SOURCE: Breitenberg, Mark. “Publishing Chastity: Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.” In Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, pp. 97-127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Breitenberg examines the ways in which honor, publication, and desire serve as the bases for Shakespeare's depiction and criticism of masculinity in The Rape of Lucrece, and emphasizes that this exploration is undertaken within the context of early modern rhetoric concerning the nature of masculinity.]

In this chapter my discussion is organized around the circulation of three critical figures in the rhetoric of early modern masculinity: honor, publication and desire. In a specifically poetic context, I will look closely at the function of these figures as the bases for Shakespeare's representation and critique of masculinity in his early poem, “The Rape of Lucrece.” In a broadly cultural context, I will consider how the poem's preoccupations and problems rehearse several distinctively Elizabethan discursive practices and belief systems involving honor among men as an often contradictory basis of male identity. By moving simultaneously in both directions, my discussion enacts the reciprocal circulation (rather than rigid demarcation) between the aesthetic and social which is especially characteristic of this period. But it also enacts a series of analogous reciprocities between: private and public spheres, private reading and public declaration, the enclosed and the disclosed, domestic space and the social arena, and finally, between what might be abstractly called inherent and circulated value. My arguments throughout this chapter thus reside at the contradiction between a cultural imperative to mark such binary differences and the impossibility of doing so; it interrogates, in this sense, some of the culture's interstitial anxieties. Lucrece herself poses a version of this question as she gazes forlornly at a mural depicting one of the West's most influential and potent myths—the story of Troy: “Why should the private pleasure of some one / Become the public plague of so many?”¹

I intend the term “honor” to embrace all its multivalent significations in the early modern period, including often synonymous words such as reputation, credit, fame and opinion. Although all of these terms are used for both men and women, they nearly always circulate around sexuality (specifically virginity and chastity) in reference to women, for whom chastity and honor are virtually synonymous. By distinction, the range of referents for masculine honor is considerably more broad.² It perhaps goes without saying that in the early modern period, honor (in men) and chastity (in women) are the most definitive attributes of identity. But it is also true—and herein lies one potential source of anxiety—that both attributes are assigned by others rather than inherent, matters of public opinion rather than intrinsic possessions. Of course, this is simply to state the obvious: that identity is a social construction, conferred rather than innate. Still, it is not always realized that this formula rests on a paradox, or at least a possible tension: one is one's reputation, but one's reputation must derive from others. Since, in the early modern period, masculine identity is typically dependent upon and figured through female chastity (or its absence), this paradox is frequently the cause of considerable anxiety. Husbands are dependent on their wives' reputation for chastity—that is, dependent on something ultimately beyond their control, despite considerable effort to the contrary.

The second operative figure in my analysis—“publication”—also functions in several ways. On a literal level, I mean to suggest the material practices of editing, printing and the public circulation of texts as well as, in the case of Shakespeare, writing supported by a relatively private relationship to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. More broadly, I use the term to signify the transition from a private to public sphere—a “making public” that might take several forms of circulation and dissemination as in, for example, Collatine's “publication” of Lucrece's virtue at the outset of the poem, an act which initiates a series of publications of private acts throughout the poem.³

My use of “desire” in this triad is neatly delineated in Valerie Traub's recent book, Desire and Anxiety. Blending Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of discursive power, Traub asserts that “desire is always (1) a matter of both minds and bodies; (2) implicated in interpretive networks, signifying systems, discursive fields; and (3) substitutive, founded on a lack, and hence, always the desire for the other.”⁴ With such a broad definition in mind, desire is no longer just the name for specific attractions to people, or to things; rather, it marks the very basis of culturally constructed subjectivities. “Ultimately one loves one's desires,” Nietzsche wrote, “not the desired object.”⁵ We might take this aphorism to mean that we are most self-aware in the act of desiring—most profoundly ourselves—rather than in the completion of that act. If our forms of desire are also forms of enculturation, desire may be said to embody or “interpellate” individuals, much in the same way Althusser understands the role of ideology: to know oneself as a subject is to recognize oneself and to be recognized as a desiring subject. In this way, we may say that desire is an active agent of ideology.⁶

But if desire motivates, explains and enables human action in a given culture—turns individuals into subjects—it must also threaten and destabilize, since desire is inevitably produced in and by a contradictory discursive field. Desire may be the social “glue” that holds subjects in place, but it is also a potentially anarchic energy that exposes the contradictions beneath the surface, the rents and tears behind a supposedly seamless social fabric. Throughout this book my focus on the circulation of masculine desire in a historical period especially marked by tension and anxiety along gender lines is intended to expose some of these contradictions. By tracking masculine desire—its motivations, directions, objects and consequences—we uncover the places where different ideologies of patriarchy do not fit together, where they conflict with one another to foster the anxieties inherent in early modern patriarchy.⁷

To take a paradigmatic example from Shakespeare's “Lucrece” (one that has also figured in my discussion of Burton's Anatomy), masculine desire appears as the supreme example of self-assertive will and as the agent of a complete loss of self-control. In other words, masculine desire is exercised in the name of conquest, possession and domination, but it also overthrows reason and leads to destructive excess. Paradoxically, then, desire is simultaneously the energy behind the most active and passive aspects of masculinity. Once again, Shakespeare's sonnet 129 succinctly develops this paradox: desire is “lust in action” (activity) but very quickly becomes “a swallowed bait / On purpose laid to make the taker mad” (passivity).⁸ In other words, the desire to possess leads to a state of being possessed by one's desire. Most importantly for my purposes, this masculine “psychomachia,” here in the form of an aggressor/victim conflict, is very often “played out” through women. Men project the conflict onto women or onto their relations with women; thus, the now-familiar formula in which love and desire effeminize inasmuch as they overthrow masculine reason; or, conversely, “woman” functions for men as the (transcendent) symbol of self-control in her embodiment of the figure of chastity. In the poem, Lucrece and Lucrece's body become the battleground for this struggle: at first, she is the symbol of Collatine's honor, truth and fortune; then, she is the “site” where Tarquin's psychological war between his reason and lust is played out; and finally, her suicide allows her to function as the transcendent symbol (and origin) of the new, repurified, republican Roman state.⁹

Understood in both their cooperative and antagonistic relations to one another, these three figures—honor, publication and desire—reveal the fundamental contradiction that anxiously manifests itself in Shakespeare's poem. Masculine honor, fame and reputation (and thus identity) require publication among other men; indeed, honor and its cluster of related terms have meaning only if they are publicly circulated, confirmed and celebrated. If female chastity functions as the basis of masculine honor, both terms accrue value only within a public exchange system—they must be published. But the rather obvious problem arises when we see that female chastity must at the same time remain the private possession of men, indeed of women too. A women's chastity should have intrinsic value—in and of itself—but since it functions as the basis for socially conferred identities, it cannot remain a private affair. In terms of masculine honor, the chastity of one's wife must be paradoxically (and indeed, impossibly) confirmed by other men and represented as intrinsically valued, published for other men yet controlled exclusively by the publisher, privately owned by the husband yet circulated beyond his dominion. The narrator of “Lucrece” poses this contradiction in the fifth stanza of the poem:

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apologies be made
To set forth that which is so singular?

(29-32)

If we add the third term—masculine desire—this unstable paradigm becomes even more viciously circular and inescapable. Since desire is aroused by impediments to its fulfillment, spurred by the prospect of conquest, the publication of chastity—even the idea of chastity alone—contains within it the “seeds” of its own corruption.¹⁰

The paradigm with which I began—the circulation of honor, publication and desire—derives in part from the foundational influence of Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire, especially as developed in his early book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. The theory's latest incarnation appears in Girard's later book on Shakespeare, A Theater of Envy, in which envy operates as the agent of mimetic rivalry. In his brief discussion of Shakespeare's early awareness and formulation of this model, Girard writes:

The proudest men want to possess the most desirable objects; they cannot be certain that they have done so, as long as empty flattery alone glorifies their choice; they need more tangible proof, the desire of other men, as numerous and prestigious as possible. They must recklessly expose their richest treasure to these desires … Like a gambler, [this] anxious desire desperately attempts to rejuvenate itself.¹¹

In this brief passage, Girard encapsulates the contradiction behind the self-defeating demand to publish chastity: the desire for individual possession versus the “desire of other men” to confirm the value of those possessions. He also articulates what we might call the addictive quality of this “anxious desire to rejuvenate itself,” as if in these matters volition were entirely at the mercy of desire.

But Girard's discussions of Shakespeare consistently move in the opposite direction from my own once this initial paradigm is set in place. A Theater of Envy advances Girard's ambition to show that his triangular model of mimetic rivalry is the “fundamental source of human conflict.”¹² He additionally measures Shakespeare's genius and dramatic success by the increasing extent to which Shakespeare recognized and depicted this deep structure throughout his career. Girard displays his debt to structuralism by arguing that literature and myth function as particularly sensitive registers of what is truly a theory of human nature, thus preventing historically specific critiques of the way power and authority are distributed among the gender of the players in Girard's triangle. Because Girard's model seeks to display what is “fundamental,” it consistently moves toward structural equilibrium, even though its parts involve conflict, aggression and rivalry. As such, systematic or ideological contradictions are largely beyond its scope.

In this critique I am following Eve Sedgwick's discussion of the uses and limitations of Girard's work as developed in the beginning of Between Men. Sedgwick points out that “Girard's account, which thinks it is describing a dialectic of power abstracted from either the male/female or the sexual/non-sexual dichotomies, is leaving out of consideration categories that in fact preside over the distribution of power in every known society.”¹³ Sedgwick wants to particularize the operations of Girard's abstract model by applying it specifically to gender and sexuality. A further specification would take up the categories of gender and sexuality as themselves produced by the triangular model both Girard and Sedgwick promote. Girard's “dialectic of power” does not just describe the way things work; in the specific context of early modern England, we can see now its functions to shape masculine subjectivity in the first place. For my purposes, then, Shakespeare's “Lucrece” is not just a register of triangular desire, nor merely a representation of the exclusion of women from a system of male exchange, but most importantly a text that displays and reveals the contradictions and anxieties of the culture that author(ize)s it on the level of masculine subjectivity itself. Although the cultural work of the poem may be understood as an attempt to stage anxiety in order to contain it through aesthetic form, closure and resolution, my point will be that the resolutions themselves only further reveal the conditions that precipitate further anxieties.

HONOR

Honor therefore ys a certaine testemonie of vertue shining of yt self, geven of some man by the judgement of good men …¹⁴

—Robert Ashley, “Of Honour” (1596)

[Man] cannot claim for himself ever so little beyond what is rightfully his without losing himself in vain confidence and without usurping God's honour, and thus becoming guilty of monstrous sacrilege.¹⁵

(Jean Calvin, Institutes)

The above quotation from Ashley's essay exemplifies what might be called, borrowing from Raymond Williams, the “residual” or traditional notion of honor during the period of Shakespeare's lifetime, while the passage from Calvin represents the “emergent.”¹⁶ In the former, honor is the public conferral of virtue among “good” men (presumably men of some status), the socially acknowledged “testemonie” or circulation of virtue characteristic of shame cultures. In the same sentence, however, Ashley states that honor is also the name given to “vertue shining of yt self,” as if the term signified an intrinsic quality independent of social assignation. Although one might say that “honor” is merely the linguistic confirmation of previously earned “vertue,” it is reciprocally the case that virtue may not exist without its public nomenclature. Ashley himself raises this possibility when he later asks, “For how can vertue stand if you take away honour?”¹⁷ If honor is confirmed publicly and through language, it functions as a signifier whose referent is assigned rather than inherent—this is indeed Shakespeare's critique as carried out in the figure of Falstaff, for whom honor is a mere “word.”

Calvin confutes Ashley's notion of honor by suggesting that its reliance on social approbation usurps God's singular authority and thus leads to human vanity. This alternative use of the word is consistent with Puritan claims for the priority of one's conscience over and against obedience to secular authority. In this way of thinking, honor is more likely to be understood as a matter between God and individuals; it can be said to possess an “intrinsic” or private character rather than a social and public one. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Calvin and Puritanism internalize social approbation and assign it the name of God.

In any case, both notions of honor represent different strains in the early modern period, sometimes in conflict with one another, and either one could be said to function in the service of different political or religious positions. Fulke Greville stages this conflict in his long poem, “An Inquisition Upon Fame and Honor,” where he more or less occupies (by the end of the poem) the middle position. On the one hand, honor (“Fame”) is little more than human vanity disguised in the cloak of moral conscience:

For Fame they still oppose even from those grounds,
That prove as truely all things else as vaine.
They give their vertues onely as humane bounds,
And without God subvert to build againe.
Refin'd Ideas, more than flesh can beare,
All foule within, yet speake as God were there.(18)

(stanza 22)

But at the same time, honor may also provide a necessary sustenance, even though it is an entirely human construction:

Of which three baytes, yet Honour seemes the chiefe,
And is unto the world, like a goodly weather,
Which gives the spirits life, the thoughts reliefe,
Delight, and travell reconciles together:
So as the Lean'd, and Great, no more admire it,
Then even the silly Artisans aspire it.

(stanza 2)

Greville thus maintains the importance of socially granted honor, but critiques the idea that it is completely apart from any referent, as Falstaff wryly suggests. And although Greville values the importance of faith above any secular success, he nonetheless recognizes the idealism of Calvin's position in the face of man's inherent weakness, the result of which is an inevitable, pragmatic defense of the traditional version of honor and fame:

For to be good the world finds it too hard,
And to be nothing to subsistence is
A fatall, and unnaturing award;
So as betweene perfection, and unblisse,
Man, out of man, will make himself a frame,
Seekes outward helpe, and borrowes that of Fame.

(stanza 19)

In other words, since it is too difficult to live in the state of “perfection” suggested in Calvin's “intrinsic” version of honor, man “seekes outward help” by constructing a “frame”: the system of socially conferred “fame” and reputation published among men. Greville thus wrestles with what he sees as an ideal notion of honor conferred only privately, from within, and a more realistic acknowledgment of the need for worldly recognition. His poem is very much a register of the way Puritan interiority challenged an older conception of public sanction as the basis of identity.

In his statistical study of the usages of honor and its associated words on the English stage, Charles Barber also finds the “beginnings of a tendency for honour to mean an inner conscience rather than an external reward.”¹⁹ He locates three definitions of honor and charts the frequency of their appearance on the public stage according to an either “gentry” or “non-gentry” context. Additionally, he adds a separate category for the growing instances of the reputation for possessing each of the three definitions. Although Barber's data is drawn exclusively from theatrical texts, he nonetheless provides a useful anatomy of at least public understandings of the word, perhaps at the expense of their religious sense. Despite new evidence of Calvin's sense of honor, Barber maintains that the most important idea circulating around the word at this time is still its knowability—the sometimes slippery concept of reputation. The second most prominent use of honor involves status, privilege and nobility, followed closely by references to honor in terms of women's chastity, construed as both “mental purity and the physical state,”²⁰ also a matter of perception rather than actuality. Although the third category refers specifically to women's own honor, it is important to realize that the first two categories, both of which refer to honor among men, rely heavily on the reputation of one's wife. Although the different uses of the word circulate in relation to one another, there is still a double standard at work, since wives' honor (chastity) is critical to their husband's reputation, but not the opposite.

Barber demonstrates a steady rise in the use of honor to refer to chastity in women (their own and as reflected upon their husbands) beginning in the first decade of the seventeenth century, where he finds a frequency six times greater than in the 1590s. During the same period, there are considerably fewer references to chastity in non-gentry women on the public stage (for example, in 1611-1620, there are eighty references among gentry and only two among non-gentry) and the numbers remain fairly stable. Barber's explanation seems persuasive: the increase in the use of honor shows “the process whereby the gentry … developed a distinctive code of behaviour to mark themselves off from the rest of society, and especially from the professional and commercial classes … and from those with puritanical leanings.”²¹ Barber's statistics may more accurately reveal a representational rather than behavioral pattern, but his general point remains important: honor as indicated and defined by chastity was of primary interest to those of property, and it functioned to distinguish that status from non-propertied classes during a period of increasingly perceived (and actual) threats to status boundaries. In general, masculine honor and female chastity were figures employed more frequently when status delineations were perceived as less secure by those who would most likely feel that insecurity.

Shakespeare's “Lucrece” registers and struggles with these multivalent definitions and functions of honor, providing an aesthetic field in which competing definitions of male and female subjectivity are played out. For example, the poem consistently describes the masculine prerogative of possessing women's chastity (as a commodity) in economic or mercantile terms. If honor is “geven of some man by the judgement of good men,” as Ashley wrote, the system in which that judgment is valued is a competitive marketplace. Lucrece's chastity is a “rich jewel he should keep unknown / From thievish ears, because it is his own” (34-35). After the rape, Collatine is the “hopeless merchant of this loss” (1660). This vocabulary is most evident in Collatine's description of his wife during the crucial exchange among the men at the outset:

For he the night before, in Tarquin's tent,
Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state;
What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent
In his possession of his beauteous mate;
Reck'ning his fortune at such high proud rate,
That kings might be espoused to more fame,
But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.

(15-21)

In this stanza, Lucrece's chastity is represented as a commodity whose value is established in the discursive exchange system between men; Collatine's publication of his “possession” confers his “fortune” at a “proud rate.” But at the same time, her chastity is also “lent” by the “heavens,” revealing the conflict between intrinsic and socially conferred systems of value. In effect, Collatine paradoxically employs the idea of the intrinsic value of Lucrece's God-given chastity in the social arena, very much the way of the world to which Greville resigns himself. As Nancy Vickers writes in her discussion of the blazon in “Lucrece”: “Within this economy of competition, of course, wealth is not wealth unless flaunted, unless inspiring envy, unless affirming superiority.”²²

As her chastity is described as “priceless wealth the heavens had him lent,” the suggestion is that Collatine has merely borrowed what truly belongs to “the heavens.” According to Calvin's understanding of honor, Collatine's appeal to public approbation of his wife's honor in order to validate his own would be a “monstrous sacrilege,” since he has usurped God's judgment. Lucrece's chastity should be neither possessed nor published by her husband, nor traded among men; its value is intrinsic. The final couplet underscores this position: although “kings might be espoused to more fame” (the residual definition of honor), Lucrece is a “peerless dame” whose virtues transcend even the highest social rank. According to this logic, Collatine's honor could not be compromised under any circumstances since his wife's chastity cannot be possessed nor acknowledged by anyone other than God.

The tension between these two opposing uses of honor is repeatedly reproduced in the poem's own unresolved conflicts. As Tarquin's “foul desire” begins to overtake him, the world of the poem becomes a rapacious marketplace, replete with militaristic terms, in which Tarquin's desire is instigated and compelled by his acquisitiveness and insatiability. Following a three-stanza blazon describing Lucrece (386-407), “new ambition” is “bred” in Tarquin: “Who, like a foul usurper, went about / From this fair throne to heave the owner out” (412-413). Here the conceit involves Tarquin's desire to usurp Collatine's rightful ownership of Lucrece's “unconquered” (408) body.

The extent of Lucrece's guilt or innocence is measured according to whether her own chastity is defined inside of or apart from this marketplace. In regard to this issue, Coppélia Kahn argues that the poem distinguishes between a “materialistic conception of chastity” (the fact of physical pollution) and “a Christian ethic which disregards material circumstances and judges an act wholly according to the motives and disposition of the agent,” which in Lucrece's case are completely pure.²³ In the former, Lucrece's honor and chastity are wholly defined in a social, material context, but in the latter, she may be judged according to a transcendent authority. Lucrece does condemn herself according to the former standard, but not by the terms of the latter: “Though my gross blood be stain'd with this abuse, / Immaculate and spotless is my mind” (1655-1666). This opposition reproduces a dualism between mind (or soul) and body: agency can only be judged by God, whereas “material circumstances” are publicly visible and accessible—they are marked by others. Here we have the woman's counterpart to the two versions of honor described at the beginning of this section, at least to the extent that women may have internalized a thoroughly masculine economy. If chastity is the female counterpart to male honor, Lucrece sees herself as guilty in terms of Ashley's “social” definition (even though her “shame” is “invisible”) but innocent before God following Calvin's “intrinsic” understanding, as long as she can maintain in her own mind the soul/body distinction, which at times proves difficult.

Indeed, where Lucrece blames herself, she often invokes terms borrowed from the masculine rhetoric of honor, internalizing its conditions of value in terms of ownership, competition and publication. She describes her chastity as the “treasure stol'n away” (1056), her husband as the lord of “that dear jewel I have lost” (1191), and her verbal and written publication of the crime as intended to “urge my impure tale” (1078). From these examples, it becomes clear that to the extent Lucrece measures herself according to the “public” conception of honor, she believes she is to blame. But her solace lies in the extent to which she can appeal to a Calvinistic conception of honor, to God rather than to others as the ultimate judge. It is the latter version of honor that makes sense of her suicide, since she has sacrificed her body for the preservation of her soul:

“My honor I'll bequeath unto the knife
That wounds by body so dishonored.
'Tis honor to deprive dishonor'd life,
The one will live, the other being dead.
So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred,
          For in my death I murder shameful scorn;
          My shame so dead, mine honor is new born.

(1184-1190)

In this passage, Lucrece's physical death is the death of dishonor and “shame,” suggesting quite literally her transcendence of the “shame culture” in which Ashley's version of honor predominates. Out of “shame's ashes” rises the phoenix-like “new born” honor advanced by Calvin.

In this way, Lucrece's suicide, which the poem seems to endorse (if not celebrate) as a “proper” solution, given what has happened, appears to offer an alternative to the socially based system of masculine honor which initiated the rape in the first place. In other words, if only Collatine had realized that Lucrece's value was intrinsic, not requiring publication, Tarquin's competitive, conquest-driven desire would not have been provoked, and the tragic sequence of events would not have begun. But except for Brutus's very late reference to “this chaste blood so unjustly stained” (1836), none of the men recognize Lucrece's claim that true feminine virtue is intrinsic—separate from whatever “pollution” her body has endured or from the public shame she has accrued on the marketplace of masculine honor. Indeed, just the opposite occurs: Lucrece's new, symbolic honor achieved in her death is quickly recirculated and made to function in very familiar ways.

Thus, although Shakespeare clearly intends to show the emptiness and self-destructiveness of Tarquin's rapacity, there is little suggestion of a way out of the wolfish marketplace in which masculine desire is spurred to violent extremes by the fetishization of chastity. Indeed, as many critics have observed, the poem ends with a verbal duel between Collatine and Lucrece's father over who feels the most grief at her death, followed by another battle between men for figurative control of Lucrece's honor in the war of revenge launched by Brutus against Tarquin. In this way, the poem reproduces the conditions of the rape in its conclusion; despite its condemnation of the rapist, Lucrece is still the fetishized object, even more so as a transcendent symbol supposedly above the marketplace. In the final reckoning, her reputation in death is made to carry an even greater weight of masculine honor.²⁴

Consequently, however we might argue that Shakespeare's “solution”—his possibility for egress from the dialectic of masculine honor and desire—appears in the idea that Lucrece's idealized chastity exists in a realm outside the marketplace of male rapacity, this is not how the poem ends. Like Greville, Shakespeare's version of intrinsic honor is impossible in the mercantile world in which he lives. But more importantly, the “solution” to the poem relies on yet another construction of “woman” as pure and inviolable, above the polluted marketplace in which masculine honor and desire are circulated. And this construction is of course not the opposite of the idea of the polluted female body but its necessary and enabling other half. As Lucrece observes, “But no perfection is so absolute, / That some impurity doth not pollute.” It is precisely the representation of Lucrece's “absolute” purity, the suggestion that her intrinsic virtue transcends the exchange system, that fires Tarquin's desire in the first place. Lucrece is trapped in a masculine fantasy that leaves little room between idealization and debasement. What appears as an exit is in fact an infinite regress.

Barber's explanation for the greater frequency of references to honor (defined in terms of female chastity) among the gentry suggests that chastity among propertied women played a greater symbolic role in delineating status differences once those differences were perceived as permeable. As Lawrence Stone has shown, a number of factors contributed to the real and perceived sense that older status distinctions were under siege, including the increasing wealth and social mobility of mercantile and professional classes and, beginning in 1603, James' liberal conferring of new titles.²⁵ In a supportive literary context, Frank Whigham has argued in his essay on The Duchess of Malfi that regulation of women's marriages and sexuality served to ensure endogamous marriage and to symbolize class purity. The fascination with the contamination and purity of women's bodies and sexualities, so frequently enacted in the Jacobean theaters, functions to stage anxieties about class as much as about sexuality; indeed, the two are inseparable, at least on a symbolic level.²⁶ If “Lucrece” relies on the residual definition of honor as denoting reputation among the privileged in order to demarcate status differences increasingly dissolved by professional and mercantile classes, it is certainly ironic that its rhetoric of chastity is so replete with economic, mercantile terms. In other words, Lucrece's chastity is intended to figure the purity and difference of the landed classes, and yet this crucial symbol is infected by the rhetoric of those it is intended to exclude. Once again, the poem reveals the mutual dependence rather than exclusivity of its binary terms.

A more important contradiction arises when we recall from Barber's analysis that one of the primary connotations of honor involved personal title and nobleness of mind. Title or rank could be linked to honor inasmuch as social status carried with it supposedly innate personal qualities. As the son of the king, Tarquin sits at the apex of this social hierarchy, in theory the highest embodiment of the honor inherent in his position. This exemplary status becomes the basis for one of Lucrece's unsuccessful appeals to her assailant:

This deed will make thee only lov'd for fear,
But happy monarchs still are fear'd for love.
With foul offenders thou perchance must bear,
When they in thee the like offenses prove.
If but for fear of this, thy will remove;
          For princes are the glass, the school,
          the book,
          Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read,
          do look.

(610-616)

Lucrece continues:

And wilt thou be the school where Lust shall learn?
Must he in thee read lectures of such shame?
Wilt thou be glass where it shall discern
Authority for sin, warrant for blame,
To privilege dishonour in thy name?
          Thou back'st reproach against long-living laud,
          And mak'st fair reputation but a bawd.

(617-623)

Lucrece's point is that not only will Tarquin destroy his own honor, but that he will additionally corrupt the entire code of ethics, “reputation” and masculine honor he is expected to exemplify as well. (This is one of what Tarquin calls “lets”—further incitements to his lust.) But the paradox of Lucrece's argument is that honor (through female chastity) is only conferred among men of high standing through a system of competition in which the greater the status of the conquered, the more prestigious the victory.

Elsewhere Lucrece urges Tarquin “[b]y knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship's oath … [t]hat to his borrowed bed he make retire / And stoop to honor, not to foul desire” (569, 573-574). (“Knighthood” is repeated several times in the poem to describe the bond between the two men, perhaps a nostalgic appeal to an earlier model of allegiance.) The bonds among men that she employs to persuade Tarquin of his allegiance to her husband are at once the same bonds upon which their rivalry is based, and they are the very terms used to unite the men in their revenge at the end: the men are “as bound in knighthood to her imposition” (1697). For Tarquin to cuckold Collatine is to destroy both men's honor but it is also the supreme act of conquest, and thus the accrual of honor for himself. The use of “stoop” in the next line seems tantalizingly close to admitting the reversibility of these terms, for it is possible to read the line as if it were saying that men debase themselves in front of both “honor” and “foul desire” at the same time.

Tarquin's theft of Collatine's prized possession is thus a “logical” outcome of the symbolic capital accorded to chastity by members of the nobility. In short, Tarquin gains honor by raping the wife of someone as powerful as Collatine at the same time as he destroys his own honor. This contradiction is certainly made explicit in the poem through Tarquin's tortured psychomachia between the preservation and corruption of his own honor—desire, or lust, is the agent that tips the scales toward the latter. But it seems to me that his overwhelming, inescapable desire is really standing in for the inherent contradictions of a system in which men receive honor from their peers in reciprocal relationships, on the one hand, yet also receive honor in their conquest of the same peers, on the other. As I suggested in the previous chapter, mutuality and rivalry are sometimes competing dynamics in the homosocial network. When Tarquin is described as “[p]awning his honor to obtain his lust” (156), or when the poem states “he hath won what would lose again” (688), it is not just because “lust” and “honor,” winning and losing, are enemies in a Manichaean struggle, but due to the reversibility and mutual infection of one term by the other. The witches in Macbeth deserve to speak the equivocal coda to this part of my discussion: “When the hurlyburly's done, / When the battle's lost and won” (I.i.3-4).

Yet another important aspect of masculine honor involves the paternity of both Tarquin and Collatine. As countless examples attest, men in the Renaissance—especially men of property, if Barber is correct—felt a particularly acute anxiety toward the fact that women controlled whether or not their sons and heirs were legitimate. Paternity anxiety—the unfortunate fact that patrilineal succession needed to “pass through” women—may very well be at the heart of husbands' obsession with their wives' chastity.²⁷ Again, this anxiety would be especially exacerbated in a period when status distinctions were more porous, since patrilineal inheritance is the primary means by which families and ranks maintain their class endogamy. However persuasive this explanation, it seems to have operated on a mostly symbolic level, since there are few (at least literary) examples of women cuckolding their husbands with men of different rank—The Duchess of Malfi providing a notable exception. In any case, it seems quite obvious that paternal legitimacy was a powerful component of masculine identity for both fathers and sons, and that women (and women's sexuality) were perceived as the very unstable fulcrum upholding that identity.

Early in the poem, Tarquin imagines the complete unraveling of his pedigree if he rapes Lucrece:

Yet though I die, the scandal will survive;
And be an eyesore in my golden coat;
Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive
To cipher me how fondly I did dote;
That my posterity, sham'd with the note,
          Shall curse my bones, and hod it for no sin
          To wish that I their father had not been.

(204-210)

A few lines later, he compares the cost of selling “eternity” for the “fleeting” pleasure of “one sweet grape who will the vine destroy” (214-215). Why should Tarquin's paternity be destroyed by his own adultery, since presumably the heirs he has already produced are legitimate? Or, to put it differently, why should the rape of another man's wife threaten to cause his own sons to “wish that I their father had not been”?

The most obvious answer is that Tarquin will have committed a crime so heinous, “so black a deed,” that his general reputation, and by extension his children's, will be destroyed. But I think the more complicated logic behind this moment in the poem is revealed when Tarquin, immediately after considering the severe price he is about to pay, turns his attention to the consequences of the rape for Collatine. In the third of three stanzas devoted to Tarquin's anticipation of the crime as an act against Collatine, he wonders:

Had Collatine kill'd my son or sire,
Or lain in ambush to betray my life,
Or were he not my dear friend, this desire
Might have excuse to work upon his wife,
As in revenge or quittal of such strife;
          But as he is my dear kinsman, my dear friend,
          The shame and fault finds no excuse nor end.

(232-238)

On one level, Tarquin believes that his proximity in friendship and status to Collatine makes the rape inexcusable. One is reminded of Leontes' jealousy in The Winter's Tale, where he irrationally fears that “[t]o mingle friendship far is mingling bloods” (I.ii.109). The closeness between Leontes and Polixenes since childhood seems to contribute to his jealous fantasy, suggesting that intimate friendship and rivalry among men are two sides of the same coin.

Similarly, in the above stanza from “Lucrece,” Tarquin refers to Collatine as his deadly foe but then, immediately following, as his “dear kinsman, my dear friend.” Casting Collatine as his arch-enemy would justify the rape, but in the same lines Tarquin also places himself in Collatine's position: to paraphrase, he wonders: what if Collatine were to destroy my paternity? This is one of several moments in the poem where the two men are depicted as almost interchangeable, at once each other's friend and enemy. The poem strongly suggests, as I have mentioned (following several other readers of the poem), that Collatine is initially responsible for the rape by advertising Lucrece's virtues. Now, as Tarquin imagines his own son having been “kill'd” by Collatine (figuratively what the rape does to Collatine's son), the rape would then possess a legitimate “excuse.” Once again, the same contradictory effects of the masculine honor code are at work: Collatine is at once Tarquin's “kinsman” and rival, “dear friend” and enemy. It would seem that within a code that confers honor among men, the rape is a violation but also an extension of male bonds. This is clearly part of the masculine “logic” underlying Catherine Stimpson's observation that “[b]ecause men rape what other men possess, rape becomes in part a disastrous element of male rivalry.”²⁸

Both as kinsman and rival, Tarquin's rape destroys Collatine's honor as well as his own. He is, in effect, doing the same thing to himself as he is to Collatine, whose infamy is described by Tarquin to Lucrece in terms very similar to the fate he himself will suffer:

So thy surviving husband shall remain
The scornful mark of every open eye,
Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain,
Thy issue blurr'd with nameless bastardy;
And thou, the author of their obloquy,
          Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes,
          And sung by children in succeeding times.

(519-525)

The consequences of the rape are very similar for both men: “disdain,” illegitimacy surrounding children already born, and infamy for generations to come among their “kinsmen.” But Tarquin's threat to Lucrece is specifically that she will be known as the “author” of her children's “obloquy,” a charge which Lucrece in part internalizes after the rape. Although Tarquin is trying to persuade Lucrece of her responsibility at this moment in order to convince her to remain silent, the idea that Lucrece is at least partly to blame, as I have suggested, runs through the poem, as well as through its critical history.

The “logic” behind this assignation of blame in this case involves a male projection of paternity anxiety on to Lucrece. For if Collatine initially “issued” (in the sense of published) Lucrece's chastity in order to advertise and circulate his own honor, to assure his kinsmen that his own “issue” are legitimate, now Lucrece must be made to bear the responsibility for their “nameless bastardy.” To play out the double entendre further, Collatine's preliminary, public “issue” destroys his biological “issue.” In order to avoid admitting his own responsibility for this self-destructive sequence (which would mean exposing the fetishized role of female chastity in the first place), responsibility is projected onto Lucrece. In other words, placing the blame on Lucrece maintains the initial construction (and publication) of the importance of female chastity, despite its destructive consequences for both men.

But the poem is far more ambivalent toward the question of blame; indeed, Shakespeare turns responsibility back on both men at the same time as he reproduces the idea that Lucrece's suicide has meaning only if she is at least partly guilty. In the process of weighing the relative responsibility for the rape, the poem initiates a critique of the masculine economy of desire and honor that I have been addressing, but its conclusion (as in the sources) defers any resolution. This ambivalence is evident early in Lucrece's own lengthy narration: “Yet I am guilty of thy honor's wrack; / Yet for thy honor I did entertain him” (842-843). Because “thine honor lay in me,” as Lucrece says in the preceding stanza, she understands herself as “guilty.” But in the second line, an important qualification is introduced: not only did Lucrece uphold her husband's “honor” by entertaining Tarquin at Collatium, but if we read “entertain” to refer also to the initial dialogue between the men, Lucrece might be said to have dutifully entertained Tarquin in absentia through her husband's verbal encomium. In the case of both references, Lucrece is guilty only inasmuch as she has functioned “properly” in a masculine economy of desire and honor.

As I have suggested, the end of the poem conspicuously places the men as still very much within the same honor system with which the narrative began; even more, the ending incorporates Lucrece's “transcendent” suicide back down into that system. Immediately following the suicide, Lucrece is depicted as “that late sack'd island” around which “two slow rivers” of red (purity) and black (“stain'd”) blood flow (1738-1744). Perhaps evoking an analogy between London and Rome, the image serves to ignite the men's nationalistic fervor, as well as establishing bonds and allegiances among them. Let us look more closely at the function of Lucrece's suicide as the key term in this homosocial triangle.

Lucretius' first lament is for the loss of his own paternal identity:

That life was mine which thou hast here deprived.
If in the child the father's image lies,
Where shall I live now Lucrece is unlived?

(1753-1755)

He continues to bewail the loss of the “broken glass” from which “my image thou has torn” (1758, 1762), reminding us that Lucrece's virtue in life served to reflect her father's honor and identity as well as her husband's. Given the poem's focus on chastity, it is possible to read Lucretius' desolation as partly due to his now corrupted patrilineal bloodline, the third man to suffer such a fate. Although his grief is primarily over her death, not her sexual violation, affective bonds between a father and his daughter are inevitably involved in paternity. Tarquinius' grief is not, of course, quite the same response as fathers who suspect their daughters of sexual impropriety: in Othello, Brabantio cries “O treason of the blood” when he first hears of Desdemona's supposed transgression (Othello, I.i.171). And Leonato's response to accusations against Hero in Much Ado are pathological, even by Renaissance standards:

… Could she here deny
The story that is printed in her blood?
Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes.”

(Much Do About Nothing, IV.i.120-122)

But the possessiveness Lucretius displays in the “grief contest” with Collatine, in which “‘my daughter’ and ‘my wife’” (1804) are interchangeable claims, draws Tarquinius into the same economy of exchange and possession.

The competition of grief between husband and father once more figures Lucrece's body as the battleground of competition among men, and once again utilizes a rhetoric of property and mercantilism:

The one doth call her his, the other his,
Yet neither may possess the claim they lay.
The father says “She's mine.” “O, mine she is.”
Replies her husband. “Do not take away
My sorrow's interest. Let no mourner say
          He weeps for her, for she was only mine,
          And only must be wail'd by Collatine.”
“O,” quoth Lucretius, “I did give that life
which she too early and too late hath spill'd.”
“Woe, woe,” quoth Collatine, “She was my wife,
I owed [owned] her, and 'tis mine that she hath
kill'd.”

(1793-1804; my emphases)

Finally (and not a moment too late for this reader), Brutus interrupts the men's lachrymachia in order to issue the call to arms for revenge against Tarquin. Abruptly, the battle between Lucretius and Collatine turns into a relationship of comrades-in-arms, suggesting for the last time the reversibility of rival and ally. In good Roman fashion, Brutus appeals to the others' masculine honor, striking “his hand upon his breast,” urging them to swear a “vow” of revenge in order to purify Rome from the pollution of tyrants. Just as the poem began, bonds between men are united around the idealized figure of Lucrece, her now “re-purified” body stirs and incites masculine honor, and we are promised a return to another battlefield, only this time the allies are rivals.

In the final stanza, the cyclic nature of the poem (its “eternal return,” one might say) is even more striking:

When they had sworn to this advised doom,
They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence,
To show her bleeding body through Rome,
And so to publish Tarquin's foul offense;
Which being done with speedy diligence,
          The Romans plausibly did give consent
          To Tarquin's everlasting banishment.

(1849-1855)

In the initial “publication” of Lucrece, her inviolable body was advertised in order to confer masculine honor and fame; now, her “bleeding,” violated body and the purity of her soul have become the fetishized objects. Indeed, the poem can only end with yet another publication of Lucrece's body, for it is a body inevitably written among men in order to confer masculine honor.

PUBLICATION

LEONATO.
I might have said “No part of it is mine;
This shame derives itself from unknown loins”?
But mine, and mine I lov'd, and mine I prais'd,
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing her—why, she, O, she is fall'n
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul tainted flesh!

(Much Ado About Nothing, IV.i.134-142)

Gazing at a painting depicting the Trojan War, Lucrece wonders to herself: “Why should the private pleasure of some one / Become the public plague of many moe?” (1478-1479). Or, to imagine what is behind Leonato's confused tirade in the above passage from Much Ado: how can my daughter, so widely renowned and publicized as chaste, silent and obedient, have suddenly “fall'n into a pit of ink”? As I have suggested, the answer to these questions lies in the fact that the “private” has no value of it remains private according to a masculine system of publicly conferred honor. Publishing the private enables a system of bonds and exchanges between men, but it also necessarily produces the anxiety of the cuckold, the rage of the father whose own blood is “corrupted,” and the violence of Tarquin. In this section I will pursue some of the implications of publishing chastity in the context of “Lucrece,” but also extend my investigation to include the figurative uses of the private/public boundary. For the latter course, I follow Stephanie Jed's observation in her brilliant work on the functions of the Lucretia story for humanism in Renaissance Italy: “we can begin to see this rape not as an inevitable prologue to Rome's liberation but as a historical figuration, formed and reformed to serve various interests and needs in different historical moments.”²⁹

Early in the course of his attack, Tarquin offers Lucrece a compact by which if she yields to him, he will keep the rape secret. This offer is based on the logic (according to Tarquin) that the “fault unknown is as good as a thought unacted” (527). The paradox behind this suggestion is that it completely defies the circumstances that brought Tarquin to Lucrece's chamber in the first place. Were it possible for Lucrece's body to remain unpublished and “unknown,” Tarquin's violent lust would not have been aroused. Indeed, the most striking aspect of Tarquin's proposal is that Lucrece's acceptance of it would be more dangerous to masculine honor and identity than the publication of the rape—not so much for the characters within the poem but according to a broader cultural logic. For as I will argue more fully in the last chapter, the prospect that women's sexuality could remain secret, that their bodies could remain simply bodies rather than “texts” carefully scrutinized and anxiously interpreted by men, threatens the foundations of male identity and the masculine economy that enables it. The parallel often drawn between Collatine's publication of Lucrece's chastity and Tarquin's penetration of her chamber and subsequent rape is generated in part by this masculine “need to know,” to make public what cannot remain private.

But it is precisely the ultimate secret of women's sexuality that keeps driving masculine desire for knowledge—in both senses of the word. As Tarquin makes his way to Lucrece's chamber, he encounters a series of deterrents (“locks,” “threshold grates,” “each unwilling portal,” “vents and crannies”), each of which heightens his desire by deferring it:

But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him;
He in the worst sense consters their denial.
The doors, the wind, the glove that did delay him,
He takes for accidental things of trial,
Or as those bars which stop the hourly dial,
          Who with a ling'ring stay his course doth let,
          Till every minute pays the hour of his debt.

(323-329)

In the next stanza he adds, “these lets attend the time … / To add a more rejoicing to the prime” (330, 332). The privacy Tarquin is about to invade (Lucrece's chamber and her sexuality) is constituted as desirable—as requiring conquest—by the series of deterrents he confronts. Each “trial” announces the secrecy and privacy (thus creating the transgressive appeal) of the crime he is about to commit.

In its lengthy description of Tarquin's path to Lucrece's chamber, the poem maps parallel paths between the invasion of her geographical space and the final penetration of her body. As Peter Stallybrass observes, citing several sixteenth-century examples, the “surveillance of women concentrated on three specific areas: the mouth, chastity, the threshold of the house”; later, he adds: “silence and chastity are, in turn, homologous to women's enclosure within the house.”³⁰ But not only “surveillance”: the a priori masculinist construction of women's bodies and their domestic spaces as private, requiring constant regulation of their openings, additionally impels masculine desire to transgress those boundaries. The prior establishment of such boundaries induces their violation just as the publication of Lucrece's chastity is not only a figurative rape but also an inducement toward the literal rape. As Jed points out, “[e]fforts to ‘protect’ these cut-off spaces will never deter acts of violence against women, for sexual violence is, in some sense, upheld by the way in which these spaces are represented.”³¹

Shakespeare's “Lucrece” is itself a text “in which these spaces are represented” and its narrative must be understood as another version of publishing her chastity and violation analogous to Collatine's within the poem. Indeed, it seems undeniable that part of Shakespeare's intent was to stir erotic desire in his (male) readers through identification with Tarquin even though he simultaneously condemns the rape. The poem is decidedly written from a male point of view, and the gender of its intended audience is suggested in the phrase, “their gentle sex” (1237).³² But this authorial complicity is especially evident in the long, Petrarchan catalogue of Lucrece's body when Tarquin first sees her (interspersed with references to her virtue)—as if Shakespeare were filling in readers who unfortunately missed Collatine's earlier discourse.

The last of these stanzas merits closer attention:

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

(407-13)

The conceit of this passage sets up Lucrece's breasts as “worlds,” “unconquered” except by Collatine, and it reveals Tarquin's desire as predominantly “ambition” for Collatine's possession rather than for Lucrece herself.³³ For the male reader, the stanza blends descriptions of Lucrece's arousing physical beauty with statements of her unavailability, both conditions of the traditionally Petrarchan object of desire. In the lines following this stanza, the narrator states: “What could he see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?” (414-415). The “text” of Lucrece's virtue and beauty is once again published: seeing and noting are almost coterminous with desirous.

In this way, Shakespeare “places” or identifies his male readers with male characters by presenting Lucrece as a “text” within the poem. This meta-narrative constructs an implicit parallel between writing and interpreting Lucrece in the poem, and the act of reading. It additionally provides another way in which the poem wages the battle between the publication of Lucrece's chastity (thus circulating her in the marketplace of male desire) and Lucrece's own resistance to her objectification. In the following passage (and elsewhere), she is primarily concerned with the publication of her ruined reputation following the rape:

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

(806-812)

In this stanza Lucrece imagines herself as a transparent text whose “character” will be easily discerned even by the “illiterate.” Lucrece wants to control the dissemination of what has happened in order to preserve Collatine's honor, as the next stanzas make clear: “Let my good name, that senseless reputation, / For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted” (820-821). In this sequence the contradiction inherent in publishing chastity is once again exposed. Earlier, Collatine's honor demanded the public circulation of his wife's “good name”; now, his honor depends on controlling the dissemination of his wife as text. Paradoxically, masculine honor requires the re-purification of a text it “corrupted” in the first place if Collatine's honor is to become once again “unspotted.”

Ownership and publication, privacy and circulation, exist in a tense dialectic “resolved” by Lucrece's suicide. She transcends the marketplace that corrupted her in the form of a renewed symbol of purity that is, however, circulated back into the marketplace as a new text, once again interpreted in order to generate masculine honor:

My resolution, love shall be thy boast,
By whose example thou reveng'd mayst be.
How Tarquin must be us'd, read it in me.

(1193-1195, my emphasis)

By figuring Lucrece as a re-purified text, the poem symbolically removes the corruption of Tarquin's rape and, in a sense, returns Lucrece to her original, pure state. In the context of Italian humanism, Jed argues that the return to and recovery of original Greek and Latin texts were motivated by a similar desire to restore lost purity. In her discussion of Salutati's Declamatio Lucretiae, original purity figures the humanist enterprise of translating and correcting ancient texts: “In order to distinguish themselves from corrupters and violators who stained and contaminated texts,” Jed writes, “the humanists invented a language which excised from the representation of their activities the signs of their own relationship of contact with texts. They accomplish this by claiming to restore what they thought were original, ‘untouched’ readings.” Jed recognizes this project as inherently flawed since “every castigation is also a contamination”; that is, every re-purification reveals the signs of its own restorative work.³⁴ In other words, humanist scholarship needed to expunge earlier editors' “contact” with the texts and then disguise their own manipulations. By extrapolation, the text serves as a battleground among men, or as a field on which men compete for the right to plant their own seed. This is not at all unlike Bacon's aggressive dismissals of earlier scientists and philosophers, the function of which is to clear the field for his own dissemination of knowledge. We have seen a similar dynamic in Bacon's repudiation of ancient science as barren and impotent.

Jed shows the way in which an earlier text of Lucretia functioned simultaneously in the service of humanist ideology and in the founding myth of Rome. In a roughly similar way, Shakespeare's “Lucrece” may also have figured the idea of a pure English state: England fashioned itself as the descendant of Rome, and Elizabeth's virginal body was made to represent England's impenetrability, as depicted in the Armada portrait. Indeed, the poem follows closely enough on the heels of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada for it to be possible to locate the figure of purity in the poem as part of the renewed nationalism that spawned, for example, Shakespeare's history plays. In the poem, this identification is suggested when Lucrece is metaphorically described as “a late sack't island” divided by “two slow rivers” (1738, 1740). But any historical parallels we may find between Lucrece and either England or Elizabeth herself must be tracked on a more figurative than direct level, since Lucrece's violation and re-purification contrast sharply with the pervasive symbol of Elizabeth's impenetrable virginity. In his discussion of Elizabeth's Armada speech, Louis Montrose argues the comparison as follows: “Unlike Lucretia, the Roman matron who submitted and was polluted, whose suicide was necessary for the cleansing of the social order, the royal English virgin will defend and preserve herself and her state.”³⁵

Perhaps a more fruitful historical moment may be found in the 1560s, a time of considerable uncertainty toward the viability of the new and untried Elizabethan state. The early fragility of Elizabeth's rule was exacerbated by her own questionable legitimacy, the rise of the northern earls in 1569, the constant threat of a Spanish invasion, and England's recent history of religious turmoil, in which Protestantism understood and defined itself as the recovery of the original purity of the Church, corrupted since by Catholicism. In such moments of perceived vulnerability, concern over boundaries, transgressions and figures of purity reach their most heightened pitch.

With this brief historical context I want to introduce the earliest Elizabethan story of Lucretia, one almost certainly unknown to Shakespeare. This version anticipates Shakespeare's representation of Lucrece as a corrupted text re-purified in order to advance the authority and legitimacy of its ‘rightful’ owners. I quote at length the richly allegorical preface to the 1570 edition of Sackville and Norton's The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc written by the printer, John Day:

Where this Tragedie was for furniture of part of the grand Christmasse in the Inner Temple first written about nine yeares agoe by the right honourable Thomas now Lorde Buckherst, and by T. Norton, and after shewed before her Majestie, and never intended by the authors therof to be published: yet one W. G. getting a copie therof at some yong mans hand that lacked a little money and much discretion, in the great plage. an[no] 1565 about [five] yeares past, while the said Lord was out of England, and T. Norton farre out of London, and neither of them both made privie, put it forth exceedingly corrupted: even as if by meanes of a broker for hire, he should have entised into his house a faire maide and done her vilianie, and after all to bescratched her face, torne her apparell, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of dores dishonested. In such plight after long wandring she came at length home to the sight of her frendes who scant knew her but by a few tokens and markes remayning. They, the authors I meane, though were very much displeased that she so ranne abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do, yet seeing the case as it is remedilesse, have for common honestie and shamefastnesse new apparalled, trimmed, and attired her in such forme as she was before. In which better forme since she hath come to me, I have harbored her for her frendes sake and her owne, and I do not dout her parentes the authors will not now be discontent that she goe abroad among you good readers, so it be in honest companie. For she is by my encouragement and others somewhat lesse ashamed of the dishonestie done to her because it was by fraude and force. If she be welcome among you and gently entertained, in favor of the house from whense she is descended, and of her owne nature courteously disposed to offend no man, her frendes will thanke you for it. If not, but that she shall be still reproched with her former missehapp, or quarelled at by curious persons, the poore gentlewoman wil surely play Lucrece's part, and of herself die for shame, and I shall wishe that she had taried still at home with me, where she was welcome: for she did never put me to more charge, but this one poore blacke gowne lined with white that I have now given her to goe abroad among you withall.³⁶

Day's explanation for publishing a new edition of the play utilizes an extended metaphor borrowed from the story of Lucretia. An originally pure text that had been put forth “exceedingly corrupted” in the edition of William Griffith some years earlier is compared to Lucrece, a “fair maid” whom the printer “berayed and disfigured,” and then “thrust … out of dores dishonested.” The metaphor authenticates John Day's “newly appareled” edition by suggesting that he is redressing a moral wrong in restoring the text's original “honesty,” as if he were acting out of moral obligation rather than self-interest.

Like Shakespeare's “Lucrece” and its antecedents, Day's preface is ambivalent about the extent of the Lucrece-text's culpability: “she” is the disobedient daughter who “ranne abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do.” But at the same time, Lucrece is represented as a victim, whom the Tarquin-like printer “enticed into his house … and done her villainy.” Day's Lucrece-as-text metaphor thus places himself in a competitive relationship toward Griffith, whom he vilifies as the corrupt printer. Day is the avenging angel who repurifies the text and thus removes the stain of its earlier corruption. Of course, since all editions are ineluctably corrupt, Day duplicates the earlier “rape” in the name of re-purification—he wipes away earlier traces of mediation only to leave his own. In other words, he removes the stain of Griffith's edition only to replace it with his own or, in another way, he removes the seed of his competitor in order to plant himself. W. W. Greg's claim that Griffith's edition was not, in fact, “exceedingly corrupted” encourages this metaphorical analysis.³⁷ Indeed, one contemporary editor has compared Day's alterations to Griffith's and concluded that “the new apparel with which Day clothed the text did not quite cover the ‘dishonested’ body beneath.”³⁸ In the competitive marketplace of London printers, “Lucrece” figures the struggle between men to disseminate the text of Gorboduc. The restoration of “Lucrece” to the state of her original purity is the condition of Day's own subsequent violation, his own mastery. This is evident in the preface as Day suggests that his “new apparelled” edition is once again ready for circulation since he has restored her “honesty”: “her parentes, the authors will not now be discontent that she goe abroad among you good readers.” But of course, Day's newly “chastened” text is now once again available for another corruption, and so the cycle continues, despite his claim to having produced the definitive edition.

For the “parentes” of Lucrece-as-text, the parthenogenic authors Sackville and Norton, Day's re-purification restores their proper ownership and right to disseminate themselves through her. This sequence is very similar to the plot of Much Ado: Leonato's excessive grief at the supposed corruption of Hero and the catastrophic loss of his filial possession are restored through Hero's staged death and resurrection. Day's use of the Lucretia story is also attentive to the same anxieties as he restores her back to the patrilineal fold: she is returned “in favor of the house whense she is descended.” Thus Day's efforts may be understood allegorically to return a wayward daughter now domesticated to her rightful parents so that she may circulate in the marriage market to their economic advantage. According to Day, Sackville and Norton should be pleased to see their “daughter” “go abroad among you good readers, so it be in honest company.” Day has restored their ownership, cleared their name and reputation, and prepared their daughter/text for profitable circulation among the public. If she is not accepted “in such form as she was before,” Day warns, “the poore gentlewoman wil surely play Lucrece's part, and of herself die for shame.”

Once again, Jed's model is instructive. She writes: “For the corruption of a text, in the minds of humanists, was not unlike a rape. The threat lay not so much in the actual violation but in keeping the rapist's seeds from reproducing.”³⁹ Griffith's mediation in the textual dissemination of the play must be removed in order to allow yet another mediation on the part of Day. But to admit this process as such would be to give the lie to the claim that each new edition receives its legitimacy and value by reproducing an unmediated version of the original. Day needs to engage the figures of original purity in order to obviate the inadmissible fact that all editions and translations leave signs of mediation; they are all, in an absolute sense, corrupt. Thus, the story of Lucretia functions as an allegory of corruption restored to original purity. For if Day dresses his editorial enterprise in the clothes of a woman whose re-purification marked the founding of republican Rome, the most famously corrupted symbol of purity in his cultural lexicon, his own small claim to textual authenticity may itself appear inviolable. Day plays the part of Brutus, invoking the figure of purity in the service of his own authority and as the means by which men “properly” reprint themselves.

Before leaving this first Elizabethan version of the Lucretia story to return to the last, it is worth mentioning briefly the play Day's narrative so suggestively introduces. Like the printer's preface, Gorboduc stages a drama of transgression and corruption in which supposedly inviolable boundaries are under siege. In the play, “Britain land” is in the throes of a violent civil war. The country is referred to repeatedly in maternal terms as, for example, “the common mother of us all” (V.ii.) and as a “wretched mother” (V.ii.). Through this metaphor, the violation of the country is at least implicitly understood as a rape threatening the “female” purity of the state and the legitimacy of its patrilineal bonds. Eubulus, the sage counselor whose advice is ignored, imagines the consequences of the insurrection as follows:

In the meane while these civil armes shall rage,
And thus a thousand mischiefes shall unfolde …
Loe he shall be bereft of life and all,
And happiest he that then possesseth least,
The wives shall suffer rape, the maides defloured,
And children fatherlesse shall weep and waile …
women and maides the cruell soldiers sword
Shall perse to death …

(V.ii.)

Although this is not at all a unique depiction of the spoils of war, it does seem conspicuous in light of the material history of the text as told by Day in his preface. The invasion of Britain is depicted as rape followed by the consequent destruction of patrilineal bonds. The “text” of Britain is corrupted by “cruell soldiers” who penetrate it. As a tragedy, Gorboduc does not enact any form of restoration analogous to Day's textual rehabilitation. But near the ending it suggests by negation the terms of re-purification required of the mother country: ‘These are the plages, when murder is the meane / To make new heires unto the royal crowne (V.ii.).

Although Gorboduc ends with this dire vision, it implicitly promises a re-purification of the state, analogous to Day's corrected text once the rebellion is ended. In drawing a parallel between these two texts, I am not proposing a direct link, as if Day's editorial allegory were consciously shaped by the contents of the play, but rather a shared rhetoric in which textual and political purity or contamination finds expression through the figure of the chaste woman. More importantly, the very construction of material texts and political states as “chaste” spaces in the first place functions to threaten what it intends to protect. The rhetoric of purity does not so much maintain impermeable boundaries as invite and enable their violation.

DESIRE

DUKE.
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg'd the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn'd into a hart,
And since my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.

(Twelfth Night, I.i.18-22)

In this passage from Shakespeare's late Elizabethan comedy, Duke Orsino comically invokes several of the terms of my discussion thus far. Olivia, who is beautiful, virginal, unavailable (and rich)—indeed, able to purify the air itself—incites the Duke's desire upon his first visual apprehension of her. At once, as if the two moments were inseparable, this desire is no longer his own but instead turns against him in the form of an independent, tortuous force. In this final section I track the peculiarly masculine “logic” behind this libidinal sequence.

Collatine's lust is heightened by Lucrece's verbal resistance in a metaphor that naturalizes this particular narrative of male concupiscence:

“So, so,” quoth he, “these lets attend the time,
Like little frosts that sometime threat the spring,
To add a more rejoicing to the prime,
And give the sneaped birds more cause to sing.
Pain pays the income of each precious thing;”

(330-334)

At the outset of the poem, the “little frosts” that both impede and inflame Tarquin's desire are Collatine's praises of his chaste and virtuous wife. Thus, an economy in which the private “jewel” must be advertised in order to confer honor constitutes masculine desire; reciprocally, masculine desire enables and maintains the economy, even though the result (in the poem) is a figure like Tarquin who, “pawning his honor to obtain his lust” (156), “scowls and hates himself for his offense' (738). In short, the conditions of masculine honor are at the same time the source of its destruction. In “Lucrece” and elsewhere, Shakespeare appears particularly attuned to the vicious circularity of this model of desire; its inescapability is tersely captured in the final couplet of sonnet 129: “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”⁴⁰

As I shall argue more extensively in the next chapter, masculine desire is enabled by the impossibility of its own satisfaction or consummation, even though that impossibility is so often represented as hellish. This is simply because if masculine desire is impelled by conquest and acquisitiveness, if it is aroused by impediments or “lets,” the economy at work needs continuously to generate new objects of desire in order to maintain itself in a perpetual state of unfulfillment. And because the masculine subject is coincident with his desire—that is, he exists so long as he desires—consummation raises the terrifying prospect of not-being, imagined after orgasm as la petite morte.

One way to understand the pervasive construction of “woman” as either transcendent or debased is to recognize both as responses to the circularity and inevitability of the masculine economy at work here. On the one hand, the idealized figure appears to promise an escape to the level of spiritual consummation; “woman” functions both as the symbol and the means by which “man” reaches beyond the mundane. Thus, Beatrice guides the pilgrim Dante through hell, St. Augustine transforms his carnal lust into spiritual desire (interestingly achieved through his mother), and Plato represents wisdom as Sophia, a kind of chaste goddess. Or, as I will discuss in the next chapter, Berowne states in Love's Labor's Lost that women are “… the ground, the books, the academes / From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire (IV.iii.299-300). On the other hand and in the opposite direction, the equally pervasive construction of “woman” as debased serves as a projection of the “hell” of masculine frustration on to women as if they were its source. Examples of this hardly require delineation, but surely Lear's misogynistic ranting, Hamlet and his father's charges against Gertrude, as well as the fiend-like descriptions of the Dark Lady in the sonnets (“to win me soon to hell, my female evil,” sonnet 144)⁴¹ are among the most prominent in Shakespeare's corpus. It perhaps goes without saying that this kind of projection sets women up as scapegoats, as if it were possible to “cleanse” masculinity by debasing women. But in both responses what appears as a way out of an economy that tortures its male members is in fact endemic to the economy in the first place—the construction of “woman” as transcendent or debased is supposedly the way out, but it is also the founding construction.

My point in drawing attention to this dynamic in both Shakespeare's work and in his culture is to understand the double-edged construction of “woman” not as merely false and dangerous, nor simply as enabling masculinity, but as enabling it in a way that perpetuates masculine instability and anxiety. As I argue throughout this book, anxiety is the condition of masculinity in such a patriarchal economy quite simply because its “solutions” to its anxiety are always returned to the economy in the form of generative causes—a gendered version of Sartre's “no exit.”

Throughout this chapter I have tried to uncover and explain the ineluctable link between masculine desire and anxiety by showing some of the inherent contradictions that develop when masculine identity defines itself among men and through its various constructions of women. This way of thinking takes as axiomatic Valerie Traub's statement that “[d]esire and anxiety thus involve fantasies of the other, fantasies that transform and recombine elements in the existing social framework.”⁴² Traub sets up a reciprocal relationship between desire as “constituted in relation to social practices” and the effects of desire that in turn shape those processes. In this way of thinking, desire is coterminous with masculine subjectivity; it “inhabits” subjectivity and in so doing enables, motivates, but also threatens individuals.

Shakespeare's “Lucrece” enacts some of the “social practices” that shape and are shaped by the masculine, desiring subject, particularly as it understands itself in relation to one of western culture's most durable fantasies: the chaste, self-sacrificing woman. In my reading of the poem, masculine desire lies at the heart of a fundamental and, for Shakespeare, unavoidable contradiction: it generates and sustains the masculine subject, on the one hand, but also exposes and imperils it, on the other. Perhaps, if we follow Lacan, this is the fundamental quality of masculine desire: the perpetual deferral of satisfaction, the construction of new desired objects that maintain the subject in pursuit, the terror that desire should come to rest in consummation. In Lacan's thinking and in Shakespeare's poem, the masculine subject is by definition in pursuit, a restless signifier whose completing signified is always within sight but never reached. Consider the following description of Tarquin early in the poem: ‘… nothing in him seem'd inordinate / Save sometime too much wonder of his eye, / Which, having all, all could not satisfy” (94-96). Once woman is constructed as Other (as fetishized, idealized or debased), once the gap or lack between man and himself is in place, the self-torture of a Tarquin or Othello is inevitable.

As Shakespeare probes this model of identity and desire in “Lucrece,” the poem comes up against the contradictions—what Traub calls the “structural impossibility”—of the model itself.⁴³ Desire emboldens Tarquin to assert his masculinity in his competitive relation to Collatine, but it also turns to “foul desire,” the agent of his destruction. The object of masculine desire must be published for it to accrue honor and value for its owner, but the very same publication leads to the loss of ownership and honor. Since desire acts to destroy the ideals it constructs as desirable, the curious practice of re-purification ensues in order to maintain desire's endless pursuit.

It seems that everywhere we turn in “Lucrece” we come up against an endless circularity between the desire to possess and the equally unavoidable possession by one's desire, between (for Tarquin) the “sundry dangers of his will's obtaining; / Yet ever to obtain his will resolving” (128-129). The dilemma is developed more fully in the following stanza:

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,
That what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond.
And so, by hoping more, they have but less;
Or, gaining more, the profit of excess
          Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain
          That they prove bankrupt in this poor rich gain.

(134-140)

The more one desires, the less one values what one already possesses, thus desire leads to loss. On the other hand, if one's desires lead to increased possession, the result is “surfeit.” Desire functions only as a destabilizing force; it swings inexorably between wanting (lack and desire) and losing, with only the briefest of stops at having. Or once again, in sonnet 129: “Past reason hunted, and no sooner had / Past reason hated …”⁴⁴

“The Rape of Lucrece” attempts to find a way out of this circularity by in effect removing the Other, the constructed object of desire who, in the masculine economy of the poem, can only generate contradictions like “poor rich gain.” Lucrece's suicide becomes a way out of this economy as she is transformed and elevated from object of desire to transcendent symbol: “My shame so dead, mine honor is new born” (1190). Her suicide is enacted as an imitation of the crime against her; she reproduces the act of Tarquin's penetration as if the rape itself killed her, as if her death could finally end and envelop the cycle of desire that preceded it.

But the final irony is that Lucrece still functions as a symbol in the male economy; she is every bit as much the Other when she is dead as when she was alive. Before the rape, Tarquin sees Lucrece in her chamber,

Between whose hills her head entombed is;
          Where, like a virtuous monument, she lies,
          To be admir'd of lewd unhallowed eyes.

(390-392)

Entombed as a symbol of chastity (the preserve of male honor) while she is alive, her symbolic renewal is hardly more than a repetition of the same. Thus when Brutus takes the bloody knife with which Lucrece stabbed herself and promises to use it against Tarquin in order to “revenge the death of this true wife,” and “so to publish Tarquin's foul offense,” we are left with only slight variations on a theme: the continuing, inescapable cycle of desire, masculine honor, and its publication.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece,” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 3rd edn. (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980): 11, pp. 1478-1479. References to Shakespeare's plays are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

2. Charles Barber, The Idea of Honour in the English Drama, 1591-1700 (Goteborg: Gothenburg Studies in English, 1957): pp. 47-57, passim.

3. Heather Dubrow points out that “throughout ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ … the characters' most private actions (or other people's ill-informed speculations about them) are continually made public through a network of surveillance and slander …” Dubrow further argues that this “helps to establish Lucrece's Rome as what anthropologists have termed a shame culture.” See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987): pp. 89-91.

4. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992): p. 7.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Marianne Cowan, trans. (1885: Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1955): p. 175.

6. See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, passim. I am also indebted to David Wilbern's understanding of desire in the poem as “circulations of desire through the poem as independent of, and prior to, those nominal agents that conventionally articulate them.” See David Wilbern, “Hyperbolic Desire: Shakespeare's ‘Lucrece,’” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England, Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991): p. 202.

7. Peter Erickson has usefully remarked that the “study of patriarchal ideology in Shakespeare's work is chiefly a matter of identifying stress points, not of explicating fixed doctrine.” See Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991): p. 23.

8. Shakespeare, sonnet 129, in The Complete Works, pp. 1605-1606.

9. In Coppélia Kahn's terrific analysis of the poem, Lucrece's suicide “symbolically restores her body to its previous sexual purity by the purgation of shedding blood, thus removing the stain which would dishonor Collatine.” See Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's ‘Lucrece,’” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): p. 65.

10. Several critics have commented on this point in various ways. In the context of the Lucretia story in Italian humanism, see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): p. 44. In reference to Shakespeare's “Lucrece,” see: Kahn, “The Rape,” p. 56; Wilbern, “Hyperbolic Desire,” p. 215; and Nancy J. Vickers, “‘This Heraldry in Lucrece' Face’,” Poetics Today 6 (1985): p. 176.

11. Rene Girard, A Theater of Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): p. 22.

12. Ibid., p. 3.

13. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 22.

14. Robert Ashley, “Of Honour” (1596), quoted in Norman Council, When Honour's at the Stake (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973): p. 15.

15. Jean Calvin, Institutes, quoted in Council, When Honour, p. 26.

16. See Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2nd edn., Robert Con Davies and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman Press, 1989): pp. 377-390.

17. Robert Ashley, “Of Honour,” cited in Council, When Honour's at the Stake, p. 15.

18. Fulke Greville, “An Inquisition Upon Fame and Honor,” in Fulke Greville, Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633; Delmar, New York: Scolars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1990): pp. 33-49. References to the poem will be cited in the text by stanza.

19. Barber, Honour in the English Drama, p. 99.

20. Ibid. p. 57.

21. Ibid. p. 268. See also Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), passim.

22. See Vickers, “‘This Heraldry’,” p. 176. Kahn makes a similar point: “… the chaste wife is seen as a precious jewel which tempts the thief … the husband's boasts initiate the temptation, in effect challenging his peers to take that jewel.” See Kahn, “The Rape,” p. 53.

23. Kahn, “The Rape,” p. 49. Kahn also provides a useful discussion of Augustine's understanding of chastity, in which he argues, according to Kahn, that “the only consideration is spiritual: whether Lucrece's will remained steadfast in mental opposition to the rape, or whether she consented to it” (p. 63). Augustine's position coincides with, and indeed may be the basis for, the version of honor I have taken from Calvin.

24. Katharine Maus draws attention to the way Lucrece's suicide re-enacts Tarquin's rape by “plunging the phallic knife into the ‘sheath’ of her breast,” noting the Latin “sheath” as the word for vagina. See Katharine Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's ‘Rape of Lucrece,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): p. 72. See also Catherine Stimpson, “Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,” in Carolyn Ruth Swift-Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Stimpson writes: “Their [Lucrece's and Lavinia's] deaths purge the lives and honor of the men whom they have ornamented …” (p. 59).

25. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, passim.

26. See Frank Whigham, “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi.” A similar claim forms the basis of Leonard Tennenhouse's Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres.

27. Coppélia Kahn has discussed this anxiety at length in Man's Estate. In her discussion of “Lucrece,” a similar point is made: “… the social order depends on the institution of marriage as the boundary line between legitimate and illegitimate procreation.” See Kahn, “The Rape of Lucrece,” p. 60.

28. Stimpson, “Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,” p. 58.

29. Jed, Chaste Thinking, pp. 6-7.

30. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): pp. 126, 127.

31. Jed, Chaste Thinking, p. 45.

32. See Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, p. 44.

33. Kahn provides a useful reading of this stanza: “The heroine becomes an image for two fields of political conquest, the expanding Roman empire and the New World (similarly, Virginia is named for a woman), and Tarquin, correspondingly, is a rival power who would snatch the newly won territory from its rightful possessor.” See Kahn, “The Rape of Lucrece,” p. 57.

34. Jed, Chaste Thinking, pp. 30, 34.

35. See Louis Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Parker and Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, pp. 315-316. Erickson contextualizes the poem in terms of Elizabeth as “an aggressive counter-fantasy of male violation of a woman,” similar to the Essex rebellion. See Erickson, Rewriting the Renaissance, p. 41.

36. John Day, “The Printer to the Reader,” in Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc, facsimile rpt., John S. Farmer, ed. (1908; rpt. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1970). References to the play will be from this edition and cited in the text. I have discussed Day's note and the play in the context of the desire for original purity in Protestant translations of the Bible in “Reading Elizabethan Iconicity: Gorboduc and the Semiotics of Reform,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): pp. 194-217.

37. W. W. Greg, cited in H. S. Bennett, English Books & Readers, 1558-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965): p. 256.

38. I. B. Cauthen, “Gorboduc, Ferrex and Porrex: the First Two Quartos,” Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962): 231-233.

39. Jed, Chaste Thinking, pp. 47-48.

40. Shakespeare, sonnet 129, in The Complete Works, pp. 1605-1606.

41. Shakespeare, sonnet 144, in The Complete Works, p. 1608.

42. Traub, Desire and Anxiety, p. 7, her emphasis.

43. Ibid. p. 7.

44. Shakespeare, sonnet 129, in The Complete Works, pp. 1605-1606.