SOURCE: Camino, Mercedes Maroto. “Writing Lucrece: Shakespeare's ‘Virtuous Moment.’” In “The Stage Am I”: Raping Lucrece in Early Modern England, pp. 12-75. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Camino studies the lengthy soliloquy that follows Lucrece's rape, demonstrating the ways in which Lucrece uses language to successfully dismiss Tarquin's arguments, thereby silencing him within the text of the poem in much the same way that Tarquin silenced her within her bedchamber. ]

“SMOKE OF WORDS”: LUCRECE AND THE VOICING OF RAPE

Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter … It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

BIRON
(reads) “Item: that no woman shall come within a mile of my court … On pain of losing her tongue.”

Love's Labour's Lost.

When Lucrece, in the middle of her lengthy soliloquy, addresses Philomel, she highlights the contradictions that have made this section of the poem the target of severe criticisms levelled at its overabundant language. Lucrece will, with Philomel, find a secluded place where, away from human sight, they can preach to beasts which are likely to show more humanity than men:

“And for, poor bird, thou sing'st not in the day,
As shaming any eye should thee behold,
Some dark deep desert seated from the way,
That knows not parching heat nor freezing cold,
Will we find out, and there we will unfold
          To creatures stern sad tunes to change their kinds.
          Since men prove beasts, let beasts bear gentle
          minds.”

(1142-48)

In the tradition of Orpheus and St. Francis of Assisi, Lucrece and Philomel will shun the society of men and tame wild animals with the sound of their songs. It is perhaps not just because “men” stand for the male of the human species here, that passages such as this one have been largely ignored by critics. Lucrece voices a justified misandry which foregrounds a rather gloomy aspect of the relationship between the sexes; and she clearly overdoes it, critics believe, for this is precisely the section of the poem that has been condemned on the grounds that Lucrece “protests too much.” Her language, it is argued, undoes both her claim to innocence and her appeal for the reader's empathy. In contrast, the first third of the poem, which is taken up by Tarquin's conflict and his resolution to rape her, has traditionally received some enthusiastic praise. J. W. Lever's words exemplify this trend:

So long as our attention is fixed upon Tarquin, it may be said that action and moral significance reinforce one another … The difficulties arise when we pass, in the next part of the poem … to Lucrece as the central figure. Up to now we have been predisposed to sympathise with Lucrece and her injuries; but it becomes increasingly clear that she is inclined to speak too much. The more she invokes our pity, the more reluctant we are to accord it … In general, Shakespeare took care not to make his wronged heroines over-articulate … Even in the early tragedy of Titus Andronicus, the horror and pathos of Lavinia raped speak most forcefully through her mute presence. In contrast, Lucrece is seen too abstractly and heard for too long.¹

Lever's comparison of Lucrece with Lavinia and his comment on Shakespeare's attitude towards women's eloquence drive home the points this chapter will present. His judgement, that is, assumes an ahistorical vision of universal aesthetics, a context where readers share the same or similar literary tastes and consider them to be quasi-objective statements. It is easy to see that to deny our pity to Lucrece is not necessarily a natural response. To assert that parsimonious eloquence would have been a more effective way to achieve the reader's involvement with Lucrece's tragedy does not go without saying. Not only does this view assume a contentious definition of tragedy, but it offers no real explanation as to what makes the poem distasteful as it progresses.² A preference for words that denote motion against words that denote emotion is a cultural construct (perhaps a prejudice) that needs to be seen as such. The differences between Tarquin's and Lucrece's modes of action and the valuation of those modes participate in a gendered paradigm, the essence of which has to be challenged.

The condemnation of Lucrece's language has been contested recently by some critics who have argued persuasively that Shakespeare is not sacrificing the reader's aesthetic or emotional pleasure as he gives Lucrece a voice of her own.³ This chapter also takes as its starting point the masculinist ideology behind the dismissal of Lucrece's voice, at the same time that it will attempt to vindicate Lucrece's narrative “space” by analysing her own use of language and the assumptions about it made throughout the poem.⁴ Her attitude will be situated within the discursive practices of the Renaissance to illustrate how throughout the second section of the poem Lucrece's voice effectively disperses the power of Tarquin's lines: by dismissing all his arguments she silences him in the text in the same way he had silenced her in her bed. Narrative and sexual silencing thus become one.⁵

In order to highlight the particular representations of language and gender which inform Lucrece's lament and have informed its reception, this chapter will focus on sections of her appeal, the description of the rape, and the lengthy tirades which make up the non-active part of the narrative.⁶ I will observe the characters' deployment of performative language and its effectiveness as a tool for power. In this way I hope to avoid falling into the cavalier trap of praising a dilemma the outcome of which effectively ratifies patriarchy, for Lucrece's terminal self-silencing and its praise, as I argue throughout this work, embody patriarchal self-preservation tactics. I shall propose, in other words, that Lucrece's suicide undermines but does not efface the power of her lament; and it illustrates that she sacrifices herself in order to maintain a “language” that relies necessarily on the violation of women's right to speak.⁷ The contradictions of a system which overvalues the acquisition and accumulation of material goods will ultimately be shown to be contingent upon a view of language and woman as commodities to be exchanged, hoarded, used, or destroyed.

The lengthy passages of Lucrece's complaint slow down the poem's initial pace and dissipate the suspense created before her rape. There is a sense of deferral as the poem progresses. Then, after Lucrece's suicide, the narrative is brought haltingly to its known destination and its aftermath wrapped-up in the last two lines.⁸ The whole poem gives a “dilated” account of events that could make, as, for example, in Machiavelli's Discourses, a very concise story.⁹ Unlike Shakespeare, Tarquin is in a hurry from the beginning of the poem when he posts “from the besieged Ardea” to Collatium. By the time he reaches Lucrece's chamber he wants to get the rape over and done with quickly but “his unhallowed haste her words delays” (552). She appeals to his royal office and its supposedly inherent ability to rule both their physical and political bodies; but the more she speaks the less Tarquin can listen and he silences Lucrece's entreaty “all in post,” unable to endure her talk: “by heaven, I will not hear thee” (666):

The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries,
          Till with her own white fleece her voice controlled
          Entombs her outcry in her lips' sweet fold.
For with the nightly linen that she wears
He pens her piteous clamours in her head.

(677-81)

Not the last person to wish Lucrece silent, Tarquin stifles her cries and rapes her as quickly as he can manage it; her words have become for him as unbearable as those of Desdemona to Othello.¹⁰ The parallels between the stories are at this point apparent, for both the scene of the rape of Lucrece and that of Desdemona's murder have the men “on top” of the female victims in a bed from which the curtains have been drawn. Patricia Parker's remarks on Desdemona's murder illuminate the misogyny involved in this topos:

Smothering or literally stopping the mouth of Desdemona is Shakespeare's invention … Her continuing to talk even after she is stifled … is, interestingly, itself attributed to the proverbial talkativeness of women by Rymer … The violence of this misogynist topos in the Renaissance is suggested by the fact that Garrulitas is imaged, in emblem books … by Procne/Philomel, who literally had her tongue cut out to prevent a speaking dangerous to her violator.¹¹

It is with Philomel, another raped woman, that Lucrece identifies her predicament. As she sees the dreaded first light of the morning when her “stain” will become visible, she is distracted by the nightingale's sad song which, significantly, “speaks” to her:¹²

“Come Philomel, that sing'st of ravishment,
Make thy sad grove in my dishevelled hair.
As the dank earth weeps at thy languishment,
So I at each sad strain will strain a tear,
And with deep groans the diapason bear;
          For burden-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still,
          While thou on Tereus descants better still.
And whiles against a thorn thou bear'st thy part,
To keep thy sharp woes waking, wretched I,
To imitate thee well, against my heart
Will fix a sharp knife to affright mine eye,
Who if it wink shall thereon fall and die.[”]

(1128-39)

The suffering which the nightingale undergoes in order to convey her pitiful message is, for Lucrece, the trial she has to overcome to move into language. She cannot escape the paradox that for men to recognise her right to speak as a violated woman she has to become “manly” by her deployment of the phallic knife which she, however, turns against herself in a reciprocal move of self-violation. She needs, that is, to re-enact her rape if her language is to be listened to; but this knife silences her voice completely: she literally and figuratively “opens up her heart.” This intricate relationship between language and violence is seen by Katharine Maus to illustrate Shakespeare's attitude towards Lucrece's position. The paradoxical images of the poem, she argues, materialise a dilemma which is to be taken literally:

Her language is not prior to her psychological state in any simple way. Lucrece's model is Philomela, the raped bird-woman who not only suffers sexual outrage but who also makes it the constant subject of her utterance; and Lucrece remembers that in order to sing, Philomela must lean against a thorn, inflicting and re-inflicting upon herself Tereus's unwelcome penetration. The pain demands representation, but the representation requires the experience, even the deliberate exacerbation, of pain; the relation between emotion and speech seems more a perverse reciprocity than a simple relation of cause and effect.¹³

The mystification of female victimisation embodied by Philomel and Lucretia is an ideological process, the contingency of which needs to be highlighted and the politics of which need to be disclosed. If, as Patricia Joplin puts it, “the political hierarchy built upon male sexual dominance requires the violent appropriation of the woman's power to speak,”¹⁴ women's reappropriation of this power needs also be violent. Why this violence has to be sacrificial, why women's move into language has to be dependent on their victimisation does not, however, follow necessarily from those premises. If women are forbidden to speak by gender restrictions, then their speaking entails assuming a “masculine” position; but this is an act of resistance both against patriarchy and against patriarchy's ideal of the “feminine”—one, however, that not only assimilates women to a “masculine” norm but that will also, once again, be co-opted.

A play that foregrounds the relationship between sexual and political violence, Titus Andronicus, corroborates the assumption that patriarchy rests on violence and is, in the last analysis, a violation of women's rights, among them the right to speak. Not less painful than either Philomel's or Lucrece's approach to language is that of Lavinia who is silenced even more effectively by having not only her tongue removed but also her hands so that she is unable to talk, like Lucrece, or to embroider her plea, like Philomel.¹⁵ Lavinia is deprived not only of her speech but also of the “silent speech” of gesture, often described as a universal language. This silencing, as Douglas E. Green has remarked, is a necessary ingredient of the play since Lavinia's speech would unravel patriarchy's guiles:

Lavinia's muteness signifies powerlessness Because of what Lavinia knows, her voice must be silenced Indeed, Lavinia's speech—or any uncurtailed mode of signification on her part—could expose to the public (and to the audience) her subjection to the arbitrary wills of men, to the contradictory desires of father, husband, rival fiancé, brothers, and rapists For Lavinia to speak now would undermine the play's design—the reconstitution of patriarchy under Lucius. But the play makes us aware of the price that this reconstitution, this order, exacts from women they, their pain, and all their experiences are consigned to silence and illegibility.¹⁶

The silencing of women these narratives expose thus epitomises some of the violent tactics deployed by patriarchal systems from the classical period to the Renaissance. Linda E. Boose's study of the bridles and cucking stools which were used to chastise shrews illuminates how this obsession with women's speech may be expressed in politically significant actions aimed at maintaining the status quo:

a discourse that locates the tongue as the body's “unruly member” situates female speech as a symbolic relocation of the male organ, an unlawful appropriation of phallic authority in which the symbolics of male castration are ominously complicit. If the chastity belt was an earlier design to prevent entrance into one aperture of the deceitfully open female body, the scold's bridle, preventing exit from another, might be imagined as a derivative inversion of that same obsession.¹⁷

Significantly enough a contemporary critic, Roy Battenhouse also associates Lucrece's orifices when he reads in her words an “invitation” to rape:

Lucrece's resort to complaints is her way of escaping from calling for help, and her spinning out a lecture to Tarquin is a way of pulling her own wool over her sheepish eyes. Indeed, her pleas have an underside of intimated invitation to sexual play.¹⁸

The “invitation to sexual play” detected by Battenhouse assumes as a matter of fact that Lucrece's words are not to be trusted; as though there were some sort of innate dissociation between her words and her wishes—so that men may read “yes” when women explicitly say “no.” His comment that she is “pulling her own wool over her sheepish eyes” finds, moreover, two parallels in the text: an unhappy one when Collatine and Tarquin surprise Lucrece busy spinning wool; and a tragic one in the rape scene when Tarquin “with her own white fleece her voice controlled” (678).

The mistrust of Lucrece's will partakes, that is, of a masculinist belief in that the sole female word to be trusted is her master's: woman is, from this perspective, seen as a soft material to be imprinted with man's language, to be penetrated with words which are literally and metaphorically “put into her mouth.” Such assumptions are obviously grounded on a view of woman's language which is, like her body, unreliable and subject to fragmentation, dispersion, and unintelligibility. Women's language, so the argument goes, is, like their sexuality, a potentially disruptive, (re)productive and promiscuous mode of action that needs be checked and appropriated.

Lucrece's words have, however, no visible audience and cannot therefore simply be dismissed as “invitation to sexual play.” Such reactions are, moreover, foreseen by the poem's awareness that an innocent woman should not be heard publicly, as, for example, when Lucrece decides how to present her argument before her male relatives, she opts for “few words”:

“Few words,” quoth she, “shall fit the trespass best,
Where no excuse can give the fault amending.
In me moe woes than words are now depending;
          And my laments would be drawn out too long,
          To tell them all with one poor tired tongue.[”]

(1613-17)

In contrast, when those words are directly conveyed to the reader in the internal context of the poem Shakespeare feels no need to justify them. As soon as some character appears on the scene he emphasises how “modest” Lucrece's eloquence is; and she insists on the worthlessness of language and her inability to deploy it effectively.

Lucrece's paranoia about being heard and slandered is, of course, more than understandable since, as Heather Dubrow has noted, the poem is crowded with references to mouths, ears, and eyes:

Indeed, throughout The Rape of Lucrece, as throughout Troilus and Cressida, 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: images of eyes and mouths reflect a world whose citizens are engaged in gazing on and gossiping about each other.¹⁹

The surveillance of women is, like the increasing privatisation of sexuality, a feature of Western culture that started to develop in the early modern period.²⁰ Surveillance and self-surveillance cannot, however, but conflict when the “self” is seen to be an adept construct which can perform various roles and is reified in the public recognition of those roles. This ontological conflict is thereby given the label “personal” in order to make the economies of production and ownership appear immanent, abstract and unquestionable. This paradoxical position of the self as subject and object becomes apparent in Lucrece's decision to kill herself in order to save the/an other's name. As a woman, she has no self that can be separated from her belonging to Collatine and she needs, therefore, to ensure that his name, “that senseless reputation,” be cleared from the suspicion of adultery and bastardy:

“Let my good name, that senseless reputation,
For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted;
If that be made a theme for disputation,
The branches of another root are rotted,
And undeserved reproach to him allotted.[”]

(820-26)

This is made even more explicit when she opts for suicide on the grounds that her “treasure” in which her husband's name and honour are reified, has been taken away from her. Once her identity as loyal wife has gone, she believes, she is as good as dead:

“O, that is gone for which I sought to live,
And therefore I need not fear to die!
To clear this spot by death, at least I give
A badge of fame to slander's livery,
A dying life to living infamy:
          Poor helpless help, the treasure stol'n away,
          To burn the guiltless casket where it lay![”]

(1051-57)

By killing herself Lucrece gives a “badge of fame” to the rumours that her continuing existence would incite, since her “reputation” is, like that of so many other Shakespearean women, liable to be the subject of slander, and calumny. The news of her fall would be spread by Fama or Rumour which, as the prologue in 2 Henry IV reminds us, is endowed with multiple tongues through which to spread its poison multifariously.²¹ All Lucrece can do to arrest “rumour” is communicate her unique experiences to make her listeners believe her. But this is rather an impossible task, for she is required not to speak since her speech would proclaim her “public,” thereby ratifying those rumours. She can do nothing other than use language if she is to convey her unutterable message; but her innocent voice should be muted. Thus, when she tries to convince Tarquin to return to his “borrowed bed” she is impossibly and emphatically presented again as a rather mediocre and “modest” orator:

Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed,
Which to her oratory adds more grace.
She puts the period often from his place,
          And midst the sentence so her accent breaks
          That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks.

(563-67)

These rhetorical devices that emphasise Lucrece's poor language abilities, like her “dilation,” write Lucrece's plight “modestly.” They exhibit her inability to deploy oratory skilfully but do not per se indicate that the narrator is distancing himself from his characters. In fact, these figures break the artificiality of language and make it seem primarily a means of communication among characters within the poem. This is clearly the case when Lucrece finally meets her relatives before whom she is even clumsier.²² Here it is not just two but three times that she makes a wrong start:

Three times with sighs she gives her sorrow fire,
Ere once she can discharge one word of woe.
At length addressed to answer his desire,
She modestly prepares to let them know
Her honour is ta'en prisoner by the foe.

(1604-08)

She foregrounds thus the “value” of words by indicating that she is reluctant to “waste” a single one of them. Her sighs serve to stress her feeling of sorrow and the stutters, as Joel Fineman observes, contrive to defer the action: “Lucrece begins to tell her story, though she begins and will continue its narration through a process of delay … Drawing out the story, through a series of deferments that heighten its suspense.”²³ Whether or not they heighten the story's suspense, these stutters echo her “dilated” appeal to Tarquin and express an attempt to come to terms with her experience by returning to it through repetition.

Lucrece's false starts construct her as an inexperienced rhetorician who is forced by hostile circumstances to project a newly developed skill; her move into language can therefore be seen as a gradual process in which she learns to deploy some rhetorical devices necessary to convey her plight convincingly. She stops short of achieving that end, however, and is utterly dismissive of the performative function of her own words.²⁴ Only her suicide, she acknowledges, will make her language that of a raped woman and not of an adulterous one. Her word, that is, can be that of “manly” action if (and only if) it speaks a self-inflicted wound. She can only become a “warrior” by wounding herself voluntarily to purge her family's lineage:

“Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools,
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators!
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools,
Debate where leisure serves with dull debaters,
To trembling clients be your mediators,
          For me, I force not argument a straw,
          Since that my case is past the help of law.
In vain I rail at opportunity,
At time, at Tarquin, at uncheerful night;
In vain I cavil with mine infamy,
In vain I spurn at my confirm'd despite.
This helpless smoke of words doth me no right,
          The remedy indeed to do me good
          Is to let forth my foul defilèd blood.[”]

(1016-29)

In contrast to this apparent dismissal of her own “helpless smoke of words” it is clearly only her testimony claiming that she is not adulterous that can be subjected to question. Lucrece's contempt for language's power is, moreover, clearly contradicted in the poem not only by the fact that her husband's publication of her virtue and beauty had provoked Tarquin's lust (7-42) but also, and more importantly, by the power of Sinon's duplicitous words. Sinon's persuasive rhetoric convinces the Trojans that he has changed sides in the battle, enables him to penetrate their ranks and subsequently to betray them to the Greeks.²⁵ The language Sinon uses, Lucrece realises, draws its power not only from what it says, but from what it does; his words and his deeds, that is, stand in an intricate relationship the effectiveness of which is out of Lucrece's power. Sinon's treachery, which Lucrece compares to Tarquin's, rests on this ability to use language to his own advantage:

The well-skilled workman this mild image drew
For perjured Sinon, whose enchanting story
The credulous old Priam after slew;
Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory
Of rich-built Ilion, that the skies were sorry,
          And little stars shot from their fixèd places,
          When their glass fell wherein they viewed their
          faces.

(1520-26)

Sinon's words “like wildfire” effectively “burnt the shining glory” of Troy. In fact, his words produce a cosmic upheaval that changes the celestial language, creating a sidereal Babel where stars, like letters on a page, find no mirror in which to identify themselves, no pattern of stable harmony and divinely ordered correspondence between their form and their reference. This arbitrariness of language, and its potential to be re-created and deployed as a tool for power falls beyond Lucrece's reach: her sighs serve her to communicate her emotions, to “give her sorrow fire” but they are ultimately nothing other than a “helpless smoke.” Her silencing, that is, is predetermined by her gender even before she expresses her desire to acquire an idiom only “Time” can teach her:

“O time, thou tutor both to good and bad,
Teach me to curse him that thou taught'st this ill;
At his own shadow let the thief run mad,
Himself himself seek every hour to kill,
Such wretched hands such wretched blood should spill,
          For who so base would such an office have
          As sland'rous deathsman to so base a slave?[”]

(995-1001)

Lucrece's language apprenticeship is, like Caliban's, an attempt to appropriate for herself the language of the coloniser in order to “curse” him. But cursing is the ultimate resource of the powerless.²⁶ Like Caliban, Lucrece manages to curse Tarquin without, however, becoming proficient in the variety of language that Tarquin, Brutus and Sinon possess: the variety that is the paradigmatic expression of male dominance and that Terence Hawkes describes as “the hallmark of … genuine manhood.”²⁷ No matter what, she can never be authorised by a language that is his language, by a culture that is his culture, or by a land that is his land. She exists almost outside of language and cannot therefore gain direct access to any political power: her language can only speak in and of an uncanny foreignness.

Lucrece's reluctance to fully express herself or to admit to doing it corroborates the masculinist assumption that performative words are “deeds” to be spoken by men. What she ignores is that her own body will be made to speak the language of political revolt. That is Brutus' “word” when he reveals his “unsounded self”²⁸ by parading her corpse in order to fuel the rebellion that overthrows the Tarquins and raises him as Roman consul in their stead.²⁹

The mutilated, bleeding body of Lucrece is, then, the sole female presence at the outset of Republican Rome as it has been throughout this poem. Such absence of feminine company has indeed submerged Lucrece from beginning to end in a wholly masculine universe. She “speaks” to Night, Opportunity, Time and Philomel but to nobody who can give her compassion and moral support; needless to say, she has no mother, sister or female friend with whom to share her sorrow:³⁰

[“]Where now I have no one to blush with me,
To cross their arms and hang their heads with mine,
To mask their brows and hide their infamy,
But I alone, alone must sit and pine[.”](31)

(792-95)

This solitude is momentarily redeemed by the brief appearance of the only woman other than Lucrece in the poem, her maid, who immediately sympathises with her sorrow. The maid shares the received paradigm of silent, chaste and obedient: being modest she “durst not to ask” (1223) Lucrece what is wrong when she first sees her—a few stanzas later, however, she is compelled to break the rules and “modestly” does ask. It is then Lucrece's turn to point out the virtues of silence and parsimony: the economic value of words that, being a seminal masculine property, should in no way be “spent” liberally:

“O, peace,” quoth Lucrece, “if it should be told,
The repetition cannot make it less;
For more it is than I can well express,
And that deep torture may be called a hell,
When more is felt than one hath power to tell.[”]

(1284-88)

This final couplet, an example of Senecan curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent,³² sums up the paradoxes not only of Lucrece as an impossible orator but also of a male poet voicing a woman's complaint. Using the persona of a raped woman, Shakespeare had to try and occupy a space which would make his own position as a loquacious (wo)man paradoxical indeed. And it is, significantly, this transvestism which has exposed him to a criticism similar to that directed against his character.³³

The structural opportunity of the second half of the poem, in other words, allows Lucrece to emerge as a human being speaking in a powerful (even when fragmented) voice. To ignore those “eloquent” lines, as Phillipa Berry has noted, amounts to dismissing from the poem Lucrece's plight:

in contrast to the poem's emphasis upon the vulnerability of the female body, the female voice is here represented, not only as much less susceptible to manipulation by men, but even as the catalyst of an extraordinary political force: Lucrece's complaint enables her to replace Tarquin as the controlling figure in the narrative until the moment of her death.³⁴

This potentially powerful female voice will, nevertheless, tragically endorse the politics in which her predicament is ciphered; she will usurp a man's position to silence herself and to speak patriarchy's language.

In the same way Lucrece does not wish to waste her husband's words, she will not waste the value of the “reputation” of his lineage by remaining alive. Collatine's properties are thus preserved by an act that not only leaves his honour intact but also saves him from undertaking with Lucretius the unsavoury task of silencing Lucrece for ever himself—as Virginius and Titus do with Verginia and Shakespeare's Lavinia.³⁵

Lucrece spares her men the task of killing her and such a sacrifice will, she hopes, keep her husband's family line free from a “pollution” which would have adverse social and economic consequences. In this financial exchange Collatine becomes “the merchant of this loss”; and Tarquin a potential usurer, a thief who “having all, all could not satisfy, / But poorly rich, so wanteth in his store / That, cloyed with much, he pineth still for more” (96-99). By “taking” Lucrece, Tarquin breaches Collatine's territorial boundaries and “trespasses” his commercial interests—an idea that is corroborated by Lucrece when she tells her husband: “thy int'rest was not bought / Basely with gold, but stol'n from forth thy gate” (1067-68). These mercantile economies make Lucrece a masculine commodity—an idea clearly conveyed in the scene in which her father and her husband pathetically dispute over the possession of her dead body:

The one doth call her his, the other his,
Yet neither may possess the claim they lay.
The father says, “She is 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 wailed by Collatine.”
“O,” quoth Lucretius, “I did give that life
Which she too early and too late hath spilled.”
“Woe, woe,” quoth Collatine, “she was my wife.
I owed her, and 'tis mine that she hath killed.”
“My daughter” and “my wife” with clamours filled
          The dispersed air, who, holding Lucrece' life
          Answered their cries, “my daughter” and “my
          wife.”

(1793-806)

This scene, which Richard Lanham has eloquently described as a “grief contest” sums up the masculine appropriation of the “last” feminine word: “grief.” The feminine connotations of “grief” are therefore dismissed by making the traditionally feminine ceremony of bewailing and bereavement a scene of violence, and the occasion of a masculine “contest.”³⁶

Lucrece's silencing and self-silencing underscores, I have argued, some pragmatics of patriarchy. The urgency to silence her lament from the text of Shakespeare's narrative also reveals the desire to have woman represented and subsequently silenced and eliminated. Lucrece's lost or despised word embodies the history of an economic discourse which figures women as the objects of exchange and the targets of violence; as bodies and texts to gaze at, to inscribe, to interpret, to dismember, to possess and to destroy. Thus reduced to being the material upon which man's history is written, Lucrece's own words, her mode of “being,” are reduced first to unintelligibility, then to silence, and ultimately to nothingness. …

Notes

1. Introduction, p. 11. Many a critic feels more closely drawn towards Lucrece while she is a silent victim. For example, her Arden editor, F. T. Prince, believes that “[i]f the story is treated at length, and above all if the heroine is given great powers of self-expression, her sufferings become sensational and not tragic … The greatest weakness of Shakespeare's Lucrece is therefore her remorseless eloquence … After her violation, Lucrece loses our sympathy exactly in proportion as she gives tongue” (Introduction, p. xxxvi). More cautiously, her latest editor, John Roe, asserts that “[d]espite the Augustinian school's suspicion that here is a lady protesting too much, the more obvious danger of such speeches is their inordinate length unsupported by a viable dramatic context. Shakespeare does all he can to elicit sympathy for the heroine as victim, but the lengths to which he goes risk an over-exposure of technique, sometimes culminating in stridency” (p. 27). Historical examples of the rejection of Lucrece's “voice” abound. See the following in Rollins, Variorum (pp. 447-523): Charles Guildon (1710): “Lucrece is too talkative and of too wanton a Fancy for one in her Condition and and [sic] of her Temper, yet there are many good Lines, some very good Topics, tho' a little too far spread as those of Night, Opportunity, and Time” (p. 459); Bernhard Ten Brink (1893): “she breaks out into an interminable monologue … The Shakespeare of the dramas would have carefully avoided all such improbable loquacity” (p. 496); Max Wolff (1907): “a very slight narrative is drawn out too long … In both stories the overloaded, highly decorated, conventional style often destroys genuine feeling; especially does the endless lament of the heroine after her violation fail to manifest the emotion which is expected of Shakespeare at such a moment” (p. 506); Emile Legouis (1927) quoted below in the text, p. 55; and Douglas Bush (1932): “Having tried his hand at oratory in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare liked it well enough to provide Lucrece with a whole series of apostrophes. They have undeniable force, but the effect is like that of Senecan declamation, like an explosion in a vacuum” (p. 518).

2. Kathleen McLuskie has highlighted the gender-bias of a definition of tragedy that “assumes the existence of ‘a permanent, universal and essentially unchanging human nature’ but the human nature implied in the moral and aesthetic satisfactions of tragedy is most often explicitly male” (“The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985; Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 98. The origins of tragedy have also been related to the rise of the polis and to the political status of noblemen in ancient Greece, and its survival or revival to some particular socio-economic configuration. These aspects are stressed in works such as Jean Pierre Vernant, “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of the Social and Psychological Conditions,” in Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. 1-5. Timothy J. Reiss studies the correlation between tragedy and the emergence of the individual in Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980). On this topic see also Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, esp. pp. xvi-xx, and pp. 156-58.

3. For particular discussion of Shakespeare's poem, see Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously,” Philippa Berry, “Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 33-39; and Kahn, “The Sexual Politics.” The relationship between verbal and visual imagery is studied by A. Robin Bowers in “Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 1-21.

4. My approach to this topic is allied to that of critics who have adopted perspectives ranging from Joplin's outright rejection of Lucretia's sacrifice (“Lucretia becomes a mouthpiece for an ideology that dehumanizes her even as it is taken by tradition to make her a ‘hero’” [“Livy's Lucretia,” p. 63]) to the ironical distancing of Lisa Jardine for whom “[t]he story of Lucretia, twin pivot with Griselda's as stereotypes of grandiose female heroism, skillfully involves the ever-present possibility of ‘frailty overwhelmed’ in the tapestry of unfaltering and courageous submission by woman to her fate” (p. 185). For Harriet Hawkins, however, Lucrece's agency of turning the knife against herself places her side by side with other suicidal Roman heroes. See The Devil's Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 152-53. Froma I. Zeitlin remarks that in classical drama suicide “is a solution in tragedy normally reserved only for women” (“Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Representations, 11 [1985], 63-94; quote at 70). Linda C. Hults also maintains that “[Lucrece's] decision to take her own life is equally reactive. She kills herself not out of a sense of positive purpose in dying (like Cato or Seneca) but out of an agonizing sense of loss of purpose in living. She is soiled property and, as such, she has no value or identity” (“Dürer's Lucretia: Speaking the Silence of Women,” Signs, 16 (1991), 205-37; quote at p. 219).

5. Lucrece's apostrophes fit within the well-documented tradition of female complaint. John Kerrigan has edited a comprehensive critical selection of some examples from medieval times to Pope's Eloisa to Abelard in Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

6. Her apostrophes occupy approximately 614 lines of the poem's 1855.

7. As Kahn notes, in this poem “to be raped and to speak about it are thus similarly indecorous, alluding to matters about which women in particular ought to be silent” (“The Sexual Politics,” p. 142).

8. As Geoffrey Bullough notes, “Shakespeare used Ovid's terse and clear-cut tale as a series of suggestions for a full-scale exercise in lyrical dilation” (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare [London: Routledge, 1961], p. 182). Ann Thompson has observed the same literary ruse in Titus Andronicus when Marcus describes Lavinia's rape and mutilation and, she believes, this is consciously done to make us focus our attention on her suffering. See “Philomel in ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘Cymbeline,’” Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 30. Patricia Parker has also called attention to this device, “dilation,” in “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54-74. See also her Literary Fat Ladies. C. S. Lewis situates the origin of this style in medieval times: “Much of this length is accounted for by digression (131-54 or 1237-53), exclamatio (701-14), sententiae (131-54), and descriptio (1366-1526)” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], p. 500).

9. For a study of Machiavelli's treatment of Lucretia, see my “‘My honour I'll bequeath unto the knife’: Public Heroism, Private Sacrifice, and Renaissance Lucretias” (Imagining Culture: Crossing Boundaries in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Jonathan Hart [New York: Garland Press, forthcoming). Ronald L. Martinez studies Machiavelli's deployment of Lucretia as pharmakos in La Mandragola in “The Pharmacy of Machiavelli: Roman Lucretia in Mandragola” (in M. B. Rose [ed.], Renaissance Drama, pp. 31-74). On this topic, see also Timothy J. Reiss, “Corneille and Cornelia: Reason, Violence, and the Cultural Status of the Feminine. Or, How a Dominant Discourse Recuperated and Subverted the Advance of Women” (in M. B. Rose [ed.], Renaissance Drama, pp. 171-210). For an analysis of Machiavelli's influence on early modern writers, see Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation 1500-1700. (London: Routledge, 1964).

10. Commenting on this particular scene Kahn notes that “[w]hen Tarquin muffles Lucrece's cries with the folds of her nightgown as he rapes her, though his act is brutal and unlawful, though he penetrates what ought to remain closed, at the same time he but repeats and reinforces the dominant tendency of the culture in concealing, sealing off, muffling women's desire and women's speech” (“The Sexual Politcs,” p. 144).

11. Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric,” p. 73 n.

12. Philomel's story appears in Ovid's Metamorphosis, trans. A. D. Melville (1986; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 134-142 (bk. 4).

13. Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously,” p. 73. As Kahn suggests, “[b]eing raped does grant Lucrece a voice—the voice of the victim … Lucrece identifies herself not with the weaving woman [Philomel], but with the Philomel who is metamorphosed into the nightingale, the Philomel who vainly laments her shame, under cover of night—wounding not her oppressor, but herself” (“The Sexual Politics,” p. 152).

14. Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle,” p. 34.

15. Lavinia manages to “speak” by tracing signs on the sand with a staff. However, as Marion Wynne-Davies remarks, her words still need to be translated by her father: “Titus reads what Lavinia has written; he transmits her text to the audience, thereby once again attempting to confuse the issues of gender and production” (p. 147). Eaton also notes that Lavinia's mutilation renders her body an “alphabet” violently inscribed “in a patriarchal script” (p. 185).

16. “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 317-26; quote at p. 323. Gillian Murray Kendall analyzes the copious references to tongues in the same issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (“‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” pp. 299-316).

17. “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 179-213; quote at p. 204. Thomas studies the use of the cucking stool, a cage, or a bridle to chastise shrews publicly (pp. 631 ff). Scolds, it is worth noting, were often associated with witches. An analysis of the relationship between sexual, verbal and urinary “incontinence” is given by Paster in “Leaky Vessels.” Jardine analyzes the misogynist dismissal of women's voices that underlies the familiar association between women's “verbosity” and their sexuality: “If the definition of the virtuous wife is as chaste, obedient, dutiful and silent, then the definition of the wife without virtue is as lusty, headstrong and talkative. These qualities make her both provocative and threatening. Woman's moist humours, which make her lascivious, also loosen her tongue. The tongue is symbol of impudence, that is, immodesty, to be carefully covered by the teeth” (Still Harping on Daughters, p. 104).

18. Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 16.

19. Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 90. Dubrow studies the rhetorical devices of the poem but concludes that Shakespeare gives Lucrece a kind of “self” and that she is somehow complicit in her own undoing. See the second chapter of this book, “‘Full of forged lies’: The Rape of Lucrece,” pp. 80-168.

20. The apparent separation between family and state entails the effective internalization of rules, manners and demeanours; so that only when the unit on which the state rests, the family, is self-regulated and polices its own members, can the domestic and the political be imaged as separate entities. On this topic see Norbert Elias' seminal The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1: The History of Manners (1939; New York: Pantheon, 1978). See also below, “In thy bed I purpose to destroy thee.”

21. Henry IV's “Rumour painted full of tongues” is a commonplace Renaissance icon. The locus classicus of the image of “sland'rous tongues” is Virgil's Aeneid in which Fama is a mobile figure who spreads rumour, normally unfounded (4. 181-90). For an account of how the representation of Fama and Rumour become separated and Fama subsequently idealized see Warner, Monuments and Maidens, pp. 127-45, esp. p. 140. See also the references to the Calumny of Apelles in my introduction.

22. This stuttering sequence is borrowed from Ovid's thoroughly domesticated Lucretia who, when telling her story, “Thrice she essayed to speak, and thrice gave / o'er, and when the fourth time she summoned up / courage she did not for that lift up her eyes” (Fasti, II, 823-25. Quoted in The Poems, ed. Prince, p. 200).

23. “Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations, 20 (1987), 25-76; quote at p. 61. Kahn has, however, suggested that Fineman's analysis converges with Battenhouse's when he renders Lucrece's “no” into a “yes.” Fineman's argument runs as follows: “it is fitting that the rape, when it finally occurs, is figured in and as a simultaneously emergent and recessive in-betweenness forming and informing the fold of Lucrece's lips, for the smirky collocation of Lucrece's mouth with her vagina supports the formal implications that Lucrece is asking for her rape because her ‘no,’ as ‘no,’ means ‘yes’” (p. 43). Kahn's counterargument is also worth quoting: “[t]hus his [Fineman's] scrupulously formal, often fascinating interpretation of the poem arrives at the same reading of the rape as that dictated by a common misogyny: it's the victim's fault—she was asking for it” (“The Sexual Politcs,” p. 158 n. 19).

24. For an analysis of the use of performative language in the poem, see David Bevington, Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 22-26.

25. The “treason” of Sinon of Troy which Lucrece assimilates to hers in the ekphrasis echoes that of the Gabines. This plot was engineered by Sextus who ran into exile pretending to have fallen out with his father, Tarquinius Superbus. He managed to win the confidence of the Gabines by leading them in several victorious scuffles against the Romans and he subsequently betrayed them. This important detail which brought about the downfall of Gabii is absent from Shakespeare's poem.

26. Anne's cursing of Richard in Richard III is, like Caliban's and Lucrece's, a display of her own impotence.

27. “Swisser-Swatter,” p. 41.

28. Goldman analyzes relates the description of Brutus in this passage to the emergence of the Renaissance's in the second chapter of his book which he entitles “Unsounded Self”: “Shakespeare's concern with the discovery of the unsounded self seems to be reflected even in the syntax of his poems. At least, it appears to account for a peculiar construction that lends bite and drive to passages in Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the sonnets” (pp. 12-32; quote at p. 24). The notion of the Renaissance autonomous “individual,” has, however, been questioned. See references in my introduction.

29. To quote Joplin: “The pierced and bloody female body is now received by communal assent as the sign of the wounded body politic. Lucretia as “word” has been “spoken” by a man and the definitive interpretation of this linguistic/sacrificial gesture seals a pact that goes down in history—and is passed on in literature—as an agreement to remain silent about the real nature of the crisis at hand and, thereby, to silence the victim” (“Ritual Work,” p. 65).

30. R. Thomas Simone believes her solitude to be partly the reason of her lengthy soliloquies which, in turn, renders her characterization “weak”: “Her weakness as a character probably stems not from a lack of ideas or understanding but from the length of her speeches, which are determined by her isolation and the rhetorical standards of the poem” (Shakespeare and Lucrece: A Study of the Poem and its Relation to the Plays [Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1974], p. 184).

31. Archeologist Jocelyn Small has, however, proposed the Lucretia story to be originally Etruscan and has noted the inclusion of women, probably including her mother, mourning her death in the extant remains of three urns. Roman Lucretia's myth would then be a reworking of an older myth in which the women significantly did not make it to the end of the journey. See “The Death of Lucretia,” American Journal of Anthropology, 80 (1976), 348-60.

32. “Light woes speak, heavy ones strike dumb.” This was a popular tag used by early modern dramatists originally found in Seneca's Hippolytus.

33. Emile Legouis, for instance, had derided Shakespeare's “eloquence” in this poem on the grounds that, for him,

    The minute descriptions with their prettiness and conceits, are especially irritating, veiling and enervating, as they do, the tragedy of the theme … From end to end of the poem the reader is exasperated by the poet's very talent, his fancy and eloquence … An aspect of Shakespeare is revealed which could not appear so clearly in his other works, but it is on the whole the less pure side of his genius, both morally and poetically.

    (A History of English Literature, trans. Helen Douglas Irvine (1926; London: Dent, 1948), p. 315; italics added).

34. p. 34.

35. In “Two Narratives of Rape in the Visual Arts: Lucretia and the Sabine Women,” Norman Bryson notes the influence of the legal punishment for adultery on Lucretia's decision:

    In Roman law, a key feature of the story is that Lucretia, albeit under duress, gave her consent to Tarquin; this makes her technically an adulteress, not a victim of rape. As an adulteress her punishment could have been considerable. Livy writes of Lucretia in the reign of Augustus, when Rome is going through one of its periodic fits of public morality: an adulteress could be killed by her pater familias; her husband was obliged to divorce her; if convicted of adultery she would lose half her dowry, the adulterer would be subject to a fine and both parties exiled separately. In such circumstances suicide seems an honourable decision. The aspect of consent, important though it will become for Augustine and others, is not, however, what Livy stresses.

    (pp. 163-64)

36. p. 107.

Works Cited

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Eaton, Sara. “Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy.” Wayne, The Matter of Difference 181-198.

Goldman, Michael. Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1972.

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