SOURCE: Washington, Edward T. “Vanishing Villains: The Role of Tarquin in Shakespeare's Lucrece.” Upstart Crow 14 (1994): 126-38.

[In the following essay, Washington contends that Tarquin, understood to be the poem's villain, serves to emphasize a complex pattern of meaning at work in The Rape of Lucrece. Through both Lucrece and Tarquin, Washington maintains, we are encouraged to see Lucrece as a personification of an outdated mode of literary expression, that of Petrarchan perfection, and to view Tarquin as the means by which Lucrece's literary hegemony is necessarily purged.]

The general theme of rebellion by an individual against the supreme authority in the established normative order and against the rules by which this order operates [is] the basic meaning of evil in the traditions of the … classical and Christian civilizations.¹

Early twentieth-century criticism was reluctant to accept Shakespeare's Lucrece as a complex and problematic literary text. Douglas Bush called it a “museum piece,” C. S. Lewis said it was “puerile” and “imperfect,” and F. T. Prince deemed it “as a whole an artistic failure.”² During the 1960's, however, a more controversial critical trend developed when D. C. Allen, J. C. Maxwell, and Roy A. Battenhouse (among others) offered readings of the poem from what has come to be called the “Augustinian” perspective.³ In exploring what Battenhouse called a “surprisingly complex meaning” in Lucrece, the Augustinians argued that the judged “imperfection” of the poem derived from the inability of earlier critics to see that Shakespeare's “perfect”⁴ heroine was morally culpable in her own demise. Hence, artistic “incongruities” like Lucrece's long-winded complaints became, not euphuistic flights of fancy by an immature Shakespeare, but rather sophisticated poetic signs that revealed Lucrece's way of “escaping from calling for help.”⁵ In the seventies and eighties feminist critics mounted a successful counter-attack against the Augustinians' unkind view of Lucrece's motives and morals, frequently by offering dense readings of their own that presupposed “complex meaning” in the poem.⁶ However, while feminist readings have argued effectively against what the Augustinians called the problem of Lucrece's moral incongruity, their arguments have not adequately accounted for the narrative's poetic incongruity. That is, their arguments do not explain the persistent way in which the poem encourages the sense that something more complex is happening in the text than the language and action of the poem seem to indicate.⁷ Why, for example, is the diction used to praise Lucrece so hyperbolic that it makes Petrarchanism feel like idolatry? Why should Lucrece's movement toward courageous self-assertion be compromised by her obviously manipulative methods and style? What are we to think when the political hero, Brutus, dismisses Lucrece's reactions to the rape as weak-minded and “mistook” (1826)?

In the effort to offer a cogent alternative to Augustinian and feminist solutions to the problem of meaning in Shakespeare's Lucrece, I will suspend the normative critical emphasis on the literal fact of the rape, and hence, on the moral worth of the emblematized protagonists. Rather I will examine these characters in their roles as typological poetic conventions in a highly self-conscious literary text.⁸ By foregrounding the poem's central characters in this way, I will endeavor to show how the villain Tarquin illuminates a “surprisingly complex” pattern of meaning in the poem that helps to clarify long-standing questions concerning incongruities in the poem's ostensibly “perfect” heroine, Lucrece.

I

Shakespeare's Lucrece is a poem that spends an inordinate amount of time calling attention to its own ill-fitting, somewhat archaic literary traditions (e.g., “the good woman wronged,” the Petrarchan ideal, the “mirror” tradition, the myth of Lucrece) and calling attention to its use of conventional, but dated (and incongruous) poetic techniques (e.g., long laments, effusive ornateness, the discourse of moral heraldry); the poem also features many reflexive allusions to the arts, literature, or to written texts (e.g., Lucrece's lament is a “dirge” [1121], the setting is a “stage for tragedies” [766], Collatine is the “publisher” [33] of Lucrece's virtues, Tarquin's eyes are “glassy margents of books” [99-102], etc.). The invocation of these various traditions, techniques, and allusions helps draw our attention to what one critic has called Lucrece's “curious preoccupation with poetic self-consciousness, as if she knows that she is bound for immortality in the realms of poetic fancy.”⁹ As Lucrece herself proclaims:

“The nurse to still her child will tell my story,
And fright her crying babe with Tarquin's name.
The orator to deck his oratory
Will couple my reproach to Tarquin's shame.
Feast-finding minstrels tuning my defame,
          Will tie the hearers to attend each line,
          How Tarquin wronged me, I Collatine.”

(813-19)

It is my contention that Lucrece's (and the poem's) “acute and uneasy self-consciousness about poetic technique and resources” (as Katherine Maus has termed it) encourages us to see Lucrece not only as the abused and pitiable victim of a vile rape, but also as the petulant personification of an outmoded but tenacious mythical trope whose suitability as an ideal Petrarchan image of “unmatched” (13) beauty and “divine” (193) virtue has outlived its usefulness.

This figurative view of Lucrece as an exhausted literary convention receives support from the political theme of revolt against monarchical tyranny in the poem. That is, as the opening “Argument” and the end of the narrative make clear, the central problem the society (and the poem) must solve is that of oppression under the traditional rule of kings. Hence, despite the poem's detailed account of Tarquin's assault and its effect on Lucrece, the rape is but the most vile symptom of a long-standing political tyranny and technically, a subplot of the poem's larger dramatic movement from monarchy to Roman republic.¹⁰ But just as Rome's central problem involves its blind acceptance of “divine” kingship, similarly the Romans in the poem demonstrate an exalted admiration for the “divine” Lucrece. This disturbing parallel between “divine” kings and an “exalted” Lucrece is what lends credence to the idea that, while on a literal level Lucrece is the victim of a violent rape, on the level of metaphor she is, rather, the target of or scapegoat for a strong literary reaction against an outmoded poetic tradition.¹¹ In this scenario, it is Tarquin, Lucrece's antagonist and literary antithesis, who, in the guise of dark lust, purges Lucrece's “perfect white” (394) literary hegemony: a bold and transgressive, but also needful action, not unlike the purging of kingly hegemony that describes the broader political theme of the poem.¹²

To substantiate the assertion that Tarquin's dastardly act also represents a curative rebellion against a hegemonic literary tradition, we may begin by noting that Tarquin's desire to despoil Lucrece does not arise from any pure delight in evil: that is, in going forward with his plan to ravish, Tarquin is fraught with ambivalence, tension, and fear, and he suffers through a genuine struggle between his passions and his more civilized sense of self:

And now this lustful lord leap'd from his bed,
Throwing his mantle rudely o'er his arm;
Is madly toss'd between desire and dread:
Th' one sweetly flatters, th' other feareth harm.
But honest fear, bewitch'd with lust's foul charm,
          Doth too too oft betake him to retire,
          Beaten away by brain-sick rude desire.

(169-75)

As these lines indicate, Tarquin's tortured consciousness, his psychomachia, does not parallel precisely the willing malignity of Iago, or the vengeful ruthlessness of Richard III, or even the monstrous hypocrisy of Angelo in Measure For Measure: and unlike Tereus, the archetypal rapist in Ovid, or Demetrius and Chiron in Titus Andronicus, Tarquin does not attempt to mask his crime with either the post-facto mutilation of his victim, or murder. On the contrary, given Tarquin's internal struggle with his passions—his “guilty fear,” his chiding of his “vanished loathed delight,” his departure as a “heavy convertite” (740-43)—the circumstances of his crime resemble most the anguishing quandary that all “the world” experiences with respect to lust as described in Shakespeare's Sonnet 129:

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Made in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
          All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
          To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.(13)

While Tarquin's ambivalence and guilt allow him more dramatic and thematic significance than critics have typically acknowledged, the arguments against the view that he is anything other than a one-dimensional villain have persisted, due largely to the critical preoccupation with his attenuated and foil-like role in the poem's moral drama. Heather Dubrow, for example, supports her view of Tarquin's limited importance to the text by noting his early departure from the narrative:

Lucrece's assailant seems like nothing so much as the stock villain of Victorian melodrama … The differing titles of the poem (“Lucrece,” then later “The Rape of Lucrece”) may reflect the author's recognition that he had gradually lost interest in Tarquin, concentrating far more on Lucrece in the latter part of the poem.¹⁴

Jonathan Hart goes further to suggest that Tarquin's anguished role represents the reader's embarrassed attraction to “the (seductive) power of sex and violence”; thus, Hart maintains that, in the end, Tarquin is a “half-forgotten” force that the poem (and the reader) would prefer to “ignore, hide, or suppress.”¹⁵ And despite his more thoroughgoing assessment of Tarquin as a forerunner of Shakespeare's later tragic heroes, Harold Walley concludes that Tarquin's role is circumscribed by the limitations inherent in what he calls Shakespeare's psychology of evil: “[In Shakespeare], whatever other damage evil may do, its destructive force inevitably ends in self-destruction.”¹⁶ But contrary to the view that Shakespeare “loses interest” in or “half-forgets” Tarquin, or that Tarquin, at best, represents a potentially complex tragic evil that “inevitably” self-destructs, I would argue rather that the poem refigures its own givens regarding Tarquin's role as a one-dimensional villain by re-introducing him, later in the poem, in radically altered character forms. On the one hand, the idea of alternative forms for Tarquin simply echoes the movement toward new political structures in the poem; but in a larger sense, the advent of these enlivened renewals helps to reveal how Tarquin's character is allied with a subversive dramatic energy in the poem that seeks to overturn several types of outmoded conventions—not the least of which includes Lucrece's conventional role as an ideal image of Petrarchan perfection.¹⁷

II

One of the most singular elements of the Lucretian myth involves Tarquin's coercive threat to kill Lucrece and then to blame her death on an errant sexual tryst with a servant. Tarquin would then murder some unwitting attendant and claim to have killed him after finding him in bed with the slain Lucrece. Given the mordant references to servants expressed throughout the text (they are deemed “vile” [202], “foul” [284], “low” [665], “heartless” [1392], “lustful” [1636], etc.) and given the Romans' almost frenzied concern with reputation or fama, even the false accusation of sexual impropriety with an underling is as horrifying a prospect for Lucrece as actual rape by the noble Tarquin. In Shakespeare's poem, moreover, the threat to implicate Lucrece sexually with a low-born vassal, cited three times in the text (in Ovid, Chaucer, and Painter's Livy it occurs but once), highlights the issue of class distinction in the narrative to a greater degree than is the case in other versions of the myth.¹⁸ On the one hand, this threatened image of socio-sexual impropriety simply heightens our sympathy for Lucrece's already degrading plight; however, unlike earlier mythical analogues, Shakespeare introduces an element into his poem which deflates the horridness of our imagined view of a baseborn servant sprawled atop the virtuous Lucrece. While Ovid, Chaucer, and Painter represent “vassal slaves” as a vaguely delineated aggregation of inconsequential humanity, Shakespeare brings forth individualized characters from the servant class (specifically the maid and the messenger) through whom our imagined view of the lower social orders gains immediacy and definitive shape. The most provocative scenario related to this unique depiction of servants involves Tarquin's threat to slander Lucrece with a common “groom” (671)—and in what seems like a nightmare come true, an actual groom appears later (1330) to play the part of Lucrece's bearer of bad tidings to her husband. Yet unlike the poem's generally disparaging view of the plebeian class, the portrayal of this lowly groom is decidedly favorable, and not at all sexual. Notwithstanding his rusticity, he is an earnest, trustworthy, reliable fellow whose positive attributes contradict the pejorative images of servants generally espoused by the poem's elite characters:

The homely villain cur'sies to her low,
And blushing on her with a steadfast eye,
Receives the scroll without or yea or no,
And forth with bashful innocence doth hie.

(1338-41)

This wholesome portrayal of the groom is placed in even greater relief by Lucrece's unwarranted and ill-conceived mistrust of the loyal envoy (“His kindled duty kindled her mistrust” [1352]), which, despite her overwrought state at this time, seems unjustified given the groom's innocent alacrity.¹⁹ In short, the conventional depravity of the scapegoat vassal, a feature in all versions of the myth, is revised in Shakespeare's Lucrece to bring forth an affirming and sympathetic characterization of a groom that deflates slighting references to servants elsewhere in the poem.

Even with this more favorable image of the messenger, the poem appears nevertheless to privilege the more conventional aristocratic view that low social status denotes low morals, the purpose of which is to establish and sustain a metaphorical connection between a depraved Tarquin and a depraved servant class. Thus, the ravisher Tarquin is variously referred to as “slave,” (200) “vassal,” (429) “servant of lust,” (295) etc., and Lucrece repeatedly warns Tarquin that his unlawful advances toward her will topple him from his otherwise lofty position in the social or moral hierarchy—rendering him as slavish as the vassal he would throw on top of Lucrece (and seemingly, the same vassal literalized before us in the figure of Lucrece's groom). The ties between Tarquin and the servants are further joined when the lord softens his earlier denigration of commoners by asserting that one's social standing depends as much upon the happenstance of birth and social mores as upon failings inherent in the individual: “For marks descried in men's nativity / Are nature's faults, not their own infamy” (538-39). But the point where the affinities between Tarquin and servants merge completely is in the poem's conventional use of blackness as the color emblem of unsavory morals. That is, given the narrative's unrelenting association of Tarquin with images of darkness (e.g., he is associated with “sable night” [117], “dim darkness” [118], “mud” [557], “black lust” [654], “blackest sin” [354], etc.), and given the inferred relationship between his immorality and the turpitude of servant status, and further given the fact that frequently, in art as well as myth, the slave in the Lucrece legend is represented as a “negro” or a dark-skinned Etruscan²⁰—it appears that Tarquin and Lucrece's messenger are joined, not only through the poem's metaphorical equation between low social status and low morals, but also through an imagistic association with darkness (“poor grooms are sightless night” [1013], says Lucrece) that equates “low” racial darkness with low or dark morals.

The ties between Tarquin and the messenger in Lucrece suggest that they are actually two aspects of the same servile character. (This is a symbolic feature of the myth generally.) However, because of Shakespeare's uniquely sympathetic presentation of individualized servants, our evaluation of Tarquin's vassal-like baseness is, given his association with the loyal groom, thrown open to question. The unstable nature of this figurative equation between Tarquin, immorality, and low social class allows us now to turn our attention to the narrative's most eminent subaltern, Brutus, the political hero whose role clarifies many of the ambiguities surrounding the conflicting meanings of “high” and “low” in Shakespeare's Lucrece.

III

More than any other character in the narrative, Brutus seems to represent truth and right reasoning. He is the only character who sees through the “divine” appearances of tyrants and who takes direct action to remedy problems. Given the manner in which the poem draws attention to the difficulties that arise with the naive idealizations of kings and of women (i.e., Collatine's boast), it is fitting that Brutus should achieve his heroism by means of a sudden transformation from naive fool to wise leader:

He with the Romans was esteemed so
As silly jeering idiots are with kings,
For sportive words and utt'ring foolish things.
But now he throws that shallow habit by,
Wherein deep policy did him disguise,
And arm'd his long-hid wits advisedly,
To check the tears in Collatinus' eyes.
“Thou wronged lord of Rome,” quoth he, “arise!
Let my unsounded self, suppos'd a fool,
Now set thy long-experienc'd wit to school.”

(1811-20)

Shakespeare accentuates the theme of Roman folly by habiting Brutus in the livery of what appears to be a socially inferior court jester, a lowly rank for Brutus that other versions of the myth do not emphasize; however, after Brutus assumes his new higher status as rebellious agent of truth and timely action, curiously, his newly refashioned heroism recalls an earlier description of Lucrece's groom, whose “true respect [is] / To talk in deeds, while others … / Promise more speed, but do it leisurely” (1347-49). This shared virtue between Brutus and the groom around the need for action creates a unified agency between them in the poem that opposes the empty rhetoric of the Roman lords who “Promise aid [to Lucrece]” (1696-97), but who fail to act upon her demand for justice. Additional support for the idea that Brutus and the groom act in concert with one another accrues with the poem's evocation of the infrequently used Renaissance word “silly.” It hardly seems coincidental that the text should use this somewhat unusual word once in reference to Lucrece's groom (1345), and again when Brutus throws off his “silly” (1812) idiot ways to transform himself from seeming fool to wise leader. That the various OED definitions of this word all denote a sense of unexaltedness (i.e., simple, unsophisticated, unlearned; of lowly rank or state) would appear to validate the view that the poem seeks to link Brutus to the groom through the idea of low social status. Admittedly, in isolation, Brutus' humble station does not cause much of a stir; but given the thrice-mentioned threat involving the vassal slave, the presence of individualized servants and vassals, Lucrece's class arguments against Tarquin's designs (and even her distinctions between high and low perspective in the Trojan painting), it seems clear that Brutus' accentuated lower class status in Lucrece is intended to align him with both the vassal groom and the fallen Tarquin.

But what are we to make of the parallels between the heroic Brutus and the sympathetic groom whose inferior station also describes the moral baseness of Tarquin's heinous crime? The answer lies with the comprehensive theme of revolt against the status quo which occurs on several levels in the poem. That is, Brutus revolts on a political level—but in his rise from court lackey to wise leader, there is also an implied social revolt by an assumedly worthless servant caste—a caste whose humane depiction in Lucrece's servant overturns and upgrades belittling stereotypes of that group by the Roman elite. Similarly, when the poem's narrator defines the groom's obliging manner as a “pattern of the worn-out age” (1350), it implies that such a passive pattern of social behavior is no longer viable—and the sympathetic depiction of the messenger as a worthy individual supports this improved refigurement of the slavish model. Moreover, such a radical change in the social hierarchy would appear to be at hand, given Brutus' sudden rise from lowly fool to the revolutionary hero who will lead Rome to a more pluralistic form of government—a socio-political paradigm of change, we might add, that resembles the momentous economic and political realignments taking place in early modern England.²¹ Yet literary change has been the focus here, and just as Shakespeare's revision of earlier mythical portrayals of the Lucrecian servant parallels an overturning of literary tradition and of social stereotypes, Brutus' social and political upheavals in the poem also signal the destruction of an artistic convention. That is, as the Romans' “silly jeering idiot,” Brutus plays the part of what strongly resembles a literary (as well as social) “court fool”; in heroically throwing off the jester's habit, Brutus also sheds a conventional literary persona, one ill-suited for the rebellious overthrow of tyrants in a politically naive Rome. Together with the poem's unconventional portrayal of servants, this overturning of literary convention by the poem's acknowledged political hero supports the argument that the slave-like “rebel” (625; 714) Tarquin also overturns literary tradition with his figurative assault on the idealized mythical image of the poetically self-conscious Lucrece.²² That Shakespeare was of a mind to articulate such a challenge to accepted poetic traditions would seem to be confirmed by sentiments expressed in Sonnet 59:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!
O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done;
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whe'r better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
          O, sure I am the wits of former days
          To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

Thus, if we consider the action of the poem on a literal level, Tarquin does in fact vanish from the narrative after his assault on Lucrece; however, in another sense his dramatic unruliness is resurrected in Lucrece's unconventional groom and in a revolutionary Brutus later in the poem. The three characters act together as avatars of one another, each one a variation of the impulse toward radical change in the narrative. As wise fool and exemplary inferior respectively, Brutus and the loyal groom break restrictive conventions to promote not only new social and political formations, but also new literary modes and values. And in his mimetic relationship to these “low” heroes, Tarquin martyrs himself with the figurative violation of a Lucrecian image that the poem encourages us to see as a compelling, but outmoded, Petrarchan trope of poetic beauty and truth. Hence the poem may be read as a kind of literary allegory, an extended reflexive metaphor that explores the relation between the poet and the prevailing discursive codes of the day. In such a context, Tarquin's violent attack on an entrenched poetic figure may be viewed as a rebellious sacrificial ritual that aims to bring about beneficial literary change—again, much as Tarquin's mytho-historical rape of Lucrece becomes the tragically ironic catalyst of political change in a tyrannized pre-Republican Rome.²³

In this essay I have sought, through an analysis of Tarquin, to explain Lucrece 's resistance to interpretations that fail to challenge the poem's surface preoccupation with conventional poetic codes. In rendering what I hope is a fresh perspective on the poem, I have been guided in part by the historicized view of Renaissance drama (I see Lucrece as narrative drama) postulated recently by David Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. Theorizing that cultures are not homogeneous productions but rather conflicted entities comprised of “uneven temporalities and contradictory discursive practices,” Kastan and Stallybrass conclude that “it was rarely essences and centralities which the drama of the English Renaissance most powerfully staged, but inversions, perversions, the local maneuvers of dressing up and of masquerade, the violent or ingenious word or device in which a whole order of things trembles and fractures.”²⁴ I would offer that the Tarquin character in Lucrece is at the center of a violent transforming power in the poem, a power that seeks to refigure the established literary order of things through the subversion of a reified symbol of that established literary order.

Given the evolving pattern of twentieth century criticism of Lucrece, it appears that the so-called “ironic” reading of the poem answers best the recurring critical questions raised about the narrative's elusive complexity. Jonathan Hart has succinctly restated these recurring critical questions as follows: “Why must the woman be silent? Why must she die?” With respect to Tarquin, these queries are not sufficiently answered with interpretations that merely invoke those conventions of evil that define the poem as morality drama, with Tarquin as the vice. Cogent answers to these questions do emerge, however, when we go beyond the poem's surface conceit to see Tarquin as a metapoetic signifier of a creative impulse to renegotiate the norms of an inherited—but changing—literary order.

Notes

1. Vytautas Kavolis, “Civilizational Models of Evil,” in Evil: Self and Culture, eds., Marie Coleman Nelson and Michael Eigen (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984), p. 18.

2. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), p. 154. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Exclusive of Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 499-500. F. T. Prince, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: The Poems (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. xxv-xxvi. J. W. Lever, “The Poems,” Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), p. 22.

3. Don Cameron Allen, “Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), pp. 89-98; J. C. Maxwell, in his introduction to the Cambridge University edition of The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), pp. xx-xxvi; Roy C. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Promises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 3-41; and Michel Grivelet, “Shakespeare's ‘War With Time’: The Sonnets and Richard II,” Shakespeare Survey, 23 (1970), p. 76. For a concise review of the Augustinian perspective in its relation to Shakespeare's Lucrece, see Harriet Hawkins, “Myth and Morals,” Essays in Criticism, 34 (1984), pp. 79-84.

4. William Shakespeare, Lucrece, in The Arden Shakespeare: The Poems, ed., F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), 1. 394. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

5. Battenhouse, p.16.

6. Coppélia Kahn, for example, explained the poem in terms of socio-sexual dynamics of power in patrilinear societies; A. Robin Bowers sought to vindicate Lucrece from “unsympathetic” readers by exploring the medieval roots of the narrative's forensic structure and tracing the poem's relationship to conduct books and Renaissance portraiture; Heather Dubrow demonstrated the latent congruity in Lucrece 's incongruous language and action through her analysis of the linguistic trope of syneciosis. Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976) pp. 45-72; A. Robin Bowers, “Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), pp. 1 -21; Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 80-168.

7. Many critics have noted what has been called a “double understanding” or “hidden perspective” in Lucrece. For an interesting evaluation of this view of the poem, see Richard Levin, “The Ironic Reading of The Rape of Lucrece and the Problem of External Evidence,” Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), pp. 85-92.

8. This approach to the poem owes much to Joel Fineman's seminal work on Shakespearean poetic convention in his book, The Perjured Eye, and to his analysis of Lucrece in the essay, “Representations of Rape in Lucrece.” Representations, 20 (1987), pp. 25-76. Several critics have followed Fineman's lead in addressing the poem's elusive complexity through the examination of the narrative's hyperbolized interest in itself as a literary product. In this regard, see also David Willbern, “Hyperbolic Desire: Shakespeare's Lucrece” in Contending Kingdoms, eds., Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 202-24 and Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), pp. 140-88. For earlier critical views in this same vein, see also Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986) pp. 66-82; Nancy Vickers, “Blazon of Sweet Beauties Best: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds., Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95-115; and James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp. 76-100.

9. Tita French, “‘A Badge of Fame’: Shakespeare's Rhetorical Lucrece,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 10 (1984), p. 99.

10. “The rape of Lucrece narrated at length in the verse is the middle of an action whose beginning is ‘kings’ and whose end is ‘consuls.’” Michael Platt, “The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic For Which It Stands,” Centennial Review, 19 (1975), p. 64.

11. Although Platt is not concerned with issues of literary convention and method in Lucrece, he does nevertheless corroborate the relationship between the rape and revolution plots with his analysis of the poem's reflexive allusion to the notion of a “conceit deceitful” (1423). As Platt says: “The visible surface of (the poem) shows us the rape of a chaste matron. Like the painter's art in the Troy tapestry, the poet's art leads us to the imagined whole of which this rape is only a part. Just as Achilles stands behind the visible spear, so does a birth stand behind the rape. It is the birth of the Republic.” Platt, p. 77.

12. Among those critics who have argued that the poem is involved in an interrogation of its own conventions and methods, only Siemon has gone so far as to suggest that the poem seeks to carry out a “willful violation” of its own givens. Since Siemon's discussion of Lucrece constitutes but his preliminary remarks to a broader examination of iconoclasm in the plays, he does not fully explore, as I hope to here, the implications of his hypothesis that the poem intends not simply to question its own literary premises, but rather to revoke them.

13. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed., Sylvan Barnet (New York: NAL, 1964). Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

14. Dubrow, p. 117.

15. Jonathan Hart, “Narratorial Strategies in The Rape of Lucrece,” Studies in English Literature, 32 (1992), pp. 69, 76.

16. Harold R. Walley, “The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy,” PMLA, 76 (1961), pp. 486-87.

17. Wilbern also postulates that the spirit of Tarquin reappears later in the poem. He contends, however, that Tarquin re-emerges in Lucrece herself, as the animus of the victim's involuntary absorption of her captor's viewpoint and identity. Willbern's notion of “binary consanguinity” between victim and aggressor is psychologically valid (i.e., the hostage complex) but not really new or “surprisingly complex.” My reading attempts to show how Tarquin's re-emergence in unanticipated character forms invites the reader to entertain a quite different interpretation of Tarquin's role in the poem that has previously been considered.

18. The three references to the threatened slander by a slave occur at lines 515-37, 670-73, and 1630-45. For the single references to the threat in earlier accounts, see Prince's edition of The Poems, pp. 191, 194, 200.

19. Lucrece is understandably shaken after her ordeal, but in contrast to her espoused faultlessness, her chidings and her terse, blunt directives (even to her gentle and sympathetic hand-maiden) strike us as untoward and even a bit haughty. We could accept her testy chagrin as simply a manifestation of her recent trauma, but as Lucrece herself has apprehended with Tarquin, “greatest scandal waits on greatest state” (1006). That is, in light of Lucrece's much-touted perfection, we can hardly avoid feeling that she has not quite lived up to the high moral standards proclaimed for her as she falls to childing and mistrusting her loyal servants.

20. Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 13.

21. That Shakespeare might have recognized the cogency of such social and political ferment would seem to be supported by the shifts in the social and political climate in England that were well underway by the time that Lucrece was written. Lawrence Stone remains the most eloquent spokesman of this now widely accepted view of the period: “In the century after 1540, there appeared a growing body of men of substance. … These men were steadily enlarging their numbers, their social and economic weight, and their political independence. Behind them loomed far larger numbers of yeomen and artisans, the respectable, industrious, literate, bible-reading, God-fearing lower middle class, many of whose aspirations these leaders shared, represented and articulated. … The only response they got (from the ruling elite) was increasingly strident and irrelevant lectures on the Divine Right of Kings. …” (Stone's latter statement is particularly suggestive, given the argument here regarding Lucrece's exalted poetic status.) The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 114-16.

22. In support of this latter point, it is noteworthy that the one other invocation of the word “silly” in the poem finds Lucrece referred to as a “silly lamb” (167)—a diminutive designation that should enjoin her fate to that of Brutus and the groom. However, while the poem transforms and elevates our view of Brutus and the servant, the hero Brutus tells us that Lucrece's self-immolation marks rather her inability to move beyond a lowly “mistook … childish humor” (1825). That is, Lucrece is criticized for her inability to transform and elevate her traditional portrayal of the despairing, powerless, and finally static good woman wronged.

23. In a recent essay, “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33[1991], pp. 327-54), Linda Woodbridge argues corroboratively that the poem is a topical political allegory in which the heroine, Lucrece, symbolizes late sixteenth-century England's vulnerability to attack from without. In Woodbridge's allegory, Tarquin looks like the enemy, but actually represents a voice of alarm that aggressively seeks to press a recalcitrant England into needful governmental action: “The England (i.e., Lucrece) once conquering others has now conquered itself through tolerating tyranny. … In Lucrece … [Tarquin's] rape … lead(s) to the downfall of a tyrannical government and to … political salvation.” Pp. 338, 347

24. David Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance, (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 7, 11-12.