SOURCE: “‘This blemish'd fort’: The Rape of the Hearth in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, edited by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane, University of Delaware Press, 2000, pp. 104-26.

[In the following essay, Dubrow observes that the invasion or destruction of public and private dwellings occurs repeatedly as an image in The Rape of Lucrece; she notes that this imagery is particularly poignant when it directly represents the fire of Tarquin's passion destroying the home that Lucrece has created and that her husband, Collatine, is meant to protect.]

[The soul's] house is sack'd, her quite interrupted,
Her mansion batter'd by the enemy,
Her sacred temple spotted, spoil'd, corrupted,
Grossly engirt with daring infamy:
Then let it not be call'd impiety,
                    If in this blemish'd fort I make some hole
                    Through which I may convey this troubled soul.

(1170-1176)

I

Loss haunts The Rape of Lucrece as insistently and menacingly as it haunts the recently bereaved. And its sometime companion, recovery, plays as volatile and complex a role in the poem as in the trajectory of actual mourning. Staged repeatedly and overtly on the level of plot, the losses in the poem focus on the title character's deprivation of chastity as she conceives it and of life itself, but include as well that “thievish dog” (736) Tarquin's forfeiture of his integrity, Collatine's and Lucretius's privation of wife and daughter, and the multiple versions of absence associated with the depiction of Troy, itself a trace in sixteenth-century English culture.

The language of the poem also both inscribes and enacts other versions of loss. The movement from originary purity, noted by many critics,¹ is echoed in the decline from the stability and clarity implied by epithets and appository constructions like “Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste” (7) to ironically ambiguous adjectives such as the reference to Sinon's “plain” (1532) countenance or Lucrece's “bright” (1213) weeping eyes. Previously analyzed by Joel Fineman in terms of erotic movements of crossing and folding and by myself in relation to tensions, rivalries, and border states, the rhetorical figure syneciosis also stages loss.² This trope links together opposites, with the oxymoron one of its most familiar incarnations and the tellingly entitled privative form “x-less x” its most characteristic manifestation in The Rape of Lucrece. For phrases like “helpless help” (1056) or “liveless life” (1374) themselves rob linguistically, taking away the word they seem to offer.

Of all the losses in the poem, however, those involving dwelling places are among the most significant.³ The plot of the narrative pivots on Tarquin's threats to the home of Lucrece and Collatine. And on the rhetorical level tropes repeatedly evoke imperilled, corrupted, or destroyed dwellings: for example, Tarquin acknowledges that “his soul's fair temple is defaced” (719); his victim describes her body as a “polluted prison” (1726); and a number of images refer to fortresses (see, for example, ll. 28, 482), thus linking the public and private, as is so often the case in this text.

My aim in emphasizing such allusions is not to diminish the primacy or the poignancy of Lucrece's rape and suicide. Indeed, the attack on her home is often conflated with the assault on her body and being; the poem emphasizes that connection in the many references to Tarquin's forcing locks and more subtly conveys it in Lucrece's letter to her husband, where the second prepositional phrase in “So I commend me from our house in grief” (1308; italics inserted) could refer either to the mourning writer of the letter or the grieving house and thus links the two. The issue of threatened dwellings is important not least because it generates reinterpretations of the threatened human victim. In so doing, however, this topic also offers new and sometimes surprising perspectives on a number of other questions about the text, ranging from the workings of characteristic tropes and generic norms to the workings of male subjectivity.

To be sure, the role of houses and homes in the poem has not gone unnoticed. Important earlier analyses of The Rape of Lucrece have, as it were, opened the door to further discussions of that issue, with Coppélia Kahn identifying connections between Lucrece and the goddess Vesta, Katharine Maus observing the parallel between Lucrece's body and a house or fortress, Linda Woodbridge adducing anthropological theories of purity and contagion to connect the violation of the borders of the body and of a house, and Georgianna Zeigler encompassing this text when she discusses Shakespeare's conception of a private space.⁴ Suggestive though all of these observations are, however, they touch only briefly on the issue of home in the course of other arguments, and hence they necessarily neglect certain perspectives that would variously expand, nuance, and challenge their assumptions. In particular, as I will demonstrate, archival documents on marriage crystallize complex relationships between home and protection, redefining the identification between a dwelling and the maternal body and insisting on cognate connections between lodgings and male subjectivity as well.

New historicism and feminism, the capacious homes that have nurtured so much important recent work in early modern studies, deserve credit for intensifying interest in such texts. Fully to understand the significance of dwelling places in The Rape of Lucrece, however, one also needs to return to intellectual homes from which many younger members of the profession have eagerly migrated, visiting the older-generation scholars still ensconced there either not at all or only for brief and tense holiday encounters—that is, source studies and close readings of literature. A festschrift is an appropriate occasion and The Rape of Lucrece an apt text for redefining the protocols of such visits. New historicism and feminism direct our attention to issues in the poem and its antecedents that might otherwise have been overlooked, while the putatively old-fashioned methods I have cited variously buttress and challenge certain presuppositions of new historicism and feminism. Above all, it is at the crossroads where all these approaches meet that we find questions about and answers to the twinned subjects on which this essay pivots: the gendered destruction of a house and the gendered construction of subjectivities.

II

Three intimately related tropes among the many figures crammed into this text particularly call for that sort of close analysis—and reward it by demonstrating why The Rape of Lucrece is so concerned with the loss of home and how that preoccupation relates to the representation of Lucrece:

“If, Collatine, thine honor lay in me,
From me by strong assault it is bereft:
My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee,
Have no perfection of my summer left,
But robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft.
          In thy weak hive a wand'ring wasp hath crept,
          And suck'd the honey which thy chaste bee kept.”
.....Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests?

(834-40, 848-49)

Both the wasp and the cuckoo imperil a home (and one might more tentatively add that the innocence represented by the bud is frequently a characteristic associated with home). These lines indicate as well how and why dwellings are threatened throughout the poem. Each of these figures presents the nexus of intrusion, robbery, and contamination that recurs in the actual rape. The second and third suggest as well sexual violations—the destruction of purity and a threat to maternity—and in so doing demonstrate a propensity for seeing such transgressions in terms of that nexus. In the first case, that of the bee and the wasp, violation also involves an outsider threatening a rightful occupant, an analogue to military invasion, while in the instance of the cuckoo, the lawful owner is actually displaced. Homes no less than homelands are threatened by aliens, these figures suggest, and the desire for a dwelling, like other versions of desire, is triangulated in these tropes, as in many other Shakespearean passages.

A closer analysis demonstrates that lines 834-40 insistently establish Lucrece's vulnerability through not only overt statements but also grammatical patterns. After a conditional where the context encourages us to gloss “if” as “since,” the trope proceeds to assume her guardianship of her husband's honor. She has internalized that patriarchal truism, an ironic assumption given that, as I will argue, the poem implies that his behavior has in fact threatened her honor in ways that render him a careless watchman at best. And his home has need of the most attentive sentinels. For the hive itself is “weak” (839), an allusion that may or may not refer to Lucrece herself. In any event, her own weakness is established in many other ways; here, as so often in the poem, threats to dwellings are associated not only with invaders but also with protectors who variously do not or cannot discharge their responsibility. At the beginning of the quotation she is not the subject of the main phrase but rather appears in short prepositional phrases (“in me, / From me” [834-35]), and, similarly, at the end she is the subject only of a relative clause (“which thy chaste bee kept” [840]). In the course of the passage, Lucrece is associated with a verb of possession, not action, “Have” (837). In the next line rather than writing “I am robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft,” Shakespeare leaves the first two of those words out: appropriately enough, both the noun and verb referring to her remain implicit, much as her subjectivity and agency have themselves been threatened by the rape. The character who will speak laments punctuated by exclamatory phrases, the character who will feel constrained to terminate her own self and her own future by suicide, here precisely mirrors those actions through her position in a world of adjectives rather than nouns and verbs. All this serves to emphasize the power of the wasp and the vulnerability of the bee.

In the succeeding image of the womb, the verb “intrude” (848) signals the many resonances of intrusion throughout the poem. In the late sixteenth century one meaning of intrude was “To thrust oneself into any benefice, possession, office, or dignity to which one has no title or claim; to usurp on or upon.”⁵ Hence the word itself links the political and domestic intrusions, two levels of the poem between which critics have sometimes felt obliged to choose.⁶ “Maiden” (848) is apparently deployed here in two senses common in Shakespeare's period, “a young (unmarried) woman” or “a virgin”;⁷ thus this overtly sexual image, like the later reference to Lucrece's breasts as “maiden worlds” (408), associates this matron with not marital chastity but asexual or presexual purity.⁸

More to our purposes now, the line in question is succeeded immediately by the question, “Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows' nests?” (849). “Hatch” plays the customary innocence of the newborn against the deceit aptly characterized by the adjective with which it alliterates. Aliens invade the nests as the wasp did the unfortunate hive, dispossessing the children who rightfully belong there. This figure anticipates the later allusion to the weasel, which was itself sometimes associated with usurping a nest.⁹ And the figure looks forward as well to Lucrece's fears that her own children could be threatened by an illegitimate offspring if she has been impregnated. But the line surely also invokes the political undertones of “intrude,” the threat of usurpation, again demonstrating the dovetailing of the political and domestic at many key moments in the poem.

Shakespeare's emphasis on a wife's obligation to protect her husband's honor and his home is hardly surprising. But juxtaposing his tropes with a particularly intriguing, though neglected, passage from the discourses of marriage nuances and complicates common critical generalizations about that responsibility. Preaching shortly after the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, John King, Bishop of London from 1611 to 1621, extends Psalm 128's brief characterization of the wife as a fruitful vine into a series of conceits suggesting that both the spouses are vines on the couple's house. Not surprisingly, in the instance of the wife he deploys the notion literally to naturalize her obligation to stay close to the house. More unexpectedly, he develops the psalm's procreative image into a trope of protectiveness. The female vine, King emphasizes, guards the house—transforming the dependency in a trope common to the epithalamium tradition, the woman as a vine clinging to her tree-like husband, into an image of strength and power: “We have found already that the vine is sustentaculum some kinde of stay and assistance to the house; 2. unbraculum an arbour or shade unto it; now 3. it is propugnaculum, being spred upon the sides of the house, a fense against the violence of the weather.”¹⁰ Rather than simply being protected from her own evil or threats from without by her house, as common generalizations about the early modern imperative to keep women inside would lead one to expect, the bride herself protects and even strengthens the house. Perhaps writing about a princess marrying a foreigner encouraged King to emphasize female power, and certainly the paradox of describing vines as powerful shelters may suggest some ambivalences about female potency even when its exemplar is the daughter of the king of England. But the presence of passages emphasizing female power in many other marriage treatises discourages the reader from entirely explaining away King's image in those terms.¹¹

Playing Shakespeare's rhetoric of female guardianship against King's, then, supports familiar commonplaces: the wife is responsible for preserving her spouse's honor, and this is figured in terms of safeguarding the home that safeguards her. At the same time, the passages demonstrate that on the issue of the female weakness that might interfere with the wife's role as sentinel and shelter the discourses in question are quite as complex and ambivalent as the expositions of male guardianship to which I will turn shortly. First of all, they do not necessarily stress such frailty to the extent facile generalizations about the early modern period might lead one to believe, as the citation from King and many other passages demonstrate. In evoking the potency of his vine by means of an image that risks compromising it, however, he gestures towards another type of complexity, more marked in texts other than his own: marriage manuals and sermons typically juxtapose celebrations of female moral and ethical agency with laments about women's incapacities.

Moreover, the discourses of marriage and related literary texts challenge some common interpretations of patriarchy in a second way that is equally germane to Shakespeare's figure of the bee: they differ significantly among and within themselves on how they deploy the limitations they do gender female. Accusations of moral weakness could be and often were used to blame the woman and justify suppression of her, another point to which I will shortly turn. Here, however, Shakespeare does not identify a culpable frailty whose name is woman but rather implies that the incapacity in question is more an inevitable physical limitation than a moral flaw. In fact, in a later passage he explicitly asserts,

Then call them not the authors of their ill,
          No more than wax shall be accounted evil,
          Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.

(1244-46)

The reference to the devil creates an unsettling conclusion despite its ostensible reassurance, again demonstrating ambivalence. But Shakespeare's overt and primary aim is to deny female culpability, presumably including women's guilt in situations where they fail in their role as guardians. Though the text elsewhere hints that Lucrece's naïveté makes her susceptible to the force and fraud of Tarquin, certainly its predominant and recurrent theme is her innocence of the guilt she attributes to herself.¹² This bee cannot be faulted in any major way for the intrusion of the wasp, as Lucrece herself acknowledges in lines 842-47.

In short, then, the tropes of the invasive wasp, worm, and cuckoo figure woman as guardian of a home subject to invasion. Shakespeare's text, unlike King's, emphasizes not only the wife's duty to protect that threatened dwelling but also her incapacity to do so. Men, too, are responsible for protecting nests and hives, the poem elsewhere suggests, and it proceeds to emphasize that they, unlike Lucrece, are deeply culpable for their failure in that role.

III

Five of the principal episodes in the poem—Collatine's initial exposure of his wife, Tarquin's rape, the descriptions of Troy, the conflict between Brutus and the familial mourners, and the political change at the conclusion of the narrative—involve to various degrees and on various levels the issue of home, exploring the responsibilities of male characters to guard it and in so doing further explicating the trope of the beleaguered bee. If, as Coppélia Kahn persuasively suggests, the story of Lucrece is “one of the founding myths of patriarchy,”¹³ Shakespeare's rendition of that narrative emphasizes not only how that myth may attempt to justify rape, the point that Kahn stresses, but also how it may engender a responsibility to safeguard that, though potentially far more positive than the attitudes of a would-be rapist, is not wholly unproblematical even when it is successfully performed.¹⁴

In the Argument, which closely follows the version of the story in Livy's Historia and Ovid's Fasti, we learn that Collatine participates in—but apparently does not originate—a boasting contest that culminates in an apparently mutually agreed on trip back to Rome:

In that pleasant humor they all posted to Rome, and intending by their secret and sudden arrival to make trial of that which every one had before avouched, only Collatinus finds his wife (though it were late in the night) spinning amongest her maids; the other ladies were all found dancing and revelling, or in several disports; whereupon the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame. At that time Sextus Tarquinius being inflamed with Lucrece' beauty …

Focusing on Tarquin's response to the boast, the poem itself omits the trip to Rome; some critics believe it is implied, while others ground interpretations in the assumption that it never occurred.¹⁵ Whichever of these positions one adopts, however, Shakespeare presents Collatine's behavior as imperiling not only Lucrece but also the home that encases and in some though not all senses represents her.

Extensive and often acute, previous commentary on his culpability has focused on the dangers of the boast, one of the most common and pernicious weapons in the deadly sport of male rivalry, and on the gaze that Collatine's vaulting language invites.¹⁶ Though this perspective is valuable, it has directed attention away from a closely related but distinct consequence of the proud husband's behavior: that is, he invites not only gazing but also entry into a previously closed space, literally and metaphorically opening his home to those he should not have admitted. In the Argument, he initially does so figuratively by boasting and hence inviting his listeners not only to look at Lucrece but also to look into the house that encases and in some senses represents her. He then literalizes these actions when he and his companions return to Rome. If, as readers have rightly noted, Tarquin's villainous passage through the house and into Lucrece's bedroom mimetically anticipates his sexual penetration of her, those actions are in turn proleptically mirrored by Collatine's opening of his home: a dubious version of hospitality anticipates a despicable perversion of it. Shakespeare's language in the Argument flags the connection between the two series of events: the military leaders are “secret and sudden” in their arrival back in Rome, and only a few lines later we learn that Tarquin “privily” withdrew from the camp. In the poem itself, if the visit is implicit, Collatine again first unlocks his home linguistically and then does so more literally; alternatively, if we are to assume that the visit does not take place, in any event the telling phrase “unlock'd the treasure of his happy state” (16) at once participates in the obvious commodification of Lucrece while also reminding us that Lucrece, too, is a treasure whose container can readily be unlocked. Similarly, in describing her husband as the “publisher” (33) of this jewel, Shakespeare draws attention not only to the role of language in his ill-conceived boast but also to the act of making a private space public.¹⁷

Comparing the text with its sources clarifies the threats to which Collatine subjects his wife and their imbrication with questions about houses and homes. Both Livy and Ovid emphasize the idleness and heavy drinking at the camp, implying that these are possible motivations for the ensuing contest; given that The Rape of Lucrece is, as Ian Donaldson observes, concerned with government in the sense of self-control, one might expect Shakespeare to include or even highlight such explanations.¹⁸ In omitting them, however, he makes the competitiveness behind the boast appear a more common and widespread characteristic, not merely the product of the peculiar conditions at the camp. Many irresponsible young men, not only bored and inebriated soldiers, he implies, participate in mimetic desire. Shakespeare's version also diffuses guilt by omitting the statement, clear in both Livy and Ovid, that Collatine himself suggests the trip back to Rome.

The guilt of not only Collatine but also his comrades is, however, emphasized by Shakespeare's most significant, and most neglected, change in his sources. In the classical versions, in Painter, and in Chaucer, the test of the wives culminates in a joyous reunion. “Adveniens vir Tarquiniique excepti benigne; victor maritus comiter invitat regios iuvenes” (“As Collatinus and the Tarquinii approached, they were graciously received, and the victorious husband courteously invited the young princes to his table”), according to Livy (Historia, I.lvii.10).¹⁹ Painter's version of Livy goes so far as to suggest the visitors welcomed the chance to spend the night with their wives. The author of the Metamorphoses characteristically renders the scene more emotional and more personal. Having come upon a weeping Lucrece, Ovid's Collatine comforts her with his presence: “‘pone metum, veni!’ coniunx ait. illa revixit / deque viri collo dulce pependit onus” (“‘Fear not, I've come,’ her husband said. She revived and on her spouse's neck she hung, a burden sweet” (II.759-760).²⁰ Even in the abbreviated Argument, Shakespeare could have readily referred to such a homecoming by adding after “whereupon the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame” a phrase like “and the happy victor warmly greeted his lady and invited his companions to dine with her.”

Notice what a big change that small addition effects. By not using this or a similar locution, Shakespeare omits a moment of domestic happiness, thus further distancing that possibility, elsewhere described as ephemeral as dew. And he plays up the disturbing implications of the visit home: rather than its culminating on the traditional comedic ending of the feast or a loving reunion, nothing mediates the original intrusion into the home, so the parallel with Tarquin's subsequent intrusion deepens. In short, Collatine, whose resemblances to the rapist many critics have noted, literally brings the military world within his house. Or, as Joel Fineman wittily put it in a Lacanian phrase that implicitly emphasizes the invasion of the house, the king's son is the letter that Collatine sends to his own address.²¹

Shakespeare's original readers, however, would have blamed Collatine for the violent depredations of Tarquin (that letter turned letter bomb) even more than contemporary readers have done. Studies of marriage in early modern England have often focused on the marital ideologies that direct the husband to contain the wife's body and suppress her speech. Though sermons and marriage manuals indubitably proffer such directives, they figure within complex and often contradictory admonitions about wifely subjection and autonomy, as I suggested above. And more to the point now, imperatives about restraining and controlling a wife coexist with frequent admonitions about protecting her.

As we saw, a series of crucial tropes draws attention to Lucrece's responsibility to safeguard the house and her husband's honor. Similarly, marriage manuals do not gender the responsibility to protect exclusively male; witness the passage from King cited above. William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties likewise emphasizes that both members of a couple have the obligation to protect each other's good name.²² But these tracts more often associate the role of defender with the male. In prayers appended to his Of Domesticall Duties, Gouge advises the husband to pray “to protect her against such as may seduce her in her soule, hurt her in her body, or impaire her credit” (sig. Kk2^v-Kk3). Similarly, Robert Cleaver and John Dod's [G]odly Forme of Householde Government, a highly influential sixteenth-century marriage manual, declares, “the best rule that a man may holde and practise with his wife, to guard and governe her, is to admonish her often” (italics inserted); a few pages later, the authors declare that the husband “must lovingly defend … her.”²³ Several other manuals trope protection in terms of concealment, again hinting at guilt that is gendered female even while expressing solicitude and respect. William Perkins advises “a wise and patient bearing or covering of her infirmities … in respect of the weakenesse of her sex,” a passage whose language hints at the male's implication in those infirmities and also coalesces covering in the sense of protection and concealment, with the latter sense also perhaps hinting at the role of accessory.²⁴ Similarly, explicating the Biblical description of Abraham as a veil of Sarah, Henry Smith explains he is called that “because he should shield her; for a vaile is made to save.”²⁵

How do these repeated commands to shelter the wife relate to generalizations about gendered suppression and intimidation? The two strains are far from mutually exclusive: as the lines quoted from Cleaver and Dod suggest, the need to protect may function ideologically as a rationale for dominance and a pretext for criticism, a point on which contemporary teenagers are prone to instruct their parents. The ideology of protection demands more attention from students of this poem and early-modern culture not least because it may itself protect its male readers by concealing an ideology of domination. This again reminds the contemporary reader, if one needed any reminding, that the vulnerability that this poem sympathetically and respectfully attributes to Lucrece can be deployed very differently.

Yet, as the discourses of marriage demonstrate, suppression and criticism are but two of the valences of a tellingly frequent preoccupation with protection. The abuses justified by solicitude do not render it a mere code or screen; it serves more admirable functions as well in the discourses in question. For example, imperatives about protecting a wife are often explicitly invoked to forbid physical abuse, pace less informed generalizations about widespread toleration for wife beating. As that instance reminds us, the frequently cited analogy between the relationship of husband and wife and that of Christ to his church surely should not merely be dismissed as mystification of power.

Assessing the material implications of the imperative to protect one's home demands equal caution. There is no doubt that on one level that duty rephrases the desire to safeguard possessions and hence buttresses recent scholars' emphasis on the rise of the bourgeois household. Shakespeare, after all, refers to “the possession of [Collatine's] beauteous mate” (18), a phrase in which the first noun primarily represents a gerund, “the possessing of,” but also inevitably signals the senses in which Collatine no less than Gilbert Osmond numbers his wife among his other belongings. Indeed, the passage proceeds immediately to deploy another expression that tellingly conflates the material and abstract, “his fortune” (19) and to refer to Lucrece as a “rich jewel” (34), a jewel, one might add, that makes its owner rich. Yet once again this interpretation, though valid, tells a partial story. The text repeatedly suggests a tenderness between Lucrece and Collatine that extends beyond a miser's delight in his treasure. Might one perhaps even argue that material possessions in the early-modern home (and perhaps other homes as well) were valued in part because they represented a wife and family treasured for emotional and ethical reasons, not just vice versa? Nuanced and shifting in its ideologies, patriarchy demands from its critics analyses as qualified and subtle as the institution itself.

It is also telling that certain passages in marriage manuals and sermons associate not only the wife but also the husband with the house itself. He is, we are repeatedly told, a sanctuary for his wife, and that sanctuary is often figured as a building. “Shee is come to thee as to a sanctuary,” Cleaver and Dod declare (p. 210); Smith virtually copies their language about havens, exemplifying the plagiarism that is not uncommon in marriage manuals (p. 56). In his sermon on the Palatine wedding King explicates the phrase “uxor tua” (“your wife”) by declaring, “The one, the margarite or pearle, wife; the other, the cabbinet or arke to keepe this Jewell” (p. 6). Metaphors of purity and value are immediately followed by metaphors indicating the need to enclose such a treasure, a responsibility again assigned to the husband. If “arke” elevates and justifies that role by rendering it implicitly spiritual, it is also noteworthy that the tropes for the husband transform him into versions of a house. And King proceeds to reinforce the point by returning to the same language: “We have found the treasure, we must adde the cabbinet to keepe the treasure” (p. 8). Such passages suggestively raise the intriguing possibility that domestic edifices were associated with the male body as well as the female, just as domestic space figured male as well as female subjectivity. It is telling that in this poem Collatine's compound is called “Collatium,” and in early modern England the connections between a man's castle and himself may be quite as intimate if less overt.

I am not, however, making the tempting but deceptive claim that early modern England witnessed a unique and radically new conception of male subjectivity based on protection. Surely that type of husbandry has been associated with husbands in many cultures; surely well documented medieval land disputes offer immediate proof of one situation in which the predecessors to early modern husbands engaged in protecting their households. But granted that domestic safeguarding has been a value in other cultures and probably enjoyed a varied and volatile status in Tudor and Stuart England, some hypotheses are worth exploring. Many cultures preceding early modern England are likely to have emphasized and valorized other types of protection over the domestic—whether represented as the mutual commitments of the comitatus, or feudal obligations to a lord, or the responsibilities of the romance journey to save the imperilled lady. Arguably early modern England, in contrast, attached increased significance to the home as the place where men were protected and, more importantly, were obliged to protect. To put it another way, that activity, so often associated with public arenas in other cultures, became intimately, though by no means exclusively, attached to the private spaces of the home. The Protestant emphasis on the home as source of religious instruction drew attention to the spiritual protection it could afford even as the Protestant development of the ideal of companionate marriage focused concern on the guardianship that a close relationship could facilitate.

How, then, do the discourses of marriage explicate Shakespeare's narrative of a marriage that, pace The Ladies Home Journal's columns on the subject, cannot be saved? Collatine, according to these early modern conceptions of wedlock, had a deep obligation to protect his wife by creating a home that was a sanctuary and becoming a haven himself. In opening his home to an invader, he is tragically derelict, at once neglecting his obligations in relation to that literal edifice and his own responsibility to serve as a kind of sanctuary. In one sense he is himself the “weak hive” (839). Thus the changes Shakespeare made in his sources become all the more telling.

Certain recent studies have constructed early modern dwelling places from an apparently opposite perspective, emphasizing home as the a locus of danger and the wife as its source more than its victim.²⁶ These arguments are not in fact wholly incompatible with mine; but my emphases on the inconsistency of representations of the wife and on the responsibilities of the husband reinterpret some of these widely accepted paradigms. The treatises I have cited link the vulnerability and culpability of what a later generation would refer to as the angel in the house, and arguably, aggression towards a female source of danger could, by the processes of reaction formation, encourage tender safeguarding of the woman herself. Perhaps, too, in Shakespeare's culture guilt or anxiety about male failures in this role were not infrequently deflected onto accusations of women who had not fulfilled it. One might even speculate, though cautiously and tentatively in the absence of clear-cut evidence within the poem, that The Rape of Lucrece stages a telling inversion of that process: if the male obligation to protect was widely established and accepted, might not Lucrece's unexpressed and unacknowledged anger at her husband for failing to protect her, opening his nest to an invader, perhaps emerge via deflection in her intense self-blame and again via reaction formation in her intense praise of her spouse? Less speculatively, however, it is clear that the emphasis on domestic danger intensified the male responsibilities traced in this essay.

Of course, Tarquin himself is the primary target for the poem's opprobrium, and the rape is the second episode in which the text explores the valences of home, especially its connections with gender and subjectivity. Again the cultural history of the period reveals historically specific resonances to the blame the narrator and Lucrece have assigned to Tarquin. The narrative is, as readers often note, loaded with references to Tarquin's role as thief and the staining that ensues: he is a “creeping thief” (305), “a thievish dog” (736) who tries to turn the tables by claiming that his victim's beauty “purloin'd” (1651) his eyes. As I have argued elsewhere, thievery in its many incarnations was at once the source of many fears in Tudor and Stuart England and a trope for a whole range of other perils involving displacement and category crises.²⁷ Burglary, the version that typically involves intrusion into a house was feared particularly (indeed, some definitions of the crime associate it specifically with the fear it excites in its victims), as the harsher penalties attached to it indicate. This is partly because of its association with sexual penetration, though, as I have also asserted, robbery was feared so much in its own right that it would be misguided to assume it merely coded sexual behavior.²⁸ In any event, when he penetrates Lucrece's home Tarquin is associated with a felony arguably even more heinous to Shakespeare's original readers than to twentieth-century ones.

At a pivotal moment in the poem, the lines in its first stanza that introduce Tarquin, Shakespeare associates him with fire:

Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire,
Which in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire,
          And girdle with embracing flames the waist
          Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste.

(2-7)

The reference recurs only six stanzas later: “with swift intent he goes / to quench the coal which in his liver glows” (46-47). Not surprisingly, twentieth-century readers are likely to interpret these lines as conventional references to passion, and certainly that level of meaning is present, as subsequent allusions to incendiary desire (see, for instance, 1475) demonstrate. Also present is a proleptic allusion to the burning towers of Troy, and in fact Shakespeare repeatedly described Sinon as an arsonist. But other meanings of fire were also significant for Shakespeare's early modern readers. For Arthur Dimmesdale, the warning “Only you can prevent forest fires” would have had sexual resonances the clean-living Smokey did not anticipate, and, conversely, for Shakespeare's early modern readers conflagrations represented a clear and present physical danger to their dwellings, not just the perils of desire.

In assessing the threat of literal flames, we confront the methodological problems attending on the social history of the period. Research by a few practitioners of that discipline has culminated in a series of articles and a useful gazetteer of fires between 1500 and 1900.²⁹ But the authors of that survey are the first to acknowledge the limitations of their statistics. For example, in this instance, as in the records of early modern crime, the northern counties receive inordinately little attention. The documentation of damage from fires includes reports from victims attempting to obtain financial relief, hardly the circumstances under which one would underestimate one's losses.³⁰

It is clear, however, that fires were a clear and present danger in early modern England. Wood remained the predominant building material in many areas during the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth, though this phenomenon, like so many others in social history, needs the nuancing of regional variations (for example, wood construction was especially popular in southeastern England because of its supply in the large forest known as the Weald, an availability that encouraged a distinctive and delightful style of architecture known as the Wealden house but may well have encouraged conflagrations as well). Thatched roofs of course intensified the dangers of timber framing, as did the continuing presence of open hearths in older buildings even after the chimney had become popular in new ones. Animal fat could all too easily ignite such a roof.

Such dangers were especially intense in towns, where fire could readily spread from one dwelling to the next. If the Great Fire of London (1666) apparently destroyed some 13,200 houses, apparently the sixteenth century witnessed some twenty-five fires in provincial towns in which at least ten houses were destroyed, and that figure is likely to be underreported.³¹ Moreover, Stratford-upon-Avon endured at least three such fires in the 1590s, as well as one in 1614, leading one to speculate how much Shakespeare heard about them and whether he witnessed one or more of them.³² Thus the domestic resonances of fire rendered the tropes connecting that element with Tarquin more disturbing, with the material threat fire posed to a house literalizing and thus intensifying the perils associated with the flames of passion.

Lucrece's role as prey of the fire in Shakespeare's trope is as telling as Tarquin's position as its purveyor. As I noted above, Coppélia Kahn has persuasively demonstrated the association between Lucrece and the Roman goddess Vesta, guardian of the household fires. Tarquin violates home and its mistress by turning fire from servant and symbol of the home to its dread antagonist—and by turning Lucrece from protector of a sacred fire to victim of a pernicious one. And this is the very point. Having reversed the role of honored guest into dreaded predator, he transforms as well the semiotics of fire and the position of its domestic guardian.

The violation of Vesta is, however, but part of the workings of this trope. Fires were, of course, also associated with martyrs in sixteenth-century England, a connection that glosses from a new perspective the reference to the flames encircling Lucrece. Described as a martyr in the Latin “incipit” heading in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women,³³ she is implicitly turned into one by this reading of Tarquin's fire. And thus the reference again links Lucrece and the physical edifice in which she dwells: both suffer Tarquin's incendiary plot.

A threat to Lucrece's home, fire is of course also the agent that destroyed Troy, the originary homeland of English national myth. Not surprisingly, the poem repeatedly alludes to its tall towers, and it evokes the blaze that destroyed them not only through repeated direct references to it but also through a metaphor that again evokes fire (“Like dying coals burnt out in tedious nights” [1379]). Such passages are the third principal locus for examinations of destroyed homes and related questions about subjectivity. If even the proud towers of Troy can burn, a method of destruction that, as we have seen, was particularly unsettling for many members of Shakespeare's original readership, then lesser cultures and residences must be vulnerable as well. At the same time, if Troy is a homeland lost through the destruction of war, it is recovered in part through the visual representation Lucrece views and her own identification with the characters she scrutinizes; thus, like Lucrece's suicide, the poem's episode involving Troy erodes the distinctions between loss and recovery.

Finally, the reactions to Lucrece's death once more involve home in the senses of literal dwelling place, protected private locale, and country. Lucretius and Collatine respond to Lucrece's tragic fate by returning home at her request and mourning over her body. Tellingly evoked by a reference to “publish[ing] Tarquin's foul offense” (1852), Brutus's alternative solution pivots on leaving the home by carrying her body to the marketplace. The verb in question signals the movement from the private sphere of home to the public arena of the marketplace, from complaint to epic action, and from grief to anger. The dovetailing of private and political elsewhere in the poem culminates in a revenge that necessitates leaving the domestic sphere for a communal one.³⁴ Fittingly, the result of that act is exile: having destroyed Lucrece's home, Tarquin, like the rest of his family, loses both home and homeland himself. A poem that has stressed transitoriness and mutability achieves closure on the words “everlasting banishment” (1855).

IV

Examining the significance of dwellings in The Rape of Lucrece can illuminate generic and narrative patterns elsewhere in Shakespeare's canon, as well as broad questions about the relationship between homes and subjectivities both in his culture and in our own. First, then, tracing the relationship of the poem to pastoral provides an appropriate culmination to an essay honoring Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, student and teacher of genre throughout her career. A prototype for its author's later and more overt versions of pastoral even though it does not conform to the literary type in question in some ways, The Rape of Lucrece shows Shakespeare beginning to test his sometimes uneasy preliminary response to that genre in general and its relationship to loss in particular. In the poem we encounter genre en procès.

The loss of home on which so many figures and episodes in the poem pivot is implicitly but closely connected with both the loss of that originary home Eden and to the deprivations of literal dwellings and metaphoric homes that recur so frequently in pastoral, notably in Virgil's first and ninth eclogues. To begin with, the pure, asexual world associated with Lucrece has analogues to the Edenic innocence sometimes, though not invariably, associated with pastoral,³⁵ and the vision of the women spinning their wool is related in more ways than one to fantasies of shepherds minding their sheep. The intrusion of Tarquin into that world anticipates the entry of the court into Hal's pastoral tavern or Polixenes's duplicitous entry into the realm of celebrating shepherds. Not the least parallel is that in all these instances the intruder crystallizes or draws attention to something analogous to his own presence that was already there, thus eroding the boundaries between two worlds and at the same time calling the very existence of such demarcations into question. The absolute virginal purity that is the fantasy behind The Rape of Lucrece is, of course, just that, a fantasy—which is not to say, of course, that Lucrece is impure in senses that the poem endorses. Needless to say, each of the texts deals with these issues about the erasure of boundaries and the adulteration of an apparently ideal world differently, which makes their early appearance in The Rape of Lucrece all the more interesting. Furthermore, at the end of Shakespeare's narrative poem those characters who survive leave the pastoral home for the marketplace, anticipating as well one of the most fundamental structural patterns in Shakespeare's pastoral plays, the return to court.

Or, to put it another way, all of these texts, like many of Shakespeare's other contributions to the form in question, are metapastorals, a not-surprising classification for works in this typically self-conscious genre. The trope of the intruder enacts on the narrative level what happens to pastoral itself, a genre in which ostensibly antithetical values and even competing genres often intrude—much as the suffix “-less” intrudes into an otherwise positive word in phrases like “helpless help” and much as the wasp and cuckoo intrude in Lucrece's revealing tropes.

The threats to dwellings in The Rape of Lucrece suggest connections not only with plays that are more overtly and directly pastoral but also with the many Shakespearean dramas that pivot on some version of the loss of a home or other dwelling. The deprivation or abandonment of a dwelling place is a recurrent anxiety in Shakespeare's culture that is variously reinterpreted, resolved, and intensified in his dramas and poems. Thus comedic characters, as critics have long recognized, temporarily abandon their customary dwellings, sometimes for a sojourn in an unheimlich world, which helps to explain the sexuality of the woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The fates of the characters in A Comedy of Errors often involve lost dwellings or, more specifically, the inability to return home. In some of the comedies, the loss of a dwelling is a repeated process, as occurs in As You Like It when Rosalind, previously denied her home with her father, is cast out from another edifice by Duke Ferdinand. Or the plays may refer briefly to additional, related losses. Oliver, Adam warns Orlando, plots to burn his younger brother's dwelling. (This threat does not appear in Lodge's Rosalynde, but it might well have been suggested by repeated tropes there of the older brother's resentment as a hidden fire; if so, the literalization of those figures into arson neatly demonstrates how cultural conditions like the fear of fire I traced can ignite the tinder of literary sources.) In the histories and tragedies, physical exile often represents other types of estrangement, a fate resonant in a culture where courtiers who had displeased the queen risked banishment from court. Coriolanus must seek “a world elsewhere” (III.iii.135). Claudius sends Hamlet to England; Richard II banishes Bolingbroke and Mowbray. Similarly, romance heroes in Shakespearean plays, like other texts in that genre, are wanderers: the peregrinations of Pericles, who literally distances himself from his dwelling and country and loses as well the family that represents home, are extreme but not atypical. The shipwrecks of romance, like other comedic patterns, enact versions of reduplicated loss: their victims, having lost or abandoned a dwelling on land when they climbed aboard the ship, suffer the shattering of that vessel as well.

The losses in question at first seem too varied to permit any generalizations, but my examination of The Rape of Lucrece gestures towards some recurrent patterns that can help to explicate imperilled dwellings in Shakespeare's texts and his culture. We have seen that the loss of home was both a danger in its own right and the locus for many other fears. Generalizing about those fears is complicated by the realization that terms like “dominant culture” risk implying more consistency on issues about gender than a careful reading of early modern texts justifies. But nonetheless it is clear that in early modern England not only female subjectivity but male as well were profoundly associated with the house and the often neglected or compromised obligation to protect it and what it represented. Repeatedly threatened by literal intruders like burglars and forces such as fire that figured invasion, domestic spaces at once signalled security and continuing threats to it; the signification of home was as unstable and permeable as the material dwelling place. And thus arguably the male bodies that trope and are troped by such dwellings were encoded as complexly as female bodies, being associated both with the strength needed to protect homes and the vulnerability and instability of those edifices.

Hence studying the contamination and destruction of dwellings in The Rape of Lucrece also gestures toward a wide range of questions about Shakespeare's worlds and ours. For example, how does the male obligation to protect gloss domestic tragedies, notably Arden of Feversham?³⁶ And how do the issues raised in Shakespeare's poem explicate the decision by early modern Catholics to harbor a priest, an action that at once protects him and endangers one's own family? Turning to perils in late-twentieth-century America, comparing and contrasting the early modern constructions of the male responsibility to protect might clarify some debates about the possession of guns. This perspective may illuminate the workings of our own domestic tragedies as well. My father, a distinguished gynecologist, once observed to me that although losing a child is always a traumatic event for a couple, he had repeatedly noticed that the parents suffered much more intensely from their loss if they had brought the infant home from the hospital, even if only for the briefest period. Although one obvious explanation is that the mother and father are likely to become more involved with the care of a baby at home, it is also probable that once the infant crosses the threshold of the house, the obligation to protect assumes new dimensions and a new intensity. As this extreme instance suggests, The Rape of Lucrece invites its current readers to rethink the connections among the loss of a dwelling and many other losses in early modern England and modern America—and in so doing to rethink as well the multiple and complex links between gender and home.

Notes

1. See especially Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape,” particularly 177-78, in his collection of essays, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). I part company with Fineman, however, on some of his analyses of the originary purity: for example, it is not associated with vision to the extent he suggests throughout his essay.

2. See Fineman, “Shakespeare's Will,” esp. 175, 191-97; Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), especially 80-84.

3. Conceptions of home were complex and volatile in the early modern period, as in many others. It is clear, however, that Lucrece inhabits a home in several senses; it is a family abode clearly associated with domestic responsibilities and hospitality. A lengthy discussion of the issue of home is outside the scope of the present article; useful recent scholarship includes Mary Thomas Crane's forthcoming study, Shakespeare's Brain: Language, Cognition, and Culture (working title); Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

4. See two essays by Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 50-51; “Lucrece: The Sexual Politics of Subjectivity,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 146-47; Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” SQ 37, no. 1 (1986), 70-71; Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 45-85; Georgianna Ziegler, “My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (1990): 73-90. (The chapter in Woodbridge's book appeared in earlier form: “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” TSLL 33, no. 3 [1991], 327-54.)

5. OED, s.v. “intrude.”

6. See, e.g., Annabel Patterson's insistence that other critics have emphasized Lucrece's experience at the expense of the political ramifications of the poem (Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 297-309.

7. OED, s.v. “maiden.”

8. Also see Kahn's persuasive suggestion that her maidenhood is connected to the association between Lucrece and Vesta (“Sexual Politics,” 146-47).

9. See D.C. Allen, “Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 92.

10. King, Vitis Palatina: A Sermon Appointed to be Preached … after the Mariage of the Ladie Elizabeth her Grace (London, 1614), 23-24. Subsequent references to this sermon will appear in my text. Throughout this essay I have retained Renaissance spellings but regularized ampersands, capitalization in titles, and the usage of i/j and u/v.

11. See my discussion of such passages in A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), especially, 1-27. Also cf. Orlin, Private Matters, 85-104.

12. For an analysis of the problems of her innocence and naïveté, see one of my earlier studies of the poem in Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 97-117. Some readers asserted that I was blaming the victim, which I believe is too bald a summary of my stated aim of asking “what type of person is prone to be victimized by evil?” (97). (Also see the distinctions on the issue of blame propounded on 97.) I still maintain that, despite the sympathy for her that the poem evokes, it draws attention to the dangers of her naïveté. I would add, however, that those dangers complicate the question of culpability in a way I did not initially acknowledge: the patriarchal values that enclose her within her house can be charged with those dangers, a possibility that the poem itself may hint at but does not pursue. On the one hand, then, here, as so often in his plays, Shakespeare demonstrates that innocence not only represents but also creates circumscriptions; but on the other hand, neither I nor the poem is suggesting that Lucrece bears a major responsibility for its events or that she could have prevented the rape.

13. Kahn, “Sexual Politics,” 141.

14. Male subjectivity in early modern England has been extensively examined, though from perspectives different from mine, in Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

15. For examples of these positions, see, respectively, Bruce E. Brandt, “Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece: Argument, Text, and Interpretation,” in Proceedings of the First Dakotas Conference on Earlier British Literature, ed. Jay Ruud (Aberdeen, SD: Northern State University Press, 1993); René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21-28. Assuming that Tarquin never sees his victim, Girard cites the rapist's motivation as a textbook example of mimetic desire; that process might remain a primary though not exclusive etiology even if he has seen her, however.

16. On the dangers of boasting see Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty's best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985); Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (Methuen: London, 1987), chapter 7. On the “scopic economy” of the poem, see especially Kahn, “Lucrece: The Sexual Politics of Subjectivity,” 143-46.

17. Although he does not focus on the issue of home, Arthur Little notes the significance of exposure in this text, like the other works about sacrificed women that he analyzes. See Arthur Little, “Picturing Rape in Titus Andronicus” in his forthcoming book Sacrificial Altar: Virginity, Race, and Pornography in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, forthcoming, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

18. Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 116-17.

19. I cite Livy, trans. B.O. Foster, vol. 1 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1961).

20. The citation is to Ovid's Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1959).

21. Fineman, “Shakespeare's Will,” 198.

22. Gouge, The Workes of William Gouge, 2d ed. (London, 1627), 145-46. In the case of this and later citations, page references after the first one appear within my text. In all quotations from Renaissance texts, I have retained the original spelling but regularized the capitalization of titles and the use of i/j and u/v.

23. Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Codly [sic] Forme of Householde Government (London, 1598), 168, 172. In attributing the tract to both writers, I am following common practice, but its authorship has been disputed; see A. W. Pollard et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-1986), I, 242.

24. Perkins, Christian Oeconomie (London, 1618), 691.

25. Smith, A Preparative to Mariage (London, 1591), 56.

26. See especially Dolan, Dangerous Familiars.

27. See my essay, “‘In thievish ways’: Tropes and Robbers in Shakespeare's Sonnetes and Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” JEGP 96, no. 4 (1997): 513-44. This argument is also pursued in my book Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

28. Dubrow, “‘In thievish ways,’” 534-35.

29. See especially E.L. Jones, S. Porter, and M. Turner, A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters, 1500-1900, Historical Geography Research Series, 13 (Norwich: Geo Books, 1984); C.J. Kitching, “Fire Disasters and Fire Relief in Sixteenth-century England: The Nantwich Fire of 1583,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54, no. 129 (1981): 171-87; Stephen Porter, “The Oxford Fire Regulations of 1671,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58, no. 138 (1985): 251-55.

30. On these and other methodological challenges, see Jones, Gazetteer, 7-13.

31. Jones, Gazetteer, 42, 46.

32. Jones, Gazetteer, 39, 43.

33. These headings may, however, be scribal rather than authorial.

34. Critics have disagreed on the putative culpability of Brutus's actions. For an attack on them, see Dubrow, Captive Victors, 125-28; for a defense, Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 297-12. I now believe that Brutus's behavior is less blameworthy than I originally claimed though still ethically problematical.

35. A.D. Cousins argues that Lucrece is described in terms of the discourses of the Golden Age and Eden, though he does not develop the point in relations to the pastoral genre; I am not persuaded that references to Eden do invariably occur where he finds them, but the argument is an intriguing one to which I am indebted here (“Subjectivity, Exemplarity, and the Establishing of Characterization in Lucrece,” SEL, forthcoming).

36. Orlin's treatment of the play stresses connections between Arden's limitations as a householder and a landowner, though her focus is on governing rather than the closely related but separate issue of protecting (Private Matters, chapter 1).