SOURCE: Introduction to The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Roe, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 22-41.

[In the following excerpt, Roe looks at the range of interpretations—from Christian to feminist—of The Rape of Lucrece, cites several sources for the poem, and assesses Shakespeare's relationship to his patron, Southampton, for whom he wrote the poem.]

THE POEM AND INTERPRETATION

The Rape of Lucrece is the antithesis of Venus and Adonis. Sexual desire, which aggressively yet also touchingly and humorously characterised Venus, returns to its familiar role as the preoccupation of the male; chastity, so ill-suited to the improbably coy Adonis, recovers its conviction in the person of Lucrece. Venus and Adonis is a poem of the fresh outdoors, which salutes procreative energy even as it recognises its inevitable shortcomings. Lucrece is a poem of interiors, of physical and spiritual darkness. The corridors down which Tarquin stalks, illuminated by his own ‘lightless fire’, lead into a circle of complexity, at the centre of which he meets the innocent but no less confused Lucrece.¹

The poem starts with Tarquin, ruminates on his quickly conceived lust, and, like Macbeth, contemplates his inexorable pursuit of an aim that can only destroy him. But unlike Macbeth it ceases to concentrate on the perpetrator, once he has done the deed, and switches attention to the victim. As soon as the rape has been accomplished it is clear that the poet intends to devote the rest of his story to vindicating the heroine. The comparison with Macbeth (a play which contains echoes of the poem, including references to Tarquin) illuminates the different sort of progress Lucrece follows after the offence. Whereas Macbeth purges his guilt within and through his own fate, the discarded Tarquin cannot fulfil this function himself. The purgation comes instead through Lucrece, who sheds her own blood. Does this make her Tarquin's counterpart in guilt, or does it merely mean that fate is unfairly forced on her as a sacrificial victim? The very change of direction in the poem, so different from the inexorably logical sequence of Macbeth, helps explain both the quandary experienced by Lucrece as victim and the uncertainty and confusion into which interpretation tends to fall.

This brings up first of all the question of the poem's moral perspective, in particular the nature of Lucrece's ‘self-slaughter’ and her motive in performing it.

St Augustine attacked the Lucrece of classical legend by reminding her supporters that a truly clear conscience had nothing to fear. He was concerned to dispute the morality of suicide, and argued that if Lucrece were truly an innocent victim she should not have killed herself: killing an innocent is also a crime.² If on the other hand Lucrece secretly consented to being raped, she was no heroine. The paradox as Augustine presents it is indeed a thorny one since it involves the notoriously difficult and contentious issue of victim complicity in sexual aggression. Shakespeare however avoids this spectre by inviting his readers to think further along the lines of the rape victim's own attitude to her experience. Unlike Augustine, Shakespeare does not ignore the cultural imperatives and taboos of an ancient society, in which pollution, even of an utterly innocent family member, brings shame on the family, shame which the victim's death is believed to cleanse. At the same time, Shakespeare is writing in a Christian culture, in which the law forbade suicide. The resulting moral debate arises from the Christian emphasis on the supreme importance of the individual soul, whereas classical Roman culture gave greater importance to the family and, under certain circumstances, allowed suicide.

A significant passage occurs at what might be described as the moment of ‘transference’, that is, following the rape when Tarquin slinks away and leaves Lucrece musing on the event:

Ev'n in this thought through the dark night he stealeth,
A captive victor that hath lost in gain;
Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will despite of cure remain;
Leaving his spoil perplexed in greater pain.
          She bears the load of lust he left behind,
          And he the burden of a guilty mind.
He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence;
She like a wearied lamb lies panting there.
He scowls, and hates himself for his offence;
She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear.
He faintly flies, sweating with guilty fear;
          She stays, exclaiming on the direful night;
          He runs, and chides his vanished loathed delight.
He thence departs a heavy convertite;
She there remains a hopeless castaway.
He in his speed looks for the morning light;
She prays she never may behold the day:
‘For day’, quoth she, ‘night's scapes doth open lay,
          And my true eyes have never practised how
          To cloak offences with a cunning brow.

(729-49)

Like any rape victim Lucrece feels that she has been contaminated and finds it hard, in fact impossible, to distinguish between Tarquin's culpability and her own personal shame. Even though pollution has been foisted on her (‘the load of lust’), she cannot help regarding it as her own. As the poem proceeds towards its dénouement a chorus of voices urges her to believe in her innocence; but Lucrece has resolved on suicide as the only solution long before her husband and countrymen arrive on the scene, and there is no wavering on her part. Medical science, at least in Shakespeare's application of it, seems to bear out her sense of contamination, for her spilt blood divides into pure and corrupt elements:

Some of her blood still pure and red remained,
And some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained …
And ever since, as pitying Lucrece' woes,
Corrupted blood some watery token shows,
          And blood untainted still doth red abide,
          Blushing at that which is so putrified.

(1742-3, 1747-50)

However inviolate her mind, the blood is evidence of those ‘accessary yieldings’ (1658) to which the body, despite its owner's will, succumbs (Chaucer—see below, p. 38—maintains that she was unconscious throughout, which clears her of even involuntary physical participation.) Augustine would say that none of this matters; but it is plain that Shakespeare took the body—soul dualism seriously, as Venus and Adonis shows. In the earlier poem the two are kept separate by careful contrivance (the man's inclination to chastity being decisive), but in Lucrece the act of sex brings them together: a chaste mind finds itself occupying a defiled body, and the resultant confusion will not be dispelled except by drastic action. The poem accordingly salutes her suicide as a triumphant release of her soul from its circumstances of defilement:

Even here she sheathèd in her harmless breast
A harmful knife, that thence her soul unsheathèd:
That blow did bail it from the deep unrest
Of that polluted prison where it breathèd.

(1723-6)

There is no evidence that Shakespeare wishes to think the matter out more subtly than this. Indeed, he probably sensed that he did not need to. While culpable in the view of the Church, suicide performed with such a fine and conscientious regard to personal honour would undoubtedly strike a chord of sympathy with the laity (hence Tyndale's worries over Lucrece's popularity).³ Shakespeare has thoroughly integrated this Roman lady (who in line 1694 appeals to her kinsmen as ‘knights’) in a familiar chivalric context, one which is characteristically adept at blurring theological principle and, with whatever effect on logic, regarding the actions of sympathetic characters in a morally favourable light.

From this perspective, the distinction between stoical Rome and contemporary England is not very marked. Of responses on the page, we have only those of Lucretius, Collatine, and Brutus to judge by, the rest standing ‘stone-still, astonished with this deadly deed’ (1730). Lucretius deplores her action as an inversion of the natural order, as a result of which children now predecease the parents, depriving fathers like himself of the consolation of survival through progeny. This cannot be enlisted as a Christian objection to what she has done, and indeed it too closely resembles one of Lucrece's own laments on the disorder of things to do much more than supplement her own plaintive rhetoric. Collatine feels uxorious rage at Tarquin's violation of his spouse, but soon falls to a futile competition with his father-in-law over who has greatest claim to grief—a further stylistic means of emphasising the pathos of her loss. Brutus criticises her for having plunged the knife into the wrong culprit, less a measured judgement of Lucrece and more a clever rhetorical means of establishing a case against the Tarquins. In each spokesman, style and performance hold sway over the finer points of moral inquiry, the effect taken as a whole contributing to the depiction of a Lucrece who has behaved in a sombre but laudable manner in conformity with Sidney's commendation of ‘the constant though lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault’ (Apology, p. 102).

In his overall handling of the theme, then, Shakespeare shows greater interest in the requirements of style—and in particular genre—than ethics, further supporting evidence for this being that the formal character of Lucrece can be traced to his activities in the theatre. He had lately completed the dynastic first Tudor tetralogy (echoes of which can be heard in some of the lines of Lucrece), which concerns itself with the transmission of guilt from one generation to the next by inherent curse or pollution; as well as this, his tragic instinct was shaped by the code of revenge drama, with its insistence on the extirpation or purgation of guilt through blood, to which his own recent Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus—again echoed sporadically by the language of the poem—belongs. (All of this is connected with the contemporary practice of putting Senecan ideas on to the Elizabethan stage.) The solution Shakespeare finds for the dilemmas confronting and expressed via Lucrece is the formalist one of subduing the abstract puzzles of conscience to the emotive force of the complaint genre, on the reasonable assumption that the pathos it produces will take care of any lingering ethical doubts.

To a large extent he succeeds. Readers generally object less to contradictions in the handling of the morality of the subject and more to the extended apostrophes of such bleak personifications as Night, Time, and Opportunity (what William Empson has described as ‘the Bard doing five-finger exercises in rhetoric at the piano’, Signet, p. 1670b). Despite the Augustinian school's suspicion that here is a lady protesting too much, the more obvious danger of such speeches is their inordinate length unsupported by a viable dramatic context. Shakespeare does all he can to elicit sympathy for the heroine as victim, but the lengths to which he goes risk an over-exposure of technique, sometimes culminating in stridency.

As Lever (p. 28) points out, we need to remember the circumstances of the time. Similar rhetorical extravagance had already worked on the stage in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which was to enjoy a later revival. Compared to this, Lucrece's speeches are not at all excessive. Also, the poem enjoys the advantages of being read in solitude, which makes for a different experience altogether from the reception of dramatic utterance. The demands of naturalism constantly forced the theatre to renew its style, and Shakespeare himself contributed decisively to the modification in rhetorical habit which was taking place on the stage. By contrast, the spaciousness of the narrative mode allows the mind to absorb the immediate drama and to contemplate at length the metaphysical condition which it expresses. Nowhere is this more powerfully done in such poetry than in the stanza just prior to the rape, where we witness the helplessness of the victim and the terrible (again Ovidian) transformation that has taken place in her attacker:

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.

(540-6)

Such descriptions never lost their appeal for Shakespeare's contemporaries, for the poem went into at least six editions in his lifetime, including one in the year he died. But a modern readership needs, to some degree, to recover the technique of appreciating the principles by which such a passage functions.

It is accordingly from the perspective of rhetorical practice that we must judge how theme and action are presented, and in particular how the heroine is perceived. In the early part of the narrative Shakespeare impresses upon the reader Lucrece's artlessness and simple good faith. Such unsuspecting honesty of disposition is hard to render without running the risk of making its possessor appear naive or unintelligent. Anyone else would suspect Tarquin was up to no good arriving unannounced and without a prior word from Collatine. But in order that she should epitomise uncomplicated virtue, Shakespeare has her accept the visit as quite natural; suspiciousness in her at this stage would cloud our impression. The antithetical structure of the poetic argument enables Shakespeare to present matters in extremes, ideal chastity opposed to base lust:

This earthly saint, adorèd by this devil,
Little suspecteth the false worshipper;
For unstained thoughts do seldom dream on evil;
Birds never limed no secret bushes fear.
So guiltless she securely gives good cheer
          And reverend welcome to her princely guest,
          Whose inward ill no outward harm expressed.

(85-91)

As the last line shows, antithesis works internally in the case of Tarquin, indicating his inner turmoil and self-division, whereas Lucrece shows no such innate contradiction.⁴ Tarquin has the devil's view of the sleeping, innocent Lucrece as he enters the sanctity of her bedchamber at a narrative moment in which the playful effects of the description trouble some readers as inappropriately precious:⁵

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 entombèd is,
          Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
          To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes …
Her hair like golden threads played with her breath,
O modest wantons, wanton modesty!
Showing life's triumph in the map of death,
And death's dim look in life's mortality.
Each in her sleep themselves so beautify,
          As if between them twain there were no strife,
          But that life lived in death, and death in life.
Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd,
Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honourèd.
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred,
          Who like a foul usurper went about
          From this fair throne to heave the owner out.

(386-92, 400-13)

Doubtless for the modern reader, more accustomed to expect moments of unbroken dramatic plausibility, such narrative pauses seem an artificial and stilted slowing of the action. But their function is to state and recall to us the poem's governing themes. Lucrece, in this image of her, has the power to resolve contradictions which in Tarquin, as in ordinary sinners, are only exacerbated. Differences of life and death are annulled, as they were in paradise, which knew no mortality. The outcome of anger is sweetness, and so on.

In addition, the picture does contain a significant element of erotic psychology, whereby an unconscious, innocent posture calls forth a voluptuous response. Shakespeare takes his cue for this from Ovid, whose original description of Lucrece as the dutiful housewife at her loom he has carefully adapted to the dramatically charged bedroom setting. (By contrast, Ovid spends few preliminaries on the rape.) A comparison shows how Shakespeare incorporates something of Ovid's delicacy of physical description and suspenseful erotic anticipation in his description of Tarquin's stealthy advance on his sleeping victim. John Gower's awkward verse translation of 1640 (the first in English) renders the Roman passage as follows:

Her lilie-skin, her gold-deluding tresses,
Her native splendour slighting art him pleases.
Her voice, her stainless modesty, h'admires:
And hope's decay still strengthens his desires.
Day's horn-mouth'd harbinger proclaim'd the morn;
The frollick gallants to their tents return.
His mazing fansie on her picture roves;
The more he muses still the more he loves:
Thus did she sit, thus drest, thus did she spin,
Thus plai'd her hair upon her necks white skin;
These looks she had, these rosie words still'd from her;
This eye, this cheek, these blushes did become her
As billows fall down after some great blast,
Yet make some swelling when the wind is past:
So though her person from his sight was tane,
Yet did that love her person bred remain.
He burns; and prick'd with spurs of basest lust,
Against her chast bed plots attempts unjust.

(Bullough, 1, 194)

Whereas Ovid's Tarquin turns these images of Lucrece over in his mind while still in the camp, Shakespeare, as the above passage shows, weaves them into the scene in which he beholds her in bed without her knowledge. The conceits are entirely appropriate to the complexity and contradictoriness of the situation whereby chastity kindles lust and the mutually inimical instincts of modesty and lasciviousness find themselves drawn indivisibly together.

There is a rhetorical purpose to Shakespeare's rearrangement of source material, and that is to concentrate all the particulars of the tragedy in these few strategically placed stanzas. The artistic conceit of life alternating with death in the image of the sleeping woman announces the eventual fate of Lucrece, which is, again paradoxically, made beautiful by its quality of heroic sacrifice. Like the Troy ecphrasis (see below, p. 31), though on a smaller scale, the picture given here summarises in concentrated form the thematic concerns to be demonstrated in the course of the action. Far from merely contributing an elusive and momentary lyric voice to the sombre epic tale, the stanzas signal the dimension of tenderness and pathos which unify the whole experience. An Elizabethan audience, looking less for naturalism of mood and more alert to the demands of thematic contemplation, would enjoy the manner in which these conceits maintain their fragile, delicate play while encompassing a wider significance.

While the device or strategy is more characteristic of narrative poetic art, Shakespeare none the less sometimes makes use of it in his mature tragic dramas, an interesting example occurring in King Lear (Quarto version) where the description of Cordelia given by the Gentleman to Kent fulfils, even to the evocation of her sympathetic tears, all the requirements of the ecphrasis mode of concentrated pity:

Kent. Did your letters pierce the Queen to any demonstration of grief?
Gent. Ay, [sir], she took them, read them in my presence,
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down
Her delicate cheek. It seem'd, she was a queen
Over her passion, who, most rebel-like,
Sought to be king o'er her.
Kent. O then it mov'd her.
Gent. Not to a rage, patience and sorrow [strove]
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
That play'd on her ripe lip [seem'd] not to know
What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence,
As pearls for diamonds dropp'd. In brief,
Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved,
If all could so become it.

(Lear 4.3.9-24)

Another relevant example occurs in Macbeth's description of the murdered Duncan immediately upon rousing his household (lines which have often puzzled later generations of critics and readers):

                                                                                                    Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood,
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance.

(2.3.111-14)

The use of non-naturalistic epithets to describe the King's face and blood enable the play (even allowing for the duplicity of the speaker) to raise in a single image one of the central themes, the sacredness of kingship, for which gold and silver are appropriate epithets. Johnson's observation that Macbeth's seemingly odd choice of diction plausibly depicts a hypocritical mind trying to feign innocence is attractive but incorrect. The audience would have recognised that even in the mouth of a perjurer and murderer (indeed, especially in such a mouth) these words capture precisely the reverence and awe of majesty. The appearance in plays of such vigorous temper as King Lear and Macbeth of images so firmly rooted in narrative poetic art bears testimony to the easiness, for Elizabethan readers and playgoers alike, of the artificial mode.

After the rape, Lucrece for the first time experiences antithesis as self-division—which Tarquin has known all along. The poem is ready now to dispense with him and concentrate fully on her. Lucrece registers her new-found sense of topsyturviness by railing on Time, Night, and Opportunity, all of whom appear to her to behave perversely. A psychologically effective moment occurs when Lucrece, gazing with suspicion on the blushing groom (1338-44), discovers that she can no longer distinguish innocence from evil. The play on faces uneasily reddening contrasts with the earlier artless blushing of Lucrece that so appeals to Tarquin when he pays his furtive visit (50-77).

Aware of self-division, another expression for her fallen condition, Lucrece chooses not to live. This is the tragic hero's decision, and it comes as no surprise; anything less would be unheroic. At this point Shakespeare introduces the much-debated Troy excursus (or ecphrasis—see Supplementary Notes). Despite arguments favouring political allegory, the Troy passage functions most obviously and effectively as a means of providing Lucrece with an appropriate heroic dimension: she sees her own fate, as we are meant to see it, depicted in the ‘skilful painting’:

At last she calls to mind where hangs a piece
Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy,
Before the which is drawn the power of Greece,
For Helen's rape the city to destroy,
Threat'ning cloud-kissing Ilion with annoy;
          Which the conceited painter drew so proud
          As heaven, it seemed, to kiss the turrets bowed.

(1366-72)

The last line in particular indicates the tragedy's attempt at assuming cosmic proportions which its bedroom and palace-chamber setting have so far inhibited. The allegory explored by the painting is explicable entirely in personal rather than political terms: Lucrece finds herself in Hecuba and her husband and father variously in both Priam and Hector, while Tarquin is clearly represented by Sinon but also by Pyrrhus. The armies on either side, as well as the city and its fortifications, recall and expand those many images of ‘servile powers’ (295), ‘ranks of blue veins’ (440), ‘round turrets’ (441), ‘sweet city’ (469), and ‘troops of cares’ (720) which have previously represented the bodies, feelings, attitudes of mind, and souls of rapist and victim.

But some recent criticism, as well as abandoning the old Augustinian dilemma, would dissent from the reading just proposed. Among the more interesting of these are the attempts at a political interpretation (i.e. closer to the spirit of Livy than Ovid) put forward first by E.P. Kuhl in a seminal article and revived again by Michael Platt.⁶ Kuhl argues that the main purpose of the poem is exemplary: it intends to demonstrate to Southampton the dangers of abusing power and status. Tarquin's initial scruples, as he nerves himself up, over unlawful possession and betrayal of trust (not unlike Macbeth's prior reflections on the duties of kinship) are repeated to him by Lucrece as she tries to reason him out of his determined course. Quite apart from the patent embarrassment that would be likely to issue from so close an alignment of Tarquin with Shakespeare's patron, the limitation of this idea is that it largely ignores the sufferings and reactions of Lucrece herself, which take up about two thirds of the narrative.

Platt, on the other hand, attempts to demonstrate the political meaning of the poem in terms of its overall structure, and shows great ingenuity in doing so. Despite his title he does not in fact see Shakespeare as advocating republicanism, even indirectly, but rather as pleading for responsible government. (Like Kuhl he belongs to the advice-to-a-prince school.) Platt bases his argument on the device of synecdoche: a partial statement or observation stands for something larger, as in the stanza in which Achilles' spear represents the warrior (1422-28). Correspondingly, the indulgence of individual passion symbolises the abuse of political power and consequent instability. Platt's interpretation of the Troy ecphrasis is more or less the opposite of the one given above. Gazing on the picture (1366-1568), Lucrece sees her own rape in the rape of Troy, and vice versa (Platt, pp. 65-66). But in the picture she also sees Hecuba, with whose sufferings she empathises, and she looks in vain for Helen—whose beauty she would destroy if by so doing she could prevent the awful fate incessantly visited on womankind as punishment for its power to attract men. While it is possible to read political meanings into individual actions, as Platt does, the poem insists on confronting us with the sufferings and predicament of the heroine as a woman, and only incidentally as a political symbol.

As might be expected, by her very sex Lucrece has attracted to the poem an increasing number of feminist studies. These take a different political line from Kuhl or Platt in examining the role of Lucrece within a patriarchy (where, it is argued, her body is perceived as an emblem of territorial possession rather than as a thing of her own). In such a perspective there is little that distinguishes the rapist from the other men in the poem: Collatine's original foolishness in boasting about his wife has kindled Tarquin's lust even more than her beauty; Lucrece is regarded by both men as an extension of male identity; the dispute between husband and father as to whose grief is the greater (1793-1806) is a selfish one with little genuine concern for the victim; the rape itself demonstrates Lucrece's essential passiveness, which is her condition in marriage, with the result that she is compelled to see her violation primarily as an offence against her husband; Brutus, like the others, indulges in suspect oratory and makes opportunistic use of Lucrece's death.⁷

Curiously enough, such studies resist implicating the author himself in the patriarchal conspiracy and prefer, like old-fashioned criticism, to keep him aloof from the vice of artifice practised by his characters, even though his poetic manner seems prey to it. As one interpreter puts it, not altogether plausibly, ‘Shakespeare moves in two directions at once: he dramatically calls into question descriptive fashion while amply demonstrating that he controls it.’⁸

One need not be a feminist reader to concur with some of the positions described above. Collatine's behaviour at the beginning of the poem is ill-advised (though not as foolish as that of Posthumus Leonatus, in Cymbeline, who wagers on his wife's fidelity), and one wonders what Lucrece's reaction might have been had she learned that her husband was partly responsible for her predicament. But as with other politically angled interpretations, most feminist readings ignore the fact that the poem concentrates so much of its imagination on Lucrece herself, on her inner woe, and only a relatively small amount on her context. Context, indeed, where it is registered, acts mainly as a foil for the heroine's personal drama. Collatine and Lucretius are inadequate not because they selfishly cultivate their own grief, even if this is what they do, but because helplessness is expected of them: theirs is the role of the traditional grieving chorus, powerless to assist the main tragic figure.

Like Venus and Adonis, from which in so many other respects it differs, The Rape of Lucrece ends on a death and strikes a note of pathos. The determination expressed by the Romans to oust tyranny is merely chorus to this effect. This at least appears to have been Shakespeare's artistic solution; but as we have seen, the poem has not been received in so unexceptional a fashion. The pathos he succeeds in wringing from the theme does not wholly dispel the ethical disquiet caused by Lucrece's dilemma and the answer she finds to it. And though readers sympathetic to the poem's rhetorical principles will respond to its carefully orchestrated moods of sorrow and reflection, a majority will doubtless always prefer the brio and dispatch of Venus and Adonis. Donaldson concludes his excellent chapter on Lucrece as follows:

Behind the lengthy rhetorical laments of the poem, one senses some uncertainty in Shakespeare's handling in particular of the principal issue of the poem, that of the proper course of action for a ‘dishonoured’ woman to take; an issue to which he was to return with greater thoughtfulness in the work of his maturity.

(Donaldson, p. 56)

In fact, no woman of Shakespeare's mature period confronts dishonour on so immense a scale: Desdemona and Hermione, two paragons of domestic loyalty, are beset with smears and suspicions but never literally violated. To treat of rape was always going to be difficult. In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare attempts to communicate the pathos ensuing from its violence by emphasising the visually horrific. In The Rape of Lucrece he adopts a more bearable introspective formula, without entirely succeeding, as he had superbly with Venus and Adonis, in subduing the poem's troubling ethical questions to the requirements of form. In this matter, indeed, he may not be so far adrift of his practice in certain of the great tragedies. Eliot accused him of resorting to stoicism for the ending of Othello, and in Hamlet Shakespeare brings a feeling of satisfaction to the close while perhaps leaving some of the questions posed by the theme of revenge still unanswered.⁹ But the historical fame of the Lucrece story and the fact that it has received such careful theological scrutiny more than usually expose the poet's customary habit of making his resolutions only partially answerable to the requirements of rationally conceived ethics. Be that as it may, henceforward the greatest outrages his heroines had to suffer were the insecurities and perversities of men's minds—complex enough matters in themselves, but artistically easier to solve.

THE SOUTHAMPTON CONNECTION

In offering The Rape of Lucrece to Southampton in 1594, Shakespeare seems to have fulfilled his promise to present him with a work which would qualify as that ‘graver labour’ foreseen at the time of the publication of Venus and Adonis. The dedication to Lucrece is even more fulsome and self-confident in its artificial self-abasement, and it has often been taken as a sign of the growth of intimacy between poet and patron. Yet we know nothing of Southampton's response. We may imagine that he liked its erotic predecessor, or Shakespeare would not have risked a second venture. But whether the poet thought it his own moral duty to try to educate the earl in more serious matters of conscience and statecraft, as some scholars have imagined,¹⁰ is a more dubious proposition. For one thing, Shakespeare would hardly have dared tell Southampton how to behave in so public a poem; for another, the implicit identification of the earl with Tarquin would be rashness of a quite un-Shakespearean kind. It would hardly come under the humanist heading, ‘education of a prince’, since such treatises, fairly popular in the sixteenth century, assume a certain artlessness, and even innocence, in the pupil and limit themselves to general political matters while particularly warning against ill advisers.¹¹ Echoes of such things can be heard here and there in the poem, but not in a sustained, programmatic way. By contrast, artful tacticians of moral flattery such as Ben Jonson adopted the foolproof ploy of applauding their superiors for already possessing virtues they hoped they would acquire. Giving one's patron a stark lesson in self-damnation is hardly the way to keep open preferment's door; we may suppose rather that Shakespeare intended the poem as a compliment to the sage and serious part of Southampton's character. Whereas Venus and Adonis may well have accommodated in-jokes and personal references without losing its poise, the nature of The Rape of Lucrece, with its strong mixture of traditional morality, makes for a stiffness and solemnity which are quite the reverse of the more malleable myth of Eros. Besides all this, the main emphasis falls not on Tarquin, who effectively disappears about a third of the way through the poem, but on the feelings and fate of the heroine. In expressing such interest Shakespeare is not alone.

A woman whose story has exercised fascination from its occurrence at an early formative point in western history, Lucrece has been subjected to fearsome scrutiny: examined as a political figure, extolled as a suffering heroine, and alternately revered and denigrated for her chastity and actions of conscience. The treatments preceding Shakespeare's which have bearing on his version need to be considered.

SOURCES

The two main Roman sources are Livy's history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, and Ovid's Fasti (or ‘Festivals’). Livy's account takes up the relatively short space of three chapters in the first book of his historical narrative, and forms part of a series of significant events in the story of the city. In particular it serves Livy's political sympathies, since in his interpretation it plays an important role in the transition from monarchy (or tyranny as Livy describes it) under the Tarquins to republicanism. Lucrece (a heroine of the sixth century bc) receives nothing in the way of psychological depiction but assumes the person of a martyr to the cause; an almost equal emphasis is placed on Lucius Junius Brutus, who leads the successful revolt against the Tarquin family. Painter made a fairly close translation of Livy in his Pallace of Pleasure (1566),¹² which the author of ‘The Argument’ (see commentary), whether Shakespeare or another, drew upon in some detail. The rape is described in military terms (though not in the elaborate poetic metaphor of Eros as siege and invasion), and Tarquin regards his victim as a ‘conquest’. Livy gets in a crack about his easily satisfied heroic instinct which glories in overcoming a woman's honour (‘profectusque inde Tarquinius ferox expugnato decore muliebre’);¹³ Lucretia in turn grieves as if over a larger-than-life calamity or public disaster (‘maesta tanto malo’). However, Livy does make a point of distinguishing between the evil that has befallen her body and her inviolate mind.¹⁴ As she claims purity of conscience, which none of her listeners dreams of denying her, she forestalls the possibility of subsequent female backsliding by identifying her suicide as a defence of the name of (Roman) women:

though I cleare my selfe of the offence, my body shall feele the punishment; for no unchast or ill woman shall hereafter impute no dishonest act to Lucrece.¹⁵

This appears in Shakespeare's poem as,

‘No, no’, quoth she, ‘no dame hereafter living
By my excuse shall claim excuse's giving.’

(1714-15)

Her resolve matches the tenor of public responsibility which Livy is eager to cultivate, and emphasises that personal conscience accords with devotion to the good of the patria. Similarly, Tarquin's selfish pursuit of pleasure destroys confidence in his virtue (or, to be exact, his father's virtue) as a ruler. The importance of rape as a personal action is second to its meaning in the political sphere, and this is the line Livy follows.¹⁶ Although, as we have seen, some critics have tried to interpret The Rape of Lucrece also primarily in political terms, Shakespeare is on balance more interested in depicting personal conscience and its part in individual fate; and to that extent he draws more fully on Ovid than on Livy.

Ovid throughout creates a characteristic atmosphere of beauty and horror, even down to the detail of macabre pathos as the deceased Lucrece apparently signals her support of Brutus's resolute vow:

She at his words her sightless eyes doth move,
And shook her head as seeming to approve.

(Bullough, i, 196)

Like the Metamorphoses, the Fasti has for its ultimate purpose the glorification of Roman destiny. Following the lead of Livy, who never misses an opportunity to enlist supernatural endorsement of the events he considers favourable to the cause of Rome, Ovid accords the death of Lucrece the status of a portent which Brutus interprets correctly by calling for the end of Tarquinian tyranny (the spirit of Lucrece giving its blessing). Livy chooses the less extraordinary miracle of the astonishing transformation in Brutus's character from a seeming dolt and party-liner to a man of decision and initiative (‘stupentibus miraculo rei, unde novum in Bruti pectore ingenium’: Livy, 1.59). Despite clear differences in emphasis, such as his customary fascination with the mentality of the sexually obsessive, Ovid shares, then, his compatriot's intention to justify the progress of Roman history.

The fame of Lucrece was to outlive such temporal concerns, however, and later treatments such as Chaucer's (in The Legende of Good Women), though based closely on Ovid's text, concentrate more on chastity as a virtue in itself. What survives in Chaucer's estimate is not so much Roman triumph as Lucrece's own good name as a type of wifely devotion:

But for that cause [ie. the Roman] telle I nat this story,
But for to preyse, and drawen to memory
The verray wife, the verray trewe Lucresse,
That for hir wifehood, and hir stedfastnesse,
Not only that these payens hir commende,
But he that y-cleped is in oure legende
The grete Austyne hath grete compassyoun
Of this Lucresse that starf at Rome toun.

(Bullough, i, 184)

Chaucer overstates St Augustine's compassion, but in concentrating on Lucrece as an emblem of universal female virtue, he breaks the domination of historical and political perspective. Brutus's role as an inspired republican matters little to Chaucer, who ends the account by a pointed comparison between the dispositions of men and women, drawing together the poem's twin themes of male treachery and female integrity:

For wel I wot that Christe himselfe telleth,
That in Israel, as wyde as is the londe,
Nat so grete feythe in al that londe he fonde,
As in a woman; and this is no lye.
And as for men, loketh which tirannye
They doon al day,—assay hem whoso lyste,
The trewest is ful brotil [brittle] for to triste.

(Bullough, i, 189)

As he acknowledges at the beginning of his account, Chaucer merely touches on the ‘grete’ (outline) of the political and historical dimension. Similarly, it may be that ‘The Argument’ of Shakespeare's Lucrece functions as a framework from which the poem selects certain details. Being a prose account, ‘The Argument’ naturally follows Livy—or more probably Painter (see Supplementary Notes). The proportion of narrative it gives to the historical question certainly exceeds that afforded by the poem; and in this Shakespeare may be re-employing Chaucer's tactic of using Roman history as a source of something which survives it. The fate of Tarquinius Superbus poses a special problem for any poet living under a monarchy, but Chaucer solves this by suggesting that the Tarquins have brought a curse upon themselves in offending against divinity (the one authority earthly kings must kneel to):

Ne never was ther kynge in Rome toun
Syn thilke day; and she was holden there
A seynt, and ever hir day y-halwed dere.

(Bullough, i, 188)

There is a touch of fairy-tale to this, not unlike the Pied Piper's punishment of the townspeople of Hamelin by depriving them of their children. If kings misbehave, they may be lost to their subjects. Lucrece's saintliness, however, might not be acceptable to those who think that the very nature of Tarquin's offence to some degree involves her complicity, however unwilling.¹⁷ Chaucer, as well as disingenuously (and disarmingly) enlisting the authority of a chief member of the opposition—Augustine—deals forthrightly with sceptics by insisting on her complete and utter senselessness at the moment of violation:

That, what for fere of sklaundre, and drede of dethe,
She lost attones both wytte and brethe;
And in a swowgh she lay, and woxe so ded,
Men myghten smyten of hir arme or hed,
She feleth nothinge, neither foule nor feyre.

(Bullough, i, 187; my italics)

Chaucer, then, produces a particularly sympathetic defence of Lucrece, and the forceful nature of his assertions on her behalf suggests that he knew that his choice of her as a typical ‘good woman’ would not go unquestioned—hence the conciliatory gesture towards the Augustinian viewpoint. Something of this problem is to appear later in Shakespeare.

Politics and conscience were to be brought together in a new formula at the end of Mary Tudor's reign, and more pertinently at the start of Elizabeth's, in a series of stern, lugubrious poems collectively known as The Mirror for Magistrates, which continued to be published until the early seventeenth century. The theme connecting these poems is that of implacable fortune enacting the will of God in bringing individuals down from whatever brief height of happiness or triumph they may enjoy. The idea is a familiar medieval one and derives from the teachings of ‘tragical morality’.¹⁸ The poems in the Mirror collection confront the reader with a figure who unfolds an exemplary tale of personal woe. The speaker is invariably a ghost or spirit who complains of the particular event, action, or circumstances that have caused his doom. While often a king or potentate, he may equally be a rebel or political misfit (along with the confessions of Richard II we hear those of Owen Glendower and Jack Cade); and sometimes the figure is a woman, as most notably in the case of Jane Shore whose story Thomas Churchyard contributed to the collection, with a shaping effect on later poems in the ‘complaint’ genre, including of course Lucrece.

As with all Elizabethan narratives, The Mirror for Magistrates keeps an eye on past performances, a noteworthy sign of this appearing in the introductory poem (or ‘Induction’) to the sequence, in which Sorrow takes the poet on a journey to Pluto's hell and there presents to him, along with other scenes of human malady and folly, a view of the destruction of Troy:

But Troy, alas! methought above them all,
          It made mine eyes in very tears consume,
When I beheld the woeful weird befall,
          That by the wrathfull will of gods was come;
And Jove's unmoved sentence and foredoom
          On Priam king and on his town so bent,
          I could not lin [cease], but I must there lament.

(E.K. Chambers, ed., The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, 1932, p. 125)

Scenes like this no doubt acted as a prompt to Shakespeare when he in turn led Lucrece to the painting which depicted the fall of Troy and the sorrows of Hecuba (1366-1568). A source for all such depictions is the second book of Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas explains to Dido how his city fell to the Greeks. More specifically, Marlowe's description in Dido Queen of Carthage exercised an undoubted influence on Shakespeare in his choice of images or words describing the sack and carnage.¹⁹ Influence builds on influence, and The Rape of Lucrece is accordingly a poem in which many previous voices can be heard mingling with and modifying one another, making it difficult to decide where to attribute a particular effect or to determine how much conscious selection has been at work. However, as in Chaucer, though at much greater length, the main emphasis falls on Lucrece and our judgement of her.²⁰

Responsibility for this may lie particularly with Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond, published only a short while before in 1592. Daniel's poem derives quite clearly from the Mirror narratives in that it confronts the reader with the ghost of a woman who has fallen prey to misfortune. The nature of her transgression is her untimely love (for a king no less), the punishment for which has been undertaken by the jealous wife and queen. In developing his story, Daniel transforms the homiletic sternness of the Mirror tradition into the romantic genre of the complaint; other examples quickly followed, dealing in the main with sorrowful heroines whose tearful confessions begged pity rather than censure.²¹ Daniel establishes sympathy for Rosamond by depicting her as an unwilling victim of her own fate. She too is an object of lust, though this is the rather melancholic, hesitant lust of an older man who asks a matron of the court to intercede for him. This woman explains the king's interest to Rosamond, who accepts him as her lover. Henry's eventual grief on discovering the poisoned corpse of his mistress is genuine and meant to be redemptive. All this of course we have only from the mouth of Rosamond herself, but there is nothing in the poem to suggest that we should distrust her. Daniel gives his heroine a voice in which to keen at length, and in adapting the tactic for his poem Shakespeare for the first time presents a version of Lucrece in which the victim expresses her own motives and misery. Until then she had been a silent witness to the statements made about her by poets and historians.

Shakespeare's poem resembles Daniel's in a good many respects: each uses rhyme royal, and a similar rhetorical play of argument occurs in both, so much so that certain stanzas could be transferred from one to the other without detection. The moral argument or conscience-wrestling undertaken by Rosamond interestingly makes her combine in one person elements of both of Shakespeare's protagonists, as if a more sympathetic version of Tarquin were to meet with a less resolute Lucrece:

But what? he is my King and may constraine me,
Whether I yeelde or not I live defamed:
The world will thinke authority did gaine me,
I shal be iudg'd hys love, and so be shamed:
We see the fayre condemn'd, that never gamed.
          And if I yeeld, tis honorable shame,
          If not, I live disgrac'd, yet thought the same.(22)

One further detail linking Daniel to Shakespeare is the casket, a present to Rosamond from Henry, who hopes that its richly inwrought erotic motifs will nudge her thoughts in the direction of desire. But Rosamond notes rather the pathos of those women who represent seductive beauty:

The day before the night of my defeature,
He greets me with a Casket richly wrought:
So rare, that arte did seeme to strive with nature,
T'expresse the cunning work-man's curious thought;
The mistery whereof I prying sought.
          And found engraven on the lidde above,
          Amymone how she with Neptune strove.
Amymone old Danaus fayrest daughter,
As she was fetching water all alone
At Lerna: whereas Neptune came and caught her,
From whom she striv'd and strugled to be gone,
Beating the ayre with cryes and pittious mone.
          But all in vaine, with him sh'is forced to goe:
          Tis shame that men should use poore maydens so.
There might I see described how she lay,
At those proude feete, not satisfied with prayer:
Wailing her heavie hap, cursing the day,
In act so pittious to express despaire:
And by how much more greev'd, so much more fayre;
          Her teares upon her cheekes poore carefull gerle,
          Did seeme against the sunne cristall and perle.

(372-92)

As well as the overall similarity, a number of verbal parallels connect this passage with Lucrece's larger survey of the Trojan scene. While civil strife and the horror of war and bloodshed make for a different emphasis from this small-scale story of seduction, rape underlies Lucrece's need for solace in the first place. Both accounts draw on a classical and mythological source. The interest in ‘curious’ workmanship is common to each; and each of them dwells on the relationship of art to life and on the power of representation to affect the spectator. Verbal details, as in phrases like ‘There might I see’ (386), recur in Lucrece (e.g. 1380, 1388, etc.), and a phrase like, ‘how she lay / At those proud feet’ (386-87) seems echoed in the line, ‘Which bleeding under Pyrrhus’ proud foot lies' (Lucrece 1449). The sheer bloodiness of the Troy scene limits its similarity with the casket depiction, but elsewhere the picture of the grieving Lucrece strikes a common chord with Daniel's poem. Compare lines 391-92 (quoted above) of Rosamond with the following description of Lucrece and her maid:

A pretty while these pretty creatures stand,
Like ivory conduits coral cisterns filling.
One justly weeps, the other takes in hand
No cause but company of her drops spilling:
Their gentle sex to weep are often willing,
          Grieving themselves to guess at others' smarts,
          And then they drown their eyes or break their hearts.

(1233-9)

Rosamond is moved at the sight of another woman's tears (albeit artificial ones), just as Lucrece's maid responds to her mistress's sorrow. What both descriptions have in common is that they effect a moment of contemplative pathos centred on a female figure (or figures) or conveyed through a female sensibility. This brings us back once more to the question of the conflicting demands of rhetorical practice and dramatic or psychological plausibility. Another Shakespearean instance, already touched on, is the delicate tableau of the sleeping Lucrece, a picture of purity in her (literal) unconsciousness of Tarquin's gaze (386-420). Such moments, asking from the reader a tender awareness of the beauty of pathos, function ecphrastically (though in a briefer space than the Troy scene) as a statement of the overall pitifulness expressed by the main theme. The extent to which they detach themselves from their immediate context enables them to encompass the feelings and ideas of the poem as a whole. Such distillations of pity summarise the concern the poem wishes to establish over the eventual fate of the heroine, its registration at an earlier narrative point bearing on the mood intended to be dominant at the end.

Notes

1. One critic has recently argued that the antithesis which opposes the two antagonists to each other also works by producing an unexpected resemblance between them. See Dubrow's account of the poem's syneciosis (‘strange harmony’, as the Elizabethan stylist John Hoskyns called it), in Captive Victors, esp. pp. 80-142.

2. Augustine concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. H. Bettenson, 1972, 1.19.19-20.

3. St Jerome had extolled the courage and resolve of Lucrece and saw her as a worthy example for Christians to follow—even though she was a pagan. Tertullian further commented that concern for personal glory was acceptable to God if it accorded with his design. The Augustinian position, however, was alive and well in Shakespeare's day thanks to the efforts of Tyndale. See Donaldson, pp. 34 and 174-5.

4. Pursuing the notion of syneciosis (see above, p. 23, n), Dubrow argues that the contradictoriness involves Lucrece in terms of motive as it does Tarquin, and appears to see this as part of Shakespeare's design. But if this is what happens, it is more likely to be an incidental and unplanned development, since the poet bases his account of Lucrece's triumph on her resistance to compromise. See Dubrow's conclusion, p. 168.

5. Consider Lewis's objection: ‘The conceit which makes Lucrece's pillow ‘angrie’ at 388 would have been tolerable in Hero and Leander but is here repellent’ (English Literature, p. 499).

6. See Kuhl, ‘Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece’, Philological Quarterly 20 (1941), 352-60, and Platt, ‘The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for which it stands’, Centennial Review 19 (1975), 59-79.

7. See variously articles by Coppélia Kahn, ‘The rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976) 45-72; Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty's best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Parker and Hartman, 1985, pp. 95-115; and Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Shakespeare and the soil of rape’, in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, 1980, pp. 56-64.

8. Vickers, ‘“The blazon”’, p. 109.

9. See T.S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, in Selected Essays, 3rd edn, 1951, pp. 126-40; and Philip Edwards, Hamlet, New Cambridge Shakespeare: 1985, pp. 60-1.

10. See Akrigg, p. 200, and E.P. Kuhl, ‘Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece’, pp. 352-60.

11. See below on Mirror for Magistrates, p. 38.

12. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 1957, i, 196-9.

13. The detail is not in Painter.

14. See Donaldson's careful analysis of the various treatments of the rape both before and following Shakespeare (chs. 1-2, 4-5).

15. Painter (Bullough, i, 198).

16. It is worth remarking, as the question of justifiable suicide arises, that taking one's life was not a matter of indifference to the Romans. Cicero argues that only if God has summoned one is it permissible, or if one is sure God has given a valid reason (as in the case of high-minded men such as Socrates or Cato). (See Tusculan Disputations 1.30.73-4.)

17. Lucrece herself seems to subscribe to this view—see above, p. 24.

18. See J.W. Lever, ed., The Rape of Lucrece, 1971, p. 123.

19. See Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, 1932, p. 152n. and Luc. 1554n.

20. Furnivall suggests that Shakespeare combines the theme of The Legende of Good Women with the style of extended lament characteristic of Troilus and Criseyde (H.E. Rollins, ed., Shakespeare: The Poems (New Variorum), 1938, p. 419).

21. See the section on A Lover's Complaint, pp. 62-5, below.

22. The Complaint of Rosamond, lines 337-43 (Samuel Daniel, Poems and a Defense of Rhyme, ed. A Colby Sprague, 1930, p. 50).