[In the following essay, Berry asserts that Lucrece is not simply a victim of patriarchal power, but that she more importantly functions as a strong voice for action and political change.]

Recent feminist criticism of Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece (or Lucrece, as it was titled in its first five quartos) has stressed the extent to which the idea of woman which it represents is one overdetermined by patriarchal ideology, and has typically interpreted Lucrece herself as a sign used to mediate and define men's relationships to men.¹ While I am partially in agreement with such interpretations of the poem, I want here to question the view that at no point in the poem is Lucrece represented as posing any contradiction, any aporia, within patriarchal discourse. Nancy Vickers, in her celebrated essay, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty's best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, argues that:

In Lucrece occasion, rhetoric, and result are all informed by, and thus inscribe, a battle between men that is first figuratively and then literally fought on the fields of woman's ‘celebrated’ body. Here, metaphors commonly read as signs of a battle between the sexes emerge rather from a homosocial struggle, in this case a male rivalry, which positions a third (female) term in a median space from which it is initially used and finally eliminated.²

Of course Vickers is right in her assertion that Lucrece, as a third and female term, occupies ‘a median space’ in the poem. She identifies this inbetween space with Lucrece's body (as Georgianna Ziegler has recently pointed out, this space is also the private domestic space associated with female identity by patriarchal culture).³ Lucrece's body does indeed begin and end the poem as the object of masculine rhetoric. None the less, it is strange that Vickers, in focusing her influential feminist analysis upon men's use and abuse of language in Shakespeare's poem, failed to discuss Lucrece's own language—her speech at her death, and her more private but much longer rhetorical performance, in the privacy of her chamber, immediately before and after her rape. For Lucrece's ‘inbetweenness’ can also be related to the importance which her voice assumes at the dead centre of the poem, in a textually constituted space which corresponds to the very depths of night according to Shakespeare's narrative. It is in this median and very dark space, under the threat of rape and death, that Lucrece utters her first words in the poem, thereby beginning a long rhetorical performance (albeit one that is occasionally interrupted) which runs from line 575 until her death at line 1722, and in which the number of lines actually spoken by Lucrece is 645—in other words, just over a third of the total number of lines in the entire poem.

The greater part of this long speech is an extended lament or complaint by Lucrece for her lost virtue, and here Shakespeare departs most strikingly from his sources in that throughout most of this lament Lucrece is alone. In the classical sources of the poem, notably Ovid's Fasti and Livy's History, Lucrece's lament is much shorter, and always addressed to an audience—her husband Collatine, her father, and their two friends, Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius. The same masculine audience for this utterance is posited in the rather longer speech found in the extremely popular Declamatio Lucretiae, written by the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century. Not only does Shakespeare's Lucrece speak most of her lament while she is alone; Shakespeare also added a number of details to the quite simple form of the lament found in his sources: in particular, Lucrece's three impassioned apostrophes to Night, Time, and Opportunity, and her meditation upon a painting of the fall of Troy. Yet while these changes have been noted by critics, they do not appear to have provoked much interest. Even a fairly extensive consideration of this part of the poem, by Don Cameron Allen, concentrates only upon the second stage of the lament, in which Lucrece meditates upon a painting of violated Troy.⁴

In this essay, therefore, I will consider the complex implications of the often forgotten centerpiece of the poem, which is one of the most extended tragic utterances attributed to a woman in English Renaissance literature, and will assess its possible importance for a feminist—and a political—reading of this poem. My contention is that Lucrece is represented in the poem as an important but unorthodox example of Renaissance virtù, for this quality is given most powerful expression in the poem, not through her actions, but through her private use of language—a use which implicitly stresses its performative, even magical powers. It is in fact in this secret and powerful feminine eloquence that we can find the clearest indication of republican political ideals in the poem. The Earl of Southampton, to whom the poem is dedicated, is known to have been interested in republican thought, and Shakespeare's choice of subject matter for his poem naturally suggests such an interest, since it was of course Lucrece's death which caused the end of Roman kingship with the downfall of the Tarquins, and the establishment of the Roman republic by Junius Brutus.⁵ Significantly, the connection of Shakespeare's narrative with republican politics is never directly stated in the poem (presumably for reasons of political expediency). It is in Lucrece's lament, however, that the question of political justice is raised most directly.

Of course Lucrece's utterances in Shakespeare's poem are always to some extent implicated within a masculine poetic discourse: a discourse which is framed by the two male poetic exemplars of Orpheus and Virgil, as well as by the voice of the implicitly male narrator. Yet in contrast to the poem's emphasis upon the vulnerability of the female body, the female voice is here represented, not only as much less susceptible to manipulation by men, but even as the catalyst of an extraordinary political force: Lucrece's complaint enables her to replace Tarquin as the controlling figure in the narrative until the moment of her death. She only speaks, of course, when she is forced into the position of social outcast and scapegoat through the loss of her chastity—as in many other examples of English Renaissance literature, it is not until a female figure assumes a position of obvious marginality to conventional society (as opposed to the unacknowledged marginality to which all women are condemned in a patriarchal society) that she finds a voice. But through her discovery of a voice at the moment of personal disaster, Lucrece also develops a plan of action.

Without disputing the oft-stated feminist view that Lucrece's suicide is closely related to her acceptance of a patriarchal ideology of female chastity, I would suggest that this central section of Shakespeare's narrative challenges any interpretation of his Lucrece as being simply history's victim. Instead, it positions her as a partially independent, if somewhat unorthodox (and confused) historical agent, who uses an Orphic private utterance to initiate historical change. Close analysis of her lament reveals Lucrece as the deliberate rather than accidental cause of that historical change which follows her death, and which leads to the expulsion and death of the Tarquins and the establishment of the Roman republic (although as I shall show later on, Lucrece never fully grasps the implications of the historical change which she initiates). It also shows her to be a figure who is learning, along with vocal self-expression, a political art of dissembling or concealment—a skill which will be most apparent in her planning of her suicide. Seemingly, Lucrece acquires and exercises a certain degree of political skill specifically through her use of language; in the first instance, she does this by appealing to a series of ideas which figured prominently in Renaissance mythographies: Night, Time and Opportunity (Opportunity being usually referred to as Occasio or Fortuna).⁶ In this part of her lament, she expresses a powerful desire to reshape history and, specifically, to make it just. This struggle with history is seen primarily as a struggle with supernatural forces.

The effort of the man of virtù to shape fortune to his will was of course an important theme of Renaissance humanism, a theme especially prominent in the political thought of Machiavelli.⁷ In his Discourses, which extolled the virtues of republican government, Machiavelli praised Junius Brutus as the Roman whose exemplary virtù led to the establishment of the Roman republic. But he also referred to the frequently important rôle played by women in the downfall of tyrannical rulers:

we see how women have been the cause of many troubles, have done great harm to those who govern cities, and have caused in them many divisions. In like manner we read in Livy's history that the outrage done to Lucretia deprived the Tarquins of their rule … Among the primary causes of the downfall of tyrants, Aristotle puts the injuries they do on account of women, whether by rape, violation or the breaking up of marriages.⁸

Shakespeare's Lucrece is represented through her lament as a woman attempting to replace a loss of a specifically feminine ‘virtue’ with a virtù which can enable her to take control of her tragic fate. Yet her feminine discovery of this quality is importantly different from the typically public manifestation of virtù usually associated with men. Her attempt to master the forces which have led to her tragedy—Night, Time and Opportunity (or Fortune)—is conducted privately, and through a highly poetic use of language which simultaneously stresses language's magical, incantatory properties. This lament begins with Lucrece according supernatural priority to a primordial female divinity, Night. Only as a result of this private struggle to assert her virtù is Lucrece able to express it in more public terms at the end of the poem, with her speech and suicide before the four men whom she has summoned.

In its appeal to Night, Lucrece's speech seems on one level to represent an early attempt by Shakespeare to use a figurative association of woman with darkness or blackness to challenge Petrarchan emphasis upon appearances in the poetic representation of women—it is her red and white perfection whose praise by Collatine at the beginning of the poem has contributed to Lucrece's tragedy. As in his use of images of darkness in connection with women in works which include the Sonnets, Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare seems in The Rape of Lucrece to be trying to define an unorthodox, dynamic version of female identity in terms of hiddenness or concealment. Lucrece appeals to Night to protect her reputation by concealing her under shadow of darkness:

O night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke,
Let not the jealous day behold that face
Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak
Immodestly lies martyred with disgrace!
Keep still possession of thy gloomy place,
          That all the faults which in thy reign are made
          May likewise be sepulchred in thy shade.
Make me not object to the tell-tale day:
The light will show charactered in my brow
The story of sweet chastity's decay,

(799-808)

Yet at the same time, Lucrece's speech makes clear the moral ambiguity of Night: an ambiguity which is also suggested in its invocation by two such different tragic heroines as Juliet and Lady Macbeth.⁹ Indeed, when considered in relation to the political themes of this poem, the associations of Night with concealment also imply a connection with the sixteenth-century humanist motif of politic dissembling, set out most explicitly in Machiavelli's The Prince. Breaking with earlier humanist emphasis upon the morality of virtù, Machiavelli had stressed that its practitioner must often dissimulate, and certainly a concealment and dissimulation associated with Night is central to Lucrece's practice of virtù. Not only does she conceal the fact of the rape until her husband and father are in her presence; the theme of hiddenness also characterizes Lucrece's lament or complaint, most of which is uttered secretly, under cover of darkness.

But the aesthetic and political implications of Lucrece's emphasis upon Night become clearer when these are related to the metaphysical significance of this concept. Night figured prominently in Orphic theology, a web of ideas which was granted considerable importance in the syncretic Christian Platonism of the Renaissance. For Renaissance Platonists, because Orpheus was described in myth as imposing order upon chaos through his extraordinary eloquence, he was seen not only as the inspired poet par excellence, but also as a magician, one of the prisci theologi—the ancient theologians whose thought was held to have prefigured Platonism as well as Christianity.¹⁰ Pico della Mirandola asserted that: ‘In natural magic nothing is more efficacious than the Hymns of Orpheus’, and identified the Orphic principle of Night with the supreme deity of the Jewish Kabbalists, the En Soph.¹¹ Within the Orphic cosmogony, Night was represented as a force which could overturn the authority even of the king of the gods.

The Orphic hymns, first published in the Renaissance at Florence in 1500, were an important literary influence upon the French Pléiade poets in the mid sixteenth century, but in England interest in this material is not apparent until 1594, when, in the same year as The Rape of Lucrece, George Chapman's The Shadow of Night was published.¹² This poem was explicitly indebted to the Orphic hymns. The first of its two parts was a long hymn or incantation to Night as a primordial goddess. Night is represented by Chapman as inspiring her poet with a virtù which is expressed through eloquence rather than strength, but which is none the less capable of ending human injustice and vice. For Chapman, Orpheus' attempt to rescue Eurydice from hell is an allegory of his fervent desire to restore justice on earth.¹³ As the new Orphic poet, he appeals to Night to stage an apocalyptic overthrow of all present ‘tyrannies’:

O then most tender fortress of our woes,
That bleeding lye in vertues overthroes.
Hating the whoredome of this painted light:
Raise thy chaste daughters, ministers of right,
The dreadful and the just Eumenides,
And let them wreake the wrongs of our disease,
Drowning the world in bloud, and staine the skies
With their spilt soules, made drunke with tyrannies.(14)

The relationship between the works of Shakespeare and Chapman has of course been a subject of controversy since Arthur Acheson, Frances Yates and Muriel Bradbrook asserted that a reference to the ‘school of night’ in Love's Labour's Lost represented a satiric attack on the intellectual views of Chapman's circle (whose members included Raleigh and the Earl of Northumberland).¹⁵ In my view, however, the rhetorical importance accorded to Night in The Rape of Lucrece (together with the use of similar imagery in several other works by Shakespeare) should prompt a reconsideration of this question; especially since the poem's date of composition seems likely to have been quite close to that of Love's Labour's Lost.

That Shakespeare's version of Night is indebted to the Orphic tradition is further suggested when Lucrece is herself directly compared to Orpheus, just before the first time that her words to Tarquin are reported by the narrator:

Here with a cockatrice' dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause,
While she, the picture of pure piety,
Like a white hind under the gripe's sharp claws,
Pleads in a wilderness where are no laws
          To the rough beast that knows no gentle right,
          Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.
But when a black-faced cloud the world doth threat,
In his dim mist th'aspiring mountains hiding,
From earth's dark womb some gentle gust doth get
Which blows these pitchy vapours from their biding,
Hind'ring their present fall by this dividing;
          So his unhallowed haste her words delays,
          And moody Pluto winks while Orpheus plays.

(540-53)

The reference suggests that while Lucrece's powers of language are comparable to those of Orpheus, at this stage they are unable to help her. It is not until after the rape, when Tarquin has fled, that her eloquence finds unconstricted expression. It is now that she appeals to ‘comfort-killing’ Night—a force which, as the poem emphasizes, has indirectly served as Tarquin's accomplice—to desert to her side, and stage a reordering of time:

O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night,
Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime,
Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light,
Make war against proportioned course of time.

(771-4)

She appeals to Night:

Let my good name, that senseless reputation,
For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted;
If that be made a theme for disputation,
The branches of another root are rotted.

(820-3)

A few lines later, Lucrece makes explicit this metaphoric connection between natural mutability and the sphere of politics, in what seems a restatement of the Machiavellian theme that all states are subject to decay, because of the natural depravity of man. Her words hint at a covert criticism of all models of kingship:

Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud,
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests,
Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud,
Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts,
Or kings be breakers of their own behests?
          But no perfection is so absolute
          That some impurity doth not pollute.

(848-54)

Lucrece follows her invocation of Night with an attack on Time and ‘thy servant opportunity’ (or Fortune) for behaving unjustly in betraying her to this misfortune. She demands of Opportunity:

When wilt thou be the humble suppliant's friend,
And bring him where his suit may be obtained?
When wilt thou sort an hour great strifes to end,
Or free that soul which wretchedness hath chained,
Give physic to the sick, ease to the pained?
          The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee,
          But they ne'er meet with opportunity.

(897-903)

Finally, she asks Time:

Why work'st thou mischief in thy pilgrimage,
Unless thou couldst return to make amends?

(960-1)

And she urges Time to punish Tarquin:

Thou ceaseless lackey to eternity,
With some mischance cross Tarquin in his light.
Devise extremes beyond extremity
To make him curse this cursèd crimeful night.

(967-70)

Lucrece's lament is therefore also both invocation and imprecation. Through its language, she figuratively seizes control of history, rather than remaining its passive victim. Thereby, from the magical perspective of Orphic poetics, she actually begins to change it. Thus the poem seems to be associating a new, feminine model of virtù, expressed through the language of grief and mourning, with the capacity to disorder time and its processes.

But it would be a mistake to overestimate Lucrece's understanding of her own relationship to language or to history. Her desire for a universal justice is confusedly interwoven in this part of her lament with concern for Collatine's honour; moreover, she seems to underestimate the power of her own language, seeing her apostrophes to Night, Time, and Opportunity as having been made in vain. This lack of self-knowledge is even more apparent in the second phase of her solitary lament, which reveals her as extraordinarily anxious about the association of certain kinds of language with historical change, and as unable to face the implications of her desire to be revenged. While it was a Greek poet, Orpheus, who had influenced her invocations of Night, Time, and Opportunity, Lucrece's contemplation here of a painting of the fall of Troy is indebted to the writings of a Roman poet: to Books i and ii of Virgil's Aeneid. And in this episode, the Greeks are identified with the treacherous power of language for deceit and destruction, through references to the ‘golden words’ of Nestor and the ‘enchanting story’ of Sinon. This emphasis upon the Greeks' powers of language suggests that the narrator may regard them with some sympathy and admiration; but Lucrece certainly views them with loathing, and grieves for ruined Troy. The episode indicates that at the same time as desiring justice, she is extremely fearful concerning the possible outcome of such a demand. Lucrece asks of Paris' cause of the fall of Troy through his abduction of Helen:

Why should the private pleasure of someone
Become the public plague of many moe?
Let sin alone committed light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressèd so;
Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe.
For one's offence why should so many fall,
To plague a private sin in general?

(1478-84)

As her identification with Troy shows, Lucrece is profoundly implicated in the hierarchical system of values and government which her appeal for revenge will eradicate. We are told of the fall of Troy:

                    the skies were sorry,
And the little stars shot from their fixèd places
When their glass fell wherein they viewed their faces.

(1524-6)

Thus in spite of her concern about Collatine's honour, Lucrece does not grasp the extent to which she is now a traitor to that system. Shakespeare would have known from his sources that the expulsion of the Tarquins would ultimately mean a loss of political power for the family of her husband Collatine, who was cousin to Tarquin. It is striking that in her meditation upon the Troy painting, Lucrece directs especial hostility, firstly, towards Helen, a woman whose rape, like her own, causes the fall of a dynasty of kings; and secondly, towards ‘perjured Sinon’:

                                                                      whose enchanting story
The credulous old Priam after slew;
Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
Of rich-built Ilion,

(1521-4)

We are told, moreover, that Sinon had:

Cheeks neither red nor pale, but mingled so
          That blushing red no guilty instance gave,
          Nor ashy pale the fear that false hearts have.

(1510-12)

and that ‘For every tear he falls a Trojan bleeds’ (1551).

In other words, although Lucrece compares this traitor to the Trojans to Tarquin, he seems more closely to resemble herself. While her face is first described in the poem as a picture of red and white beauty, when she appears before the four men at the end of the poem the misfortune she has experienced is ‘carved in it with tears’ (1713), and this clearly adds to her rhetorical impact. Hence in her intense hostility to Helen and Sinon, Lucrece may imply a buried anxiety about her own ambiguous status as both member of and traitor to her society. At the same time, her criticism of Sinon also articulates a profound uncertainty about the ethics of a use of language to produce political change. Yet in spite of such reservations, Lucrece never fully acknowledges either her own contradictory historical position, or her personal recourse to the manipulative and performative resources of language. She goes on to stage the last act of her own tragedy, unaware of the full political and historical implications of the private as well as the public phases in this compelling performance.

Notes

1. See in particular Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 45-72; and Nancy Vickers, ‘“The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. P. Parker and G. Hartman (London, 1985), pp. 95-115.

2. Vickers, ‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best’, p. 96.

3. Georgianna Ziegler, ‘My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice, 4, 1 (Spring 1990), 73-90.

4. Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning, 2nd edn (Baltimore, 1968), ch. 4.

5. See Margot Heinemann, ‘Rebel Lords, Popular Playwrights, and Political Culture: Notes on the Jacobean Patronage of the Earl of Southampton’, Yearbook of English Studies: Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558-1658, 21 (1991), 63-86.

6. For the frequent identification of Fortune with Opportunity or Occasio, see Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (London, 1927), pp. 115-16.

7. The view of several Florentine humanists was that virtù vince fortuna: fortune need not overwhelm a man who does not fear to swim with her fierce current. Niccolò Machiavelli explored the problematic relationship between man and fortune (a personification whose feminine gender he stressed) in chapter 25 of The Prince. This book, together with Machiavelli's Discourses, was printed in England (in Italian) in 1584, under a false Italian imprint.

8. Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker SJ (London, 1983), 3, p. 26. I am indebted to Patricia Klindienst Joplin for the discovery of this quotation, which she cites in ‘“Ritual Work on Human Flesh”: Livy's Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic’, Helios 17, 1 (Spring 1990), 51-70.

9. Romeo and Juliet 2.2.10-16; Macbeth 1.5.50-4.

10. See D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972).

11. Pico della Mirandola, ‘Conclusiones secundam propriam opinionem … hymnos Orphei’, ii and xv, in Conclusiones (Rome, 1486).

12. See Françoise Joukovsky, Orphée et ses disciples dans la poésie française et néo-latine du XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1970).

13. The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1941), ‘The Shadow of Night: Hymnus in Noctem’, lines 151-2.

14. Ibid., lines 247-54.

15. See Arthur Acheson, Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (London, 1903); M.C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh (Cambridge, 1936); F. A. Yates, A Study of ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ (Cambridge, 1936).