[In the following excerpt, Burrow provides an overview of The Rape of Lucrece, focusing on the poem's sources, political implications, and its treatment of the topic of rape. Burrow takes issue with those who disparage The Rape of Lucrece as confusing and inconclusive, and he maintains that the poem's primary merit is its willingness to explore “dark but profound questions.”]

THE ARGUMENT, SOURCES, AND POLITICS.

The story of Lucretia, the chaste wife whose rape precipitated the ejection of the kings from Rome, has been subjected to varieties of interpretation from the earliest period of Roman historiography.¹ Shakespeare could have read versions by Ovid, Livy (or by Livy in Painter's translation), by Dionysius Halicarnassus, Gower, and Chaucer, and any number of popularized versions of these.² Each version differs slightly in detail, as well as in its ethical and political attitudes to the central character. Lucretia stood at the centre of a variety of intersecting ethical and political debates. She was often briefly cited in both poetry and prose as an example of feminine virtue, whose suicide reflected the purity of her mind. But most post-classical interpreters of her story were also aware of St Augustine's critical treatment of it. Augustine argues at length that chastity is a virtue of the mind, and so ‘what man of wit will think he loseth his chastity, though his captived body be forced to prostitute unto another's bestiality?’³ He consequently presented the suicide of Lucretia as a case which raised a mass of awkward questions about responsibility and punishment: either she did not consent to the rape, in which case only Tarquin was guilty of a crime and she unjustly condemned herself to death; or else ‘she herself did give a lustful consent’ and so rightly punished herself. He concludes, ‘this case is in such a strait, that if the murder be extenuated, the adultery is confirmed, and if this be cleared the other is aggravated’.⁴ By 1610 the full text of Augustine's City of God was available in English (by an odd quirk of fortune it was printed at almost exactly the same time, and in the same print-shop, as Shakespeare's Sonnets). In its post-classical forms the story of Lucretia prompts uneasy arguments about relations between body and will, consent and pollution.

In most of the versions which precede Augustine Lucretia's story is politically charged. Her rape lies at the start of the Roman Republic, and writers who like republics regard it in a very different way from those who do not. According to Livy, her violation led to the banishment of the kings from Rome and the institution of government by consuls, and thus enabled the emergence of later forms of Roman republican government. This was a profoundly influential view of her significance, but was by no means the only way of glossing the political consequences of her rape. For a tradition deriving from Tacitus, the consular government to which her rape gave rise was as much a form of slavery as the monarchy from which it was notionally an escape. William Fulbecke in his An Historical Collection of the Continual Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians (printed by Richard Field in 1601) wrote of the transfer of power from kings to consuls which followed the expulsion of the Tarquins, ‘what could be more unjust, or more contrary to the free estate of a city, than to subject the whole common weal to the rule of many potentates, and to exclude the people from all right and interest in public affairs?’ (p. 1).⁵ By 1574 Justus Lipsius was praising Tacitus for having concentrated on examining life inside the courts of princes, and the flattery and treachery which occur under a tyrant, rather than dwelling on the ‘speciosam Lucretiae necem’, the misleadingly beautiful death of Lucrece.⁶ These arguments about the political significance of Lucretia's story have not stopped: some twentieth-century readers have felt that the republican panegyrists who leapt to praise the republic which resulted from Lucretia's fate are too readily founding their form of liberty on a woman's violation, and that republican ideals and the justification of rape are not just bedfellows in this story, but are sinisterly and consistently intertangled.⁷

So the question ‘Which sources did Shakespeare follow?’ does not just mean comparing in painful detail versions of the story in which Lucrece sends out two messengers to tell her family about her rape, and those in which she sends only one. It means deciding which sides (and the plural is necessary) Shakespeare took in these many arguments about Lucrece: is her story about rape, or about liberty? Does telling her story distract attention from an analysis of what tyranny is and how it works? The question as to which sources Shakespeare drew on also reverberates with two other questions: what are the politics implicit in the poem? And what is the relationship between the poem and the prose Argument which is prefixed to it? These three questions are intervolved because the Argument shows clear signs of a debt to Livy, and shows an implicit allegiance with a republican form of government (or, to be more precise, an elective consulship). It concludes: ‘Wherewith the people were so moved that, with one consent and a general acclamation, the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls.’ The vital word here is ‘consent’, and the key concept which it appears to support is the belief that the government of the state should reflect a popular voice.⁸ The poem, however, differs from the Argument in several respects, some relatively insignificant, and some central to its moral emphasis and meaning.⁹ In the poem Lucrece sends one messenger to her father and husband, whereas in the Argument she sends ‘messengers’; in the poem Tarquin does not seem to have visited Lucrece's house before the rape, whereas the Argument says he and Collatine had surprised the other Roman matrons at play the night before, and had discovered the chaste Lucrece busily sewing. The most significant difference of emphasis, however, emerges in the very last lines of the poem:

The Romans plausibly did give consent
To Tarquin's everlasting banishment.

(ll. 1854-5)

Here the Romans only ‘give consent’ to the punishment of Tarquin, and there is no reference to a change in the mode of government. The word ‘consent’ is echoed from the Argument, but seems muffled by the echo: here it is as though the Romans are simply applauding the performance of Tarquin's punishment in order to give it a retrospective seal of approval, rather than actively participating in a transformation of their state.

What is going on here? Was a more Livian and more political Argument tacked on to an only peripherally political poem? Richard Field printed a number of political works, including William Fulbecke's Historical Collection, and, in 1594, Justus Lipsius's highly Tacitean Six Books of Politics. His print-shop certainly had connections with people who were capable of writing a preface to Shakespeare's poem which was informed by detailed knowledge of Roman historians. The pagination of the Quarto left him with a blank page after the dedication (A2^v), which the Argument fills up neatly.¹⁰ Perhaps it was put there just before publication, to flesh out the narrative and historical context to what the Dedication describes as a pamphlet ‘without beginning’. Alternatively, Shakespeare may have read or reread Livy (perhaps in Painter's translation) before he wrote the Argument.¹¹ Or, like Spenser, whose ‘Letter to Ralegh’ gets almost all of his own Faerie Queene wrong, he might have forgotten details of the poem when he came to describe it in prose.

The simplest and most radical hypothesis, however, is that Shakespeare read the version of the story of Lucretia in Ovid's Fasti side by side with the more explicitly political prose versions by Livy and the Greek historian Dionysius Halicarnassus, and that by adding the prose Argument to his poem he invited his readers to read the Lucretia story in the same way, as two generically distinct things. A single book would have given Shakespeare a grasp of all these variant versions of the story. This was Paulus Marsus's edition of Ovid's Fasti, which was frequently reprinted in the sixteenth century.¹² There are strong grounds for believing Shakespeare knew this version. Before the rape of Lucretia, Ovid's Tarquin pretends to the Gabii that he has been cast out by his family. He then betrays the tribe who have taken him in. At this point both Marsus and his fellow commentator Constantius compare Tarquin to Sinon.¹³ This detail is almost certainly what prompted Shakespeare, who was attempting a ‘graver’, quasi-epic, labour in Lucrece, to insert the description of the sack of Troy into his poem, at the climax of which Tarquin is compared to Sinon, the Greek who wins the pity of the Trojans and then persuades them to take in the Trojan horse.

But whether or not Shakespeare owned or read Marsus's Ovid, the edition gives an exemplary instance of how early-modern readers read the tale of Lucretia, and casts a bright light on the relationship between the poem and its Argument. To read Ovid's Fasti in Marsus's edition is to experience the story of Lucretia in multiple versions at the same time. Massive quotations from Livy physically surround the elegiac couplets of Ovid, and sometimes all but push them off the page. Marsus prints so much of Livy because he believed that Ovid imitated the Roman historian, and he urges his readers to make comparisons between the versions in prose and verse.¹⁴ He also ends his commentary on the story with an encomium of the liberty which the Romans obtained after the banishment of the kings, which he compares to the liberty which he himself had obtained several years before, and which he celebrates each year.¹⁵ The most influential recent accounts of the way Livy was read in the late sixteenth century suggest that he was taken as a practical guide to political life;¹⁶ the example of Marsus's Ovid indicates that readers in this period also read comparatively, with an eye to variant versions rather than to the practical applications of what they read. Marsus encourages his readers to think about the elegiac Lucretia of Ovid and the republican Lucretia of the Roman historians side by side, and clearly applied the political argument of the latter to his own circumstances. This set of reading practices is very likely to explain the presence of two discrepant versions of the story in the volume which Field printed, and may well indicate that for Shakespeare, as for Marsus, the story was two things at once: a poem which was partly about how to give suffering a voice, and a republican prose history. The ‘wiser sort’ of Shakespeare's readers would have not been surprised to be invited to think about the story in two distinct ways by the physical form of a book.

Does the presence of the Argument and the likelihood that it is by Shakespeare mean, though, that Lucrece is a republican poem? Ovid's poem and the historians' prose versions have distinct and complementary emphases. Ovid emphasizes moments at which Lucretia is unable to speak, when her voice sticks in her throat, and Marsus's annotations frequently draw attention to Lucretia's hesitations and stammerings (and Shakespeare's Lucrece repeatedly breaks off or rethinks sentences as passions draw her mind another way).¹⁷ But Marsus is also keen to quote from the historians extensive passages of exhortative rhetoric by men: whereas Brutus's speech persuading the Romans to banish Tarquin is passed over in indirect speech in Ovid, Marsus's commentary quotes an extensive digest of Dionysius Halicarnassus, in which Brutus's rhetoric stirs the populace to action.¹⁸ The relationship between text and commentary presses for both a generic distinction between different versions of the story, and for a gendered differentiation between modes of speech: passion chokes a woman's voice in Ovid's poem; men, meanwhile, speak out to transform the state into a republic.

This aspect of the commentary alerts us to the fact that Shakespeare's response to the versions of Lucretia's story which came down to him is in one respect extraordinarily radical. Shakespeare's Lucrece is astonishingly, unstoppably, all-but endlessly eloquent. She has her moments of elegiac choking of the voice, of the pathetic silence of the Ovidian heroine (e.g. ll. 1604-8); but she has also taken over the eloquence of the men who speak so loudly and so long from the margins of the Renaissance Ovid. And one moment when Shakespeare allows his heroine to speak, and speak like a man, has a massive bearing on the question of the poem's politics. Unlike any other Lucretia before her, Shakespeare's Lucrece urges Tarquin not to rape her, and she does so using a vocabulary which is distinctively male, and for readers in 1594 distinctively political:

This deed will make thee only loved for fear,
But happy monarchs still are feared for love.
With foul offenders thou perforce must bear,
When they in thee the like offences prove.
If but for fear of this, thy will remove.
          For princes are the glass, the school, the book,
          Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look.
‘And wilt thou be the school where lust shall learn?
Must he in thee read lectures of such shame?
Wilt thou be glass wherein it shall discern
Authority for sin, warrant for blame
To privilege dishonour in thy name?
          Thou back'st reproach against long-living laud,
          And mak'st fair reputation but a bawd.

(ll. 610-23)

This builds on, but goes far beyond, the transposition of a male voice of seduction to a female voice in Venus and Adonis. Lucrece speaks here with the voice of a Renaissance royal counsellor, and echoes Cicero's injunction that it is better to be loved than feared.¹⁹ The last couplet of the first stanza here quoted was excerpted in W. B.'s The Philosopher's Banquet of 1633 under the heading ‘Of Princes’,²⁰ and the lines are themselves a culling of commonplaces. Antonio Guevara in his Dial of Princes, for example, insists that Princes should govern themselves before they can govern their state. He claims too ‘that if the miserable Tarquin [whom Guevara conflates with his father the king] had been beloved in Rome, he had never been deprived of the realm, for committing adultery with Lucretia’.²¹ The advice which Lucrece gives to Tarquin here is a textbook example of political oratory in this period: the civic aspect of rhetoric in Elizabethan England was not displayed by speaking to the Senate, but by giving counsel. Early readers of the poem would have heard behind the voice of Lucrece at this point that of Erasmus (‘The tyrant strives to be feared, the king to be loved’),²² or any one of a dozen contributors to the genre of humanist prince-books. Her words would have won an easy nod of assent from early readers, who would instinctively feel that princes should seek to be feared through love, and should provide exemplary government. They should ‘govern all’, or regulate their appetites. These comfortable, and, by the 1590s decidedly old-fashioned,²³ Erasmian orthodoxies then abruptly end:

‘Have done,’ quoth he. ‘My uncontrollèd tide
Turns not, but swells the higher by this let.’

(ll. 645-6)

Tarquin will not be counselled. Shakespeare takes a paradigm instance of what should be politically effective rhetoric within the tradition of humanist political thought, and he puts it into the place where readers familiar with Ovid would expect either silence from Lucrece or a pathetically ineffective lament. The result of this hybridization of elegy and the discourse of humanist prince-books is an explosive piece of rhetorical cross-dressing: the forms of counsel which should prevent monarchy sliding into tyranny simply do not work in this poem. They become the words of a woman who is about to be raped. And she is raped by a man who cannot govern his own passions.

Jonathan Bate has suggested that ‘Shakespeare's poem … is more interested in desire than in politics’. Ian Donaldson has suggested that ‘Shakespeare cannot have wished to be thought to be questioning, even in a very indirect way, the system of monarchical government under which he lived and to which he owed allegiance’.²⁴ Michael Platt and Annabel Patterson have, conversely, seen Lucrece as either overtly republican or as a work which is rooted in the discourse of republicanism.²⁵ The variety of these judgements testifies to the complexity of the poem, and all may have their truths. But the widespread analogy between the supremacy of the reason over the passions and of the just monarch over a nation made the passions of a prince and their regulation an inescapably political matter in this period. ‘Government’—Lucrece urges Tarquin to ‘govern all’—meant both the regulation of passions and of the nation. The poem is not ‘royalist’ if that is taken to mean that it is founded on a belief in the absolute supremacy of the will of the prince. It is also not likely to be a ‘republican poem’, in the sense of one which advocated the abolition of monarchy, since such a thing was not a publishable, perhaps not even a fully thinkable, thing in the England of the 1590s. So what is it?

For many of the most influential political thinkers of the late Elizabethan period England was a form of mixed monarchy, in which the Queen in parliament interacted with the Queen in Council in ways which could attribute considerable power to any one of these three elements. The moment of the rape in Lucrece dramatizes a collapse in the complex interrelationship between monarch and counsel. In the context of what Patrick Collinson has described as ‘the Elizabethan monarchical republic’ this is a terrifying event. The ideal tempering of a monarch's passions by reason and counsel is shown only in a state of radical dysfunction. Theoretical formulations of mixed monarchy in the Elizabethan period are thin on the ground; but even Lord Burghley, who was by no means a radical thinker, could envisage formal measures for ensuring that the Privy Council would continue to govern during the interregnum which might follow the death of Elizabeth; others, such as Thomas Digges, could imagine Parliament remaining in session after the Queen's death in order to determine the succession.²⁶ By the end of Elizabeth's reign the Queen's femininity was shifting traditional views of what counsel should be, and the voices of female members of the privy chamber might often have almost as much influence on her actions as male members of her Privy Council.

Lucrece does not directly comment on these aspects of the political scene, nor does it provide a viable republican alternative to conciliar monarchy. It transposes the rhetorical trick which Shakespeare had learned in writing Venus and Adonis into a political key: it puts the discourse appropriate to one kind of speaker—a male counsellor—into the mouth of another kind of speaker—a victim of rape—and in doing so raises unanswered and urgent questions about both gender roles and politics. A woman who speaks like a counsellor, and then is raped—this subject-matter darkly intimates that a polity founded on the notional ability of counsellors to curb the will of the prince encounters a black and insoluble problem if the prince cannot control himself. And Shakespeare's method of raising this insoluble problem makes any political radicalism in the poem immediately deniable, even when its critical position is most apparent to its readers. If Lucrece's words to Tarquin were quoted out of their context (and Shakespeare, as we have seen, had learned to allow printed words to drift free of their context in Venus and Adonis) they would become a commonplace of impeccable orthodoxy—as they duly became when quoted by W.B. in The Philosopher's Banquet. In their original context, in a poem in which even a prince is unable to persuade himself not to follow the ‘worser course’, and in which a woman is destroyed as a result of her failure to persuade him, and in which a prose argument intimates that there are alternatives to monarchy, Lucrece's words ask awkward and unanswerable questions about unregulated monarchy. Rhetoric once again, as in Venus, fails to persuade. But here it cannot persuade to good, nor can it save a state from decline towards tyranny.

READING (IN) LUCRECE.

Shakespeare learnt from and ingeniously transformed what he read. One of the things he read and from which he learnt most was Shakespeare. Lucrece is part complement, part sequel to Venus and Adonis. Where the action of Venus and Adonis had spread itself in a leisurely way across two days, Lucrece spins almost twice as many lines from a single night and morning. Venus had shrunk and expanded time with a delicious wantonness: in Lucrece the only thing that happens quickly is travel to and from Collatium. Tarquin arrives at the poem's start in a flash of dark fire; Collatine and the other Roman lords enter abruptly at its end with ‘But now’ (l. 1583). Lucrece's body is ‘published’ on the streets of Rome with such ‘speedy diligence’ (l. 1853) that it takes only a single line to accomplish. Once characters are within the domestic space into which Lucrece is herself oppressively locked, however, time is forced into slow motion. Tarquin's long slow passage to Lucrece's chamber makes every tiny object become an obstacle: the wind blows him back, a needle tries heroically to become a sword. It is as though the poem's slow expansiveness is the chief guarantee that it is indeed the ‘graver labour’ promised in the dedication to Venus and Adonis: just as its rhyme royal stanza extends and slows the brisk six-line form of Venus and Adonis, so its treatment of time delays action and forces its characters to reflect on what they are doing, and on what has been done to them. This poem cannot flit lightly through the woods, as Venus and Adonis could, nor does it fleetingly compress the complaints of a woman at night as Venus and Adonis had done (ll. 829-52): Lucrece spends lines 747-1078 filling the hours of darkness with complaints, and repeatedly seeks new means of making moan. Even the sound of morning birdsong coming in from the outside world is transformed inward into lament (ll. 1107 ff.), as Lucrece weaves the notes of her sad song into the melancholy tale of the raped Philomel. The fleeting moment of sexual consummation which was missing from Venus and Adonis becomes, in the slow-motion domestic spaces of Lucrece, a source of pained reflection and regret, and all but endless eloquence.

Although Lucrece radically decelerates Venus and Adonis, its imaginative starting-point is the final section of the earlier poem, when Venus complains against death, curses love, and time seems to stand still as the body of Adonis melts beside her. The final phase of Venus and Adonis also moves towards a physically inward setting, as Venus's eyes shrink back into her head like the tender horns of cockled snails, and the goddess finally flits off, meaning to (though perhaps not actually performing her intention) ‘immure herself and not be seen’. Lucrece spends her poem immured within her house, until her body is finally displayed in Rome. And throughout the poem Tarquin's assault on her is represented as a raid on the inner regions of a domestic space. As he hovers over the sleeping Lucrece, her body becomes a castle under siege:

Whose ranks of blue veins as his hand did scale
Left their round turrets destitute and pale.
They, must'ring to the quiet cabinet
Where their dear governess and lady lies,
Do tell her she is dreadfully beset,
And fright her with confusion of their cries.
She, much amazed, breaks ope her locked up eyes,
          Who, peeping forth this tumult to behold,
          Are by his flaming torch dimmed and controlled.
Imagine her as one in dead of night,
From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking,
That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite,
Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking.
What terror 'tis! But she in worser taking,
          From sleep disturbèd, heedfully doth view
          The sight which makes supposèd terror true.

(ll. 440-55)

At the centre of Venus and Adonis a goddess discovers that ‘all is imaginary’, and at the end of the earlier poem Venus's mind and perceptions are thrown into rebellious tumult by the sight of Adonis dead. Those passages lie behind the extract from Lucrece quoted above, but are rewritten in a darker key that suits the claustrophobic interiority of Lucrece. Her veins become desperate servants scrambling to wake their governess as she sleeps in her ‘quiet cabinet’. It places Lucrece in a tiny, intimate room within a castle, surrounded by walls within walls. Then the real and the imaginary blend, as a reader is first asked to imagine her imaginings, and then to realize that she awakes and finds her imagination truth. A dreaming queen within a simile of siege who is really a woman under attack: the effect is of claustrophobia within claustrophobia, of truth within a dream within a siege. Lucrece never lets its readers forget that it is a chamber work in a literal sense of being set in a chamber: the word ‘chamber’ is rung on in lines 302, 337, 365, 1626.²⁷ Here she occupies a ‘cabinet’, an intimate inner room designed for private occupation, to which only personal servants and family would have access. This image of a little room hems in the heroine: at the end of the poem Lucrece herself recalls and attempts to purify her violated inner regions by insisting that her mind ‘Doth in her poisoned closet yet endure’ (l. 1659), as a clean inhabitant within a polluted, private room.²⁸ The rape is figured as a violation of domestic spaces, and in this respect feeds off widespread late sixteenth-century anxieties about burglary and theft.²⁹

But the attempt at violation of the domestic sphere rebounds on the rapist. In a passage which is designed to make its readers do a double-take, it is Tarquin's soul, rather than that of Lucrece, which is exposed to a siege and ravished:

Besides, his soul's fair temple is defacèd,
          To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
          To ask the spotted princess how she fares.
She says her subjects with foul insurrection
Have battered 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 controllèd still,
          But her foresight could not forestall their will.

(ll. 719-28)

‘She’: the pronoun matters acutely. Tarquin becomes a rebel against himself, who destroys his own soul's private and consecrated places, and his invasive male pride forces on him a feminine sense of violation.³⁰ This detail illustrates how in this poem Shakespeare was not just building on, but going far beyond the ending of Venus and Adonis. Lucrece generates a slow-moving interior realm where all action seems violent and abrupt, and in which men of action have to readjust themselves to the reflective pace and expansive volume of female rhetoric, and find themselves becoming victims of interiority. Tarquin and Collatine are men at war who are suddenly plunged into a setting and a pace of life with which they are occupationally unable to cope. Lamenting, thinking on consequences, debating the pros and cons of actions—these things are forced on the men in the poem, and make their rhetoric seem inadequate to the domestic realm. The way Lucrece deliberately brings warriors and images of warfare into a domestic sphere marks it as one of the seminal moments in Shakespeare's career. The long slow pause after, or in anticipation of, or in the midst of a battle is a setting to which he recurs again and again. The awkwardness of men, especially martial men, misplaced in domestic environments for which neither their language nor their conduct quite suits them becomes the substance of many of the tragedies: Macbeth begins after a battle, forcing its hero to reflect about action rather than act; the oppressive domestic closeness of Othello is forced on its hero by the sudden and unexpected end of the battle against the Turks. Slowness, reflection, domestic space, and a preoccupation with how deeds and desires and persuasion interconnect: these themes and moods Shakespeare came to first in Lucrece. And they are absolutely central to Shakespeare.

Even readers who recognize the significance of Lucrece within Shakespeare's career, however, have felt that it is overstocked with words. Few who have read Lucrece's complaints against Night, Opportunity, and Time would wish that she had found further personifications to berate (although Shakespeare's treatment of the complaint tradition is carefully used to characterize his heroine).³¹ The poem interweaves a wide range of imagery from seemingly divergent areas: there is a little of the hunting imagery that runs through Venus and Adonis, there are recurrent allusions to merchant venturers in search of profit, there is a mass of heraldry, some smoke, and a more or less equal amount of fire. There are many seas, which extend from the boundless tide of Tarquin's will as he rapes Lucrece into the eddying tidal waters of Collatine's grief at the end of the poem. Both of these floods seem to flow together in the dark waters of blood which finally ebb from and surround the ‘island’ of Lucrece's body. Commentators have often felt these riches of imagery do not work comfortably together, and that their diversity compounds inconsistencies and uncertainties in the ethical design of the poem. It has been said that the poem is caught uncomfortably between two incompatible ethical models: Lucrece has a soul, and a profound sense of inward guilt; she also has a keen sense of family honour and is overwhelmed by the shame that goes with the violation of that public honour by Tarquin.³² Is the poem concerned with interior guilt or public shame, with insides or with outsides? Is it primarily interested in the material question of who owns Lucrece, or in the immaterial question of who is dishonoured by the rape?

The poem does raise these questions, and does not offer conclusive answers to them. But the fact that it does so is not indicative of a flawed design. Like its sister poem Venus and Adonis, it relishes multiplicity, and is fascinated by perspectival experimentation: it invites its readers to feel with Tarquin the dazzling brightness of Lucrece's face as he pulls back the curtain from her bed (and this moment of wonder prompts one of the very few reprises of the ‘Look’ formula (l. 372) that regularly introduces similes in Venus and Adonis); it also wants its readers then suddenly to shift perspective and to be inside Lucrece's eyelids as she opens them to see the carnal ghost who has violated her chamber. The poem builds on the tearful diffractions of sight which Venus experiences at the end of Venus and Adonis, and refuses to see things singly. But it does much more than this. The poem is partly about the different ways in which readers read, and the distinct ways in which different people and different sexes respond to material realities. It is also the result of deep thinking about the ways in which human actions may be described in a number of ways which are not compatible with each other. Its Argument, as we have seen, draws attention to the fact that there are various ways of reading the story of Lucrece. And reading—how one does it, how experience changes how one does it—is one of the central preoccupations of the poem. Both books and people are physical things and more than physical things, and this poem presses repeatedly on this similarity between people and texts. It begins to do so when Lucrece fails to read Tarquin's intentions from his eyes:

But she that never coped with stranger eyes
Could pick no meaning from their parling looks,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies,
Writ in the glassy margins of such books.

(ll. 99-102)

The poem was written to be printed. Here, though, it suggests that at the centre of people's minds are secret thoughts which readers of their faces can miss. The verb ‘writ’ suggests that Tarquin's privy intentions might be either printed notes which explain an arcane allusion, or handwritten marginalia jotted down according to principles known only to the annotator and illegible to Lucrece.³³ Tarquin's face has both the impersonality of print and the idiosyncrasy and near illegibility of a manuscript annotation.

Do readers read aright? The heroine of the poem is throughout conscious that she may be read, and read awry, that people will see her face and infer from it an inner crime which she did not commit. One of her primary concerns is to ensure that she will not become an exemplum of ill for those who debate in future over her life. She is also, at the start of the poem, a simple reader who believes that books and their margins should tell the same story, and that inner feelings should be physically printed on the material form of the face. She wants to be a legible, physical emblem of grief, where her inner sorrow is simply published in her face:

‘And grave, like water that doth eat in steel,
Upon my cheeks what helpless shame I feel.’

(ll. 755-6)

At the same time she fears such publication of her sorrow if it meant that the source of her shame would become legible to all. She fears that the sour-faced groom, and even those who cannot read, will be able to perceive her private experiences published in her expression:

Yea, the illiterate that know not how
          To cipher what is writ in learnèd books
          Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks.

(ll. 810-12)

At this stage of her story her face does not in fact carry the story behind her grief graven upon it, although she thinks it does. But by the end of the poem her tears have fretted visible characters in her countenance, and her grief is written clearly for all to see:

                                                  with a joyless smile, she turns away
The face, that map which deep impression bears
Of hard misfortune, carved in it with tears.

(ll. 1711-13)

Grief gradually etches emotion onto the face, making it a map of woe legible by all. This is in a way the end of a process of metamorphosis, which turns Lucrece into a physical form which is immediately and unambiguously legible, and which parallels the movement of the poem from the heroine's chamber to the public world of Rome. Private experiences are finally published in the face. This moment also prepares the way for Lucrece's reception into a literary tradition as an exemplary violated heroine, whose chastity is legibly printed in her countenance.

The odd thing about the poem is that while Lucrece is becoming an increasingly legible figure of grief, her own view of what reading is undergoes a radical change. And it changes in a direction which is diametrically opposed to the direction in which her own person is tending. She comes to read in a way that is aware of the subtle shining secrecies written in the margins of people's faces. The crucial transitional moment in this process is her response to the picture of the siege of Troy. That picture is initially introduced from what it is tempting to call an impersonal perspective. It is not quite right to call it ‘impersonal’ however, since this phase of the description repeatedly addresses the reader of the poem as ‘you’ (‘There might you see’), or as an impersonal ‘one’ which instinctively carries a male pronoun (‘That one would swear he saw them quake and tremble’). As the narrator describes the picture he emphasizes the way that it inscribes the characters of the Greek heroes in their painted faces:

In Ajax and Ulysses, O what art
Of physiognomy might one behold!
The face of either ciphered either's heart;
Their face their manners most expressly told.

(ll. 1394-7)

‘One’ (male) immediately reads the heroes' manners ciphered in faces. The battle for the city is still raging when the picture is observed by the narrator's detached gaze: Achilles is still alive, and Troy's walls still stand. But when Lucrece comes to the painting it undergoes a sudden change. She sees things in the public, material form of the artwork which had been invisible to the narrator and his audience of male connoisseurs. When Lucrece begins to look at it, the picture becomes unmistakably an image of the very last days of Troy: Hecuba laments; Sinon, like Tarquin, betrays the town. The painting is presumably a multi-panelled historical narrative series, which graphically presents all of Troy's history at once. Lucrece, though, is a motivated reader who zooms in to the moment in the sequence onto which she might best project her own sense of violation. And the figure of Sinon makes her rewrite her responses to the picture:

‘It cannot be’, quoth she, ‘that so much guile—’
She would have said ‘can lurk in such a look’,
But Tarquin's shape came in her mind the while,
And from her tongue ‘can lurk’ from ‘cannot’ took.
‘It cannot be’ she in that sense forsook,
          And turned it thus: ‘It cannot be, I find,
          But such a face should bear a wicked mind.’

(ll. 1534-40)

As we have seen, Shakespeare the sophisticated reader of classical texts probably formed the idea of adding the description of the sack of Troy when he came across a comparison between Sinon and Tarquin in the marginal notes to Marsus's edition of Ovid's Fasti. At this point in the narrative Lucrece becomes a reader almost as sophisticated as her author. As well as reading her own experiences into the picture of Sinon, Lucrece brings to it a knowledge of the story which surrounds it. She sees the apparently innocent face of Sinon; and she adds to that innocence her knowledge of the part he will play in the fall of Troy. She no longer looks directly at the face before her for outward visible signs of its moral nature, but interprets its expression in the light of what has happened to her, and in the light of what will happen to Priam. Reading a narrative picture means now for her not just taking physiognomy as a physical sign of intent; it means taking account of circumstance, of prior and future events, and of stories which cling around the story before her. It means almost reading the scene like an annotator, who is aware of circumambient history in the way that Marsus's marginal notes to Ovid's story of Livy encourage his readers to be aware of the larger historical setting.

So reading matters in Lucrece. And the main characters in the poem do it very differently. Lucrece seems not to be aware at all of the medium in which Troy is depicted, and even the narrator fails to note what it is painted on or of, or what its colours, materials, and pigments are. She is interested entirely in the private significance it carries for her; he in its technique. When Tarquin looks at Lucrece as she sleeps, however, he reads her in a different way again. The description of the sleeping Lucrece is, as Nancy Vickers has shown, a blazon dominated by the male gaze.³⁴ Tarquin is not a bookish character, but even he reads objects in a way that carries the impress of his nature. He reads Lucrece as though she is simply a material thing:

Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd:
Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honourèd.
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 mightily he noted?
What did he note, but strongly he desirèd?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tirèd.
With more than admiration he admirèd
          Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
          Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

(ll. 407-20)

This was, as we have seen, one of the most popular passages among manuscript miscellanists. A section from it appears in the popular anthology England's Parnassus (1601), and another part of it was imitated and elaborated by Suckling. The desire to record, and at times to rewrite, this passage, may have been prompted by the obvious complicity which it establishes between a male reader and a male viewer. But readers may have been prompted to write it down partly because of its writerly language: ‘mightily he noted? / What did he note’. This voyeur has his commonplace book to hand, and is ready to make Lucrece's appearance into his property by writing it down (as Jachimo does in the closely analogous scene in which he spies on the sleeping Innogen in Cymbeline 2.2). But Tarquin is above all preoccupied with what Lucrece is made of. In Renaissance art the value of constituent materials composed a vital part of the meaning of art objects. Azure was an especially expensive pigment; coral a precious and rare commodity believed to bring good luck. Ivory too was an expensive raw material. Much of this vocabulary of costly materials is of course common in erotic blazons from the period, but the combination of so many materials of value here evokes a very particular kind of looking. Tarquin is a rich patron drooling over a costly work of art, working out how much the artist has spent on materials and dwelling longingly on the bits that cost the most. The ‘pair of ivory globes’ of Lucrece's breasts belong, for Tarquin, in a cabinet of curiosities. Globes were not in fact made of ivory in this period, but of papier mâché onto which ‘gores’ or triangular sections of a map (usually paper) were glued by a skilled workman. This made them a rare thing: an early modern artefact which was valuable purely because of the skill of the workman in transforming paste and paper into an accurate instrument. But Tarquin metamorphoses globes into images of conquest and precious materials. Unlike Lucrece he does not read a work of art in the light of what it might mean for him, or for the emotional senses which might emerge from its material form. He reads in order to own a thing of costly worth, which he sees as simply something to possess.

The poem's fascination with reading, and how to read the mind's construction in the face, reflects light on several points in it which critics have found puzzling. People are like texts: they can have secret meanings and they can have public, printed meanings. These two are unlikely ever to coincide, since no two readers read in exactly the same way. This fascination with the varieties of reading also helps to clarify the peculiarities of the poem's beginning and ending. Critics have been disturbed and intrigued by the fact that the rape of Lucrece in the poem originates with Collatine's boast to Tarquin and his fellow warriors about his wife's chaste beauty. This conflicts with the account of the matter in the Argument, in which Tarquin goes with Collatine to see Lucrece as the Roman lords test their wives' chastity. In the poem, however, it is Collatine's rash ‘publication’ of his wife's beauty that prompts Tarquin's desire. And the poem invites its readers to ask why Collatine published his wife's beauty so promiscuously:

Or why is Collatine the publisher
          Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
          From thievish ears, because it is his own?

(ll. 33-5)

Collatine's exposure of his wife's beauty has been variously interpreted by modern readers as a failure to protect her reputation,³⁵ or as a moment which suggests that rape is the price paid by a woman for being described.³⁶ To emphasize Collatine's culpability here, however, may be to attach too little significance to the role played by readers in the poem, and the wider question about how different people respond to published works. That the poem is thinking about such matters is indicated by the return to the word ‘publish’ at its end: the body of Lucrece is used to ‘publish Tarquin's foul offence’ (l. 1852). This preoccupation is not surprising: Lucrece was only the second printed work to which Shakespeare's name was attached. The poem is aware that it will be read by unknown readers who will have unpredictable responses to what they read (and by 1594 it is likely that Shakespeare had some idea of how strongly readers of Venus and Adonis had responded to the erotic charge of that poem). That anxiety over publication and interpretation feeds into the central action of the poem, since it was not unusual in this period to associate publication with sexual exposure, or with the leaking of secrets from a private chamber into a public sphere. Thomas Nashe's preface to the pirated edition of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella represents the printing of Sidney's private works as the result of a thieving violation of a private chamber. Although, Nashe claims, poetry ‘be oftentimes imprisoned in ladies' casks, and the precedent books of such as cannot see without another man's spectacles, yet at length it breaks forth in spite of his keepers, and useth some private pen (instead of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement’.³⁷Lucrece explicitly links together intimacy violated—the chamber of Lucrece is broken into—and publication. But throughout the poem asks whether what people experience or feel coincides with the way in which they are read.³⁸ Collatine ‘publishes’ Lucrece; but how does he know how Tarquin might respond to his publication? How far is Brutus using the ‘published’ body of Lucrece to serve his own ends at the conclusion of the poem? These questions the poem cannot lay to rest.

RAPE AND CONSENT.

Lucrece is about a rape, and about how women and men respond to rape. It also responds acutely and in detail to early modern thinking about the crime of rape and its nature. The common-law offence of rape in the late sixteenth century encompassed not one, but two distinct kinds of crime. The first form of rape was defined as intercourse with a woman over the age of 10 against her will. This was a felony against the woman, which, under the Elizabethan statute 18. Eliz. cap. 7, was punishable by death without benefit of clergy, and for which a woman could bring an appeal of felony. The second kind of crime referred to in this period as ‘rape’ was the abduction of a woman along with her husband's property, or in an attempt to acquire the heritable possessions of her father by a forced marriage.³⁹ This form of rape was seen as a violation of the proprietary rights of the husband of a married woman or of the father of an unmarried woman. In cases of rape-as-abduction the woman's family might suffer material loss, and so were regarded in law as deserving compensation. The two forms of rape are often blended in the writing of the period, so that rape was widely represented and thought of as both a crime against property and a crime against a person. The Elizabethan law of rape-as-sexual-violation was further confused by an extremely odd and unfair treatment of consent. A refusal to consent at the moment of rape was, as now, a central element in definitions of rape-as-sexual-violation. Subsequent events could, however, retrospectively affect whether or not a woman was deemed to have consented, and so could determine the severity of the crime.⁴⁰ If the victim consented to marriage to the rapist after the event this could remove grounds for the victim to make an appeal of felony, or might mitigate the punishment given to the offender. Legal textbooks from the period also frequently stated that if a woman conceived she cannot have been raped, since conception was taken to imply consent: ‘rape is the carnal abusing of a woman against her will. But if the woman conceive upon any carnal abusing of her, that is no rape, for she cannot conceive unless she consent.’⁴¹

These multiple currents within the common-law offence of rape have a shaping influence on the imagery and argument of Lucrece. The crime of rape raised questions about property and ownership, but it also created an overlap between these material concerns and immaterial questions about volition, and about what it is to ‘consent’ to an act. Rape was both a material violation of family and property, and an immaterial violation of a woman's will. This is the determining reason why the imagery of the poem refers frequently to jewels and treasure, and why Tarquin is presented as a thief or merchant venturer, gambling what he has in order to gain something he cannot own, and why these material concerns are habitually translated into, or yoked with, metaphors for desire.⁴² Rape straddles these realms, since it was both a crime against wealth and a crime against will. Tarquin does not abduct Lucrece, of course, and that becomes part of the point of the poem: he desires to possess her, but his form of possession consists in forcing her to have sex with him against her will rather than in obtaining the use of her or her husband's property. He slips from desiring rape as a form of material enrichment to achieving it as a violation and contamination of another's will. That desire issues only in the destruction of desire at the moment when its object is achieved is an idea to which Shakespeare recurred in the sonnets (notably in 129), and which is a ground-tone of thought in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. For Tarquin a crude desire to possess an object ends in his possessing nothing which has any material value at all:

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

(ll. 134-40)

And as Tarquin skulks from the poem Shakespeare presents us with the paradox of a man who has sought a material thing, a ‘jewel’, a possession, and who is tricked by the double nature of rape into achieving only a spiritual and physical violation which contaminates his own soul, while leaving him with nothing.

It is not only Tarquin whom the poem leaves in this position. At the end of Lucrece the male members of Lucrece's family haggle over who ‘possesses’ the victim, and who should most mourn her death. This scene again has its foundation in the Elizabethan law of rape: if a rape victim died, either the father of an unmarried woman or the husband of a married woman could seek redress. But although both men are feeling that they have lost a material possession, the poem mocks them with the emptiness of their claim to possess Lucrece:

The one doth call her his, the other his,
Yet neither may possess the claim they lay.
The father says ‘She's mine.’ ‘O mine she is’,
Replies her husband …

(ll. 1793-6)

and:

‘My daughter’ and ‘My wife’ with clamours filled
          The dispersed air, who, holding Lucrece' life,
          Answered their cries, ‘My daughter and my wife.’

(ll. 1804-6)

Words often vainly oppose words in this poem without resolving themselves into an outcome. Here words which claim possession over Lucrece vanish into air (and in the first Quarto, which does not contain speech marks, it is not even clear who says ‘O mine she is’ in line 1792). Is rape primarily about possession of goods or of a woman? The poem mocks those who want to see it purely in this light: they set out like Tarquin to possess Lucrece, then find that the air has as good a claim on her as they do.

The Elizabethan law of rape raised questions about ownership and family honour, and connected those questions with imponderable and intangible concerns with volition and agency. The most slippery and intangible aspect of rape in this period was the question of what ‘consent’ might be. Absence of consent to sex could take the form of explicit refusal, or it could be an interior matter; but, as we have seen, it also might be qualified by later events which were completely beyond the will of the woman, such as conception. These darker reaches of the Elizabethan law of rape are registered in Lucrece's actions. Her determination to kill this ‘bastard graff’ (l. 1062) along with herself is not simply an expression of her horror that she might bear Tarquin's child and so defile Collatine's lineage. It also reflects a fear that if she conceived she might be thought to have consented to the rape. Pronouns throughout the latter part of the poem suggest that, as many rape victims do, she feels the crime is partly hers: ‘O hear me then, injurious shifting Time, / Be guilty of my death, since of my crime’ (ll. 930-1). She means ‘the crime against me’, but her language suggests she cannot regard herself as free of complicity. The extraordinary insideout inversion with which the men of Rome seek to console her also tries hard not to mean what it says: they say, ‘Her body's stain her mind untainted clears’ (l. 1710). This means that her untainted mind makes her body free of pollution, but the inverted syntax makes it seem to say the reverse. These areas of uncertainty within the poem interact in complex ways with the multiplicity of versions of the Lucretia story which Shakespeare inherited, not all of which are clear about the choices Lucretia does or does not make. In most versions of the story Lucretia is given the classic Hobson's choice by Tarquin: she can choose either to be raped and killed and shamed for ever by being placed in bed next to a dead slave, or she can agree to be violated by Tarquin. Her response to this non-choice was treated in a variety of ways in different versions of the story. The version of the story in Dio's Roman history states that Lucretia chose to yield to Tarquin rather than lose her reputation: when he threatens to kill a slave and ‘spread the report that he had found them sleeping together and killed them, she could no longer endure it, but, fearing it might really be believed that this had so happened, chose to yield to him and die after giving an account of the affair rather than lose her good name in perishing at once’.⁴³ Is this a choice? And does making such a choice amount to consent? And does the decision that Lucretia makes in this version to control the stories which are subsequently told about her give her anything which amounts to self-determination?

Most modern readers would think the only possible answer to these questions would be ‘no’. Shakespeare and his heroine, however, are extremely uncertain and uneasy about the extent to which her will might be contaminated by Tarquin's crime. This is compounded by the fact that the poem does not represent the actual moment of violation (to have done so might well have risked the suppression of the volume). The result is that the moment of rape becomes a blur, which extends both to a reader's visual and ethical perception:

‘No more,’ quoth he: ‘By heaven I will not hear thee.
Yield to my love; if not, enforcèd hate
Instead of love's coy touch shall rudely tear thee.
That done, despitefully I mean to bear thee
          Unto the base bed of some rascal groom
          To be thy partner in this shameful doom.’
This said, he sets his foot upon the light,
For light and lust are deadly enemies.
Shame folded up in blind concealing night,
When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize.

(ll. 667-76)

Darkness falls, and Lucrece says nothing in response to Tarquin's offer of a simulacrum of choice. The moment of the rape is a critical one in differing versions of the Lucretia story: Chaucer's heroine faints at this point; Ovid's is overcome by the fear of infamy; and in Livy ‘her resolute modesty was overcome by his victorious lust’—a moment which is itself blurred by textual corruption: modern texts, but not the early modern versions available to Shakespeare, emend the odd grammar of Livy here to read ‘as if by force’.⁴⁴ Shakespeare's narrator loads sententious observation on sententious observation in order to fill in the time taken by the physical act of rape. What happens while he moralizes? All we witness suggests that Tarquin presents the non-choice—either she must ‘yield’, or else she will be raped and killed and defamed—and is then so overwhelmed by desire that he does not stay for an answer (and this is how the marginal notes to Q6 present it: ‘Tarquin all impatient interrupts her and denied of consent breaketh the enclosure of her chastity by force’). Lucrece's chastity—that is, her freedom from any taint of having given any form of consent to sex with a man who is not her husband—is preserved by Tarquin's haste and by the poem's reluctance to represent the moment of rape, since she does not say or do anything in response to the options he offers. And yet Tarquin has staged the rape as being her choice, despite the fact that it is manifestly an act of coercion.

This is one of the cruellest aspects of his crime. But it is a vital one, since it goes some way towards explaining why both Lucrece and the poem are so undecided about the extent to which she is in control of her fate, and about whether her inner mind as well as her family honour is tainted by the crime. Has she ‘consented’ to the rape? And does the concept of consent have any purchase on a moment where the choice is between rape or death with perpetual infamy? For many readers her cry that ‘I am the mistress of my fate’ (l. 1069) rings true: she manages to ensure by her actions that she will go down in history as an exemplum of a chaste wife. Her complaints, and her efforts to establish a bond of sympathy with Philomela and Hecuba, have also been seen as creating a feminine language of woe, and as therefore bringing about a form of expressive victory from a physical defeat.⁴⁵ She is indeed manifestly concerned to shape her own story, and not become a theme for disputation or an example of lust, and this concern for her own future exemplary status is presented as one of the chief motives for her actions. Her suicide is a decisive act of choice, and it is carefully staged in order to win the consent of her family to revenge before her death. Yet the poem interweaves each of these threads of autonomy with darker matter. Her lament with Philomel joins the two violated women in a single song, but their voices are not in perfect consonance as they sing of different stories: ‘For burden-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still, / While thou on Tereus descants better skill’ (ll. 1133-4). When she laments with Hecuba she ‘shapes her sorrow to the beldam's woes’ (l. 1458), and the phrasing here suggests that seeking to identify across a huge gulf of time with the sorrow of another woman leads her to reshape her own suffering rather than simply to give it voice. Finding a source and a parallel for her suffering involves also warping it. She and Hecuba are both victims of male aggression, but Hecuba has not been raped, and the gulf of ages which separates the two women is replicated by a gulf between their experiences. Lucrece's grief seeks to find vehicles, but the vehicles it finds are other people's stories rather than her own, approximations to grief rather than expressions of ‘her grief's true quality’ (l. 1313).

And, like many rape victims, she feels guilt and a sense of inner taint. At least part of this guilt has to do with the shadow of a choice with which Tarquin has presented her (and I should emphasize that my argument here is not intended to blame the victim of rape, but to explain the circumstances in which the victim comes to blame herself). Lucrece urges her hand to ‘Kill both thyself and her for yielding so’ (l. 1036). The word ‘yield’ is rung on through the poem: Lucrece's doors ‘yield’ to Tarquin's battery, and immediately before the rape he urges her to ‘yield’ to him. The word belongs exactly to the ambience of this poem: immaterial things (and people) can ‘yield’ in the sense of physically giving way; people can also in some sense voluntarily yield themselves subject to a superior when they are defeated. ‘Yielding’ occupies a hazy world between volition and compulsion in which the balance between the two is painfully unclear. The poem traps Lucrece and her readers within this dark terrain. The concept of ‘yielding’ slips from the compulsory to the semi-voluntary, and Lucrece is agonizingly uncertain about where to locate herself on that scale. That slippage is not one which modern readers wish to experience, and for good reason. It leads to painful questions about the autonomy of victims in circumstances in which a man is clearly and devilishly to blame.

Nevertheless, the intersection between the multiple versions of the story and the multiple strands within the Elizabethan law of rape creates an area of conceptual darkness at the heart of this poem. Lucrece is left feeling both that her family honour is violated and that her will is contaminated by ‘yielding’. And some early readers took an even darker view of her than that: one seventeenth-century reader left a note of his scepticism about the conduct of Lucrece when she entertained Tarquin in a British Library copy of Q1: ‘whoever made a feast for a single guest?’⁴⁶ The suggestion that Lucrece may have ‘yielded’ in part voluntarily goes a long way towards explaining why the poem shuffles between Christian conceptions of guilt and pagan conceptions of shame: Lucrece's private guilt comes from the shadow of a choice which she has been given; her public shame is a necessary response to the fact that rape was in this period viewed as a crime against the family, its status, and its heritable possessions. The poem's journey through these dark realms, where choices seem not really to be choices at all, also helps to explain why that crucial word ‘consent’ seems to mutate from the strong claim in the Argument that the Roman people ‘with one consent’ agreed to change the state into one that is governed by consuls to its less muscular usage at the end. At the end of the poem ‘The Romans plausibly did give consent / To Tarquin's everlasting banishment’ (ll. 1854-5), and in applauding the banishment they implicitly assent to a transformation in their state which, according to Fulbecke's Tacitean vision of Roman history at least, substitutes one form of tyranny for another. ‘Consent’ of the kind that is exercised by a post-Kantian individual who freely chooses to determine the direction of her actions, irrespective of material pressures, just does not exist in this poem. Lucrece works off a variety of discourses, of ownership, of self-determination, of material enclosure, of liberty and tyranny. And it darkly pinions its heroine and readers within the indeterminate areas of overlap between those different discourses. The poem is not confused in doing this: it is asking dark but profound questions of the way in which the individual will intersects with circumstances, about how our bodies are both public objects and receptacles of hidden inner emotions. If it does not resolve these questions it is because they are irresolvable. What the poem does achieve, however, is to make those questions matter.

Notes

1. Donaldson [Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982)] is the authority here.

2. On the sources, see Bullough, [Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare Volume I: Early Comedies, Poems, Romeo and Juliet (London, Henley, and New York, 1957)] 179-99. Extensive discussion is in Wilhelm Ewig, ‘Shakespeare's Lucrece: Eine litterarhistorische Untersuchung’, Anglia 22 (1899), 1-32. Earlier views are surveyed in Rollins [Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Poems, A New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia and London, 1938)], 416-39. For the view that Gower is the main influence on how Shakespeare dramatized the tale, see R. Hillman, ‘Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece’, Chaucer Review 24 (1990), 263-7.

3. St Augustine, Of the City of God, trans. John Healey (1610), 28.

4. Augustine, City of God, 31.

5. Quentin Skinner notes (privately) that Fulbecke is here echoing Livy 3.9.3-5.

6. Justus Lipsius, ed., C. Cornelii Taciti Opera quae Exstant (Antwerp, 1589), sig. *2^v. The dedication to Maximilian (in which this remark occurs) appeared in editions from 1574.

7. See Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989).

8. Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (1993), 306. ‘Shakespeare has written a brief epic which, unlike Virgil's long epic, is Republican in sentiment and focus’, Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare, rev. edn. (New York and London, 1983), 35.

9. The most sustained denial that the Argument is by Shakespeare remains J. R. Tolbert, ‘The Argument of Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Texas Studies in English 29 (1950), 77-90.

10. It is, however, unlikely that Field wished to save paper and reduce costs: the volume collates 4^o: A2, B-M⁴, N¹. Had the Argument been omitted and the poem begun on A2^v he would have been spared the need to end the volume with a singleton.

11. Baldwin [T. W. Baldwin, The Literary Genetics of Shakespere's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., 1950)], 115.

12. Baldwin, 108. The commentaries of Antonius Constantius (Antonio Costanzi of Fano) and of Paulus Marsus (Paolo Marsi) were originally written in 1480 and 1482 respectively. The helpful account in Ann Moss, Ovid in Renaissance France: A Survey of the Latin Editions of Ovid and Commentaries Printed in France before 1660, Warburg Institute Surveys 8 (1982), 17-18 emphasizes the pedagogical intention of Marsus's commentary.

13. Marsus [P. Ovidii Nasonis, Fastorum Libri VI. Tristium V. De Ponto IIII. In Ibin. Cum Commentariis Doctiss. Virorum, Ant. Constantii Fanensis, Pauli Marsi, Barth. Merulae, Domitii Calderini, Zarotti: multo quam hactenus usquam, & elegantius & emendatius excusis (Basle, 1550)], 142.

14. Marsus, 140.

15. Marsus, 151: ‘The poet himself has delayed greatly, and perhaps we too have delayed excessively in glossing him down to the banishment of the kings and the birth of liberty for the city of Rome. But that very delay, and the placing together of these histories, was more pleasing to me in as much as liberty herself is pleasing. After I myself had achieved liberty nine years ago, I have celebrated each year the feast of liberty at the end of September, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.’

16. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30-78.

17. ‘ter conata loqui’ (‘Three times she tried to speak’, Fasti [Ovid, edited with a translation by James George Frazer, vol. 5 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1976)] 2.823) prompts a long note, Marsus, 148, as does ‘quid faciat?’ (‘what should I do?’ Fasti 2.801), which prompts Marsus (147) to say: ‘Nullae vires erant Lucretiae ad loquendum, ob pavorem, nec erat sibi mens ulla’ (‘Lucretia had no strength to speak, because of her fear, nor did she have any power of thought’).

18. Marsus, 150-1.

19. De Officiis 2.7.23. See Barry Nass, ‘The Law and Politics of Treason in Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Shakespeare Yearbook 7 (1996), 301: ‘Articulated moments before her rape, Lucrece's devout recapitulation of official Tudor precepts does not so much validate them as reveal how inadequate such discourse is to the violence and lawlessness of her princely adversary.’ Lucrece's rebuke may owe something to the apostrophe to Tarquin delivered by the narrator in LGW [The Legend of Good Women in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987)] 1819-22: ‘Tarquinius, that art a kynges eyr, / And sholdest, as by lynage and by ryght, / Don as a lord and a verray knyght, / Whi hastow don this lady vilanye’. Gower reflects on Tarquin's tyranny at Confessio Amantis 7.4889 and 4998.

20. The Philosopher's Banquet (usually attributed to Sir Michael Scott, STC 22061.5), 103.

21. Antonio de Guevara, The Diall of Princes, trans. Thomas North (1557), sig. M6^v.

22. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge, 1997), 28.

23. Martin Dzelzainis has suggested (privately) that the failure of Lucrece's rhetoric may show that the old-fashioned pieties of early humanist political rhetoric fail to influence the new-style Tacitist prince Tarquin.

24. Bate [Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993)], 73; Donaldson, 116.

25. See Platt, Rome and Romans, 13-51, which is a revised version of his ‘The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for which it Stands’, Centennial Review 19 (1975), 59-79; and Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 297-317.

26. See Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, in John Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy (1997), 110-34.

27. For the association between chambers and female chastity, see G. Zeigler, ‘My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice 4 (1990), 73-100.

28. ‘The closet in every house, as it is a reposement of Secrets, so is it only … at the owner's, and no other's commandment’, Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1625), 103. For the intimacy of the closet, see Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (1995), 76-100.

29. See Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss (Cambridge, 1999), 45-61.

30. Hynes, ‘The Rape of Tarquin’.

31. Heather Dubrow, ‘A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare's Lucrece and Generic Tradition’, in B. Lewalski, ed., Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 400-17.

32. Donaldson, 45-6.

33. ‘Marginalia—traces left in a book—are wayward in their very nature … The marginal gloss, however, responds to another frame of mind: the need to spell everything out’, Laurence Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 612.

34. Nancy Vickers, ‘“The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in Patricia Parker, Geoffrey Hartman, and David Quint, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London, 1985), 95-115.

35. Dubrow, Domestic Loss, 51-5.

36. ‘Rape is the price Lucrece pays for being described’, Vickers, ‘“The Blazon”’, 102.

37. Sir P.S. His Astrophel and Stella (1591), sig. A3^r.

38. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London, 1993), 218. Wall builds on Vickers, ‘“The Blazon”’.

39. The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights (1632) distinguishes between ‘a hideous hateful kind of whoredom in him which committeth it, when a woman is enforced violently to sustain the fury of brutish concupiscence, but she is left where she is found, as in her own house or bed, as Lucrece was, and not hurried away, as Helen by Paris’, and abduction.

40. See the lucid account in Sokol [B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare's Legal Language: A Dictionary (London and New Brunswick, NJ, 2000)], 319-24, and Barbara J. Baines, ‘Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation’, ELH 65 (1998), 69-98.

41. Henry Finch, Law, or a Discourse thereof in Four Books (1627), 204.

42. Although it also reflects contemporary anxieties about burglary and ‘the violation and contamination of a dwelling place per se’, Dubrow, Domestic Loss, 48.

43. Dio's Roman History, ed. with an English translation by Ernest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, 9 vols. (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1914-27), ii.17.

44. LGW ll. 1812-18; Fasti 2.810; Livy [Titus Livius, History of Roman Books I-II, ed. with an English translation by B. O. Foster (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1919)] 1.58.5.

45. For a strong statement of the view that Lucrece seeks to use, and simultaneously suspects, a masculine persuasive language, see Philippa Berry, ‘Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992), 33-9.

46. Shelfmark G 11178, sig. E1^v.