[In the following essay, Montgomery studies Shakespeare's abundant use of formal, patterned rhetoric in The Rape of Lucrece, maintaining that through this extravagant rhetoric Shakespeare shifted the reader's perspective, established mood, explored the psychology of his characters, moralized, and suggested a philosophical framework for the poem.]

Whatever Shakespeare made of the legend of Lucrece, it is not a story in the usual sense, and it is not dramatic. His treatment of what Ovid, Livy, Chaucer, and Painter passed on to him is an expansion and reshaping into major points of emphasis of elements which their versions handle briefly.¹ He takes what his sources (along with other versions) treat as a historical and illustrative anecdote about the heroics of chastity in action and makes his poem enter and dwell within the souls of the protagonists to such a degree that action as such is entirely secondary. What Tarquin and Lucrece do is for Shakespeare far less interesting than how they feel. Hence his much abused rhetorical flourishes, which are his means of summoning forth areas of meaning and interest scarcely suggested by the short, bare versions he knew.²

Our normal response to formal, patterned, extravagant rhetoric is hostile. It need not be so, and to demonstrate this I have in mind three areas of the poem which should illustrate what Shakespeare is up to: the first begins at line 281 where Tarquin, having yielded to lust against his better judgment, moves towards Lucrece's chamber, and ends, approximately, with her awakening; the second deals with Tarquin's reactions after the rape (ll. 694-742); the third is the well-known description of the painting of burning Troy (ll. 1366-1568). In style, these sections of Lucrece are heavily conceited; they interrupt or slacken the pace of narrative; they are largely free of dialogue.

To begin, let us consider the first section at midpoint or a bit beyond. Shakespeare describes the sleeping Lucrece at some length as Tarquin stands over her:

Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
Coz'ning the pillow of a lawful kiss;
Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,
Swelling on either side to want his bliss;
Between whose hills her head entombed is;
          Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
          To be admir'd of lewd unhallow'd eyes.

(ll. 386-392)

This stanza has been attacked as a gratuitous embellishment, an example of Shakespeare demonstrating a needless virtuosity.³ As a means of underlining Lucrece's purity it is certainly most indirect, but the manner of the description is motivated by more than Shakespeare's desire to exercise himself in the conventional formulas of amatory verse. The personification of the pillow, angry and swelling, echoes the situation of Tarquin; Lucrece as a “monument” serves to perpetuate the emphasis repeated elsewhere on the appeal of unspoiled beauty to ungoverned lust. Moreover the stanza dwells on Lucrece, on what Tarquin sees, referring only in its last line to his “lewd unhallow'd eyes.” But in the surrounding stanzas the fact that Tarquin is the beholder is important. The “high treason” of his eyes misleads his heart (l. 369); they are blinded at first by the “greater light” of Lucrece's face (ll. 374-375); his eye “Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins” (l. 427). There is an obvious effort to make palpable the extraordinary, powerful effect of beauty seen at close quarters and to note the fresh, erotic attraction of Lucrece's fragile purity: the whiteness of her hand against the green coverlet is “like an April daisy on the grass” (l. 395), and her golden hair “play'd with her breath” (l. 400). Shakespeare is taking care to make Tarquin's motivation equal to the enormity of his act and to establish the quality of both.

The first third of the poem deals most prominently with Tarquin's psychology, which Shakespeare handles not only through the conventional psychomachia (ll. 190-281), but also through animation of the setting. Having rationalized his lust, Tarquin's eye “heartens up his servile powers” (l. 295), and “The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece' bed” (l. 301). At this point, the locks on the doors “rate his ill” (l. 304), “the threshold grates the door to have him heard” (l. 306), weasels shriek (l. 307), “The wind wars with his torch to make him stay” (l. 311), and Lucrece's glove, which has a needle in it, wounds him (l. 319).

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.

(ll. 323-327)

The effect is to increase the tension as well as to re-emphasize the power of Tarquin's reprobate faculties, and we may perhaps sense a hint at broader thematic reference in Shakespeare's personification of the environment: Tarquin's intended act is a crime against nature, whose “denial” he misconstrues.

The reader is meant to participate closely in the scene and to be persuaded not only that what Tarquin contemplates is monstrous, a primal sacrilege, but also to join empathetically in the working out of his impulses.⁴ The demand on the reader is threefold: he must judge, he must understand the inner process by which Tarquin is led to his act, and he must feel the horror of what is to come. This accounts, I think, for the mixture of delicate lyric description (“like an April daisy on the grass”), which follows almost directly after “Where like a virtuous monument she lies, / To be admir'd of lewd unhallow'd eyes.” Or, more obviously, consider lines 407-427, which heighten Lucrece's passive beauty and Tarquin's terrible compulsion:

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 honoured:
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred,
          Who like a foul usurper went about
          From this fair throne to heave the owner out.
What could he see but mightly he noted?
What did he note but strongly he desired?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tired.
With more than admiration he admired
          Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
          Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.
As the grim lion fawneth o'er his prey,
Sharp hunger by the conquest satisfi'd,
So o'er this sleeping soul doth Tarquin stay,
His rage of lust by gazing qualifi'd;
Slack'd, not suppress'd; for standing by her side,
          His eye, which late this mutiny restrains,
          Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins.

The account of Tarquin's inner turmoil continues for another stanza and a half; the lines quoted here will serve to reveal the complexity of effect Shakespeare intends.

The remarkable description of Lucrece's breasts goes beyond what might be apparent if Shakespeare were merely concerned to confine us to Tarquin's point of view, although that is dominant. Most obviously, the allusion to Scripture provides a standard for severe judgment. What Tarquin is to do must be understood as satanic, not unlike the corruption of the prelapsarian world. The simile enlarges the context in which we view the central event of the poem but does so in a way that preserves the focus on Tarquin's inner state and intensifies the innocence of Lucrece poised against the horror of her imminent violation. Moreover, there is no overt action in these stanzas; there is, however, a most immediate sense of action carried through the figures, both the simile in the first stanza quoted and the rhetorical questions in the second, as well as the two major figures of the third stanza.

Something must be said, also, of the suddenness of Shakespeare's changes in direction and focus. The crowding of figures against one another is not random, not the result of an immature talent expending its powers extravagantly and chaotically. Through the three stanzas we move from judgment, to combined empathy and analysis, to the more immediate horror of bestial appetite in which the analysis is continued. The first stanza provides us with broad moral reference; the second (abandoning simile) asks us to understand the process of Tarquin's soul, and it is worth noting that Lucrece's features are no longer the distant “maiden worlds unconquered,” but more plainly “Her azure veins, her alabaster skin, / Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.” In the third stanza, the figure of the “grim lion” forces us to move back from our involvement with Tarquin, to replace empathy with revulsion, but we are still meant to follow the psychology of his lust. The technique with its mixing of perspectives and changes in distance is an effort to provide several points of view at once, and through it all Shakespeare manages a superb effect of mounting energy.

The stalling of external action is perhaps a consequence of figurative density and variety, and through the figures the impression of movement is transferred to motivation and sensation. This transference is perhaps most obvious in Shakespeare's use of personification. We have noted how earlier he animates the inert environment, as Tarquin is driven by his lust towards Lucrece's chamber, so as to embody and direct the responses of the reader. Later, the personifications are of a more familiar kind. Tarquin, in the bedroom scene with which we are still concerned, has had his lust momentarily suspended by gazing on the sleeping Lucrece, but the moment is brief, and “His eye, which late this mutiny restrains, / Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins” (ll. 426-427).

At this point Shakespeare returns to the device of the psychomachia, to render Tarquin's emotions in the imagery of siege warfare:

And they [his veins], like straggling slaves for pillage fighting,
Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting,
In bloody death and ravishment delighting,
Nor children's tears nor mothers' groans respecting,
Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting:
          Anon his beating heart, alarum striking,
          Gives the hot charge and bids them do their liking.
His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,
His eye commends the leading of his hand,
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride, march'd on to make his stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;
          Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,
          Left their round turrets destitute and pale.

(ll. 428-441)

The conceit here is extended to suggest the mounting intensity of the tempo of battle, but quite apart from such an obvious effect, the personifications, which seem to split Tarquin into a whole host and draw attention away from him as an individual, an actor whose coherent personal presence is felt, widen the import of what is going on and yet keep our attention on Tarquin's psychology and the fundamental illegality of his intended act. The revulsion the spectator should feel is here subordinated, though still present (“children's tears” and “mothers' groans”); Shakespeare gives it full force again only after Lucrece has awakened.

These stanzas, as their rhetoric and rhythm indicate, are a moment of crisis, prepared for and developed over a considerable expanse of verse. The imagery of martial contest and siege warfare has already been employed at line 295 and after, and we have already seen Shakespeare's figuring of Lucrece's body as a world, though her breasts are now “the heart of all her land.” The presence of such images is maintained steadily through Lucrece and is almost always used to suggest that what is innocent and admirable is engaged in struggle and subject to peril and eventual defeat. There is a fundamental moral pessimism in the poem.

If Lucrece is figured as an invaded kingdom or a corrupted world, Tarquin is more than conqueror or devil. It is worth repeating that up to and shortly beyond the rape events are seen and understood primarily from Tarquin's point of view and in terms of his psychology, and, although the reader is never allowed total and continuing sympathy with him, the maintenance of his perspective builds towards a climax of Shakespeare's interest in him. This interest lies not in what he does nor in how sensational a villain he is, but in what happens within him. The external assault on a chaste woman is an issue of far smaller importance than that of the violence he does his own soul. As soon as the rape is done, Shakespeare begins to comment upon it, at first in the tones of conventional emotionalism—“O, that prone lust should stain so pure a bed!” (l. 684)—and then in terms both of its consequences—“Pure Chastity is rifled of her store, / And Lust, the thief, far poorer than before” (ll. 692-693)—and of the irony of its psychological and moral pattern. This latter Shakespeare works out by the analogy to “the full-fed hound or gorged hawk” which cannot enjoy the prey they delight in pursuing. Surfeit becomes poverty and hunger; the strength of desire becomes weakness. Pushing the analogy further Shakespeare moves once more into the realm of struggle and contest:

The flesh being proud, Desire doth fight with Grace,
          For there it revels, and when that decays,
          The guilty rebel for remission prays.

(ll. 712-713)

As before, the figures are managed so as to hint at a dimension of understanding that is broadly religious, if not Christian, but the main focus is still military, as in the next two climactic stanzas:

So fares it with this fault-full lord of Rome,
Who this accomplishment so hotly chas'd;
For now against himself he sounds this doom
That through the length of times he stands disgrac'd:
Besides, his soul's fair temple is defac'd,
          To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares
          To ask the spotted princess how she fares.
She says her subjects with foul insurrection
Have batter'd down her consecrated wall,
And by their mortal fault brought in subjection
Her immortality and made her thrall
To living death and pain perpetual;
          Which in her prescience she controlled still,
          But her foresight could not forestall their will.

(ll. 715-728)

There is no doubting the Christian force of “living death and pain perpetual.” And, if nothing else, the placing of the comment after that of the loss of Tarquin's reputation reminds us which consequence is more serious. But these do not exhaust the effects, for we also return to a tone of regret, a kind of mourning that a soul is lost, that something holy has been destroyed. And Tarquin knows it as well as the reader.

Before letting Tarquin go his melancholy way Shakespeare spends a few lines emphasizing the damage his act has done to both of them: their situations are parallel, though different. The main burden of the rest of the poem is the tracing of Lucrece's woe, the evolution of which culminates in the scene in which she meditates on the painting of burning Troy.

There is hardly need to do more than notice the congruity of this scene with the other figures drawn from siege warfare, military contest, and insurrection, and there are other general resemblances between the episode and those just treated, especially their function of suspending external action. But the description of the Troy painting is basically a different device. Neither personification, nor, in itself, a projection of mood, it is first of all an object which Lucrece contemplates at length, and thus it has an objective existence in the poem. The earlier images of castles, temples, battles, and sieges are established by the poet as part of his point of view, his representation of the quality of the protagonist's experience and sensations. Partially through these figures the poet reaches for the outer dimensions of his meaning. But as Lucrece allows her eyes and mind to scan the painting, she is the one who derives its significance. We must first of all understand the stated significance of the painting as colored by her conscious mind.⁵

Her most immediate motive for viewing the painting is her need for an outlet to her passion: she pauses “for means to mourn some newer way” (l. 1365). Shakespeare later remarks that her absorption in the “painted images” is only partially therapeutic: “It easeth some, though none it ever cur'd, / To think their dolour others have endur'd” (ll. 1581-1582). Furthermore, the archetypal tragedy of Western history would hardly offer her any more fruitful solace. On one level, then, Shakespeare employs the Troy painting to demonstrate the continuing psychological effects of Lucrece's “grief,” and there is a definite rhythm to her passion (as Shakespeare says near the end of the scene: “Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow” [l. 1569]), beginning with her search for a “face where all distress is stell'd (l. 1444); succeeded by anger at Helen (ll. 1471-1472), a questioning of the nature of life in which “private pleasure” swells to general catastrophe (ll. 1478-1492), lament over the fate of individuals depicted in the painting, especially Hecuba with whom she identifies, and then a long meditative equating of Sinon and Tarquin as types of smiling deceit, which culminates in the lines: “… as Priam him did cherish, / So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish” (ll. 1546-1547). A resurgence of anger prompts her to rip at the effigy of Sinon with her nails, after which she comes to herself and remembers that it is only a painting.

This last touch, it seems to me, helps explain why Shakespeare has earlier devoted space to an apparently distracting and detailed comment on the skilful realism of the painting (ll. 1373-1442).⁶ If he has perhaps drawn attention away from the problems at hand in the body of the poem, nevertheless by underscoring the vivid realism of the picture, he motivates Lucrece's illusion that the figures in it are alive. A related motive is to convince the reader of the overwhelming emotional experience Lucrece's contemplation of the painting produces in her. From seeking an outlet for grief her reaction moves to hallucination, a development that should remind us that she is as much a victim of her own compulsive passion as she is of Tarquin's brutal lust, that her tragedy lies in her unreasoning reaction as well as in her violation.⁷

Don Cameron Allen has suggested that if The Rape of Lucrece is not an allegory, yet it moves in that direction, and he cites the phrase “so my Troy did perish” as a hint that Shakespeare, if not actually following the Renaissance allegorizers of the Aeneid, is at least approaching an understanding similar to theirs.⁸ Shakespeare moralizes throughout the poem, and so do other characters, notably Lucrece. But her generalized comments are everywhere prompted by her immediate situation: her efforts to persuade Tarquin not to rape her or her attempts to rationalize and find emotional relief from her distress. Therefore it is not immediately clear whether the following lines (which Allen refers to⁹) are meant to be part of Shakespeare's theme or merely to translate Lucrece's state of mind:

“Her house is sack'd, her quiet interrupted,
Her mansion batter'd by the enemy;
Her sacred temple spotted, spoil'd, corrupted …”

(ll. 1170-1172)

Lucrece is here speaking of her own soul and arguing herself into a determination on suicide, yet the personification directly recalls Shakespeare's comment on Tarquin's soul (ll. 715-727) and the destructive invasion of Troy.

The problem of whether or not a work such as this is an allegory is difficult to resolve, for Shakespeare at the very least seeks to give the story a fairly generalized significance and yet however often he hints at universal roles for Tarquin and Lucrece (such as “saint” and “devil”), his method of moving swiftly and frequently between different levels complicates and, I think, obviates any consistent abstraction of the theme. However brief his attention to straight unadorned narrative, to the merely historical in the legend, the poem begins and ends in this context. Second, we must not forget how compelling is his interest in the psychology of the characters, an interest he exploits not only through the figures we have examined, but also through the direct ruminations of the protagonists. Lucrece's long apostrophe to Night, Opportunity, and Time is the most obtrusive example, and there is sufficient indication that this section of the poem, whatever the tediousness of its length, is a demonstration of Lucrece's mental distress.

We are therefore confronted with the problem of what to make of Shakespeare's hints at a broader meaning for his poem, his suggestions that Tarquin and Lucrece and the rape may symbolize something like the inevitable destruction of innocence by evil. We know that in the Sonnets and elsewhere Shakespeare displays an interest in this theme or variants of it, but to conclude that in The Rape of Lucrece it is the center of interest, we would be forced to agree that all or most of the ingredients of the poem were directed towards it. They are not. Lucrece is sometimes an image of the uncorrupted world, sometimes a woman with a “waxen” mind; Tarquin is one moment the personification of lust and then “this fault-full Lord of Rome.” Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to put things otherwise: in allowing Lucrece to become temporarily not Lucrece but a figure of prelapsarian purity, Shakespeare is reminding us of the universal context in which the events of the poem exist. From this point of view, Lucrece is not a personification of something broader; rather Shakespeare briefly makes her a figure in order to bring into play wider areas of meaning which will influence and illuminate the quality of her experience.

The same may be said for Tarquin and for the way in which the episode of the Troy painting is applied in Lucrece's remark, “So my Troy did perish.” If I am correct, Shakespeare's method approaches the borders of allegory through the occasional enlarging of his characters into figures and through his destruction of the potential verisimilitude of the crucial scenes in the poem, but if the method stops short of allegory, it is due to the variety of tasks Shakespeare seems to be attempting. As I have suggested, he has used rhetorical figures in an effort to do several things nearly at once, to shift perspective, create mood, explore psychology, moralize, and suggest a broad philosophical atmosphere. If he intended the last of these to draw together all the rest into an ideologically coherent whole, he failed. But I am not at all sure that that was his intention. His accomplishment at least was to take a legend with conventional and obvious limits of meaning and make it reach out in many directions and to enlarge the capacities of the kind of narrative poem he had to work with.

Notes

1. These may be studied in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. 427-439. The notion that Lucrece is essentially dramatic in method has been around for some time, and may be reviewed in such works as Muriel C. Bradbrook's Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), pp. 110-116; Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 152-153, and most recently in Harold R. Walley's “The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy,” PMLA, LXXV (1961), 480-487. In some instances one suspects that this disposition comes from the habit of looking at the poem as if it were an incident in Shakespeare's dramatic development.

2. An unflattering response is Douglas Bush's: “… his love of rhetoric runs away with his sense of drama. … Dramatic realism is likewise defeated by incessant conceits” (p. 152). “Granting of course that the conceited style was instinctive with most Elizabethans as it cannot be with us, one discerns in this baffling tissue of ingenuities only a clever brain, not a quickened pulse. … As often in the early plays, the author has quite forgotten the situation; he is holding the subject at arm's length, turning it round, saying as much as he can about every side of it” (p. 153).

3. Bush, p. 153. The text for quotations from Lucrece is Shakespeare's Songs and Poems, ed. Edward Hubler (New York, 1959).

4. Hallett Smith in Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 114-116, observes that the conceits and rhetoric serve to provide internal expressiveness and to draw the reader into participation.

5. Horst Oppel's article, “Das Bild des brennenden Troja in Shakespeares ‘Rape of Lucrece,’” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, LXXXVII-LXXXVIII (1951-1952), 69-86, argues that the painting has “a separate and unobvious function in the whole poem” (p. 72) and that among other things Shakespeare is concerned with the theme of art's expression of cosmic forces. Oppel's thesis is intriguing, but his abstractive interpretation is much too drastic in making the poem a treatise in philosophy.

6. Rollins in Variorum Poems, pp. 224-228, records several comments and speculations on the Troy painting episode, most of them concerning the kind of painting or tapestry Shakespeare is describing and where he might have viewed a model. None of these deals with possible motives in the poem for his insistence on the realism of the details in the work of art.

7. Shakespeare moralizes fully on this point at lines 1093-1120, and beginning at line 1240 with a comment on women's “waxen minds,” he devotes three stanzas to the weak impressionability of the female, concluding that men “Make weak-made women tenants to their shame” (l. 1260). Near the end of the poem Brutus, chiding Collatine and Lucretius for their unreasoning grief over Lucrece's suicide, says: “Such childish humour from weak minds proceeds” (l. 1825).

8. Don Cameron Allen, “Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey, XV (1962), 96-97.

9. Ibid, p. 96.