Shakespeare's Figure of Lucrece: Writing Rape

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Figure of Lucrece: Writing Rape," in Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction From Wyatt to Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 141-63.

[In the essay that follows, Crewe examines Shakespeare's representation of rape in The Rape of Lucrece.]

.. . In more than one sense, Shakespeare is repeating history when he rewrites the narrative of Lucrece. Her story is first related in Livy's larger history of Rome, in which, however, it is not precisely her story, since she is not heard. It is then frequently retold in historical, literary, and other texts. Ovid, Augustine, Chaucer, and Machiavelli may be the most notable repeaters of the Lucrece story before Shakespeare, but they are far from being the only ones. The history of Lucrece thus comes to include the history of its textual repetition.1

It might be suggested that what motivates or corresponds to this textual repetition is the sociohistorical recurrence of rape, in which case the repetition at every level of Lucrece's history threatens to be endless and identical. Moreover, the mere fact of this repetition may seem to imply the existence of a stable, transhistorical fatality of political life and/or gender relations in which rape is virtually predestined to keep on occurring identically, perhaps as the negatively defining nexus of masculine and feminine identity. The actuality of this threat of repetition reveals itself at the authorial and critical level as well as in the narrative; "writing rape" ("the violence of the letter") threatens merely to reinstantiate rape, as we shall see, and it is difficult at least for any male critic to avoid repeating the action, at once pusillanimous and relentless, of Tarquín in the poem. It is also difficult for the male critic not to repeat the abusive cliché that rape is the secret desire of the female victim, betrayed by her body language. Indeed, this cliché, which is also that of the masculine observer, is repeated in the poem, but with a difference.

Here I shall argue that Shakespeare, while far from escaping repetition and in some ways only intensifying it, tries to stake out a field of conscious reflection, and possibly of conscious sociopolitical interest and representation, in "Lucrece," doing so within and against this seemingly fateful repetition. This repetition with a difference is at once facilitated by and manifested in Shakespeare's expansion of the usually brief Lucrece story to "minor epic" proportions. Among other things gained through this expansion, I will suggest, is this space of putative reflection, volition, and maneuver.

This gain constitutes part of the distinctively Shakespearean interest of the poem, just as it reveals a distinctively Shakespearean interest in the story of Lucrece. Correspondingly, the poem has something to lose from simply being assimilated to its textual predecessors.

A corollary to this claim (or perhaps it is just another way of making the claim) is that Shakespeare's poem enacts a sustained problematization of the abstraction, reification, or totalization of rape. It accordingly enacts a sustained interrogation of the totalization of gender differences, of the accompanying totalization of violence and abuse, and of the representation of rape as a violation of essence. Correspondingly, rape does not emerge as the constitutive thing unequivocally signified by the poem or in the poem.2 Nor can rape be regarded as an extratextual phenomenon, an ideal Aristotelian action, or a pure social fact that the poem merely imitates or reflects.3 In none of these ways is the poem simply "about" rape, though the assumption that it is so (or must be so) is encouraged by the 1616 Folio, in which "The Rape of was added to the poem's 1594 quarto title, "Lucrece."

All these differences, many of them between the poem and its textual predecessors, notably including those of Livy and Augustine, render "Lucrece" somewhat insusceptible to totalizing criticism of the kind that has been practiced, sometimes in relation to it, but perhaps more often in relation to Richardson's Clarissa.4 Furthermore, it makes an issue not just of reading rape but of writing it—of writing rape, that is to say, as literature, as law, and as social or even sociobiological fact. The question of difference, or of the capacity to make a difference, is thus posed at the level of writing. It becomes a question of the level at which rewriting could hope to begin, or would have to begin.

We can begin—but only begin—to consider the poem's repetition with a difference by noting that Shakespeare does not identify rape with the single or punctual act of physical penetration. Nor does he fully identify the crime with Tarquín, who increasingly emerges as the problematic scapegoat-rapist of the poem. In Shakespeare's poem, Tarquin's penetration of Lucrece—or whatever—occurs between two stanzas, not in any one stanza, and it is therefore "censored," meaning that only one thing can be understood to occur there—or that nothing definitively occurs there. One stanza ends with the lines "The spots whereof could weeping purify / Her tears would drop on them perpetually," and another begins "But she hath lost a dearer thing than life."5 What actually happens in the relevant blank—a blank in which Tarquin's action may or may not coincide with something Lucrece has already been dreaming as he watches her sleep—is left, as the saying goes, to the reader's imagination. Yet if penetration must be supposed to occur in, or unequivocally to be signified by, this blank space, it is anticipated in the precedinstanza and also temporally displaced, possibly to the occasion of marital deflowering, in which the consent and even the desire of the woman is rightly or wrongly assumed by the law. Temporal displacement to an even earlier psychic or literal violation by the father (or dream of it) cannot be ruled out.6 As a result of this apparent temporal displacement or indeterminacy, an internal scenario of repetition with a difference is introduced into the poem. Lucrece's sense of being tainted or unchaste is thus related to more than one possible scenario of rape, including that of its unfulfilled dreamrecurrence in her mind.

Admittedly, one could say that this particular "deletion" principally confirms that rape is not a sexual crime and that physical penetration is not constitutive of it. Rather, it is a crime of violence, which the penetration merely instantiates, and that is what we see it to be in Lucrece's bedroom, in which Tarquin's violence is represented and which thus remains definitively the scene of a rape. What is constitutive, legally and phenomenologically, is Tarquin's threat of violence and his defamatory plot. This possibility is doubly marked in the poem inasmuch as there is evidence of Lucrece's willingness to sleep with someone other than her husband without being threatened, and hence at least of his choosing to make it a rape. Tarquín recalls the moment in which Lucrece received him:

 "she took me kindly by the hand,
And gaz'd for tidings in my eager eyes,
Fearing some hard news from the warlike band
Where her beloved Collatinus lies.
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.


"And how her hand in my hand being lock'd,
Forc'd it to tremble with her loyal fear!
Which strook her sad, and then it faster rock'd,
Until her husband's welfare she did hear;
Whereat she smiled with so sweet a cheer
That had Narcissus seen her as she stood,
Self-love had never drown'd him in the flood.n

(253-66)

These two stanzas are part of the poem's endless rereading of the mingled red and white in Lucrece's face. Here the colors are read into the best possible construction of Lucrece's behavior as loving wife, namely that she is concerned for nothing but her husband's safety. Yet it is Tarquín the would-be rapist who effects this reading—he precisely does not claim that she secretly desires him—and who construes Lucrece's trembling handclasp and sweetly enigmatic smile as evidence of pure concern about Collatine. To say that there is a sign or body language here that can be read otherwise is not to say that Tarquín, in raping or attempting to rape Lucrece, enacts her secret desire, but rather that his nonrecognition of any alternative to rape seems to be a function of his own ironically betrayed narcissism. Nothing but rape, it would seem, of an empowered, married woman who also "belongs" to her husband can effect the competitive male autonomization he desires. In this critical moment, Tarquín as rapist paradoxically becomes the ideal reader of Lucrece as chaste, loving wife. His reading denies her the natural ("kind") motive of wanting a lover rather than a husband who is always literally or figuratively in the wars with other men. It also denies her the "unkind" but not socially or culturally insignificant one of masochistically exposing herself to a putative figure of masculine power. We are thus made aware of avenues not explored at this point in the poem, at least by Tarquín; in Shakespeare's "Lucrece," like Clarissa, a rape scenario is not the only possible one between adult principals. Nor does there seem to be any moment in the poem in which that scenario can be the sole or self-identical one.

Yet even if rape is to be construed here as a crime of violence rather than as a sexual one, it apparently takes its place in a violent continuum without a clear origin or end. The violence begins in the poem with the siege of Ardea; continues when Collatine invidiously boasts of his possession of Lucrece and thus exposes her to danger; continues when Tarquín arrives at her house while her husband is away, in a manner that may already, as the poem implies, taint her in the eyes of her servants; continues when the (prose) siege is replayed as (poetic) rape, just as it does when (poetic) rape is folded over and replayed as (prose) siege; continues when Lucrece "gratuitously" commits suicide, thus effecting an intensified repetition as well as attempted annulment of rape after everyone has declared her innocent; continues when the men in her life competitively seek to appropriate her in a grieving contest; arguably continues when the Brutus of the poem exploits the situation to reveal himself as a hitherto unsuspected political contender. Within this continuum of violence, rape can mean physical assault on Lucrece's person, but as an act of seizure (raptus) it can also be regarded as that which nonexclusively instantiates an originary violent desire for and crime against private property, not excluding textual property:

 why is Collatine the publisher
Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
From thievish ears, because it is his own?

(33-35)7

If the rape remains unlocated as a sexual crime, then, it also seems unlocated as a crime of violence. This diffusion of rape in the text might seem to constitute part of Shakespeare's problematization of it, as well as resistance to its reification, yet this diffusion also threateningly generalizes it. Moreover, abusive masculine spectatorship as well as originary masculine violence seem to be displaced "upward" towards the reader and/or the author: indeed, the tendency of the poem to relocate all violence in writing, reading, and the acquisition of textual property, hence "authorship," has previously been remarked by critics including Dubrow. In other words, resistance to reification alone constitutes an insufficient political-representational strategy.

Thus far, however, we have not considered the extended representation of Lucrece as a site of potential difference, both in her problematic capacity to act against the repetition and totalization of rape, in her capacity to act for or against the Shakespearean "interest," and in her capacity to facilitate the forms of mediation and exchange that might be capable of instituting difference.

An impulse to regard rape as an elementary form or originary event is at once manifested and resisted by Lucrece herself. She attempts to trace her own victimized situation back to that of fateful, "originary" rape in the Troy story, where it has frequently been located, and her victimization—or rather, her conflicted desire to be and not to be in the victim position—appears when she seeks out the abducted married woman, Helen, in the Trojan picture she eventually confronts. In identifying Helen, however, not as the victim but as the whorishly culpable cause of her own undoing, Lucrece as chaste Roman drastically separates herself from infamous Greek Helen, and perhaps from certain temptations of power. (The negative differentiation and positive identification effected through rape thus reemerge between women as well as between men and women.) Yet her momentary recognition of Helen as alter ego does allow her to recognize the possible power or complicity of the woman as passive-aggressive cause of Troy's fall, an event in which, incidentally, the cultural translatio in which Rome is founded begins. In this drama of power and violent inheritance, it is not quite clear whether the man or the woman comes first—or who desires to occupy the originary position. Lucrece's subjective/objective genitive, "Helen's rape" (1369), lodges this indeterminacy in the poem and locates a certain doubleness or even duplicity at the origin of cultural violence and inheritance. After surveying the entire scene, however, Lucrece fails to recognize herself or originary rape in Troy—or resists doing so.

The refusal of identification with Helen does not, however, fully or differentially identify the chaste Roman Lucrece, but rather makes her a baffling and self-baffled figure, while it contributes to the generic instability of the poem that bears her name. If this refusal sets Lucrece up to be the tragically abused victim, no less does it enable her to subvert tragic (or reified) high seriousness. Not only is Shakespeare's figure of Lucrece assimilated to a Renaissance dialectic of will and wit, tragic high seriousness and deflating humor, but the figure of Lucrece becomes the eponymous one in Shakespeare's ironic "Ovidian" poem, in which tension is periodically reduced by a garrulous narrator (the rape narrative is not identical with the poem). Moreover, the poem will not sustain high seriousness as it transforms itself finally into a humorous etiological one to explain why Lucrece's spilt blood splits into three fractions. In short, neither Lucrece nor the poem will sustain anyone's critical high seriousness, or will do so only on the rather ironic condition of being critically silenced.

It is Lucrece who, lamenting in isolation after the departure of Tarquín, avowedly finds her own complaints tedious in the end, and cuts them off before turning to more economical and productive use of her resources.8 And it is she, the figure in the poem most entitled to do so, who may find the whole overwrought, impossible situation ludicrous in the end. When she is asked to identify her assailant, she does not successfully name Tarquín, but can only manage a repeated "He, He—" (1717, 1721). (Tarquin's name is produced as that of the definitive rapist by Lucrece's furiously proprietary father.) In Lucrece's own locution, we may hear the echo of a Chaucerian giggle. Or rather, we can undeniably hear this even while we hear Lucrece, like Clarissa, incriminate Man in general rather than any particular man: it is He, He, who is responsible. The point is that Lucrece's final utterance will not sustain the reification of her rape or of Tarquín as the definitive figure of the rapist.

This failure of definition or final identification is accompanied by the extraordinary tinctures and crossings of Lucrece's representation in general, and specifically in her extended, multiphase blazon, that feature of the poem that is so often discussed. It is within this hugely expanded field of indeterminacy that tinctures, crossings, and mergers of "interest" become important, while identities become virtually untraceable.

At one level, the blazon of Lucrece is the utterly conventional one of the Elizabethan poet, which Louis Montrose among others has read in terms both of a conventional Petrarchanism and of the iconography of Queen Elizabeth, to which Spenser notably contributes.9 On Shakespeare's part as "woman's poet," and no doubt on Spenser's as well, a certain identificatory interest in the Petrarchan queen and a sympathetic view of her threatened position among violent Elizabethan noblemen can be inferred. An unsuspected Shakespearean interest in the queen's successfully maintained character of chastity, all the ugly "tainting" Elizabethan rumors notwithstanding, may also disclose itself in due course. Something other than identificatory sympathy is present in the blazon of Lucrece, however, since one of those who produces it is Tarquín as beholder, intent on penetrating the shield of chastity which Lucrece, as Roman wife rather than Virgin Mary, mysteriously still possesses.

This reminds us that the blazon is conventionally the product of the masculine master-perspective or objectifying gaze, which at once fixes and anatomizes, composes and decomposes, its object.10 In this poem, however, the gaze of the observer is itself fractured and distributed among successive observers—even if it is also displaced "upward"—and forms of reciprocal exchange between gazer and object begin to assume increased significance.

The prolonged blazoning of Lucrece begins when her husband, Collatine, is reported as praising the "clear unmatched red and white / Which triumphed in the sky of his delight" (11-12). This crudely self-serving appropriation of Lucrece in the act of praising her coincides with, but is simultaneously exposed as, a very simple reading of her, that of naively totalized self-interest. For Collatine, Lucrece's red and white are stable, stably opposed and distinct, and uncontradictorily combined. This figure of pure Petrarchan triumph is one that Collatine also assimilates to an immaculate purity, not cosmetic beauty, when he goes on, like a witless Astrophil, to stellify Lucrece along with other "mortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties" (13)—stars that are there, however, only to do him "peculiar duties." Ironically, just as the "ideal" reading of Lucrece as dutiful wife comes from her would-be rapist, so the "ideal" Petrarchan reading of her comes from the crudely possessive husband, exposed as such.

From Collatine's point of view, Lucrece's possible interests, which are not necessarily undivided, remain unacknowledged, nor is any interest manifested in her. A more complex and arguably more interesting as well as interested figure of Lucrece succeeds this one. It is the developing figure of Lucrece in the criminal/incriminating eye of Tarquín, but then also of Tarquín in the eye of Lucrece. (The question of who has the superior or more encompassing eye, Tarquín or Lucrece, is played out through a series of grotesque "eye/I" puns akin to those of the sonnets.) For Tarquín, Lucrece is the property of another, but by the same token one who acquires the properties of another, properties not fully identical to those of the self:

When at Collatium this false lord arrived,
Well was he welcome'd by the Roman dame,
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.

(50-55)

The stable, distinct red and white of Collatine's description have been destabilized (or mobilized) here, and have entered, as Joel Fineman has claimed in the related instance of "Venus and Adonis," into an increasingly complex pattern of chiastic crossing, in which separate identities, original positions, and determinate significations are rapidly effaced.11 (Silver and gold later take the place of white and red, but not respectively so, since each color can fight with the other color, fight under the other color, or blend into it.) Distinctions between background and foreground, face and mask, surface and depth, are equally undone, and so therefore is the topography that would enable any moral determination to be made about Lucrece's complicity or otherwise in the rape, or perhaps about the respective positions of the participants.

Moreover, with the introduction of all these chiastic figures, a new form of representation enters the field of the poem. This is what I shall call the cross-representation of individual subjects' material interests that would otherwise remain merely opposed, incommensurable, irreconcilable, or even unrepresented. Not only does this pattern of cross-representation become more marked as the poem continues, but it is a form of representation of which Lucrece becomes the key figure by being "blazoned." (This process renders more complex and generally representative the figure of the Petrarchan woman as well as of the queen who unites the houses of York and Lancaster.)

This blazon is one in which the interest of Lucrece appears to be not simple, but divided or reciprocal inasmuch as virtue and beauty constitute two possible and antithetical grounds of fame, the former being the claim of the iconically chaste wife, akin to that of the stoic Roman man of virtue, and the latter being the claim of the more glamorously infamous beauty, figured for Lucrece by Helen of Troy. Yet these putative interests coincide inasmuch as imply a common interest in fame, and yet again they divide inasmuch as "fame" can mean good reputation or notoriety. What we have in the figure of Lucrece, then, is a model of actual or potential unity as well as conflict of interest, but also a model of one in whom antithetical interests may be cross-represented—for example, that of virtue by beauty and vice versa, or that of Greek Helen by Roman Lucrece and vice versa. While the crossing may remain incomplete, the possiblity of cross-representation also applies to the interaction between Lucrece and the increasingly reciprocal figure of Tarquin—an interaction in which each beholder sees him/herself figured in the other. Not for nothing does Lucrece say at one point, "In Tarquin's likeness I did entertain thee," thus identifying herself, no doubt inadvertently, with her rapist—or with the King Tarquín who is the rapist's namesake elder brother, the original rather than the likeness already found wanting. This reciprocation, in which the non-self-identify of the identified, gendered principals is increasingly implied, leads up to the final moment of the blazon, in which Lucrece's blood is finally split—or "let," to adopt one of the poem's favored locutions. The spilt blood immediately splits into three fractions.

We may have imagined, as we have often been led to do in the poem, that there is a "bottom line," and that the redness of blood is (at last!) a primary color or determinate signifier, on the one hand of masculine violence, or on the other of feminine passion and guilt, betrayed by an uncontrollable blushing.12 Yet Lucrece's spilt blood splits into the three fractions, a red, a black, and a pale, watery corona or "rigol" (1745). The blood of the living Lucrece is thus shown to have been a tincture all along, not a primordial entity, signifier, or natural cause. If this paradoxical "clarification" is part of what makes Lucrece's death the cathartic one of the poem—makes it a therapeutic bloodletting that renders her own figure and everything else in the poem distinct—what it makes distinct is, ironically, the non-self-identity of Lucrece as well as of her interest.

There are now three colors or tinctures to which Lucrece may be assimilated: the pale, virtually pure "rigol," red, which is now indeterminately a primary color and a tincture (whole and part at once), and an unexpected dark tint/taint close to black. This unsuspected dark fraction, identified in the poem as the Tarquín strain, implies Lucrece's partial internalization of the Tarquín figure and hence her ability to cross-represent him up to a point (it is through her action that King Tarquín is deposed). It is also, however, the strain or tincture in which the ink can most readily be identified. We are made to see that Lucrece's "character" and fate are—or have been—written all along, yet not exclusively in black as the color of her doom and/or "hidden" criminality, or in blood as the color of irrepressible natural passion, or in the ethereal "rigol" of endless (or only slightly tinted) purity.

The final exposure of Lucrece's tainting writtenness not only implies the "crossing" complexity of the Shakespearean investment in her figure, but also the possibility of her being rewritten, ultimately even by her own hand. It implies the possibility of her being rewritten right down to the biological level that may seem to constitute destiny in the final analysis.13 In his figure of Lucrece, Shakespeare foregrounds even the biological determination—or that one above all in the end, since it is equally the determination of the male author as perpetual rapist-manqué. While no full, specular interchange can ever be said to occur between Shakespeare as author and the represented figure of Lucrece, a certain crossing of "selves" and material interests can now be considered, as can the displacement of primary identities and gender determinations.

In an almost uncanny wa we may be brought to the recognition of a Shakespearean interest in the figure of Lucrece as woman by the feminist discourse that seems most antipathetic to it. This is the now arguably "primitive," foundational feminist discourse in which rape is not just reified, but projected in the most primordial, elementary form. Such a projection is contained in a work by Susan Brownmiller with the suitably anti-Shakespearean title Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.14

Brownmiller reimagines prehistory such that rape constitutes the sole, universal, and absolutely differential nexus of relation between the sexes. (One can hardly speak of constructed genders at that stage.) By virtue of man's biological advantage in strength over woman, he is able to turn his penis into an offensive weapon and to assert his power at his will. It is open season on rape. Brownmiller also imagines a primordial moment in which the woman is "fighting like hell to preserve her physical integrity" (22), but because of her biological disadvantage she must strike a "risky bargain," namely that of placing herself under the protection of a particular man.

This first form of the social contract in a hitherto Hobbesian world of endless rape is the one in which the institution of marriage is born. For Brownmiller, however, the primordial state of affairs, which is biologically determined, is mitigated but not radically changed in any subsequent version of the social contract. The implied threat against women, or against any particular woman, is that of recourse to rape in the final analysis; in principle, furthermore, every married woman is still a raped virgin, the only difference being that she is the private property of a single rapist rather than the common possession of an entire rapist community. Every social formation, material practice, and representation will betray the continuation of originary rape, which also remains the unalterable content of social life and gender relations. Rape is the signified in which all signifiers originate, and to which they inevitably return.

Confirmation of this thesis might be claimed from the notorious figurative overload of Shakespeare's "Lucrece," in which "the violence of the letter" is sufficiently foregrounded.15 In the scene of rape, moreover, Tarquin's displayed sword is metonymically his penis (and vice versa). Neither this assumed figurative telos nor this figurative equivalence, however, is the same as primordial identity. The sword, after all, is no more nor less a cultural artifact than is the mythic phallus, and neither is an inalienable form or function of alleged male biological supremacy. In the poem, moreover, sword, spear, phallus, engraving tool, pen, embroidery needle, gauntlet, and glove are all within the same substitutive chain, as are various senses of the word "pricking." Among other things, it is the woman's power to alienate ostensibly male tools and signifiers that Lucrece's entry into writing and her eventual suicide reveal. It is by these means that she penetrates (or always and already inhabits) masculine order in both the critical and political senses of the word, and it is by these means that she inserts herself into the poem's circulation of power and violence, though to what eventual avail and in whose ultimate interests is debatable.16

Correlatively, it appears to be Tarquin's unrealizable desire in the poem to reestablish primordial male identity by explicitly willing or intending rape. Yet after the blank in the poem, Tarquín seems to find not only that he has not been authenticated or taken the place of his own elder brother, but that he has been penetrated himself. This also constitutes his own discovery of himself in the place of the female other rather than of the authenticated male self:

 his soul's fair temple is defaced,
To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
To ask the spotted princess how she fares.

(719-21)

A voice within, now that of Lucrece as internalized governing "other," replies, condemning Tarquín, her subject, to "living death and pain perpetual." The end of Tarquin's story in the poem is one in which he is reduced (or elevated) to a figure of penitence, having in effect become Lucrece's imagined, powerful reading of him. As the fool who rushed in, he becomes a strong negative exemplum for the aspiring Elizabethan writer; he is also a telling instance of one who is read by the woman, whose "literacy" apparently prevails.

The effect of all this is to render highly dubious any claim to identity or uninterrupted series between the phenomena of the poem and those of primordial or biologically determined rape and sexual difference. Even if these primitive "origins" remain uneffaced, they are at once attenuated and redistributed through a far more complex system than any envisaged under Brownmiller's social contract, or perhaps under any possible social contract. This, too, becomes clear as Brownmiller articulates her vision of the contemporary primitive:

On the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violent young men there rests an ageold burden that amounts to an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force. The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. (174-75)

According to Brownmiller, it is these "police blotter rapists," repeatedly convicted in an act of bad faith by patriarchal society, who do the dirty work of male terrorism. Yet we may wonder how the secondary distinction arises between Achilles and his Myrmidons. It is not enough to rehearse their mythic origin in an ant swarm as that which differentiates them from Achilles. In Brownmiller's scenario, it is hard to imagine how the distinction could be produced except by the very same means used to subjugate woman, namely violence culminating in and signified by homosexual rape. And insofar as Brownmiller is testifying to a continuity between the primordial condition and immediate social fact, we may recognize—as Brownmiller certainly does—that these same "police-blotter rapists" will continue to rape and be raped in the primitive power struggles in the prisons to which they are sent. Indeed, the threat of such rape and of contingent degrading dependencies is a highly publicized and seldomchallenged unofficial deterrent in the modern criminal justice system.

It is precisely the possibility of masculine power asserted through homosexual rape that is figured by Achilles in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. If Achilles is the hypermale figure, he is so by virtue of a violence that does not appear to discriminate between men and women, or may functionally rather than chivalrously discriminate in favor of women. Shakespeare's Achilles is the alleged pining lover of a Trojan woman but the dominant male in his relation to Patroclus, who has arguably entered into Brownmiller's risky matrimonial bargain with Achilles as protector. For what it is worth, too, the only damage we see being done by the Myrmidons in Troilus and Cressida is to Hector. And if the violence of Achilles is directed primarily against men, Brownmiller will have given us the reason for it, which is that women are biologically hors de combat before the struggle really begins. None of this, however, is either unequivocally supported by or fatefully written into Shakespeare's play. Indeed, it is the Achilles of Shakespeare's "Lucrece" who emerges as a better candidate for hypermale rapist than the feeble performer in Troilus and Cressida or the almost comically pusillanimous Tarquín in the poem.

The hitherto unconsidered figure of Achilles in "Lucrece" is conspicuously not pictured in the otherwise rather full Trojan tableau that Shakespeare's Lucrece eventually confronts:

For much imaginary work was there—
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear
Gripp'd in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head
Stood for the whole to be imagined.

(1422-28)

Compelling an imaginative presence as Achilles may be, he is also just not "there" in the poem—the "whole" is a "hole" in the text—any more than is punctual rape. His absence, which is also the lack of any image other than that of the synecdochic spear as big prick (which may nevertheless be what the fantasized hypermale always comes down to in the end), makes it impossible for Lucrece to find the mythical hypermale rapist in the picture. Tarquín, by the same token, is no more than the player of Achilles' mythical part in a rape that apparently cannot be total in the absence of Achilles. Certainly, neither Paris nor Helen, neither Greeks nor Trojans, participate in any "ideal" action of rape, either in Troilus and Cressida or in "Lucrece."

The figure on whom Lucrece herself becomes most intensely fixated in the end—or looks at most "advisedly" (1527)—is that of the traitor, Sinon. He, rather than Helen, is the one who promises or threatens most perfectly to represent her, and by the same token to represent her crossing with the "impotent" Tarquín. On one hand, he is the weak though womanishly "fair"(1530) man, virtually the eunuch, whose only power (albeit an enormous power) is that of the smooth-spoken betrayer or rhetorical rapist who penetrates the paternal domain of Troy. He is also the figure of the perfect hypocrite in whose face truth appears. For all these reasons, he is putatively the figure by whom Lucrece can be cross-represented, but by whom Tarquín may also be represented, just as Ajax and Achilles cross-represent each other when Lucrece says of them that "the face of either ciphered either's heart"(1396). (Perhaps, however, it is only through the neuter figure of Sinon that Tarquín and Lucrece can fully cross over.) Yet Sinon is also the figure in whom Lucrece may least be represented, since he is a weak man, a Greek, and a seducer from without, none of which characteristics is literally hers. As a hypocrite's, moreover, his is the self-cancelling image that may simply be another blank in the representation or limit to it. After an enormous effort to decipher this baffling figure, Lucrece furiously attacks it in an attempt to distinguish herself from it and force it definitively upon Tarquín as his image:

Here all enrag'd, such passion her assails,
That patience is quite beaten from her breast.
She tears the senseless Sinon with her nails,
Comparing him to that unhappy guest
Whose deed hath made herself herself detest.
At last she smilingly with this gives o'er:
"Fool, fool," quoth she, "his wounds will not be sore."

(1562-68)

Lucrece's humorously recognized failure to discover any figure in the painting, male or female, who satisfies her demand for effective, punitive identification of rapist or victim may lead to her making herself that figure in the end, possibly in the androgynously "whole" guise of the woman effectively raping and punishing herself in a single action. She cannot, however, fully possess and autonomize herself as the raped woman even in that moment, since what she is doing will also look like stoic suicide, a publically virtuous action that makes her the noblest Roman of them all.

What therefore seems to be lacking in the representation, or unrepresentable in it, is the definitive figure of the rapist as the actor of an "originary" masculine violence against the woman. This absence does not, however, mean that the parameters have finally changed. One reason why Lucrece cannot definitively locate the figure of the rapist is that he is to be found, if anywhere, in the authorial position, in keeping with the "upward" displacement of violence in the poem. The compelling imaginative presence of Achilles is marked by the spear held in a mailed fist, but this figure is also the Shake-spearean signature in the poem. It is with the power of Achilles that "Shakespeare" is thus identified, all the more so for its being an invisible but imaginable omnipotence, never compromised, as is that of Tarquín or Lucrece, by its own theatrical representation. Yet at the same time it is a power, which is also an imagined power of sole authorship, never capable of being wholly embodied or possessed. Arguably, the attempt to do so could be only an act of folly or of abomination that would turn William Shakespeare—if these expressions may be forgiven—into the biggest prick known to history—or, more advisedly considering the Achilles emblem, the biggest jerk. Failing, and always failing, this impossible self-identification, Shakespeare too must participate in the poem's field of more complex and restricted interest.

To say this is tantamount to saying that the only representabe Shakespearean interests or positions in the poem participate in, or cross-represent, those of represented others, including those of Lucrece and Tarquín. And even (or above all) in relation to the self-totalizing Achilles figure, another Shakespearean interest in the poem's schemes of reciprocation may disclose itself. The Achilles position may be one in which Shakespeare is under a compulsion to sign himself, yet that signature is not his only one in the text, and the Achilles position is one from which he is also socially displaced. Another Shakespearean signature appears on the title page, subscribed (the term is important) to the poem's dedication to the Earl of Southampton. A particular form of impotence or emasculation, not merely feminine, is the reciprocal one of Achillean domination, and the name of that powerlessness is Patroclus. The name is not spoken in the poem, yet the relevant form of powerlessness is not necessarily unrepresented in it; indeed, it is inherent in the very situation to which the poem's dedication draws attention, namely its being produced under patronage, and specifically under the patronage of the powerful Earl of Southampton. It is being produced, in other words, in a setting of domination and dependency between men, and a specific one of which (thanks to the advertising of Shakespeare among other authors) the homoerotic "taintedness" has become a commonplace of literary history. The authorial position is accordingly one in which Shakespeare can be more than a little interested in the violated, shamed, and incipiently silenced woman, who is also the "property" of another. Moreover, "disadvantaged" class and gender positions, both qualified, however, by the singular privilege of literacy, can evidently be cross-represented up to a point.

The reason for suspecting that a Patroclus is implied in the figure of Lucrece and in the patronage setting has already been anticipated in my discussion of Brownmiller's primordial scenario and specifically in my identification of Achilles as the fantasized hypermale warrior-rapist of the poem. A further reason for supposing that there is a Patroclus inside the figure of Lucrece is given by the ordinary conventions of the Shakespearean theater, in which there is a boy actor inside every represented woman. It is this which makes every heterosexual courtship on the Elizabethan stage a masked homosexual courtship as well, and "taints" at least any man with an interest in that stage; crossings between the social text of drama and the more withdrawn poetic text are ubiquitous in Shakespeare's writing.17

The question of why Shakespeare's interest crosses with, and is also masked by, that of Lucrece in the poem may now seem practically to answer itself, but let us briefly spell it out. It is a participatory interest in Lucrece's struggle, whether vain or successful, for self-inscription in a political world in which she is threatened with marginalization, objectification, and the performance of others' scripts, including their erotic ones. Identification with this "woman's condition," already effected by Ovid and Chaucer as "women's poets" or male poets as women, is vastly extended by Shakespeare in "Lucrece." Her effort to establish her will, meaning in every sense her desire rather than that of others, leads to her entry into writing and the attempt literally to write her own will as a master text of the future.

Shakespeare's quasi-identificatory interest in the figure of Lucrece presumably includes an interest in her as the Philomel-figure of the raped woman who is also the silenced woman. This silenced condition seems compatible not just with garrulousness but with brilliant lyric performance, yet it remains the imagined or felt condition of having or being allowed no voice in which the self is recognizable, or by which it feels authentically constituted. The role of Philomel, however, is one that Lucrece plays to comical excess, in a way that increasingly implies its possessive, autistic inauthenticity. The poignant, classical Philomel lives only to name her rapist before relapsing into silence and death, whereas Lucrece spends 265 lines denouncing Night, Opportunity, Time, and other reified agents (belonging, indeterminately, to scenarios of rape and assignation) before even she gets bored with the sound of her own voice. She ends her life, as we have seen, without naming her rapist to her would-be avengers, thus paradoxically reclaiming her autonomy but failing, like Richardson's immaculately self-totalizing Clarissa, Queene of Grub Street if not of the shepherds, to be the touching Philomel.

Shakespeare's "Lucrece," as 1 have suggested all along, is far from resolving questions of gendered representation fundamentally, or from decisively negating "primitive" determinants of representation. Yet it does constitute a socialization of representation in comparison with the texts previously discussed, and it does incorporate in and through the figure of Lucrece a field of reciprocation, exchange, and differing potentiality, even if that potentiality remains in many if not all respects unfulfilled in the poem.

There is, however, a clear sense in which Shakespeare's figure of Lucrece is Shakespeare's figure as Lucrece, or is Shakespeare fighting for, and under, her (rhetorical) colors. Similarly, Lucrece's drama of self-recognition and attempted self-embodiment in front of the Trojan painting may in some respects be taken as a reciprocal miming of Shakespeare's own, while her attempted movement into the position of the interpreting subject from that of the female "cipher"—or that of the endlessly tainted ("tinted") woman—constitutes a significant moment of attempted self-inscription:

"Make me not object to the tell-tale day:
The light will show character'd in my brow
The story of sweet chastity's decay,
The impious breach of holy wedlock vow,
Yea, the illiterate that know not how
To cipher what is writ in learned books,
Will quote my loathsome trespass in their looks.

(806-12)

The fear of being objectified by being powerfully or determinately read into an unfavorable scenario—including an historical one of "chastity's decay"—is evident here, and it is a "feminine" anxiety to which there is a suggestive masculine counterpart in the Elizabethan antitheatrical reading of the male actor/poet/playwright as homosexually tainted, complicit, or passive. Yet the fear of such objectification must not make Lucrece object to exposure, and to being read, hence "attainted," by anyone in the literate domain, since that is the only condition on which she can write herself. It is the condition on which she can enter into writing, as distinct from remaining in the private condition of a Philomel; it is also the condition on which she can seek to escape the prophecy that the writing of the "good" woman will be done by others, canonically by men, or will, in effect, be no writing at all, either remaining undone or being done only in "chaste" invisible ink.

It would be presumptuous to suggest that the Shakespearean difference and the difference it makes is that of establishing common cause or fully representing the sociopolitical interest of the woman as other, as if it were identical to his own interest. For one thing, difference is always that which remains to be produced, not that which has its own a priori grounds in representation. For another, the exemplary fate of "Shakespeare's" Lucrece and his continuing self-inscription in the Achilles position might seem to betray the lack of any difference in the final analysis; indeed the strategic incorporation by the male author of the woman's part (the synecdochically reduced woman) could be regarded as masculinist business as usual, here conducted by Shakespeare as the supreme businessman. Yet in emphasizing the writtenness of rape through the nonfatal "posthumous" emblem of Lucrece's blood, the poem does establish the field of difference as one of unforeclosed possibility in the rewriting of sociocultural scripts. In this respect, it differs from many of its predecessors in the Lucrece tradition. . . .

Notes

1 The historical legend of Lucrece is discussed by Ian Donaldson in The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Textual predecessors of Shakespeare's poem include: Livy, Ad Urbe Condita (trans. Philemon Holland, 1600) 1:57-60, 3:44-49, in a version conceivably pertinent to the Folio "Rape of Lucrece"; Ovid, Fasti 2:721-852; Augustine, City of God 1:19; Chaucer, Legend of Good Women 1680-1885; Gower, Confessio Amantis 6.4593-5130; Painter, Fallace of Pleasure (1556). More remote impingement might be traced to versions by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Servius; Plutarch; Diodorus Siculus; Valerius Maximus; Florus; Dio Cassius; Emporius; Seneca; Jerome; Tertullian; Salutati; Machiavelli; Tyndale; Edward More; John Case. See also Heather Dubrow, "The Rape of Clio: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare's Lucrece," Shakespeare Newsletter 34 (1984): 3.

2 I have been positively and negatively influenced by William Beatty Warner, "Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations of the Literal," Diacritics (Winter 1983): 12-32. Warner criticizes the notion that rape is purely signified in Clarissa: he antithetically conceives of rape as a circulating figure in the text, which such critics as Terry Castle and Terry Eagleton aggressively literalize. My main differences with Warner arise from his constituting antithetical realms of textual circulation and free play on one hand and of inert sociolegal fact on the other. I wish to emphasize writing rape rather than reading it, and to insist that writing goes between these antithetical realms, if such they are.

3 As significantly "entitled" women, protagonists like Lucrece and Clarissa are hardly instances of broad social fact, nor do they self-identically and exclusively instantiate the feminine. It could be suggested that my account, unlike those of Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class-Struggle in Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), dehistoricizes the issues. For Eagleton especially, the figure of Clarissa is a function of a particular, determinate shift from aristocratic landowning to bourgeois property relations. Clarissa acts for the latter against the former, yet her "excessive" adherence to the codes of the latter disrupts the codes. A very similar argument could be made, however, about the Shakespearean Lucrece in her earlier historical setting; in fact, the argument practically makes itself.

4 Under reifying criticism, I include the work of Eagleton and Castle, and of Warner inasmuch as he antithetically reifies a free text and a fixed world of sociolegal fact. In relation to "Lucrece," the reifying tendency is represented, for example, by Coppélla Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece, " Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-76; Katherine Eisaman Maus, "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82.

5 William Shakespeare, "Lucrece" in The Poems, ed.F.T. Prince, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1960), 80. Prince represents one limit in regarding the poem as virtually pure, unmotivated, and tiresome figuration from start to finish.

6 1 make no claim about what women dream, yet the claim that they dream inter alia of rape is made by Helen Hazan, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination (New York, 1983), cited in Warner, "Reading Rape," 13. Nothing new or different is proved about rape even if that is the case, and it is certainly no argument either for women's social complicity in rape or for any sociolegal tolerance of it.

7 Needless to say, the woman's property in her body or self is virtually a contradiction in terms in the poem and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Such property is property in the no-thing (res nulla) that woman must be in phallo-centric representation. Yet even that negative ownership or property is not immune to invidious appropriation, as Shakespeare equally suggests. In the invidious eye of the beholder, that paradoxically unownable property may become the most desirable of all.

8 In unpublished work, Mark Rasmussen of Johns Hopkins University has interestingly discussed Catullus's lament of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, in "The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," as a model for such extended complaint in Latin and neoclassical poetry. The problematic of such prolonged complaint includes that of its solitariness—its lack of, and lack of any desire for, a social audience or participation.

9 On the blazon and its implications, see Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Eliza, queene of the shepheardes' and the Pastoral of Power," ELR 10 (1980): 153-82; Nancy Vickers, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Caroline Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980): 95-115; and Catherine R. Stimson, "Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape," in the same volume, 56-64.

10 There is now a very extensive critique, largely feminist, of the master-gaze of the male beholder in Western painting, film, and visual representation generally. A summary of the issues and some of the criticism is included in Michael Fried, "Courbet's Femininity," forthcoming. I am not aware of any extensive comparable discussion of the reciprocal gaze that is troped in "Lucrece." It also needs to be recalled that reading is not "gazing."

11 I acknowledge the usefulness of Joel Fineman's discussion of colors and tints in "Venus and Adonis," Johns Hopkins University, 1986.

12 Reading the woman's blush as the undecidable sign of her innocence or guilty complicity is too widespread in literature and criticism to need particular citation. Suffice that the reading of the blush is an issue in "Lucrece," as in Much Ado and Clarissa, to name only those. Frequently in the criticism, but not in Shakespearean representation, "reading rape" seems to come down to a reading of the blush.

13 Jonathan Goldberg has emphasized that the biological is always and already written, subject only to revision as the (auto)biographical. See "Milton's Prose Autobiographies," English Renaissance Prose 1 (1987):3.

14 Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

15 In work forthcoming, Jonathan Goldberg systematically and powerfully examines writing (writtenness) as the material matrix of all Renaissance constructions of universal anthropology, of privileged and repressed subjecthood, and of representation generally. He also gives a landmark account of "the violence of the letter" in Renaissance representation.

16 The question cui bono? could somewhat tediously be thrashed out with reference to the action of the poem, yet the point I would rather make is that the action of Lucrece—both figure and poem—is not just inconclusive but unconcluded inasmuch as it continues in our criticism.

17 I acknowledge the forthcoming work of Laura Levine of Wellesley College on the homoerotic "taintedness," in the eyes of Elizabethan antitheatricalists, of the theater and all who participate in it. The claimed emasculation of the actors and, by extension, their imitative audiences, makes them virtually equivalent to depraved women in this antitheatrical discourse.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece