire:

Haply that name of "chaste" unhapp'iy set
This bateless edge on his keen appetite,
When Collatine unwisely did not let
To praise the clear unmatched red and white
Which triumphed in that sky of his delight;
Where mortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties,
With pure aspects did him peculiar duties.

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. . . .

Perchance his boast of Lucrece' sov'reignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king;
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be.
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
His high-pitch'd thoughts, that meaner men should vaunt
That golden hap which their superiors want.

(8-21; 36-42)

Shakespeare locates the ultimate cause of Tarquin's crime, and Lucrece's subsequent suicide, in an evening's entertainment. The prose "Argument" that precedes the poem adds further clarification: "In their discourses after supper everyone commended the virtues of his own wife; among whom Collatinus extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia."⁹ The prose next narrates an event that Shakespeare significantly writes out of the poetry: the competitors ride from Ardea to Rome to test their wives and, with the exception of Lucrece, all are "found dancing and revelling, or in several disports." It is for this reason that "the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame." The "Argument," in contrast to the poem, then, remains faithful to Shakespeare's two principal sources, Ovid and Livy.

Young Tarquin entertained his comrades with feast and wine:. . . Each praised his wife: in their eagerness dispute ran high, and every tongue and heart grew hot with deep draughts of wine. Then up and spake the man who from Collatia took his famous name: No need of words! Trust deeds!

(Ovid, Fasti, II, 725-6; 731-4)¹⁰

The young princes for their part passed their idle hours together at dinners and drinking bouts. It chanced, as they were drinking . . . that the subject of wives came up. Every man fell to praising his own wife with enthusiasm, and, as their rivalry grew hot, Collatinus said that there was no need to talk about it, for it was in their power to know . . . how far the rest were excelled by his own Lucretia.

(Livy, From the Founding of the City, I, lvii, 5-7)¹¹

Rereading Shakespeare's classical models reveals the radical way in which he transforms them.¹² The descriptive occasion remains the same—the light-hearted boasting contest—but the all-important test, ironically proposed by Collatine in both Ovid and Livy, has been eliminated. In Lucrece Collatine becomes a foolish orator, not an enemy of words but their champion. He who stops the descriptive speeches is now blamed for not knowing when to stop: "When Collatine unwisely did not let / To praise . . ."(10-11). Moreover, in both Latin sources the sight of Lucrece inflames Tarquin's passion; in Lucrece he sets off for Collatium without having seen her. The result, then, of this rewriting is a heightened insistence on the power of description, on the dangers inherent in descriptive occasions. Here, Collatine's rhetoric, not Lucrece's behavior, wins over his companions; Collatine's rhetoric, not Lucrece's beauty, prompts Tarquin's departure.

What transpires in Tarquin's tent, then, is an afterdinner conversation during which, in a "pleasant humour" ("Argument"), his warrior guests divert each other through a contest of epideictic oratory, oratory intended to persuade, in this case, through hyperbolic praise of its female subject.¹³ Shakespeare's soldiers present "discourses" ("Argument"), and his narrator characterizes them as orators (30). Collatine is labeled a "publisher" of his possession (33), his descriptive speech is called a "boast" (36), and his rhetoric is thus specifically in the mode of competitive "blazon." A similar context, the one that sets in motion the plot of narrowly averted rape in Cymbeline, provides, I think, clues to reading the rhetoric of the initiating event of Lucrece:

It was much like an argument that fell out last night, where each of us fell in praise of our country mistresses; this gentleman at that time vouching (and upon warrant of bloody affirmation) his to be more fair, virtuous, wise, chaste, constant, qualified and less attemptable than any the rarest of our ladies in France.

(Cymbeline, I.v.53-9)

This recollection of two previous boasting contests predictably prompts still another, and from that final one evolves the wager that sends lachimo to test the honor of Imogen. At the end of the play, when a repentant lachimo reflects back on the evening of feasting and oratory that led him astray, he recalls how Posthumus was drawn into the competition by hearing other guests "praise [their] loves of Italy / For beauty, that made barren the swell's boast / Of him that best could speak" (V.v.161-3). It was then that Posthumus picked up the oratorical challenge and began "His mistress' picture, which, by his tongue, being made" (V.v.175), proved the others "unspeaking sots" (V.v.178). lachimo confesses that he "made scruple" of Posthumus's praise, and for that reason "wager'd with him" (V.v.182).

Returning to Cymbeline, I.v, lachimo's making "scruple" of Posthumus's praise takes the form of a debate about the colors of rhetorical ornamentation, about the terms of acceptable versus "proud compare." lachimo elaborates:

If she went before others I have seen, as that diamond of yours outlustres many I have beheld, I could not but believe she excelled many: but I have not seen the most precious diamond that is, nor you the lady.

(Cymbeline, I.v.69-73)

Posthumus's justification of his use of the superlative ("I prais'd her as I rated her: so do I my stone" (I.v.74)) underlines an emerging reification of Imogen, a reification implicating one of the most conventional Petrarchan conceits—beautiful eyes framed by blond hair are diamonds set in gold. Imogen's position becomes that of a splendid jewel placed between buyer and seller. Shakespeare's scene, after all, is a gentlemanly transposition of what is an after-dinner conversation among merchants in the Decameron; it is, at some level, a descent into shop talk. Although Posthumus rejects the vocabulary of merchandizing ("the one may be sold or given. . . . The other is not a thing for sale, and only the gift of the gods" (I.v.79-82)), he none the less unwisely engages in it through his own prideful rhetoric.¹⁴ When lachimo responds that the very notion of a perfect woman, like that of a perfect jewel, invites theft, he challenges the judgment of the describer, he questions the wisdom of describing. The narrator of Lucrece explicitly poses that same question:

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?

(29-35)

Collatine, of course, is not content to enjoy his "treasure" (16), his "priceless wealth" (17), his "fortune" (19) in silence since, within the economy of a competition, wealth is not wealth unless flaunted, unless inspiring envy, unless affirming superiority. Collatine's descriptive gesture, then, entails a risk inherent in the gesture itself: he generates description, he opens Lucrece up for display, in order to inspire jealousy; and jealousy, once inspired, may be carried to its logical conclusion—theft. Indeed Shakespeare's narrator specifically casts Tarquin's desire for Lucrece as desire for lucre:¹⁵

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,
Of gaining more, the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,
That they prove bankrout in this poor rich gain.

(134-40)

Before the rape Tarquin wonders "What win I if I gain the thing I seek?" (211); after, Lucrece declares herself, and thus Collatine, "robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft" (838). The cause of the rape ("the act of taking anything by force, violent seizure (of goods), robbery, and, after 1481, violation of a woman") is precisely that Collatine's self-serving oratory has fallen on "thievish" rather than passive, but none the less envious, ears. As Catherine Stimpson points out, "men rape what other men possess."¹⁶ Tarquin's family has recently assumed power and is thus "espoused to more fame" (20), but it is Collatine who claims the "peerless dame" (21). In that Lucrece is "peerless," is "so rich a thing, / Braving compare" (39-40), she would seem destined for royal possession: "Her peerless feature, joined with her birth, / Approves her fit for none but for a king" (I Henry VI, V.v.68-9). In the play of power between Tarquin and Collatine, at least for the privileged duration of this after-dinner sport, Collatine has carried the day—or, rather, the evening—by usurping royal prerogative. Description within a like context clearly serves the describer and not the described; extravagant praise of Lucrece is more precisely praise of Collatine, be it as proud possessor or as proud rhetorician. The rapist is indeed the villain of the piece, but the instigation of this particular villainy is more correctly located along the fine line walked by the boaster. Rape is the price Lucrece pays for having been described.

The matter for Collatine's rhetoric, the argument suggests, is Lucrece's chastity; the poem, however, progressively shifts its reader's perspective. Although virtue is always at issue, it soon competes with beauty for the distinction of being Lucrece's most appreciable quality. By the time of the rape Tarquin considers only "beauty" to be his "prize" (279); he tells Lucrece, "Thy beauty hath ensnar'd thee to this night" (485). Beauty, we know, does not need the embellishments of an orator: "Beauty itself doth of itself persuade" (29). It "excels the quirks of blazoning pens," and is sufficiently persuasive "in the essential vesture of creation" (Othello, II.i.63-4). And still in Tarquin's tent it seems that Collatine called upon all the conceits of descriptive convention to outdo his comrades at arms:

When Collatine unwisely did not let
To praise the clear unmatched red and white
Which triumph'd in that sky of his delight;
Where mortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties,
With pure aspects did him peculiar duties.

(10-14)

The body Collatine praised, the narrator tells us, is a partial body, a face; its distinctive features are the conventional colors of its flesh and the brightness of its eyes. Collatine's description depends, moreover, on a well-worn Petrarchan conceit: the lady's face is a clear sky; her eyes, its stars. It should be noted that this specific conceit dominates the discarded descriptive mode of Sonnet 21, where the speaker rejects the use of "heav'n itself for ornament" (3). The problem, thus, seems to reside in the unacceptable boast, the coupling of what is mortal to what is heavenly, that determines the line: "Where mortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties" (13, my italics). By the time the reader, like Tarquin, first "sees" Lucrece, the stage has been set for a repeat performance of a now familiar rhetorical portrait:

When at Collatium this false lord [Tarquin] arrived,
Well was he welcom'd by the Roman dame [Lucrece],
Within whose face beauty and virtue strived
Which of them both should underprop her fame.
When virtue bragg'd, beauty would blush for shame;
When beauty boasted blushes, in despite
Virtue would stain that o'er with silver white.

But beauty in that white entituled
From Venus' doves, doth challenge that fair field;
Then virtue claims from beauty beauty's red,
Which virtue gave the golden age to gild
Their silver cheeks, and call'd it then their shield;
Teaching them thus to use it in the fight,
When shame assail'd, the red should fence the white.

This heraldry in Lucrece' face was seen,
Argu'd by beauty's red and virtue's white;
Of either's colour was the other queen,
Proving from world's minority their right.
Yet their ambition makes them still to fight;
The sov'reignty of either being so great,
That oft they interchange each other's seat. . . .

Now thinks he that her husband's shallow tongue,—
The niggard prodigal that prais'd her so,—
In that high task hath done her beauty wrong,
Which far exceeds his barren skill to show.
Therefore that praise which Collatine doth owe
Enchanted Tarquin answers with surmise,
In silent wonder of still-gazing eyes.

(50-70; 78-84)

In the presence of the "silent war of lilies and of roses"(71) in Lucrece's "fair face's field" (72), Tarquin stands awestruck, frozen. And yet his mind is filled with Collatine's evening oratory; before a real, as opposed to a rhetorical, beauty his thoughts tellingly return to an assessment of the paradoxes inherent in Collatine's speech. Tarquin mentally characterizes the previous blazon of Lucrece as an expression of both a prideful need to possess and a foolish propensity to squander. For Collatine, an orator whose skill is barren, had lavished "poor rich" praise through a catalogue of overblown clichés, rich in exaggeration but poor before the splendor of their subject; Tarquin, at least momentarily, has "eyes to wonder" but lacks a tongue "to praise" (Sonnet 106, 1. 14).

More important, however, when the reader "sees" what Tarquin sees, that spectacle proves to be little more than a heraldic amplification of one element of Collatine's description, an amplification operated through the introduction of a conceit that literalizes the rivalry already prefigured in the narrator's synopsis (her "unmatched red and white . . . triumph'd" (11-12)). Lucrece's face becomes an animated shield colored in alternating red and white. Collatine's original praise was "unwise" to dilate or expand upon that coloration, and yet here her milky complexion and rosy blush fill four stanzas. Shakespeare's narrator, it appears, would outdo Collatine in rhetorical copia. His strategy, of course, is not a new one: the original blasonneurs, each outdoing the others by displaying his part of woman's body, repeatedly employed the body/shield metaphor. In Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, 13, Astrophtl praised Stella by inventing a competition among male gods as to "whose armes the fairest were" (2): Cupid won, "for on his crest there Vies/Stella's faire haire, her face he makes his shield" (10).¹⁷ The narrator of Lucrece, claiming his own poetic status through a dazzling blazon, paints his subject in the colors of heraldic terminology. Lucrece's face becomes a red and white ground or field (its "colours") bearing stars (its "charges") on the surface. The imagistic network thus set in motion figures Lucrece's beauty throughout the poem.

In Tudor England, coats of arms held "an immense and imposing place in everyday life."¹⁸ The term "armes," John Guillim advised, had to be understood "in a metaphoricall sense" since heraldic "arms" assumed that name "by way of a figure called Metonymia subiecti" from "martiall instruments."¹⁹ With the introduction of gunpowder, shields were less and less the practical gear of the warrior. They remained his emblem, however, and figured in nostalgically chivalric court entertainments; in pageants, tilts, and tourneys; and in a variety of decorative contexts, where they displayed the symbolic marks of gentlemanly pedigree. Guillim notes their double function: on the one hand, "they doe delight the beholder, and greatly grace and beautifie" the people and places they adorn; and, on the other, they signify personal status by identifying the owner's property and ancestry.²⁰ Coats of arms displayed the "precious gem" of honor by marking the distinction between the "gentle" and the "ungentle," the "difference twixt the Lord and Page."²¹ Their complex system of charges and colors served also to make further distinctions: only monarchs, for example, could display the sun on their coat; only knights ennobled by monarchs could display precious stones. To confuse the correspondence of symbol to social status was forbidden, "for that it [was] a thing unfitting, either to handle a meane argument in a loffie stile, or a stately argument in a meane."²² Family arms, name and property—in many senses coextensive—were bound within a patriarchal system of entitlement: "It was the male line whose ancestry was traced so diligently by the genealogists and heralds, and in almost all cases via the male line that titles were inherited."²³ The "name of the house" could not be preserved by a woman since, once married, she took her "denomination" and her "colors" from her husband. Lucrece's face, then, is not her shield, but rather her husband's: "Collatine," she says, "thine honour lay in me" (834)²⁴.

Read as a martial image, Lucrece's body as shield stands between Tarquin and Collatine to deflect blows, to prevent direct hits; read as a heraldic image, that same body is the medium assuring the passage of Collatium from father to as yet unborn son. Once raped, a polluted medium threatens the family with "nameless bastardy" (522).²⁵ Tarquin's crime, in essence the wearing of another man's coat of arms, was, according to Gerard Leigh, not only punishable by death in the England of the 1590s but also by attaintment. The marking or scarring of a shield for behavior so scandalous as to contaminate the honor of an entire family, attaintment was prescribed for a variety of crimes, not only for the defiling of a "maid, wife, or widow" but also for "too much boasting" of oneself in "manhood and martial acts."²⁶ Clearly, "Honour and beauty in the owner's arms, / Are weakly fortress'd from a world of harms" (27-8), when those arms are "unwisely" displayed, are made vulnerable to usurpation. The form the narrator's description of Lucrece assumes, moreover, makes plain the implications of the metaphor upon which it depends: here metaphor re-enacts the descriptive scene which narrative has just recounted. What we read in Lucrece's face is the story of a competition that, although between allegorical queens, is entirely cast in the vocabulary of gentlemanly combat: first, beauty and virtue strive for predominance ("virtue bragg'd" (54) and "beauty boasted" (55)); then, moving to territorially figured counter-claims for the right to display the other's colors, they shift ground to a field where the "red should fence the white" (63); and finally skirmish becomes serious as two ambitious warriors confront each other, "The sov'reignty of either being so great, / That oft they interchange each other's seat" (69-70). Indeed, Tarquin advances toward Lucrece "like a foul usurper" who plots "from this fair throne to heave the owner out" (412-13). The embattled tale inscribed in Lucrece's face is, then, the tale of Lucrece: it proceeds from a boasting match (as in Tarquin's tent), to a claim for the opponent's "field" and "colors" (as we will see in the rape), to an exchange of sovereignty (as will follow the action of the poem).

Lucrece is fully blazoned only when Tarquin approaches her bed.²⁷ He draws back the curtain, and his eyes begin "to wink, being blinded with a greater light" (375): the beauty of Lucrece "dazzleth" (377) her spectator into a state of suspended contemplation. The narrator describes Lucrece's body part by part, through a series of rhetorically highlighted "couplements" (flesh like an April daisy, hair like golden threads, and so on). Although his description introduces new colors, it opens and closes with variations of Collatine's "red and white": "Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under" (386); "Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin" (420)²⁸. Tarquin's initial assault, in the form of a touch, awakens Lucrece, and he tellingly explains his presence by evoking not what he has just seen with his eyes (her hands, her hair, her breasts), but rather what he had previously "seen" with his ears:

First like a trumpet doth his tongue begin
To sound a parley to his heartless foe, . . .

But she with vehement prayers urgeth still
Under what colour he commits this ill.

Thus he replies: "The colour in thy face,
That even for anger makes the lily pale
And the red rose blush at her own disgrace,
Shall plead for me and tell my loving tale.
Under that colour am I come to scale
Thy never-conquer'd fort: the fault is thine,
For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine.

(470-1; 475-83)

Tarquin would persuade Lucrece with flattery. Indeed, taken out of the context of a rape, his language is that conventional to "loving tales": he celebrates her complexion; he represents her as a virtuously unassailable fortress; he praises the irresistible beauty of her eyes.

Tarquin goes on to define two moments in which Lucrece's beauty has acted upon him: first the moment in which her described beauty destined her to be raped; and second the moment, after his period of self-questioning, in which her perceived beauty reinforced his conviction. It is clear, however, that the determining moment is the first: in Lucrece vision is shaped by description. The rapist returns obsessively to the narrator's five-line synopsis of Collatine's winning blazon; he locates motive in that initial fragmentary portrait; he speaks to his victim only of the bright eyes that "charge" and of the red and white that "colour" her shield. Although Tarquin assigns responsibility to Lucrece ("the fault is thine" (482)), his rhetoric of praise reveals its agonistic subtext. Indeed, his descriptive strategies literally repeat those of Collatine: he moves from Lucrece's complexion to her eyes; his final line ("For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine" (483)) usurps the "peculiar duties" (14) of Collatine's conclusion.

In addition, Tarquin's pun on the word "colour"—a word that appears more often in Lucrece than in any other Shakespearean text—signals the rhetorical origins of the crime. Lucrece asks under what "colour" (pretext) he commits "this ill" (476), and he responds that the color in her face will serve as orator to justify his action, that under that color he rapes her. This wordplay is not new to Tarquin; he has already used it in his self-vindicating soliloquy:

O how her fear did make her colour rise!
First red as roses that on lawn we lay,
Then white as lawn, the roses took away. . . .

Why hunt I then for colour or excuses?
All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth.

(257-9; 267-8)

Semantic play here depends upon the sixteenth-century possibilities of the term "colour": the "colours" of Lucrece's flesh (the red and white of her face) are indistinguishable from the "colours" of heraldry (the symbolic colors on the shield that is her face) which, in turn, are indistinguishable from the "colors" of Collatine's rhetoric (the embellishing figures that fatally represent that face). Here body, shield, and rhetoric become one.

After the rape, the "heraldry in Lucrece' face" is transformed: she perceives herself as marked or tainted²⁹; her face wears "sorrow's livery" (1222). Her maid wonders but dares not ask, "Why her two suns were cloud-eclipsed so, / Nor why her fair cheeks overwash'd with woe" (1224-5). When Collatine arrives, he stares "amazedly" at "her sad face" (1591), at "her lively colour kill'd with deadly cares" (1593), and asks, tellingly, "what spite hath [her] fair colour spent"(1600). The double implication of the verb "to spend," meaning also "to speak," points to the irony of Collatine's question; for in spending (speaking) her "fair colour" he has also spent (wasted or consumed) it. At the sight of Lucrece's suicide, Collatine and his men stand "stone-still, astonish'd with this deadly deed"(1730). As the color pours out of her body, her father and her husband compete for possession of the corpse: "Then one doth call her his, the other his, / Yet neither may possess the claim they lay" (1793-4).³⁰ Her father laments the loss of that "fair fresh mirror" that revealed in its complexion (its red and white) the blush of his youth: "O from thy cheeks my image thou hast torn" (1762). Her husband, "the hopeless merchant of this loss" (1660), "bathes the pale fear in his face" (white) (1775) in Lucrece's "bleeding stream" (red, now tainted with black) (1774) and then, significantly, fails to make rhetoric of his experience:

The deep vexation of his inward soul
Hath serv'd a dumb arrest upon his tongue;
Who, mad that sorrow should his use control
Or keep him from heart-easing words so long,
Begins to talk; but through his lips do throng
Weak words, so thick come in his poor heart's aid
That no man could distinguish what he said.

(1779-85)

Shakespeare's poem closes as it opened, as men rhetorically compete with each other over Lucrece's body. Now that the victorious orator has been rendered incomprehensible, another takes over with a call to revenge. The events that begin in a playful rhetoric of praise end in a serious rhetoric of blame. Lucrece, then, is clearly "about the rhetoric of display, about the motives of eloquence,"³¹ but what is "displayed" at each privileged moment is the woman's body raped at the narrative's center. When the warriors move "To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence" (1851-2), display of Lucrece in death parallels display of Lucrece in life: the bloodiness and pallor of her corpse stand as a sign of Tarquin's dishonor, just as her "unmatched red and white" stood as a sign of Collatine's honor.

Lucrece is rare among Shakespeare's texts in that it is dedicated: "Lucrece: To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titch-field." Its dedicatory epistle predictably expresses devotion to a young dedicatee suggestively identified, by some, as the young "master mistress" of the Sonnets. The epistle suggests that the poet's "untutored lines" are hardly worthy of their noble patron, and yet Shakespeare's lines are anything but "untutored." Indeed, Lucrece is a masterpiece, that is, a piece "made by an artist to prove he is a master."³² The closing of the London theaters in the early 1590s compelled young playwrights to impose themselves as masters of alternative genres; patrons, like Southampton, had to be courted and rival poets, like those evoked in the Sonnets, conquered. The glossy rhetorical surface of Lucrece—the insistent foregrounding of "display pieces" that has prompted so much critical praise and blame³³—serves above all to demonstrate the prowess of the poet. And it is in this sense that Shakespeare moves in two directions at once: he dramatically calls into question descriptive fashion while amply demonstrating that he controls it.³⁴ Entered like Collatine in a contest of skill, Shakespeare's encomium of Lucrece—his publication of Lucrece—stands as a shield, as an artfully constructed sign of identity, as a proof of excellence.

When, in his Accedence of Armorie, Gerard Leigh enumerates the nine "sundry fashions" of shields, he begins with the "firste, and ancients of all others."³⁵ The source for this postulation of origin, we are told, is to be found in "the Poets" who tell of the transformation of an exquisitely beautiful woman, Medusa, into an "ouglie, monstrous shape."³⁶ Medusa figures in two contexts as a face on a shield: first, Perseus uses a shield to reflect her image and thus to enable him to decapitate her either by avoiding the need to look at her directly or by stupefying her with the sight of her own reflection; and second, when the battles of Perseus are done and Medusa's head is no longer needed to petrify male rivals, he gives it to Athena, who bears it on her shield, a shield in turn copied by later warriors. It is the latter shield, the Gorgon-bearing shield of Athena, "godesse of Herehaughts [heralds],"³⁷ that Leigh goes on to describe as follows:

this targe of the celestial goddes sheweth thincestious life and filthy act committed by Medusa daughter to King Phorcius, who spared not a publique place for holy rites. Ye the sacred Temple of Minerva to practise her filthy lust, with that same godde Neptune, wherof as she openly fled the discipline of womanly shamfastnes, she was by the godes decree for hir so foule a fault, bereft of all dame Bewties shape, with every comely ornament of Natures decking. The glyding eye framed to fancies amorous lust, turned was to wan and deadlie beholding. And for those golden and crisped lockes, rose fowle and hideous serpents . . . Thus everie seemelie gifte transformed into loathsome annoiance, of a beautiful Queene, is made a beastlie monster, horrible to mankinde, a mirror for Venus minions.³⁸

Leigh, writing during the reign of a "most gorgious and bewtifull" virgin queen,³⁹ reports the story of Medusa as a moral tale, as a lesson about the dangers of straying from "womanly shamfastnes" and, by implication, of frequenting women who do. Gifted with every "comely ornament" of conventional Petrarchan beauty—bright eyes, curly golden hair—Medusa's fair face's field is metamorphosed in the name of punishment for a sin Leigh elsewhere refers to as an "adulterie."⁴⁰ The Gorgon's face, then, stands as the reverse of Lucrece's face, and the act defining that difference, in Leigh's rendition, would seem to be any unlawful expression of female sexuality.

The report Leigh makes of Medusa is, of course, precisely the report Lucrece most fears for herself: her suicide is specifically motivated by a desire not to be matter for epideictic orators who might speak in blame or for "feast-finding minstrels" who might win profit by "tuning [her] defame" (815-19). Her dramatic refusal to live is, in part, a refusal to encourage wantonness in women. And yet what is strikingly coincident in the narratives of both Medusa and Lucrece is the determining presence of a rape. For, at least in Ovid's most familiar account, Medusa too is not only a paragon of beauty but also a victim of violation:

 she both in comly port
And beautie, every other wight surmounted in such sort,
That many suters unto hir did earnestly resort.
And though that whole from top to toe most bewtifull she were,
In all hir bodie was no part more goodly than hir heare.
I know some parties yet alive, that say they did her see.
It is reported how she should abusde by Neptune bee
In Pallas Church.⁴¹

Rape, according to Ovid, is the price Medusa pays for being "beauty's best"; monstrousness, the price for having been raped. But the line separating idealization from denigration, beauty from the beast, is marked here by a male, not a female, gesture of violation.

"Medusa," wrote the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati, "is artful eloquence."⁴² Salutati explained his suggestive identification of a beautiful/monstrous woman's face with artful speech by elaborating a false etymology, one that depends upon reading the name of Medusa's father, Forcus, as derived from the Latin for ("to speak"). And yet the pairing of Medusa with eloquence appears not only in the work of Salutati, but also in a privileged classical source. During still another lighthearted male contest of both drinking and oratory, the Symposium, a flattering Socrates tells Agathon, the speaker who immediately precedes him, that he was held spellbound by the dazzling display of Agathon's speech. He compares Agathon to the master rhetorician Gorgias, and then permits himself a witty play on words: "I was afraid that when Agathon got near the end he would arm his speech against mine with the Gorgon's head of Gorgias' eloquence, and strike me as dumb as a stone" (198c).⁴³ As the woman's face that one carries into battle, that reduces eloquent rivals to silent stone, the apotropaic power of the "Gorgon's head of Gorgias' eloquence" resides in its ability to stupefy a male opponent: "Whatever the horror the Medusa represents to the male imagination," writes John Freccero, "it is in some sense a female horror. In mythology, the Medusa is said to be powerless against women, for it was her feminine beauty that constituted the mortal threat to her admirers."⁴⁴ And that threat is a threat of forgetting: "By Medusa he [Fulgentius] wants to signify oblivion (which is without doubt to signify rhetorically); by changing the states of mind of men, she makes them forget previous thoughts."⁴⁵

Shakespeare returns repeatedly to the dangers of falling victim to the manipulation of descriptive rhetoric about women: one need only think of Othello's vulnerability to Iago, or Posthumus's to Iachimo. More specifically, at the end of I Henry VI, the Earl of Suffolk outmaneuvers his king by displaying a Gorgon's head of gorgeous eloquence that makes his young monarch forget all former engagements: "Your wondrous rare description, noble Earl, / Of beauteous Margaret hath astonish 'd me" (V.v. 1-2, my italics). Suffolk protests that his praise has been but superficial:

The chief perfections of that lovely dame,
Had I sufficient skill to utter them,
Would make a volume of enticing lines,
Able to ravish any dull conceit;

(I Henry Vi, V.v. 12-15)

The play's concluding lines point to the disastrous consequences of both Suffolk's ample rhetorical skill and Henry's defenselessness before the "force of [his] report" (V.v.79). Suffolk momentarily prevails, and thus advances his plot to rule not only Margaret but, more importantly, "the King, and realm" (V.v. 108). Similarly, in the single stanza between the narrator's report of Collatine's descriptive blazon and the vision of Lucrece's face as shield, an astonished Tarquin speeds to Collatium, "His honour, his affairs, his friends, his state,/ Neglected all" (45-6). Suffolk's consciously motivated description, like Collatine's carelessly miscalculated boast, clearly stupefied the opposition; it functioned as did perfect shields "in such glorious and glittering manner, that they dazzled the eyes of the beholders."⁴⁶ Here rhetorical display and heraldic display seem of a like purpose; and here both turn upon a male figuration of a woman's face.

When in the final poem of the Rime Sparse, Petrarch's speaker turns toward the Virgin, that "solid shield of afflicted people" (366, 17), he simultaneously turns away from a Laura now recognized to be a Medusa: "Medusa and my error have made me a stone" (366, 111).⁴⁷ That same Laura had, of course, constituted the obsessive fixation of an entire "volume of enticing lines" informed by a specifically descriptive project: "Love, who first set free my tongue, wishes me to depict and show her to whoever did not see her, and therefore a thousand times he was vainly put to work wit, time, pens, papers, inks" (Rime Sparse, 309, 5-8). The poet's labor is vain only in the sense that verse will never successfully represent her; and yet each failure provokes another attempt; each fragmentary portrait, because fragmentary, generates another. It is his mastery of what George Puttenham would later label "The Gorgious" that makes of Petrarch a poet's poet, that wins him the laurel crown. "The Gorgious" designates for Puttenham "the last and principall figure of our poeticall Ornament": it is the figure by which we "polish our speech and as it were attire it with copious and pleasant amplifications and much varietie of sentences, all running upon one point and one intent."⁴⁸ Petrarch's dazzling descriptive display, all run ning upon the figuration of Laura's beauty, functions—to continue Puttenham's analogy—as does the placing of "gorgious appareil" on a naked body, or the polishing of "marble or porphorite .. . so smoth and cleere, as ye may see your face in it."⁴⁹ It is indeed that fixity of vision, Petrarch would suggest, that turns him to petra ("stone"); but it is also that self-glorifying fixity that makes of him Petrarca: "Medusa is, like the lady of stone, no historic character at all, but the poet's own creation. Its threat is the threat of idolatry. In terms of mythological exempla, petrification by the Medusa is the real consequence of Pygmalion's folly."⁵⁰

One might then wonder, following Mary Jacobus, if there is a woman in this text explicitly dedicated to the celebration of a woman.⁵¹ Or, rather, does the shield of Laura/lauro but stand as a glossy surface positioned both to reflect Petrarch's own image of himself and to dazzle a world of rival poets stupefied by its display? For it is, in some senses, the fascination with that "feminized" median surface of one's own creation that must be conquered: if it threatens petrification, one must first petrify it. Thus Petrarch's characteristic descriptive moves—fragmentation and reification—are, like the moves of Perseus, designed not only to neutralize but also to appropriate the threat. By first decapitating Medusa and then converting her severed head into an object of use in his own defense, Perseus conquers the fear of that which both repels and fascinates, the fear cast from a Freudian, male perspective as fear of the female (the mother's) body. And yet, as recent critics have shown, the sexual threat figured as the face of the Medusa serves in turn to figure other threats—"male hysteria under political pressure," for example, or male anxiety before the limits of representation.⁵² The male rhetorician, both politician and artist, thus places the shield of eloquence between himself and the "world of harms" that surrounds him. That shield, of course, is artfully painted on both faces; it speaks both in praise and in blame. The turn of the shield, like the flip of a Lucrece/Medusa coin, is a gesture subject only to his potentially capricious will. And, as Shakespeare demonstrates, even when that gesture problematizes its own status, it none the less remains embedded in the descriptive rhetoric it undercuts. The merging of the heraldic and the rhetorical, central to the very notion of a "blazon of sweet beauty's best," then, emblematizes the trap which description has traditionally constructed for "woman"; it remains, it would seem, to women to write their way out of it.⁵³

Notes

¹ Quotations from Shakespeare's Sonnets are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974). All other Shakespeare quotations are from the relevant Arden edition. Text and line references are indicated in parentheses following each quotation.

² The verb "to blazon" ("to inscribe with arms .. . in some ornamental way, to describe fitly, to publish vauntingly or boastfully, to proclaim") first appears in English in the sixteenth century. All references in this essay to sixteenth-century definitions of terms are adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary. The rhetoric of "blazon" is, of course, part of the broader category of epideictic rhetoric, rhetoric in praise or blame. For a recent discussion of epideixis and Shakespeare's Sonnets, with bibliography, see Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Terjur'd Eye'" (Representations, 7 (1984)), 82-3, n. 8.

³ Elizabeth Cropper, "On beautiful women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the vernacular style" (Art Bulletin, 58 (1976)), 376.

⁴ The use of "skill" here represents an emendation of the 1609 text which shows "still." Here I follow Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven and London, 1977), 341-2, n. 12. Booth gives a brief history of this emendation which he judges "generally accepted since the eighteenth century."

⁵ My theoretical framework clearly suggests the triangulated construct of mimetic desire outlined by René Girard, but as recast in the work of a number of feminist critics attentive to the role played by gender in the positioning of individuals upon that triangle. My formulation specifically echoes Mary Jacobus, "Is there a woman in this text?" (New Literary History, 14 (1982)), 119. For discussions of Girard in this context, see Jacobus, op. cit., 130-7; Patricia Klindienst Joplin, "The voice of the shuttle is ours" (Stanford Literature Review, 1 (1984), 35-6); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Homophobia, misogyny, and capital: the example of Our Mutual Friend" (Raritan, 2, 3 (1983), 130-1). Coppélia Kahn characterizes Lucrece as a drama of male rivalry in "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece" (Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 53-4). Our interpretations differ in that she reads the "rhetorical displaypieces" as a "happy escape from the poem's insistent concern with the relationship between sex and power" (45), and I read them as inscribed within that relationship. I take the adjective "homosocial" from Sedgwick's work on "male homosocial (including homosexual) bonds" in the cited essay, as well as in "Sexualism and the citizen of the world: Wycherley, Sterne, and male homosocial desire" (Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 226-45).

⁶ Hélèn Cixous, "The laugh of the Medusa," tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Amherst, 1980), 249-50.

⁷ The classic essay on this subject is Gayle Rubin's "The traffic in women: notes on the 'political economy' of sex," in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York and London, 1975), 157-210. See also Joplin, op. cit., 31-43; and Sedgwick, "Homophobia, misogyny, and capital," 126-7.

⁸ On the problem of the appropriation of Philomela by male artists, see Joplin, op. cit., 43-53; and Jane Marcus, "Liberty, sorority, misogyny," in Edward Said (ed.), Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute (Baltimore, 1980), 61-2.

⁹ It should be noted that the authorship of the "Argument" has been questioned. Michael Platt usefully compares the frame provided by the "Argument" to "an action whose beginning is 'kings' and whose end is 'consuls,'" in "The Rape of Lucrece and the republic for which it stands" (Centennial Review, 19 (1975)), 64. The criticism on Lucrece is too abundant to be outlined here, but four discussions of the poem have particularly influenced this study: Clark Hulse on the iconic nature of Lucrece, in "'A piece of skilful painting' in Shakespeare's 'Lucrece'" (Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978)), 13-22; Richard Lanham on the centrality of rhetoric as motive, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London, 1976); Coppélia Kahn's excellent essay on the politics of patriarchy; and Catherine R. Stimpson, "Shakespeare and the soil of rape," in Carolyn R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol T. Neely (eds), The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana, Chicago and London, 1980), 56-64.

¹⁰ Ovid, Fasti, tr. James G. Frazer (London, 1931).

¹¹ Livy, From the Founding of the City, tr. B. O. Foster (London, 1939).

¹² Numerous critics have noted not only the folly of Collatine's boast, but also the discrepancy between the "Argument" (in line with the sources) and the poem. For a particularly persuasive description, followed by an interpretation very different from my own, see Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington, 1969), 7-8. See also Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1957), 180; and Lanham, op. cit., 96.

¹³ Many sixteenth-century texts evoke similar descriptive occasions. Frederico Luigini's Il Libro della Bella Donna (Venice, 1554), for example, concludes a day of hunting and a hearty meal with an after-dinner game in which each hunter forms in words an ideal woman.

¹⁴ On the "shallow self-assertiveness" of Posthumus, see David S. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London and Basingstoke, 1982), 149.

¹⁵ On Lucrece as money or wealth, see Kahn, op. cit., 53-6.

¹⁶ Stimpson, op. cit., 58. See also Kahn, op. cit., 71, n. 19.

¹⁷ William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962).

¹⁸ Guy C. Rothery, The Heraldry of Shakespeare: A Commentary with Annotations (London, 1930), 10.

¹⁹ John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie (London, 1611), 2.

²⁰ Ibid., 2.

²¹ In the verse epistles of Thomas Guillim and John St George, preceding Guillim, n. pag.

²² Guillim, op. cit., 7.

²³ Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), 591. Cited by Kahn, op. cit., 46.

²⁴ My reading here is clearly at variance with that of Hulse, op. cit., 14.

²⁵ See Kahn, op. cit., 47-8, 60-1.

²⁶ Rothery, op. cit., 37.

²⁷ This scene is recalled, and indeed alluded to, in Iachimo's approach to Imogen's bed (Cymbeline, II.ii); on the way in which Shakespeare's narrator implicates himself with a gaze "hardly less lewd than the rapist Tarquin's," see Joplin, op. cit., 33-4, n. 16.

²⁸ For an analysis of the metaphors here comparing Lucrece's body to a city or country about to be attacked, see Kahn, op. cit., 56-7.

²⁹ Ibid., 46-7.

³⁰ Ibid., 55-6.

³¹ Lanham, op. cit., 82.

³² Ibid., 82.

³³ See Muriel C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of His Earlier Work in Relation to the Poetry of the Time (New York, 1952), 115.

³⁴ On "the dual role of the author" who "can move in both directions at the same time" (again in a context where human beings have become an exchange value), see René Girard, "'To entrap the wisest': a reading of The Merchant of Venice," in Said (ed.), Literature and Society, 110.

³⁵ Gerard Leigh, Accedence of Armorie (London, 1591), 16.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 16v.

³⁷ Ibid., 16v.

³⁸ Ibid., 118v-9^r.

³⁹ George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), 255.

⁴⁰ Leigh, op. cit., 16.

⁴¹ W. H. D. Rouse (ed.), Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding 's Translation of the Metamorphoses (London, 1904), 101.

⁴² Coluccio Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman (Zurich, 1951), 418. My translation.

⁴³ Plato, Symposium, tr. Michael Joyce, in Edith Hamilton arid Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, 1961), 550.

⁴⁴ John Freccero, "Medusa: the letter and the spirit" (Yearbook of Italian Studies (1972)), 7.

⁴⁵ Salutati, op. cit., 417. My translation.

⁴⁶ Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie, 4th edn (London, 1660), 6.

⁴⁷ Petrarch, Rime Sparse, tr. Robert Durling, in Petrarch 's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). All further references to Petrarch are to this edition and translation of the Rime Sparse, and will appear in parentheses in the text.

⁴⁸ Puttenham, op. cit., 254.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 254.

⁵⁰ Freccero, op. cit., 13.

⁵¹ Jacobus, op. cit.

⁵² See Neil Hertz, "Medusa's head: male hysteria under political pressure" (Representations, 4 (1983), 27-54); and Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture (Paris, 1977).

⁵³ "If Medusa has become a central figure for the woman artist to struggle with," writes Joplin, "it is because, herself a silenced woman, she has been used to silence other women" (op. cit., 50). See also Cixous, op. cit.