[In the following excerpt, Cousins argues that Tarquin and Lucrece can be seen as parodies of Petrarchan lovers and that Lucrece's husband, Collatine, is a braggart who unwittingly turns Tarquin's violent attention towards Lucrece.]

(III) TARQUIN, LUCRECE, AND COLLATINE

As might be expected, much of the more recent commentary on Lucrece has focused on the interrelated matters of politics, gender and subjectivity. The poem's representation of the Roman world and its politics, especially its sexual/gender politics, has been studied; how Lucrece emerges from the variously political discourses of later Elizabethan society, and its negotiations with them, have been considered; the poem's representations of subjectivity in relation to patriarchy and to rape—and their connections—have been widely discussed.¹ In focusing on those matters, most commentary has inevitably centred on the characterization of Lucrece herself. But as a result the mutually defining nature of characterization in the poem has received insufficient attention.² Here I want to propose that by examining the reciprocal formation of consciousness and of role among Shakespeare's Tarquin, Collatine and Lucrece as far as the beginnings of his poem's rape scene (that is, approximately from lines 1 to 441) one sees that the characterizations established early in Lucrece are more complex in their discursive relations than has been acknowledged. Recognition of their being so helps to illuminate not merely subsequent happenings in the poem, such as Lucrece's insistent denial of her own innocence and her decision to commit suicide, but also crucial concerns of the poem, such as the sceptical interrogation of exemplarity, the interaction between exemplarity and historical process.

In particular, I shall argue here that while Tarquin is a tyrant figure, and distinctly a Platonic type of the tyrant, he is as well a demonic parody of the Petrarchan lover insofar as he pursues a lady, Lucrece, who is portrayed as at once an exemplar of the chaste Roman matron and an incarnation of the Petrarchan mistress. Violating her, Shakespeare's Tarquin sexually heightens and violates the Petrarchan discourse of love. Yet it is not Lucrece's primary misfortune that, in her guise as Petrarchan mistress, she attracts a tyrant figure (in fact, a proto-tyrant) who defines himself specifically, as a tyrant, in relation to her via the role of grimly parodic Petrarchan lover. Rather, as is argued here, it seems that Lucrece's primary misfortune lies in the hubris of her husband, Collatine. When part of the Roman army besieging Ardea, Collatine tries to gain a personal victory over the king's son, his superior and kinsman: Collatine's boastful vying with the proto-tyrant redirects Tarquin's violence and desire from the enemy/foreign/public to the kindred/Roman/private. The poem registers that redirection of Tarquin's violence and desire not only in terms of Petrarchan discourse but also in terms of the myths of the Golden Age and of Eden. Tarquin becomes an analogue to Satan; Lucrece, indicated as embodying both Tarquin's and Collatine's notions of the absolute good on earth, becomes an analogue to the earthly paradise and (an incorruptible) Eve; Collatine thus figures as a self-betraying Adam, who brings the serpent to Eden and tempts the serpent into violating his (unwilling) Eve.

When the intricate interactions among Tarquin, Collatine and Lucrece in the early part of Shakespeare's poem are seen especially as expressed through those Platonic, Petrarchan and Golden Age/Edenic discourses, then the immediately relevant consequences are as follows. Tarquin's mutually intensifying, interconnected roles, read in conjunction with the also mutually intensifying and interconnected roles of Lucrece, which are antithetic to his, clarify her comprehensive sense of violation and contamination. Thus clarified, too, is her deep sense of defacement, of her innermost self's having been stolen; both clarifications, in turn, help to illuminate her decision to commit suicide. Light is shed, moreover, on the sceptical questioning of exemplarity and on other of the poem's concerns. The final consequence, then, appears to be that a new perspective is offered on the poem as a whole: important happenings can be viewed from a revealingly unfamiliar angle; things not previously observed, such as the sceptical questioning of exemplarity, come sharply into view.

The easiest way to start specifying what has been outlined above is probably by looking at the characterization of Tarquin, for with him the poem itself begins. Tarquin's historical role as proto-tyrant seems to be his basic one in the poem. Shakespeare's narrator may also picture Tarquin in the roles of parodic Petrarchan lover and of Satan, but it is indicated that they are Tarquin's expressions of his tyrannic role in relation to Lucrece. At the beginning of the ‘Argument’, the narrator signals that Tarquin's immediate role model is his father, whose pride, treachery, violence and violations—of family bonds, of laws and of custom—manifest his will to power, his will to tyranny (ll. 1-6). The poem reveals, of course more thoroughly than does the ‘Argument’, that Tarquin is certainly his father's son.³

The opening of Lucrece predominantly characterizes Tarquin in terms of desire. The ‘Argument’ emphasizes his underlying role to be that of proto-tyrant, the opening stanzas do so as well; but as proto-tyrant he is initially and chiefly characterized in the poem by the ‘desire’ (l. 2) which informs the expressions of his tyrannic role in relation to Lucrece.⁴ The narrator implies several things about the nature of that desire: its treachery (‘trustless’ and ‘false’, in l. 2, suggest that it betrays Tarquin while impelling him to betray Collatine and Lucrece); its possession of Tarquin (he becomes ‘[l]ust-breathed’, the narrator says in l. 3); its sinister, even demonic, energy (ll. 4-7); its violence which displaces the military violence directed by Tarquin against Ardea. Desire, treachery and violence are, according to Plato's Republic, marks of the tyrannic character.⁵ In fact, desire and the need to gratify it tyrannize over the tyrant. He becomes driven by a ‘master passion’ in whose service he will violate even domestic sanctities (9, 572-5). The characterization of Tarquin as proto-tyrant accords in those respects, then, with Plato's type of the tyrant in his Republic.⁶ And it does so in others as well. According to Plato's text, desire possesses the tyrant but he is vulnerable also to fears: ‘He is naturally a prey to fears and passions of every sort’ (9, 579b). Tarquin's soliloquy in his chamber dramatizes the compelling force of his desire in conflict with the constraining power of his fears (ll. 190-280).⁷ Further, Plato describes the tyrant as bestial and, more specifically, as a wolf to his fellow citizens (8, 569b and 565d-566a). Shakespeare's narrator compares Tarquin, just before the rape of Lucrece, to a ‘cockatrice’ (l. 540), a ‘gripe’ (l. 543; that is, to a vulture or an eagle) and to a ‘foul night-waking cat’ (l. 554). Tarquin is thereafter compared to a ‘wolf’ when he rapes Lucrece (ll. 676-7). Subsequently he is figured as a ‘full-fed hound or gorged hawk’ (l. 694) and ‘thievish dog’ (l. 736). In his primary role as proto-tyrant, Tarquin seems deliberately represented in accord with Plato's account of the tyrannic character. He may be, as Ovid had indicated and Shakespeare apparently accepted from Ovid, truly his father's son but he is also more than a reincarnation of his tyrannic father.

How much more than that he is can be seen from his relations to Lucrece. The ways in which Tarquin perceives Lucrece and defines himself in response to his understanding of her express, of course, his desire for her and thus his role as Platonic tyrant figure in relation to her. As has been foreshadowed above, one such expression of his role as tyrant in relation to her is his role as parodic Petrarchan lover. When first the narrator describes Tarquin, characterizing him predominantly in terms of desire, it seems that ‘[l]ust-breathed’ Tarquin (l. 3) is as a man possessed. What tyrannizes over the proto-tyrant is desire for a woman pictured to him, by her husband, in a way that anachronistically celebrates her as a type of the Petrarchan lady: ‘Collatine unwisely did not let / To praise the clear unmatched red and white / Which triumph'd in that sky of his delight’ (ll. 10-12). The narrator confirms that image of Lucrece by adding to his report of Collatine's imprudent eulogy. He praises Lucrece's eyes, identifying them with the stars. They are, he says, ‘[M]ortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties’ (l. 13). Reworking the Petrarchan motif of the lady's eyes being, or resembling, stars, Shakespeare's narrator confirms what his report of Lucrece's public celebration by Collatine has previously, and likewise metonymically, indicated through Petrarchan allusion (‘red and white’, l. 11): Lucrece's role as Petrarchan object of desire. So Tarquin, the Platonic tyrant figure tyrannized by desire for a woman imaged to him as virtually prefiguring Laura, becomes in relation to her a counterpart to the Petrarchan lover.⁸ But the differences between Tarquin and, say, Petrarch's speaker in ‘Passa la nave …’ are more important than the similarities. In particular, the latter's desire for his lady seems ambivalent. Tarquin's desire for Lucrece is, however, solely unspiritual, a ‘lightless fire’ (l. 4) concerned only with the body and with violation: ‘lurk[ing] to aspire, / And girdle with embracing flames the waist / Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste’ (ll. 5-7). Expressing his will to tyranny, his proto-tyrannic role, Tarquin's desire makes him a brutal parody of the Petrarchan lover as a species; it makes his pursuit of Lucrece a sexual heightening and violation of the Petrarchan discourse of love. As might be expected, Shakespeare's narrator implies that very distinctly and emphatically in his account of Lucrece's rape.

The interaction between that parodic role and Tarquin's other main roles in relation to Lucrece is intriguing; nonetheless, before it can be looked at those roles through which her subjectivity is chiefly fashioned in the poem must be considered. Lucrece's initial and main role in the poem is, almost inevitably, that of chaste Roman matron: the narrator first identifies her as ‘Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste’ (l. 7). Her subsequently established guise of Petrarchan lady complements her initial one by heightening the reader's sense of both her chastity and her beauty (see especially ll. 12-14). The two roles also have a less obvious harmony, for they can be seen—though in different ways—as imposed. Lucrece's initial role gives her selfhood in terms of a conventional category of the female in her society. In that sense the basic role given to her in the poem, which concurs with her own notion of who she basically is, appears to be culturally imposed. And not only does Lucrece acknowledge the role of chaste Roman matron to be in fact essential to her idea of who she is; she acknowledges, too, her feeling or consciousness of its being imposed from without (by implication, socially). Her most explicit acknowledgement occurs, I think, just after her three long complaints, when she is pondering suicide: ‘I was a loyal wife: / So am I now,—O no, that cannot be! / Of that true type hath Tarquin rifled me’ (ll. 1048-50).⁹ The reader may not agree with Lucrece's refusal to accept her own innocence but, that aside, it would seem clear that she thinks of herself as being primarily a chaste Roman matron and as having received that role from without—of her basic selfhood as therefore ultimately able to be erased from without.

Lucrece's externalized sense of her ultimate self thus appears to be inseparable from, and to clarify, at once her profound consciousness of herself as an exemplar of chastity and her profound fear of becoming an exemplar of unchastity. She recognizes that others have established her as the former and that they can turn her into the latter: she recognizes her vulnerability as an exemplar, how indifferent to her inner life and beyond her control that aspect of her selfhood is (see ll. 519-39 and 806-40). Her consciousness of herself as exemplar seems to clarify, in turn, her sense of being immersed in historical process. Rape impels Lucrece to look anxiously to the future and also anxiously to the past, as well it might.¹⁰ But for her, as exemplar, there is a special reason for its doing so. Exemplarity, in her world as of course in Shakespeare's, is a means of illuminating and stabilizing historical process, of defining subjectivity within it. Anticipating misrepresentation of her role as exemplar, its unjustly parodic inversion, Lucrece simultaneously anticipates the falsification of history (see, for example, ll. 813-26). To preserve her existence as an exemplar of chastity is likewise, for her, significantly if partly to save the present from future misinterpretation, to protect history from false tradition. The case is alike yet interestingly different when she turns to the past. Looking to a picture of the Trojan past for comfort, she seeks consolation in discovering an exemplar of misery (ll. 1443-56), not merely in order that she may find a companion in her distress but, as well, that she may find another self—one whom she may vindicate and so, through whom, amend history (ll. 1457-98).

Lucrece's preoccupation with her exemplarity and with control of meaning and of subjectivity in interpretation of the past will be examined again below. For the moment, discussion must focus on what seem to be her other main roles in the poem. Those other roles are, much like the ones previously considered, imposed from without. That is to say, although they are revealed by the narrator as consonant with personal appearance and impulse in Lucrece, they are also revealed by him as in effect deriving from Collatine's devotion to her and from Tarquin's perception of her via the celebratory picture drawn by her husband. They connect with, as well as complement, her roles as chaste Roman matron and Petrarchan lady, just as they evoke from Tarquin roles linked to his guises of Platonic tyrant figure and parodic Petrarchan lover. They are, moreover, syncretic and in part anachronistic: as was indicated earlier, they figure Lucrece as a type of the earthly paradise and (an incorruptible) Eve; Tarquin therefore comes to figure as a type of Satan (later, of course, he becomes an analogue to Sinon); Collatine thence comes to figure as a self-betraying Adam, who unwittingly tempts the serpent to violate, to steal. It is a powerful mingling of discourses—Platonic, Petrarchan, Golden Age/Edenic—that combines with what is chiefly an Ovidian historical discourse to characterize the three main actors in Shakespeare's narrative and thereby re-present the rape of Lucrece.

The representation of Lucrece in terms of Golden Age/Edenic discourse begins with the initial picturing of her as an ideal Petrarchan lady. When Shakespeare's narrator first mentions Collatine's unwary celebration of Lucrece, he affirms her husband's reported and summarized speech by describing her face as the ‘sky of [Collatine's] delight; / Where mortal stars as bright as heaven's beauties, / With pure aspects did him peculiar duties’ (ll. 12-14). The Petrarchan allusions in those lines have already been discussed; what I wish to emphasize here is that the Petrarchan imagery suggests Lucrece to be Collatine's heaven on earth (‘lent’ to him by ‘the heavens’, as the narrator subsequently remarks in another context).¹¹ With the initial use of Petrarchan discourse in the poem, then, another discourse also emerges, the Golden Age/Edenic: from that signifying of Lucrece to be Collatine's heaven on earth follows imaging of her as the earthly paradise and as Eve. In fact Lucrece's face, ‘that sky of [Collatine's] delight’ (l. 12), is soon after described twice by the narrator as a ‘fair field’ (l. 58; ‘her fair face's field’, l. 72).¹² The elaborate, conventional trope seems important for several reasons. First, it suggests that Lucrece's face is an ideal landscape and so it complements the preceding image of her face as Collatine's ‘sky of … delight’ (l. 12). Further, the trope forms part of a compressed allegory that, in emphasizing the fusion of beauty and virtue in Lucrece, indicates her to be a Golden Age innocent living in a world far removed from the ‘world's minority’ (l. 67; see ll. 52-73). Then, too, it pictures Lucrece so attractively (and as so vulnerable) at the moment when she is welcoming Tarquin into her home. Finally, the trope derives from Petrarchan tradition, as ll. 71-2 signal, and thus hints at the extent to which Golden Age/Edenic discourse in the poem is generated by Petrarchan discourse.¹³ The latter also initiates the former, as it happens, in what is the last identification of Lucrece as an earthly paradise before she is raped.

That moment of identification, which deserves closer attention than it is often given, occurs in the report of Tarquin's long, intense gazing on the sleeping Lucrece (see ll. 365-71, 386-420), the visual assault that precedes his more directly physical one. The narrator starts his account as follows:

Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
Coz'ning the pillow of a lawful kiss;
Who therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,
Swelling on either side to want his bliss:
Between whose hills her head entombed is,
          Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
          To be admir'd of lewd unhallowed eyes.
Without the bed her other fair hand was,
On the green coverlet; whose perfect white
Show'd like an April daisy on the grass,
With pearly sweat resembling dew of night.
Her eyes like marigolds had sheath'd their light,
          And canopied in darkness sweetly lay,
          Till they might open to adorn the day.

(ll. 386-99)

Petrarchan images of ‘lily’ and of ‘ros[e]’ (l. 386), used recurrently to describe Lucrece, introduce the passage. They serve immediately to eroticise the picture of the sleeping woman in terms of propriety and of impropriety (‘Coz'ning’, ‘lawful’ in l. 387). The ‘[c]oz'ning’/‘lawful’ conceits, in themselves, obliquely contrast the playfully imagined, innocent, frustrated desire of the ‘pillow’, which may rightfully ‘kiss’ Lucrece, to Tarquin's unlawful, violent and as yet unfulfilled desire to possess her physically. However, insofar as those conceits are at once suggestive of conflict (the mock conflict between ‘hand’ and ‘pillow’) and linked to Petrarchan imagery, they serve also to remind the reader that it is especially the Petrarchan images used to describe Lucrece throughout the poem that tend to identify her as a site of conflict. The first instance of Petrarchan imagery, for example, identifies her as the embodiment of perfect beauty through whom Collatine can vaunt his superiority over Tarquin, but through whom, likewise, Tarquin will assert his tyrannic will and role over Collatine (see ll. 7-14). According to the narrator, moreover, a struggle between ‘beauty and virtue’ (l. 52) as to which ‘should underprop [Lucrece's] fame’ (l. 53) can be seen in the ‘silent war of lilies and of roses’ (l. 71) occurring ‘in her fair face's field’ (l. 72). It is interesting and significant, too, that the Petrarchan images beginning the passage lead subsequently to the notion of Lucrece as monument, a notion connecting with her sense of herself as an exemplar of chastity (see ll. 390-2). But it seems most interesting and most significant that then, only after associating her with conflict and emphasizing her role as exemplar (an emphasis with overtones of death), the Petrarchan images introduce the picture of her as an earthly paradise.

There is a striking contrast between the playful, ominous, reverential prelude to that picture and the picture itself. An unspoiled, tranquil, natural richness is suggested by the picture's vivid detail: the ‘perfect[ly] white’ hand (l. 394) lying on ‘the green coverlet’ (l. 394), which is likened to an ‘April daisy on the grass’ (l. 395); the ‘pearly sweat resembling dew of night’ (l. 396); the ‘eyes like marigolds’ that have ‘sheath'd their light’ (l. 397). Metonymically that detail associates the inviolate, perfectly beautiful Lucrece with an inviolate, perfectly beautiful nature. And one sees Petrarchan images both introducing that picture of Lucrece and helping to create it. Lucrece's ‘other fair hand’, like the one beneath her head, is of ‘perfect’ whiteness; further, the narrator celebrates the splendour of her eyes in terms that form a counterpart to those used by him near the poem's beginning.¹⁴ Lucrece thus appears as both an earthly paradise and a Golden Age innocent; but those representations of her do not alone imply her role as a type of Eve. Her husband and Tarquin chiefly impose that on her.

Like Chaucer's narrator in The Legend of Good Women, Shakespeare's narrator emphasizes Collatine's responsibility for exciting the interest of Tarquin in Lucrece. Although he speculates on a number of specific possibilities—that Lucrece's very chastity aroused Tarquin (ll. 8-9), that Collatine's vaunting her ‘sov'reignty’ provoked the king's son (ll. 36-7) or that Tarquin's own ‘envy’ and pride did so (ll. 39-42)—the narrator emphatically blames Collatine's imprudence for causing Lucrece's misery. ‘Collatine unwisely did not let / To praise’ his wife in Tarquin's hearing, the narrator says (ll. 10-11).¹⁵ ‘[I]n Tarquin's tent,’ he adds by way of elaboration, Collatine ‘[u]nlock'd the treasure of his happy state: / What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, / In the possession of his beauteous mate’ (ll. 15-18). ‘[W]hy is Collatine the publisher / Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown / From thievish ears, because it is his own?’ he asks (ll. 33-5). Yet it is not merely Collatine's imprudence that the narrator stresses. He emphasizes, too, the hubris that makes Collatine fatally incautious. In his account of Collatine's ‘boast of Lucrece' sov'reignty’ (l. 36), the narrator tells of him ‘[r]eck'ning his fortune at such high proud rate / That kings might be espoused to more fame, / But king nor peer to such a peerless dame’ (ll. 19-21). In a moment when military conflict with a foreign enemy is deferred, Collatine uses his wife as a means of seeking personal victory over his superior and kinsman; the result of his hubris is that he redirects Tarquin's violence and desire from the enemy/foreign/public to the kindred/Roman/private.¹⁶ His overreaching pride—an aggressive, patriarchal vanity that firmly links him with the otherwise dissimilar Tarquin—leads him to flaunt the wife who is his heaven on earth, his earthly paradise and, in effect, an innocent from the Golden Age, before the proto-tyrant. The latter, then perceiving her as ‘the heaven of his [own] thought’ (l. 338), quickly resolves to dispossess him. So, as has been suggested earlier, Collatine unknowingly tempts Tarquin to violate and thus to steal the woman represented by the narrator as an embodiment of Golden Age/Edenic discourses. In doing that, he also unwittingly refigures both himself as a self-betraying Adam (an Adam who falls through pride) and Lucrece as an innocent, unfallen Eve. Simultaneously and appropriately, of course, he thereby helps to refigure Tarquin as a type of Satan, Tarquin's subsequent actions reinforcing his own role and that imposed on Lucrece.

The process of characterization outlined above results, then, not merely from some trivial, male rivalry. It derives from Collatine's attempt to impose over Tarquin's will to illegitimate power—as proto-tyrant and son of a tyrant—his own will to illicit power, functioning within and expressed through the notionally unthreatening and not to be threatened sphere of the domestic.¹⁷ In that attempt, of course, Lucrece is objectified and so Tarquin perceives her; on the other hand, the end of the poem suggests that Lucrece has always been objectified by her husband and by her father.¹⁸ Tarquin, moreover, could arguably never have perceived her except as ‘an object of consciousness’, although he may not have seen or particularly considered her at all had not Collatine set her image compellingly before him.¹⁹ The end of that struggle between wills to illicit power, between domestic and public regimes (respectively Collatine's and Tarquin's), seems immediately to be the mutual defining of subjectivity for its participants, including Lucrece as an unknowing participant. The struggle of wills generates, in short, refigured subjectivities for each participant and thence a comprehensively refigured myth of the Fall.

One can now consider, I suggest, Tarquin's role as a type of Satan. That role seems implicit from virtually the moment he enters Lucrece's home. The narrator says, referring initially to Lucrece and subsequently to Tarquin:

This earthly saint adored by this devil,
Little suspecteth the false worshipper;
For unstain'd thoughts do seldom dream on evil,
Birds never lim'd no secret bushes fear:
So guiltless she securely gives good cheer
          And reverend welcome to her princely guest,
          Whose inward ill no outward harm express'd.
For that he colour'd with his high estate,
Hiding base sin in pleats of majesty,
That nothing in him seem'd inordinate,
Save sometime too much wonder of his eye. …

(ll. 85-95)

The allusion to Lucrece as ‘[t]his earthly saint’ (l. 85) evokes her connected roles as chastity's exemplar and Petrarchan lady; it harmonizes, too, with the notion that she is Collatine's heaven on earth. More to the point, however, the trope allows the narrator to characterize Tarquin antithetically to her as a ‘devil’ (l. 85), a ‘false worshipper’ (l. 86) and agent of ‘evil’ (l. 87), who conceals from her his ‘inward ill’ (l. 91), his ‘base sin’ (l. 93). That insistently demonic representation of Tarquin is elaborated on by the narrator's subsequent references to his ‘parling looks’ (l. 100), which are likened to ‘baits’ and ‘hooks’ (l. 103). But it is specifically an emphasis on innocence in the characterization of Lucrece, and allusion to her as an embodiment of the earthly paradise, that indicate Tarquin to be Satanic rather than merely demonic, here and subsequently in the narrative.

As has been argued above, the opening description of Lucrece as ‘[t]his earthly saint’ develops into a representation of her as someone naturally innocent. ‘[U]nstain'd thoughts do seldom dream on evil, / Birds never lim'd no secret bushes fear …,’ the narrator says (ll. 87-8), explaining her ‘guiltless’ (l. 89) and unsuspecting reception of her visitor.²⁰ The images initiating perception of Lucrece as naturally innocent point back to the image of ‘her fair face's field’ (l. 72), with its connotations of an ideal landscape and of Golden Age virtue, and forward to the description of her, just prior to Tarquin's assault, as a type of the earthly paradise, of uncontaminated nature (ll. 386-99). And it is precisely her natural innocence which the narrator proceeds to emphasize in describing how she responds to the intense, erotic gaze of Tarquin—the ‘inordinate’ stare (l. 94) that she necessarily notices but cannot decipher. According to the narrator:

… [S]he that never cop'd with stranger eyes,
Could pick no meaning from their parling looks,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies
Writ in the glassy margents of such books;
She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks:
          Nor could she moralize his wanton sight,
          More than his eyes were open'd to the light.

(ll. 99-105)

Unable to read, much less to interpret, the language of seduction in Tarquin's eyes, Lucrece perceives no harm in his gaze. In being unaware of the artifice of seduction, she is like a fish that neither recognizes enticement nor fears to be snared (l. 103): an allusion to a familiar Petrarchan motif. Thus Lucrece, represented predominantly in terms that both suggest her natural innocence and evoke her recurrent presentation as a type of the earthly paradise (which thereby refigures her as Eve), is unwittingly betrayed by her husband (in effect, an overreaching Adam) to temptation by the demonized (Satanized) Tarquin. He, moreover, disguised as his apparent self, knowingly falls from high estate in pursuing her.²¹ The poem's narrator puts before the reader a Romanized, Petrarchized, re-visioned story of the Fall—and in doing so arguably generates much of the intellectual intricacy, as well as emotive power, in Shakespeare's version of the Lucretia story.

Lucrece seems to be no simple Eve figure; certainly, she becomes a quite complex one as the poem progresses. Lucrece/Eve fights back, so to speak, and makes Tarquin/Satan experience not just a fall from the dignity of high estate, from the honour code of the Roman aristocracy, but a fall from high estate itself in Rome. Tarquin, likewise, appears not to be simply refigured as, and refiguring, Satan. For a start, his nocturnal soliloquy on whether or not to rape Lucrece shows him pondering in effect whether to abandon or to deepen his Satanic role.²² What seems particularly relevant at this point, however, is that the Petrarchan discourse used recurrently throughout the earlier part of the poem to fashion Tarquin's subjectivity appears strikingly at the end of his speech, to signal his consciously imperfect resolution of his inner conflict. Near the very end of his soliloquy, he declares:

Affection is my captain, and he leadeth;
          And when his gaudy banner is display'd,
          The coward fights, and will not be dismay'd.

(ll. 271-3)

And the final words of his speech are:

Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize;
Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?

(ll. 279-80)

The lines first quoted evoke Petrarch's sonnet ‘Amor, che nel penser mio vivo e regna’, translated by Wyatt and by Surrey; Tarquin's words offer a desperately pugnacious reworking of the love-as-warfare allegory in Petrarch's poem. Tarquin's concluding words perhaps likewise evoke a sonnet by Petrarch, ‘Passa la nave mia colma d'oblio’; if so, they offer an aggressive reworking of the love-as-a-perilous-sea-voyage allegory in that poem.²³ There is a Petrarchan finale, as it were, to Tarquin's soliloquy—and appropriately so. Tarquin's acute self-consciousness in his soliloquy can be seen in his sensitivity to history: paradoxically enough, like Lucrece he is all too aware of how he may be officially represented, of how his existence may be constructed (but not in his case misconstrued), in years to come (see ll. 202-10, 223-4). Exemplarity is a concern for him as it is for Lucrece. His acute self-consciousness can also be seen in his sensitivity to his own speechmaking, in his politician's sense of the rhetorical nature, the theatricality, of his moment of decision (see ll. 225-7, 267-8). A Petrarchan finale certainly befits such a speech but it seems especially suitable because Petrarchan discourse acknowledges, notionally with regret, reason's incapacity to govern desire.²⁴ Petrarchan discourse can be used, therefore, to legitimize one's denial of constraint by reason. So, in effect, it is used here by Tarquin. The proto-tyrant making up his mind to commit rape is shown de facto to misappropriate and, likewise, desperately to rework Petrarchan discourse.²⁵ He is thus represented in order for the reader to perceive the dishonesty of his characterizing himself as the warrior compelled now to fight in the service of passion, the lover overwhelmed by desire.²⁶ The Petrarchan ending to the soliloquy signals his consciously specious resolution of his dilemma.

That ending signals, of course, other things as well. It confirms how thoroughly parodic a Petrarchan lover Tarquin is. Yet arguably, too, it confirms something about Tarquin as a Platonic tyrant figure and type of Satan: he can possess, and then momentarily, ‘the heaven of his thought’ (l. 338) only by violation, which he knows to be also self-violation because violation of the aristocratic Roman code of conduct by which he, at any rate, thinks his existence primarily defined.²⁷ Moreover Tarquin's final, mock-Petrarchan characterization of himself as love's warrior leads to what can be perceived, after his piously inaccurate remark about the gods' abhorrence of rape (ll. 349-50), as his committing a rape which distantly parodies the myth of Mars' rape of Rhea Silvia. Certainly, the rape of Lucrece does seem an ironic counterpart to that myth. The ancient myth tells of a rape which is an originary event for Rome: the chaste Rhea Silvia, raped by the god of war, conceives Romulus and Remus. The rape of Lucrece is, likewise, an originary event for Rome, but in a significantly different way: the Roman Republic is unwittingly and indirectly engendered by a warrior/parodic ‘warrior of love’, a self-confessed enemy to the gods (ll. 344-57), who in doing so initiates the overthrow of the monarchy and hence his own downfall.

What might now, and finally, be considered here is the means through which Tarquin primarily expresses himself as a Platonic tyrant figure, a parodic Petrarchan lover, and a type of Satan in relation to Lucrece before he expresses those roles through directly physical sexual violence. It seems that he does so through the male gaze. The pervasiveness of the male gaze in his relating to her can be readily shown. When Tarquin first sees Lucrece, the narrator refers to his ‘traitor eye’ (l. 73): traitorous to the ‘beauty and virtue’ displayed in her face (l. 52), and ultimately to himself as well. That ‘traitor eye’ initially succumbs to the purity of what it perceives (l. 73); it is initially intimidated, and Tarquin looks at Lucrece with the ‘silent wonder of still-gazing eyes’ (l. 84). The innocent Lucrece, of course not recognizing Tarquin for what he is (at that moment, a Satan figure), nonetheless remarks the ‘sometime too much wonder of his eye’ (l. 95). She stands vulnerable to ‘his wanton sight’ (l. 104).

But Tarquin himself falls victim to the gaze in imposing it on Lucrece. At the end of his soliloquy he announces: ‘My heart shall never countermand mine eye’ (l. 276). The gaze imposed on Lucrece subdues the man imposing it, a phenomenon interestingly linked with Tarquin's role as parodic Petrarchan lover at that moment of the narrative. Not much later, Tarquin notes with approval that, because it is night, he is free from the divine gaze: ‘The eye of heaven is out, and misty night / Covers the shame that follows sweet delight’ (ll. 356-7). Imposing the gaze, and victim of his imposing it, he is also subject to a cosmic and sacred form of it. Lucrece would escape his infliction of it if she could (ll. 540-6); he seems relieved to have escaped the divine, transcendent gaze antithetic to his own.

Feeling liberated from the divine gaze, he then tyrannically indulges his: the male gaze thence expressing, in particular, his roles of Platonic tyrant figure, and type of Satan, in relation to Lucrece. When, according to the narrator, ‘[i]nto [Lucrece's] chamber wickedly he stalks’ (l. 365), Tarquin ‘gazeth on her yet unstained bed[;] / The curtains being close, about he walks, / Rolling his greedy eyeballs in his head’ (ll. 366-8). ‘By their [his eyes'] high treason is his heart misled’, adds the narrator (l. 369).²⁸ The proto-tyrant's compulsion and betrayal by desire are metonymically indicated by means of the gaze, which thereby signals his role as a Platonic tyrant figure. Thereafter, at the moment of symbolic violation when Tarquin opens the curtain to Lucrece's bed (ll. 372-8), the narrator describes Tarquin's gaze in cautiously Petrarchan terms which lead to representation of him as Satan. Viewing Lucrece, Tarquin is dazzled: ‘[T]he curtain drawn, his eyes begun / To wink, being blinded with a greater light’ (ll. 374-5). The narrator suggests that the brightness blinding Tarquin—and so negating the gaze—may be the light reflected from Lucrece herself (ll. 376-7), a plausible suggestion given his previous and subsequent praise of her skin's whiteness. That being the case, then by itself the innocent beauty of the Petrarchan lady repels the gaze: a Petrarchan convention. Even if it is not the case (l. 377), then, nonetheless, in imposing the gaze Tarquin is blinded like any less transgressive Petrarchan lover looking too rashly or too long at a chaste and resplendent lady. If only the power of the gaze had at that moment been broken, the narrator laments (ll. 379-85). But of course it is not; on the contrary, having been temporarily blinded as if some merely rash or insistent Petrarchan lover, Tarquin again imposes the gaze (ll. 414-17) and in doing so figures as a type of Satan (ll. 386-99, discussed above). His unchecked gaze, the narrator remarks, both ‘slak[es]’ his lust and stimulates it to more directly physical sexual violence (ll. 425 and 427).

To trace Tarquin's imposition of the gaze on Lucrece is to demonstrate its pervasiveness, and necessarily to suggest its prime importance, as a means through which he in his various guises relates to her. A more precise account of that importance requires, however, some further discussion of Tarquin and the gaze. I should like briefly to consider three things: the aesthetics of the gaze; the power of Tarquin's male gaze; the reader's implication in and distancing from Tarquin's imposition of the gaze on Lucrece. When Tarquin first imposes his ‘traitor eye’ (l. 73) on Lucrece and his gaze is overpowered, the narrator says: ‘Therefore that praise which Collatine doth owe [to Lucrece's beauty] / Enchanted Tarquin answers with surmise, / In silent wonder of still-gazing eyes’ (ll. 82-4). The words ‘Enchanted’, ‘wonder’ and ‘still-gazing’ seem allusions to, but certainly evoke, the then current, and linked, aesthetic categories of meraviglia (wonder) and stupore (astonishment or amazement).²⁹ That Lucrece should be perceived by Tarquin as marvellous and so fill him with wonder, stupefy him with amazement, is not itself wonderful given her role as ideal Petrarchan lady. Yet that is not the immediately relevant point. Venus, in Shakespeare's earlier narrative poem, would perfect Adonis as an aesthetic and erotic object (see l. 21 of that poem, for example); here, Tarquin's initial response to Lucrece objectifies her in aesthetic and erotic terms. At the same time, however, Lucrece's unique combination of beauty and virtue both overcomes and elevates his male gaze: rendered relatively passive, raised from the solely carnal to an aestheticized eroticism, Tarquin's male gaze ascends for an instant beyond unrefined curiositas (lust of the eyes) and simple concupiscence. At the moment when Tarquin is about to be assigned his Satanic role, he views Lucrece much as Milton's Satan momentarily views Eve: ‘[T]he evil one abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good …’ (9, 463-5).³⁰ Subsequently, of course, his gaze resumes its power.

As the narrator recounts what Tarquin could see of the sleeping Lucrece (ll. 386-420), he says:

Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquered;
Save of their lord, no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honoured.
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred;
          Who like a foul usurper went about,
          From this fair throne to heave the owner out.

(ll. 407-13)

To Tarquin's male gaze, the narrator suggests, Lucrece's breasts are so much new, sexual geography: ‘maiden worlds’ (l. 408) for him to conquer as if he were an Alexander the Great of sex (l. 411). The implicit emphasis on the colonizing impulse in Tarquin's gaze thus emphasizes, too, Tarquin's characterization as proto-tyrant and as Platonic tyrant figure. Further, it contributes to his identification as a type of Satan, one who ejects a self-betraying Adam (Collatine) from possession of his earthly paradise/Eve.³¹ Demonized though Tarquin's male and colonizing gaze affirms him to be, however, it does not in itself distinguish him from other personae fashioned in verse by Shakespeare's contemporaries or successors. For example, the persona in Donne's Elegy 19 says to the lady supposedly subordinated to his male gaze: ‘O my America, my new found land, / My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned’ (ll. 27-8). A more complex example is the persona in ‘The Sun Rising’. Using the languages and categories of the world beyond the walls of his and his lady's bedroom, he constructs the fiction that he and his lady inhabit a private utopia of love, one which variously refigures, subsumes and displaces the outer world—transcending time and space, class and riches. Yet in his alternative world, the ‘good place’ that is also ‘no place’ but in his fiction, he reinscribes patriarchal, Jacobean rule. With reference to his lady, he orders the sun: ‘Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, / Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine / Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me’ (ll. 16-18). Again with reference to his lady, he announces: ‘She'is all states, and all princes, I’ (l. 21). The beloved on whom the persona focuses his gaze (ll. 13-14) is not merely objectified. She is colonized: in his eyes she becomes a body of claimed territory that, as he tells it, lies subject to his autocratic rule. Shakespeare's Tarquin and the Donne personae discussed above may be different in ways that are many and clear; nonetheless, they are not insignificantly alike.³²

To have explored the power of the gaze is necessarily to have raised questions about resistance and implication. For example, how and where in the narrative is the gaze resisted? Is the reader never implicated in Tarquin's imposition of it on Lucrece? Perhaps those questions, and some others, can be usefully if partly answered by one's returning to the episode in which the narrator describes Lucrece as she lies asleep (ll. 385-420). His description of her is at once stylized, vivid and intimate. Its being so seems to make it curiously ambiguous. Allowing the reader to see what Tarquin sees when he gazes on Lucrece, the description offers a celebration of and commentary on her beauty; it ends with emphasis on the vehemence of Tarquin's response to that beauty. Thus it offers shared visions, mingled gazes. At once praising Lucrece's body in fairly intimate detail and commenting on the innocence and vulnerability of her beauty, the description implicitly sets the narrator's moralized male gaze in opposition to the male and colonizing gaze of Tarquin. For all that, the self-indulgent intimacy and ludic elaboration of the description (as in ll. 386-9 and 401) indicate the narrator's gaze to be indeed a moralized male gaze which, though certainly resisting and condemning Tarquin's, does not merely allow the reader to see what, and something of how, Tarquin saw, but also implicates the narrator and the implied male reader in Tarquin's violating gaze. There is an irony, then, in the narrator's questions, ‘What could he [Tarquin] see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?’ (ll. 414-15). Tarquin's is not the only ‘wilful eye’ (l. 417).³³

From that concluding discussion of Tarquin and the gaze, one might now turn to consider what studying the reciprocal formation of consciousness and of role among Tarquin, Lucrece and Collatine can be said to reveal about the establishing of characterization in Shakespeare's second narrative poem. For a start, doing so strongly suggests that the characterizations established early in Lucrece are more complex in their discursive relations than has been acknowledged. The three main figures in the poem are not merely translated from the pages of Ovid: they are at once Ovidian and comprehensively transformed. In particular, they become actors in a Romanized, Petrarchized, revisioned myth of the Fall—a version in which the type of Eve is innocent and betrayed, not betraying (a version, too, in which she ultimately gains her revenge on the counterpart to Satan).

Moreover, thus perceiving the characterizations of Tarquin, Lucrece and Collatine early in the poem seems to illuminate both subsequent happenings in it and some of its main concerns. When one recognizes that Tarquin's sexual assault involves his forcing on Lucrece his mutually intensifying, connected roles, which are antithetic to hers, then the scope of his violence can be seen more clearly: his assault appears to involve unusually comprehensive psychic violence in conjunction with extreme physical violence. Lucrece's profound sense of contamination seems, therefore, even more understandable. So too does her decision to commit suicide. Yet if those later occurrences in the poem are illuminated, what are arguably among its main concerns appear as well to have new light shed on them. The mutually defining nature of characterization early in the poem indicates that Lucrece's interactive roles are variously imposed on her from without and, further, that she well knows her basic role as chaste Roman matron to have been externally imposed and to be removable. Recognizing the externality of Lucrece's selfhood, and her partial awareness of its being so, perhaps first clarifies yet more distinctly her feeling of contamination and her decision to commit suicide: one comes to see that she thinks of Tarquin's assault as having stolen her main role in her world. And Lucrece's sense that her role as chaste Roman matron derives from without seems at the same time to shed light, too, on her insistent denial of her innocence. To her mind, apparently, Tarquin's assault has erased her basic self and thus she is no longer chaste and hence not completely innocent. Those matters aside, however, the externality and imposition of Lucrece's selfhood arguably have more important implications.

Lucrece's awareness of her basic role's imposition from without is firmly linked to her consciousness of herself as an exemplar of chastity. That link raises questions about exemplarity in, and beyond, the poem. Well aware that her role of exemplar, like her one as chaste Roman matron, derives from without, Lucrece believes that her rape immediately deletes the latter but also that it will subsequently make ambiguous or delete the former. To regain the one, to preserve the other, she resolves upon suicide. Her perception of who she ultimately is, and the self-negating decision that results from it (to lose herself in order to save herself), seem to raise several major questions about exemplarity. First, if one's role as exemplar is imposed from without, in light of external circumstance and with no, or little, precise knowledge of one's inner life, then how reliable can exemplarity be as a means of defining subjectivity, of identifying an incarnation of an ideal? Further, how can exemplarity therefore be regarded as a reliable means of interpreting history, of clarifying and stabilizing it? That question has a special relevance, I think, because the intertextual relations of Shakespeare's narrative suggest how often and how variously Lucrece's role as exemplar has been reconstructed: continuity, variation and contradiction all mark its descent. Moreover, what does it indicate about exemplarity if Lucrece has to kill herself to preserve its/her integrity and hence the integrity of historical tradition? Lucrece successfully preserves her exemplarity, preserves historical tradition, and seemingly reveals the hermeneutic limitations or incapacity of exemplarity. There are of course other questions implicitly raised; nonetheless, my main point here is as follows. Exemplarity appears not merely to be subverted in the poem, though aspects of it certainly are; rather, it is subjected to close and sceptical examination.³⁴ Shakespeare's narrative suggests that exemplarity is reliable and unreliable as a means of defining subjectivity and interpreting history: it is more or less simply accurate in Tarquin's case, for instance; however, because of its dependence upon externals and contamination by opinion, it has to be made accurate in the case of Lucrece. It works and it does not. Perhaps in some of Montaigne's essays, rather than in contemporary English writings, one finds the counterpart to Shakespeare's sceptical treatment of exemplarity in Lucrece.³⁵

Just as exemplarity is sceptically examined in the poem, so too is neoplatonism. Although an account of the poems' sceptical inquiry into neoplatonism cannot be offered without Lucrece having been considered as a whole, some things can nonetheless be suggested now in connection with the poem's establishing of characterization. Lucrece tends, unknowingly, to read human subjectivity in neoplatonic terms. In so reading Tarquin she makes a tragic mistake, as she soon discovers and in effect acknowledges (ll. 1527-61): his soul is not to be read in his appearance. Yet hers is, as Tarquin sees at once when he meets her. That contradiction, for all its bluntness, has more subtlety than might at first be thought. It seems primarily to indicate that a neoplatonic reading of human subjectivity, like a reading of subjectivity and of history by means of exemplarity, can be seen as unreliable and as reliable: sometimes not working, sometimes working well. Yet the contradiction seems also to imply that Lucrece, chaste matron of early Rome and mulier economica (woman in the role of household manager), necessarily lacks the education and experience required for her to understand the problems inherent in the neoplatonic scheme of reading—outlined for Shakespeare's contemporaries by Castiglione, among others. His outline of those problems, however, arguably heightens rather than resolves the contradiction, for the words he has Bembo speak on the matter do not help one to recognize when, or not, appearance can be read as truly indicative of the soul.³⁶

Finally, here, a few remarks need to be made about the gaze and the counter-gaze in the earlier episodes of Lucrece. It might be mentioned again that more than one gaze is alluded to in those episodes. There, to be sure, the narrator indicates that Tarquin most vigorously imposes it but Tarquin himself draws the reader's attention to the divine gaze: that of ‘[t]he eye of heaven’ (l. 356). His allusion to the divine gaze, particularly to its being ‘out’ (l. 356), evokes and queries the notion of divine providence, which Lucrece in effect considers when lamenting her misfortune (ll. 764-1015, for example). It might be mentioned again, likewise, that if the divine gaze is suggested by Tarquin to be in contradiction to his own, a counter-gaze is also implicitly exercised by the narrator (especially in ll. 386-420). As has been argued above, however, gaze and counter-gaze elide—if not always, then nonetheless often enough and significantly, as at the crucial moment when Tarquin surveys the sleeping Lucrece (ll. 386-420). The counter-gaze seems either to be absent or treacherously to merge with the thing it should oppose. To study the establishing of characterization in Lucrece leads one to encounter a use of the gaze, a transformation of myth, a scepticism, more complex than can be seen in Venus and Adonis.

Notes

1. For examples of the critical approaches and concerns mentioned above, see: M. Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Salzburg: English Institute, 1976), pp. 1-40; C. Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1977), 45-72; R.S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 18-41; T. French, ‘A “badge of fame”: Shakespeare's Rhetorical Lucrece’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 10 (1984), 97-106; N.J. Vickers, ‘“This Heraldry in Lucrece' Face”’, Poetics Today, 6 (1985), 171-84; K.E. Maus, ‘Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 66-82; J. Fineman, ‘Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape’, Representations, 20 (1987), 25-76; G. Ziegler, ‘My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice, 4 (1990), 73-100; D. Willbern, ‘Hyberbolic Desire: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in Contending Kingdoms, eds M.-R. Logan and P.L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 202-24; P. Berry, ‘Woman, Language and History in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1991), 33-9; L. Woodbridge, ‘Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33 (1991), 327-54; H. James, ‘Milton's Eve, the Romance Genre, and Ovid’, Contemporary Literature, 45 (1993), 121-45; J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 65-82; J.O. Newman, ‘“And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness”: Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 304-26.

2. In fact, none as far as I am aware.

3. That is likewise implicit in Ovid's narrative.

4. See ll. 1-8, 30-4 of the ‘Argument’, ll. 20-1 and 36-42, of the poem itself, and ll. 3-7 of the poem on desire as informing his expressions of his tyrannic role in relation to Lucrece.

5. Reference is to Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee, 2nd edn (rev.) (1974; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). R. Bushnell discusses Plato's characterization of the tyrant in her Tragedies of Tyrants, pp. 9-18.

6. See also ll. 652-65 of Shakespeare's poem, spoken by Lucrece.

7. Cf. ll. 120-89.

8. Reference to Petrarch will be to the edition and translation by R.M. Durling: Petrarch's Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. R.M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976).

9. Cf. ll. 519-39, 806-40, 1184-211, and so on.

10. Her doing so is, as well, one of the elements of her characterization that connect her with the personae of the Heroides.

11. See l. 17.

12. The ‘field’ trope is of course derived from heraldry.

13. In general connection with the argument being pursued here, the reader might care to consult two other volumes in this series: R. Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare (1995); R. Sowerby, The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry (1994).

14. Compare ll. 397-9, especially 399, with ll. 13-14.

15. Cf. ll. 36-8.

16. In connection with Collatine's hubris, see especially l. 19.

17. Functioning and expressed safely, as he is apparently to be taken as thinking, if he is to be taken as thinking at all.

18. See especially ll. 1751-1806.

19. The phrase is Bakhtin's, from his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 293.

20. In conjnction with ll. 87-8, see ll. 386-99.

21. See ll. 90-4, 190-301, 491-504. In ll. 362-4 he is compared to a ‘serpent’.

22. See ll. 127-301, especially 181-2, 190-245, 253-80.

23. See ll. 9-14 of the former poem, ll. 13-14 of the latter.

24. See ‘Passa la nave …’ l. 13, with its reference to passion's defeat of reason.

25. Compare ll. 248-52 with ll. 271-3 and 279-80.

26. Compare ll. 197-201 with 271-3.

27. See l. 348. See also ll. 197-224.

28. Cf. l. 73.

29. See, again, D. Summers's Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), here at pp. 171-6.

30. Reference to Milton is from The Poems, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968).

31. See ll. 412-13; cf. ll. 386-99.

32. Cf. the discussion of Elegy 19 in the preceding chapter.

33. Cf. ll. 419-20.

34. One aspect of exemplarity subverted in the poem is that of its unquestionable interpretative authority, as asserted by some sixteenth-century writers.

35. For an illuminating account of Montaigne and exemplarity, see T. Hampton's Writing From History, pp. 134-97.

36. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. C. S. Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 342-5.