SOURCE: "Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XIV, 1981, pp. 1-21.

[In the following essay, Bowers argues that Shakespeare demonstrates Lucrece's virtue by employing rhetorical techniques and an omniscient narrator which emphasizes "the violence of rape and Lucrece's consequential disturbance of mind and ultimate despair. "]

Lucrece has not fared well at the hands of critics. Though obviously an admired and popular work when it was published in no fewer than six editions during Shakespeare's lifetime, it was considered to be insufficiently dramatic by Romantic critics, and then for most of the last two centuries the poem was judged to be interesting only up to the rape scene itself, after which Lucrece drones on, committing rhetorical suicide long before her actual death: "The greatest weakness of Shakespeare's Lucrece is therefore her remorseless eloquence. In Ovid Lucrece does not even plead with tarquin; but Shakespeare makes her start an argument which might have continued indefinitely, if the ravisher had not cut it short. After her violation, Lucrece loses our sympathy exactly in proportion as she gives tongue."¹ As early as 1932, Douglas Bush announced the quietus of Lucrece which so many of his colleagues had sought: it was a "museum piece" which "For all its seriousness of theme and intention .. . is as soulless as [Venus and Adonis], and much more wearisome."² For these critics, as for many others, the death of Lucrece seems to have been a blessing in disguise.

Only recently has the poem been revived for further examination. Harold R. Walley studied the work as a prelude to the later tragedies, and Don Cameron Allen, while providing a survey of the classical legend and some of its Renaissance commentators, chose to take what he called an Augustinian approach, yet he found Shakespeare adopting a view that Lucrece is "a little beyond forgiveness."³ This basically unsympathetic view is developed more forcefully by Roy Battenhouse, who concludes that Lucrece is really duplicitous and that "The multiple ironies of human self-delusion (intensified by a feminine proclivity to self-pity and evasive argument) are here Shakespeare's tragic theme." Her speech is "moral double-talk," so that in her suicide, "we have been shown martyrdom in an obscene mode, a religious 'dying' which Shakespeare hints, figuratively, is a kind of masturbatory self-rape."⁴ Unlike Allen, Battenhouse has adopted Augustinianism with a vengeance.

One should, however, bear in mind the context of Saint Augustine's remarks about Lucretia in The City of God: he is concerned in this early section of the work with the Christian's proper attitudes towards death, homicide, and suicide. In this context, Lucretia's suicide may give rise to a hypothetical dilemma about whether or not she was truly chaste: "If she was made an adulteress, why has she been praised; if she was chaste, why was she slain?"⁵ It is not necessary, says Augustine, for Christians to follow the suicidal exemplum of Lucretia, who in being concerned with preserving merely bodily chastity was pursuing the Roman ideal of glory and fame, because in a Christian sense chastity resided in the mind. Augustine's reasons for including the Lucretia story appear, therefore, to be primarily rhetorical, rather than judgmental, because he wishes to demonstrate that his Christian audience should avoid any possible dilemma by regarding chastity as essentially a matter of conscience rather than corporality. In J. Healey's early seventeenth-century translation, Augustine concludes that Lucretia "thought good to shew this punishment to the eies of men, as a testimony of hir mind, unto whome shee could not shew her minde indeed: Blushing to be held partaker in the fact, which beeing by another committed so filthyly, she had indured so unwillingly. Now this course the Christian women did not take; they live still, howsoever violated: .. . they have the glory of their chastity stil within them being the testimony of their conscience, this they have before the eies of their God, and this is all they care for."⁶ Augustine wishes his Christian readers to understand the difference between Roman and Christian concepts of glory, and if we are inclined to be less than charitable towards Lucretia, we should remember that he earlier appeals for sympathy toward all victims of sexual abuse, and more particularly for pity toward those who, like Lucretia, subsequently commit suicide:

But because every body is subject to suffer the effects both of the furie, and the lusts of him that subdueth it, that which it suffereth in this latter kinde, though it bee not a destroyer of ones chastite, yet is it a procurer of ones shame: Because otherwise, it might be thought, that that was suffered with the consent of the minde, which it may bee could not bee suffered without some delight of the flesh: And therefore as for those, who to avoide this did voluntarily destroy themselves, what humaine heart can choose but pittie them? yet as touching such as would not doe so, fearing by avoyding others villanie, to incurre their owne damnation, hee that imputes this as a fault unto them, is not unguiltie of the faulte of folly.⁷

Critics have tended to consider Lucrece as a product of Shakespeare's juvenile prolixity or as a poem of utter irony in a satiric mode. In either case, his heroine has been treated by this almost exclusively male phalanx as being typically feminine in her rhetorical excesses if not in moral waywardness. To the contrary, I hope to show that in keeping with his literary and artistic contemporaries, Shakespeare develops his legend to demonstrate Lucrece's virtue which is forcibly and unwillingly violated by tarquin; that the rhetorical techniques employed by Lucrece and the omniscient narrator are consistent in emphasizing the violence of rape and Lucrece's consequential disturbance of mind and ultimate despair; and that the aesthetic result of Lucrece's long lamentations and suicide is one of appropriate pity for her tragic demise, rather than scorn for her prolixity or duplicity.

If we note that Shakespeare has omitted from the body of the poem the larger political and ethical issues which he describes in his prefacing Argument, then we realize how the poem's focus has been narrowed to the actual ravishment of Lucrece and its devastating personal consequences, so that any political or social repercussions are seen to stem from this symbolic sexual despoliation. Thus the poem explores the processes of internal thought in monologue and of interpersonal thought in debate, all of which are commented upon by a narrator whose omniscient position gives coherence to the poem and direction to the reader.

This personalizing of the Lucrece legend was the most usual approach taken by writers in the Renaissance. While Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Governour, relates the political view that the pride of the Tarquins, not the rape by one of the sons, was the cause of their downfall,⁸ the most common treatment of the legend is the moral one which uses Lucrece as an exemplum of constancy, continence, and chastity.

The concept of chastity and its destruction is more complex in the Renaissance than has generally been recognized by modern critics and readers. Guided by medieval commentary on Pauline theology and attendant sacramental institutions, Renaissance theologians discussed both male and female chastity, with the twin threats of seduction and rape, under the heading of adultery. The seventh commandment provided divines with a broad spectrum of topics dealing with vices of the flesh. Henry Bullinger, Protestant minister of Zurich, wrote on the meaning of marriage: "Wedlock is prepared to this end and purpose, that honesty and chastity may flourish among good men, and children may be brought up in the fear of the Lord." He outlines his sermon to "first speak of holy matrimony; then, of adultery; thirdly, I will shew you what is contained under the name of adultery; and lastly, I will make an end with a treatise of continency."⁹ In the third section, discussion of rape is based both on pagan and on Old Testament examples to show its devastating effects. For students of Shakespeare, two examples are particularly significant: "Neither is it unknown to any, that the kings were expelled out of the city of Rome, and Troy, being wearied with ten years' war (which troubled both the east and west), was at last utterly sacked and clean overthrown, because Tarquinius had perforce ravished Lucretia, and Alexander Paris had stolen of Greece Menelaus his Helena, another man's wife." Bullinger concludes that the breaking of chastity frequently results in widespread slaughter, and in legal situations, "Rapes and such villainies committed perforce the laws do punish with loss of life."10

Rape, with its concomitant death and destruction, was considered from at least three points of view in the Renaissance. Perpetrators of rape justly brought death on themselves, from a legal standpoint, and frequently caused widespread havoc and death to whole tribes and societies as a direct result of their wicked deeds. These two results, though somewhat pitiable, were to be expected. Furthermore, from a third viewpoint, the rape victim was always viewed with pity for her suffering, yet with admiration for her patientia—her suffering endurance—even though the rape might result in the victim's death.

Among the works of the well-known Elizabethan translator, Arthur Golding, are two which treat Lucrece and her analogical sisters in terms of the actual or threatened death as a result of lecherous adultery. In a chapter, "Of Temperance," of Hurault's moral discourses, Golding first exemplifies the violent death associated with adultery by the story of Gyges's murder of the King of Lidia so that he can marry his wife, then draws the obvious conclusions: "And for that cause doth our Lord and lawgiver say, that he which lusteth after a woman, sinneth as much as if he had to do with hir, by reason of the consent which he hath given to the sinne, the performance wherof ingendereth death. For when lust is once entred in, it is hard to keepe the rest from following after, or at leastwise to forbeare to give attempt to obtaine the rest, as the judges did to Susan, David to Bersabee, and tarquin to Lucrece."¹¹ Similarly, the acceptance of threatened death by the Apocryphal Susanna and the suicidal death of Sophronia are seen in The Warfare of Christians to be pitiable, but admirable: "Likewise Susanna being led by [the] feare of God, chose rather to dy a shamfull death, than to consent to advoutrie. And Sophronia of whom Eusebius writeth, stroke hir selfe through [with] a knife, to the intent shee would not be defiled with whoredome."¹²

This pity for the rape victim and admiration for her martyr-like suffering was apparently equally strong for both pagan and biblical victims, and frequently for contemporaneous ones. Very early in the sixteenth century the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (who spent much time in England) discusses not only early historical examples, but likens them to the strong and constant women martyrs of the present. After a list including Cleobulina, Happarchia, Diotina, Lucretia, Cornelia graccorum, Portia, Chelia, and Sulpitia, he extends the examples to include the worthy Catharine of Aragon, "of whome that maye be more truelye spoken of, then that, that Valerius wryteth of Lucrece, that there was in her feminine bodye a mans hearte by the error and faute of nature. I am ashamed of my selfe, and of al those that have redde so manye thynges[,] when I behold that woman so stro[n]gly to support and suffer so manye and divers adversities, that there is not one .. . that with suche constancy of mynd hath suffred cruel fortune or could so have ruled flatterynge felicitie, as she dyd."13 It is not surprising that, having chosen a heroic martyr in Lucrece at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare should return to show in detail another martyr in his Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, a play in which she significantly overshadows Ann Boleyn as spiritual rather than physical forebear of Elizabeth I.

In domestic conduct books, too, Lucrece maintained a stellar reputation as an example of chastity and constancy. Richard Hyrde's translation of Vives' Instruction of a Christian Woman, published in 1592, reveals the importance of Lucrece's domestic duty and chaste honesty: she provides the model for the young Elizabethan woman to emulate, not in terms of her suicide, but because of her high standards:

What can be safe to a woman (saith Lucretia) when her honestie is gone: And yet had she a chaste minde in a corrupt body. Therefore (as Quintilian sayth) she thrust a sharpe sworde into her body, and avenged the compulsion, that the pure minde might bee cleane seperated from the defiled bodie, as shortly as could bee. But 1 saye not this, because others shoulde followe the deede, but the minde: because shee that hath once lost her honestie, should thinke there is nothing left. Take from a woman her beautie, take from her kindred, riches, comelynesse, eloquence, sharpnesse of witte, cunning in her craft: give her chastitie, and thou hast given her all things. And on the other side, give her all these thinges, and call her a naughtie packe, with that one word thou hast taken all from her, and hast left her bare and foule.¹⁴

Authors of the Renaissance invariably admired Lucrece in her tragic loss of life. Taking their cue from Italians such as Tasso and Petrarch, who grouped Lucrece with other virtuous women such as Penelope, Virginia, and Judith,¹⁵ English poets saw the Tarquin-Lucrece story as a corruption of tarquin by beauty, which caused the rape and death of Lucrece: her example of chastity is included among several disparate exempla in a catalogue of the abuse of beauty mentioned by Emilia Lanier, who, according to A. L. Rowse, was Shakespeare's dark lady:

Twas Beautie bred in Troy the ten yeares strife,
And carried Hellen from her lawfull Lord;

Twas Beautie made chaste Lucrece loose her life,
For which prowd Tarquins fact was so abhorr'd:
Beautie the cause Antonius wrong'd his wife,
Which could not be decided but by sword:
Great Cleopatraes Beautie and defects
Did worke Octaviaes wrongs, and his neglects.¹⁶

Earlier, George Turberville had used the example of Lucrece in his elegy, "Upon the death of the aforenamed Dame Elizabeth Arhundle of Cornewall," and the story was presented in the lachrymose and awkwardly juvenile poem by Thomas Middleton, "The Ghost of Lucrece," shortly after Shakespeare's Lucrece appeared.¹⁷ Playwrights such as Heywood, Massinger, and Shakespeare himself also reminded their audiences of Lucrece's tragedy and admirable contancy and chastity.¹⁸

It is quite apparent that in a Renaissance tradition which stretches at least from Boccaccio to Thomas Heywood Lucrece consistently proves to be "the verey ledare and teacher of the Romaynes chastyte, and the moste holy example of the auncyente wyffes," whose "chastite can never be to muche commendyde and praysede."¹⁹ Interest in the Lucrece legend and admiration for its heroine ranged from the scholarly to the popular. On the one hand the story occasioned the longest marginal manuscript comment by the famous scholar, Isaac Casaubon, in his copy of Livy's Roman History now in the British Library. Compared to his other marginal comments, its relative length indicates his strong interest in the legend's significance and its history of commentary.²⁰ On the other hand, popular conduct books frequently called forth Lucrece as an exemplum of chastity and constancy in the minds of the young. No wonder, then, that the influential Elizabethan mistress of Hardwick Hall, Bess, Countess of Shrewsbury, named her last child Lucrece.

Just as those who wrote philosophical and moral discourses tended to focus on the figure of Lucrece herself to express the virtues of constancy and chastity, so the artists of the Renaissance most usually extracted from the legend those personal qualities of Lucrece which were demonstrated as she suffered the wrongs of Tarquin. A few produced a series of representations outlining the entire legend, much like Shakespeare's Argument prefacing his Lucrece. For example, in a panel attributed to Biagio di Antonio, now in the Ca' d'Oro, Venice, the complete sequence of the rape of Lucrece is represented in four stages, from Tarquin's mounting his horse at the left of the panel, through the rape itself, then the suicide, and finally on the right, the lamenting of family and others over Lucrece's body.²¹ The effect is much like that of the famous Sistine Chapel panel by Michelangelo of the "Temptation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve," where the before and after, the cause and effect, produce not only a personal impact, but also social and theological reactions in the viewer.

These panel sequences, however, pall by the side of the much more numerous and popular representations of the rape scene itself, sometimes twinned with the scene of Lucrece's suicide, as in the accompanying engraving where a sword identical to that used by Tarquín to threaten Lucrece is then used by Lucrece to kill herself: the follow-through is instantly appreciated by the viewer.²² More common is the pose seen in Titian's "Tarquín and Lucrece" where Tarquín, clad in the scarlet breeches and hose of lust, his right stocking rolled down to expose a phallic knee between Lucrece's thighs, and with parallel-pointing blade held high in his right hand, symbolizes the furious violence of rape in his combined sexual and corporal attack on Lucrece. At least five versions of this scene are attributed to Titian or the school of Titian, and in all of them the violence of the rape is emphasized with threatening sword and knee. Titian completed his painting c. 1570, and it may have increased the popularity of the legend as artistic subject. In any case, the emblematic sword of violent rape is repeated with an added falcon-falchion pun by Shakespeare, so that he joins with and reflects all Renaissance artists who chose the same subject:

This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade,
Which like a falcon tow'ring in the skies,
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings' shade,
Whose crooked beak threats, if he mount he dies:
So under his insulting falchion lies
Harmless Lucretia, marking what he calls
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcons' bells.²³

Undoubtedly the most popular pictorial subject dealing with the Lucrece story is that of the example of Lucrece herself, and there are innumerable paintings such as the "Lucretia Romana" by the follower of Cranach which show a portrait of Lucrece, calm and serene, with the upturned sword giving only a hint of the imminent suicide. Sometimes the sword or dagger is only pointed at Lucrece, as in the portrait "Lucretia" by Paolo Veronese, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In all cases, the self-inflicted violence is more suggested than demonstrated, and the paintings are compositionally quite static to emphasize the virtue of Lucrece. Note, for instance, that the "Lucretia Romana" is compositionally stabilized in the traditional triangle by the position of the very sword which has already pierced and is about to kill Lucrece herself. This triangular composition, usually reserved by Renaissance artists for such religious subjects as the Holy Family, no doubt helps to emphasize Lucrece's martyrdom.

Paintings of this type are in fact so numerous that the Warburg Institute, London, photographic collection contains reproductions of over fifty different full-length paintings, engravings, and statues depicting Lucrece's act of suicide, in addition to a similar number of threequarters-length and half-length studies, including those by many well-known Renaissance artists.

The obvious popularity of these individual portraits of Lucrece shows that by the end of the sixteenth century those aspects of the Lucrece legend which have developed most significantly are the virtuous qualities of Lucrece—her chastity, faithfulness, and constancy—which are considered to be more important than the violence of her death. All portraits of Lucrece depict a serene, frequently partly nude figure to show the external beauty which reflected her inner virtue. The threat of impending suicide is hinted at but not dwelt upon, and very often, as in the "Lucretia Romana," her virtues are pointed out by motto. Lucrece has thus become at once a symbol of chastity and an emblem of chastity destroyed. In keeping with this trend, Shakespeare also individualized and emblematized his story of Lucrece to manifest the inherent virtues of his heroine who is deprived of her chastity by force and who consequently suffers such a perturbation of mind that she resorts to the pitiable act of suicide. This act and its ideational cause are explored and discussed through internal monologue and interpersonal argument which, on analysis, are found to provide a coherent structure for the poem.

The structural heart of Shakespeare's Lucrece consists of two traditional debates which stem directly from the popular medieval débat literature. Both debates are internal monologues, the first by Tarquín, the second by Lucrece. In between these, the act of rape takes place, so that the whole sequence may be viewed as cause-act-effect. This tragic development of the poem is focused and explained for the reader by extensive use of narrative commentary which clarifies the etiological connections and prepares the emotional response of the reader. When seen in this light, the reader can more fully appreciate the structural and aesthetic harmonies which Shakespeare incorporated into a coherent whole.

The first internal debate of Tarquín occurs only after almost two hundred lines of narrative expositon and comment. Including the historical setting, but not merely historical in nature, the narrator explains early that this is to be a tragedy of the decay of worldly happiness as a result of the abuse of honour and beauty:

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

(II. 22-28)

Tarquín is soon closely identified with honor, "His honour, his affairs, his friends, his state, / Neglected all," (11. 45-46) while Lucrece is symbolically related to virtuous beauty: "The Roman dame, / Within whose face beauty and virtue strived" (11. 51-52). At this early stage, the imagery of siege and battle are introduced seemingly innocuously, for honor and beauty are weakly "fortress'd" and in Lucrece only beauty and virtue are competing in her looks, but very shortly Tarquín becomes actively involved, first by merely viewing the "silent war of lilies and of roses" in Lucrece's face, and then by being captivated by her beauty (II. 71-77). Once he has succumbed, we find that this deceptive Iago-Sinon figure, "Hiding base sin in pleats of majesty" (1. 93), needs only the convenient occasion, the "sable night, mother of dread and fear" (I. 117), and a suitably convenient rationale in order to carry out the vicious act. Shakespeare provides the darkness (II. 162-68), and while Tarquin's symbol of rapacious might is introduced quietly at this point ("His falchion on a flint he softly smiteth,"I. 176), his inner debate proceeds to supply him with an illogical, vicious rationale.

The debate itself (II. 183-280) comprises a traditional medieval argument between the rational wit and the emotional will. In lines of rational conscience (II. 190-238) Tarquín examines the consequences of his rash act in terms of honor, shame, reputation, and friendship—all of which will be destroyed if he carries on with the deed. These topics are legion and central in medieval and Renaissance philosophy, theology, and art, so the fact that Shakespeare will return to amplify them in this poem is not surprising. In the meantime, Tarquín rejects them all, declaring that "My will is strong past reason's weak removing" (1. 243), and crosses over a pivot of narrative comment "'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will" (1. 247), to opt for the vices of unrepentant lechery (11. 253-80). Like the contemporaneous Romeo, who "ne'er saw true beauty till this night," Tarquín exclaims his firm resolve to reject wit and clasp his will:

Then childish fear avaunt, debating die!
Respect and reason wait on wrinkled age!
My heart shall never countermand mine eye.

(II. 274-76)

In this first section of the poem lies the cause of all the ensuing woe. In a traditional, Augustinian sequence of the fall into temptation, we witness the object of temptation (the beauty of Lucrece), the contemplation of that object and its attendant possibilities of sinning in the first part of the interior debate, and movement of the will to overcome reason in the second part of Tarquin's debate. His resolution to act on the basis of the will completes the debate and foretells the rape while foreshadowing the ominous consequences.²⁴

Once resolved, Tarquin does not turn back: "By reprobate desire thus madly led, / The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece' bed" (11. 300-01). Door locks, like the thorns in the Romance of the Rose, may delay him, but the rampage of his "hot heart" cannot be diminished. In a long, predominantly narrative passage (11. 281-476), we are reminded as Tarquin moves stealthily toward Lucrece's chamber that he interprets all these portentous "lets" to his progress "in the worst sense" (1. 324)—that is, he is unable to perceive the correct hint to cease and desist from his violent attack on Lucrece. Instead, he proceeds perversely to idolize Lucrece, in the same way that Romeo idolizes Juliet; here the pseudo-religious language is clarified by the narrator:

So from himself impiety hath wrought,
That for his prey to pray he doth begin,
As if the heavens should countenance his sin.

(ll. 341-43)

For Tarquin, as for Romeo, "love and fortune be my gods, my guide!" Reminding himself of the advantages of nocturnal opportunity (11. 356-57), just as Venus reminds Adonis (Venus and Adonis, 1. 720), the "lurking serpent," Tarquin, reaches Lucrece, who now "Lies at the mercy of his mortal sting" (1. 364). The narrator's conventional Petrarchan blazon of the sleeping Lucrece contrasts with our view of the lustful Tarquin, who becomes the "grim lion" which "fawneth o'er his prey, / Sharp hunger by the conquest satisfied" (11. 421-22). Martial imagery of violent attack now predominates: his "beating heart, alarum striking, / Gives the hot charge" (ll. 433-34); his hand "march'd on to make his stand" (1.438) and becomes a "Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall" (1. 464); and the assault is proleptically complete as "This moves in him more rage and lesser pity, / To make the breach and enter this sweet city" (ll. 468-69).

As Lucrece awakens amid this imagistic assault, she is kept silent by the narrative voice, which reports Tarquin's ignoring of her pleas as he announces his impending rape—"Under that colour [banner] am I come to scale / Thy never-conquer'd fort" (11. 481-82)—and also his immutable decision: "I have debated . . . Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy" (11. 498-504). Now Tarquin adopts the iconographic pose discussed earlier: at this point, with blade held high, he is poised for the attack. After threatening a plot like that which Macbeth achieves—to kill her with servants unless she yields quietly—he pauses only briefly to listen to, but to take no notice of, the hesitant appeals of the terrified Lucrece (ll. 558-60).

The narrator's introduction to this initial speech by Lucrece (which occurs a third of the way through the poem) emphasizes both her "pity-pleading eyes" and that "Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed, / Which to her oratory adds more grace" (11. 561-64), and indicates in the following stanza the outline of her appeal to Tarquin. In amplification of this plan, Lucrece invokes the concepts of friendship, shame, honor, reputation, and guilt (11. 575-672)—in fact, the very same topics which we have seen Tarquin consider and reject in his earlier interior debate (11. 190-238). So far in the poem we have observed his decision-making process and now his overt rejection of Lucrece's pleas (11. 667-72), before he undertakes the ravishment decided upon much earlier. In the ultimate homage to night, he "sets his foot upon the light" and then puts out the light of Chastity. Othello could do no worse:

This said, he sets his foot upon the light,
For light and lust are deadly enemies:
Shame folded up in blind concealing night,
When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize.
The wolf hath seiz'd his prey, the poor lamb cries,
Till with her own white fleece her voice controll'd
Entombs her outcry in her lips' sweet fold.

(li 673-79)²⁵

This narrative comment belies the claim by some critics that Shakespeare blamed Lucrece for failing to call for help and saw her as a guilty accomplice in the rape.²⁶ Admittedly the cries are not given in dramatic exclamation, but this no doubt added to the intended effect: instead, they are stifled in the silence of narrative report, just as Tarquin stifled them; thus in cohesion of form and content, Shakespeare again emphasizes the forced silence of Lucrece.

After the nefarious rape, the remainder of the poem deals with its devastating effects on Lucrece, who demonstrates in the longest interior debate of the poem (11. 747-1078) the chaotic results of rapacious lust. While Tarquin slinks away, ridden with guilt and in Pyrrhic victory, "a captive victor that hath lost in gain" (1. 730), Shakespeare's narrator places Lucrece in the traditional emblematic pose of frantic grief: "She desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear." 27 These emblematic gestures of Lucrece, reflecting her tumultuous inner debate, are again emphasized at the end of her long monologue, where the narrator reminds us that the dishevelled look and agonized, rambling rhetoric of Lucrece are a direct result of her abject grief and despair: "True grief is fond and testy as a child" (1. 1094), so that Lucrece becomes "deepdrenched in a sea of care" (1. 1100). If critics cavil at the extraordinary length of Lucrece's plaintive and passionate harangue, Shakespeare's narrator is the first to set them straight: "Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words, / Sometime 'tis mad and too much talk affords" (11. 1105-06).

Lucrece's debate itself is ostensibly a harangue against Night, Opportunity, and Time, which seems to be uncalled-for, even digressive, at this juncture of the poem. Yet underneath this overt structure runs a more subdued reiteration of Tarquin's own interior debate at the beginning of the poem. Her angry denunciation of Night moves from the blame of night for the deed of rape to questions of Lucrece's own guilt, reputation, shame, and honor (11. 764-847). In all these, she takes it upon herself to accept blame for the committed crimes. She moves back, however, from the specific occasion of Night to the more widespread possibilities associated with Opportunity which she apostrophizingly blames for the evils of the world in an epic catalogue of sins.²⁸ Overseeing all such evil opportunities is a "Mis-shapen time" which now seems to err in creating chaos rather than calm. If time is to encourage disturbances, as Lucrece sees it, then she will appeal to time for help in putting a curse on Tarquín, so that he might turn to despair, deprived of friends and honor (11. 981-1015). These now-familiar topics, together with the shifting of blame from one figure to the other, indicate the instability of Lucrece's reasoning powers in her state of despair. Identified first by the narrator as a Philomel who "with herself. . . is in mutiny" (11. 1079, 1153), Lucrece accepts the role and in imitation vows to hold a knife to her breast.²⁹ In her decision to commit suicide she recapitulates her desire to create her honor anew by overcoming her shame, so that her fame will remain purged for future ages (11. 1184-1211).

So ends the final debate of the poem, from which point Lucrece has resolved to carry out the act of suicide. Her decision is followed by narrative comment and incident which continually remind the reader of the sadness and woe of the modest Lucrece, all of which should evoke our sympathy. As he later provided Emilia to comment on Desdemona's woe, Shakespeare now describes the incident of Lucrece's weeping maid to enhance the elegiac effect. In an emblematic scene at least as old as Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland, tears flow freely in grief and sympathy. Yet within this scene of lamentation the narrator warns us that the adamantine minds of men are the cause of all this woe:

No man inveigh against the withered flower
But chide rough winter that the flower hath kill'd;
Not that devour'd, but that which doth devour
Is worthy blame; O let it not be hild
Poor women's faults, that they are so fulfill'd
With men's abuses! those proud lords to blame
Make weak-made women tenants to their shame.

(ll. 1254-60)

The suffering of the withered Lucrece is given further demonstration and greater prominence by her ensuing encounter with the "sour-fac'd groom" and by the analogous painting of the Trojan war which resulted from Helen's rape. This analogue of rapacious destruction was to find further development, of course, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, where not only destruction of the individual, but also social and universal corruption are the manifest results. In the poem, the narrator again directs our thought to the "thousand lamentable objects" in the vivid painting, one of which proves particularly apt in her likeness to Lucrece, the "despairing Hecuba" who becomes an emblem of "Times's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's reign"(1. 1451). Here Hecuba, symbolically weeping not only for Priam, but for all of Troy, is juxtaposed to "perjur'd Sinon," a likeness of Tarquín, who caused all these woes (11. 1534-47). Lucrece now directs her nails not at herself as she did following the rape in a state of despair, but at the painted image of Sinon in an act of rage. Thus in the ebb and flow of disturbed sorrow, "Losing her woes in shows of discontent" (1. 1578), Lucrece points out to us in the painting an icon of tragic rape and rapine akin to her own.³⁰

At the entrance of Collatine, only a coda-like swan-song is rhetorically necessary before death: the narrator reminds us how she "modestly" prepares both reader and Collatine for her suicide. Her honor has been "ta'en prisoner by the foe" (1. 1608), and in description replete with tears, sadness, and lament, "this pale swan in her wat'ry nest / Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending" (ll. 1611-12). Despite the fact that Collatine and his lords make an Augustinian distinction between her "body's stain" and her "mind untainted," her decision has been made—in perturbation though it may be—to carry out her suicide. We are left, at the conclusion of the poem, in the presence of a classical pietà with family and friends in tearful lament over her body. Brutus alone, once reputed for his foolishness, comes to his senses and, taking inspiration from the virtue of Lucrece in death, seeks redress for Tarquin's "foul offence" by expunging the entire monarchy.

The essentially forensic structure of Lucrece is developed in a threnodic mode to stress the personal effects and eventual social ramifications of chastity's destruction by forces of brutal lust. On the one side Tarquín follows the traditional sequence of thoughts and actions which lead to spiritual and physical death. His decision to rape is accompanied by increasingly brutal imagery, in terms of the animalistic as well as the violent, so that he moves from temptation at the sight of beauty in the form of Lucrece, through contemplation of her beauty in such a way that his will usurps his rational powers, with a resulting decision which is patently irrational. Lucrece, on the other side, is victimized by the brutish Tarquín to the extent that her own powers of rational thought and action are weakened and destroyed by him. All of her actions in the initial third of the poem are dictated by her virtuous modesty and charitable nature. But when the rape has been committed, the rational balance of her mind is so disturbed that she becomes "hopeless," not in a modern pejorative sense, but in the sense that she is without hope, which leads in a traditional way to despair and (unless corrected, as Montague reminds us of his son) eventually to death. Lucrece as an emblem of chastity destroyed demands all the pity Shakespeare can muster by his use of a narrator who constantly makes the reader aware of the pathos of the situation, through direct evaluative comment and through aqueous imagery at least as ubiquitous as that found in Milton's Lycidas. The etiological development of the thematic aspects of the poem provides it with a coherence which perhaps can only be fully appreciated in this light. All of Lucrece's shame, guilt, and loss of honor are derived from Tarquin's shame, guilt, and loss of honor. The iterative transferrai of these central topics from Tarquín to Lucrece, with the concomitantly tragic acts of rape and suicide, become apparent slowly, yet at the poem's end the reader is invited by the narrator to observe and meditate the devastating effects of prior causes:

They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence,
To show her bleeding body thorough Rome,
And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence.

(II. 1850-52)

The social result for Rome, of course, was a monarchic purge, but for the reader of Lucrece the effect is primarily tropological because Shakespeare, in keeping with the artistic milieu of his era, adopted a theme not only cherished by the society in which he lived, but also dear to the hearts of artists and authors who were well aware of the important relationship of personal decision and social consequences. Focusing upon individualized, symbolic figures in their work, these artists and authors demonstrated to Elizabethan audiences that no society is better than the individuals comprising it.

Virtually parallel to the debate structure of Lucrece is the debate in Venus and Adonis. The tragicomic sequence of events is very similar; the thoughts of Venus move from spying the beauteous object, Adonis, through an extended contemplation of this fine specimen, to a decision to tempt him howsoever she can. Adonis follows a parallel primrose path to folly and destruction. First he allows himself to be plucked from his formerly well-reined horse, and then lands squarely in a flower patch, upon which he langorously debates with Venus the various possibilities in the meaning of the word "love." Although some critics have remained unaware of the complexity of this debate, the narrator in Venus and Adonis, like that in Lucrece, tries to remind us of the conceptual implications, even though they prove too much for Adonis himself as he sinks slowly to Venus's level. As she swoons in breathless anticipation, he lowers his lips to revive her with a symbolic kiss. The liaison is complete, the effect fatal.³¹

In addition to the death-dealing effects of the boar, one result of this debate is the primal curse on worldly love and lovers issued by Venus in a gesture of spite (Venus and Adonis, 11. 1135-64). The angry reaction of Venus is transformed into Lucrece's equally perturbed reaction when she curses Tarquín after the rape (ll. 967-1015). In both situations the emotional reactions are similar, though Venus's curse stands and remains by itself, while Lucrece comments on the folly of such curses in a realization of her own irrational state.

Here, as in the entire Lucrece poem, the situation and its development become symbolically individualized. The very choice of mythology rather than historical legend as a subject in Venus and Adonis leads to an objectifying of the debate between the figures involved. The story is archetypal, the debate consequently more external and philosophical. The figures engaging in debate are static, two-dimensional, allegorical in a medieval dramatic sense. In Lucrece, however, debate and debaters interest the reader in a more psychic than philosophic way. The story is legend rather than myth, the debate becomes internalized, the vicissitudes of will in its battle with reason become more introvertedly complex in a Spenserian manner, with the result that the reader must follow intimately the morbid convolutions of attempts to reason by disturbed minds.

In a sense, Shakespeare incorporates to varying degrees in his poem the many facets of his literary and artistic heritage. Whether written before or after the poem,³² the prefacing "Argument" provides the legendary contexts in regard to the poem's historical and political settings, as derived from Livy and as subsequently reflected in the pictorial panel sequences of Renaissance Europe. In the poem itself, Shakespeare has chosen to focus on the two most developed, Renaissance aspects of the legend, the virtues of Lucrece as a model of chastity and the violent destruction of that symbolic chastity by the fury of willful rape. The consequent sexual and psychic subjugation of Lucrece by Tarquín demonstrates the horrendous effects of the triumph of will over reason. The demise of Lucrece is agonizing and emblematic, so that although Renaissance readers could have recognized the limitations of a Roman view of fame and glory, as explained by Saint Augustine, they would have undoubtedly reacted with pity towards Lucrece in her excruciating suffering. This pity would not necessarily have exonerated Lucrece in her suicide, but would have emphasized the virtues of her life, as well as an understanding of the dilemma to which she was subjected. In the light of these prevailing attitudes, it is not surprising that John Donne wrote his lengthy treatise on suicide, Biathanatos, with the same Augustinian appeal for compassion: "So doe I wish, and as much as I can, effect, that to those many learned and subtile men which have travelled in this point, some charitable and compassionate men might be added."³³ For Shakespeare's audience, then, violent rape and destruction of life were linked etiologically, so that the poem's focus upon the two major legendary figures shows how social and political weaknesses emanate from the decisions and actions of individuals seen as symbolic of their society.

Hence Lucrece should not be judged by dramatic standards, as critics since Coleridge and Hazlitt have often done, but rather it should be appreciated and evaluated on the basis of Renaissance psychic and literary theory which depended largely on traditional, medieval ways of explaining the corruption of the mind and the ensuing vicious actions in this world. The traditional de casibus theme has become internalized, is seen as being more complex, to include the notion of de casibus mentium, yet having social repercussions which fanned out from the diseased mind. The total effect is a tragedy evoking considerable pity on the reader's part. In Lucrece Shakespeare develops his themes concerning the destruction of chastity in a consistently iterative, yet ever-expanding series of debates which pit will against reason, illogic against logic, despair against hope, to produce a more sympathetic reaction in the reader to the significance of preserving chastity than did the more impersonal approach found in the earlier Venus and Adonis. Certainly, the immediate popularity of Lucrece bears this out: read almost as avidly by its first audiences as Venus and Adonis, its subject matter firmly ensconced in the Elizabethan imagination, traditionally orthodox both in form and content, Lucrece confirms the Renaissance admiration for its heroine while requiring its readers to tackle the much more significant questions of the personal and social implications of rape.

Notes

¹ F. T. Prince, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: The Poems (London: Methuen, 1960), p. xxxvi. For a survey of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century criticism, see H. E. Rollins, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. 476-523; esp. pp. 476-78, 492, 496-97, 501, 506, 507. A more recent survey is given by J. W. Lever, "The Poems," Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 22-25. See also Lever, "Shakespeare's Narrative Poems," in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 122-26; and T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 140, 153. Recent significant studies of the poem include Coppélla Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 45-72; and S. Clark Hulse, "'A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 13-22. A shorter version of the present study was presented at the Central Renaissance Conference, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in April, 1980.

² Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 154.

³ Harold R. Walley, "The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy," PMLA, 76 (1961), 480-87; Don Cameron Allen, "Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece" Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 89-98; esp. pp. 91, 98.

⁴ Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 19, 32, 28.

⁵ St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. George E. McCracken, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), Bk. 1, Ch. xix, pp. 88-89.

⁶ St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God, trans. J. H[ealey], (London, 1610), Bk. 1, Ch. 18, sig. D4. In his translated notes to this chapter, Vives points to the rhetorical use of the dilemma, and refers to Cicero's Rhetoric for examples. See Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), 2. 38-39, pp. 126-27. In this instance, he says, Augustine finds the dilemma applicable both ways.

⁷ Ibid., Bk. 1, Ch. 15, sig. D2.

⁸ Sir Thomas Elyot, The Poke named The Governour (1531), 1.3, 1.5, 1.17, 2.5; but for a typical emphasis on rape as the reason for the downfall, see Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. by T. B., (London, 1586), sig. R1; pp. 241-42.

⁹ Henry Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, trans. H. I., ed. Rev. Thomas Harding, The Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1849), I, 394. For typical comments on male as well as female chastity, see B. Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), ed. Walter Raleigh (London: David Nutt, 1900), p. 250; William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morali Philosophie . . . (London, 1584), p. 116, sig. R4^V; and Nicholas Breton, An Olde Mans Lesson, and a Young Mans Love (London, 1605), sig. E2.

¹⁰ Bullinger, Decades, I, 417. See also John Hooper, A Declaration of the Ten Holy Commandments of Almighty God (London, 1550), ed. Samuel Carr, The Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1843), pp. 284, 354.

¹¹ Jacques Hurault, Politicke, Moral, and Martial Discourses, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1595), sig. XI; p. 305.

¹² Arthur Golding, trans., The Warfare of Christians: Concerning the conflict against the Fleshe, the World, and the Devili, (London, 1576), sigs. B6^v-B7; pp. 12-13.

¹³ Juan Luis Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, trans. Thomas Paynell, (London, c. 1553), sigs. E3^V-E4. See also sigs. A5^v-A7; and Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T. B. (London, 1586), sigs. R1ff.

¹⁴ Juan Luis Vives, A Verie Fruitfull and pleasant booke called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London, 1592), sig. C4. See also comments on Lucrece, sigs. B6^v, X6; and Thomas Salter (?), A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (London, n.d.), sig. B3.

¹⁵ Francis Petrarch, The Tryumphe of Chastitie, trans. Henry Parker, Lord Morley (1553-1556?), ed. D. D. Carnicelli (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 114, II. 202-19. For date of this edition by Morley, see Carnicelli, p. 10. Torquato Tasso's comment on the virtuous actions of Lucretia and Portia is found in "Of Marriage and Wiving . . . Done into English, by R. T." (London, 1599), sig. 14.

¹⁶ Emilia Lanier, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), ed. A. L. Rowse, The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 85. See also p. 127 for her traditional view of the biblical analogue of Susanna and the Elders. Though she did not die in this situation, Susanna chose death rather than yield to false accusations of adultery.

¹⁷ George Turberville, "Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets" (London, 1567; rpt. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), p. 144, sig. H8^v; Thomas Middleton, "The Ghost of Lucrece," ed. J. Q. Adams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937). In his retelling of the Rosamond-Henry II story, Michael Drayton shows the guilty Rosamond contrasting herself with "chaste Lucrece": see "The Epistle of Rosamond to King Henry the Second," II. 97-101, in Drayton's Englands Heroicall Epistles (London, 1597), ed. John Buxton, Poems of Michael Drayton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), II, 450.

¹⁸ Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece (c. 1594), ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950); Philip Massinger, The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976): The Roman Actor, II.i.133-35, and A Very Woman, V.iv.164; Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), Taming of the Shrew, II.i.296; Titus Andronicus, II.i.108; IV.i.64; IV.i.90-91; As You Like It, III.ii.148; and Twelfth Night, II.v.92; II.v.105.

¹⁹ Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus, trans. Henry Parker, Lord Morley, ed. Herbert G. Wright, Forty-six Lives (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 156, 159. See also Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy (1595), ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 12; Robert Greene, Penelope's Web (London, 1601), sig. B3^v; Greene, Philomela, The Lady Fitzwater's Nightingale (London, 1615), sig. C3; Thomas Heywood, GUNAKEION: or Nine Bookes of Various History, concerninge Women (London, 1624), sig. M3^v; and a popular rhetorical textbook, Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (London, 1563), Fol. xxvi, sig. G2. A useful, brief survey of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance treatments of the Lucretia story can be found in Arthur M. Young, Echoes of Two Cultures (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), pp. 59-125. Not until the early to middle seventeenth century did some writers take seriously Aretino's suggestion that Lucretia invited and revelled in the attentions of Tarquín. See Saad El-Gabalawy, "The Ethical Question of Lucrece: A Case of Rape," Mosaic, 12 (1978-79), 82-86.

²⁰Titi Livii Patavini, Romanae Historiae Principis, Libri Omnes . . . (Francoforti ad Moenum, 1578) [British Library shelfmark C. 75.i.6, signed Is. Casaubonus], sig. C6.

²¹ Collection of the Warburg Institute, University of London, Photographic Reproductions (reference, Mostra, Lorenzo il Magnifico 1949, 10, pp. 70ff). See also, for example, Henricus Goltzius' sequence of four engravings (Bartsch, III, 35. 104-7; and F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings Engravings and Woodcuts [Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, n.d.], VIII, 37) on the Lucrece story: (a) Banquet of Collatinus; (b) Lucretia and her women spinning; (c) Tarquin's rape of Lucretia; (d) Lucretia committing suicide.

²² This unidentified engraving is found in Philippus Lonicerus, Icones Livianae (Frankfurt am Mein, 1572), sig. E2; and also in Isaac Casaubon's copy of Livy, Titi Livii Patavini, Romanae Historiae Principis, sig. C6.

²³Lucrece, ll.. 505-11. All quotations are taken from the New Arden edition.

²⁴ St. Augustine discusses this temptation process in De sermone Domine in monte, 1, 12-13, 33-37, trans. Denis J. Kavanagh, Commentary on the Lord's Sermon on the Mount (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951), pp. 52-57; and in De Trinitate, 12. 12, trans. A.W. Haddan, revised by W. G. T. Shedd, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), II, 819-20; see also D.W. Robertson's discussion in A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 72-76.

²⁵ The wolf is iconographically associated with the rapist. See Ripa, Iconologia (1625), p. 520, sig. Kk4^v, under "Rapina"; and Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp. 161-67.

²⁶ See, for example, Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 16.

²⁷ L. 728; see also 1. 762. For an historical survey of classical, medieval, and early Renaissance iconology of the gestures of tearing the face and hair in extreme grief, see Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1976).

²⁸ This section is allied to the traditional tragedies of Fortune as its wheel turns. See Frederick Kiefer, "The Conflation of Fortuna and Occasio in Renaissance Thought and Iconography," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9 (1979), 1-27.

²⁹Lucrece, ll. 1128-48. For the grief of Philomel, see Shakespeare's The Passionate Pilgrim, xx, 8-28. See also Ann Thompson, "Philomel in 'Titus Andronicus' and 'Cymbeline,'" Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 23-32. Timothy Bright identifies such extreme perturbation of mind leading to despair and suicide as a product of "melancholie rising [b]y adustion": see T. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), ed. Hardin Craig (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 110-13, sigs. G7^v-H1.

³⁰ S. Clark Hulse, "'A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 19, points out that "Shakespeare's one violation of chronological order, leaving Sinon for last, is thus dictated by his rhetorical order, moving from the tapestry itself, to Lucrece's vocal response, to her recognition of the similarity to her own fate: from ecphrasis to prosopopoeia to icon"

³¹ I argue this coherence of structure and theme in '"Hard Armours' and 'Delicate Amours' in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 1-23.

³² See T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 108-15; and J. W. Lever's comment in his edition of The Rape of Lucrece (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 108.

³³ John Donne, Biathanatos (London, 1646), Preface, p. 22, sig. C3^v. For his comments on the suicides of Christian martyrs and their preservation of chastity, as related by Augustine, Ambrose, and Eusebius, see Part 2, Distinction 6, Section 8, pp. 148-151, sigs. T2^v-T4. Biathanatos was written about 1607-09; see Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), pp. 159-64.