SOURCE: Dubrow, Heather. “A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare's Lucrece and Generic Tradition.” In Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, pp. 399-417. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Dubrow contends that The Rape of Lucrece contains an implicit criticism of the values and conventions of the complaint poem style.]

Scholars typically dismiss both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece as mere literary samplers, works in which an undiscriminating preoccupation with rhetorical display precludes a sustained concern for other issues, be they formal, psychological, or moral. According to such interpretations, Shakespeare's overriding concern is to cram as many tropes as possible into these poems, even at the expense of their overall structure. Thus one critic, lamenting the absence of subtle characterization in either poem, observes, “it is brilliance of the surface which has priority.”¹ Rooted in a preconceived notion of what Shakespeare could and could not do early in his career and also, perhaps, in a misconceived distrust of elaborate wordplay, such interpretations have shaped our readings of The Rape of Lucrece. In particular, while many scholars have noted that Lucrece's lengthy speeches evidently participate in the tradition of the complaint,² none has examined Shakespeare's approach to that literary type in any depth; we have assumed he was too preoccupied with the patterns of his tropes to give much attention to the patterns of his genre.

Yet another reason we have neglected the ways Shakespeare approaches the complaint is that in many respects that literary form is quite as slippery as Tarquin's rhetoric. Even A Mirror for Magistrates itself changes as it goes through successive editions; most obviously, the later volumes include women among their speakers. The subsequent works influenced by the Mirror also differ considerably among themselves; thus, for example, Drayton retains the structure of the dream vision in his “Robert, Duke of Normandy” but abandons it in the complaint delivered by that unlovely lover Peirs Gaveston. And if we include in our descriptions of the genre pastoral complaints and sonnets, the complaint comes to seem singularly amorphous even in an age that delighted in loosely defined genres.

Nonetheless, when we compare The Rape of Lucrece to contemporary complaints, we uncover an approach to genre quite as complex and intriguing as that in, say, Love's Labour's Lost. For Shakespeare is writing not merely within the complaint tradition but also against it: he is rendering many of its assumptions very prominent and very problematical. If Lucrece delivers a complaint against Tarquin, in a sense Shakespeare delivers one against his genre.

To explore Shakespeare's critical approach to the complaint, we must first define that tradition more precisely than we customarily do. In the largest sense, of course, his Roman narrative does participate in that vast tradition of Tudor complaints that is rooted in the Mirror and ultimately in Ovid's Heroides.³ Hallett Smith has attempted to place The Rape of Lucrece in a narrower framework: the complaints written about inviolably chaste women in the 1590s.⁴ Distinguishing these poems from their counterparts in the Mirror, he maintains that they substitute increased sentiment for the moral and political concerns of earlier works in the genre; the primary aim of these later complaints, he argues, is to move their readers, not to instruct them.

I would suggest, however, that both Shakespeare and his Elizabethan readers were more likely to interpret his poem in the context of a different type of complaint, a category including certain of the works that Hallett Smith enumerates and a number of others as well. In some poems of this type, the heroine does retain her chastity, but in others she surrenders it. And, significantly enough, she is threatened by a ruler, a situation that invites speculations on the uses and abuses of power. Rather than neglecting the political questions threaded through the Mirror, these complaints simply approach them from a different perspective, that of the women who variously yield to the monarch's power or, alternatively, valiantly preserve their chastity in the face of it. No fewer than seven poems of this type appeared within the brief span of two years: Daniel's “The Complaint of Rosamond” (1592); Churchyard's “The Tragedy of Shore's Wife” (1593), a considerably expanded version of a poem in A Mirror for Magistrates; Chute's “Beawtie Dishonoured” (1593); Lodge's “The Complaint of Elstred” (1593); Barnfield's “The Complaint of Chastitie” (1594); Drayton's “Matilda” (1594); and, of course, The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Although these poems may deviate from the formula in small particulars (most obviously, Tarquin is not a king but the son of one), they follow it closely enough—and appear in close enough conjunction with each other—for contemporary readers to have sensed themselves in the presence of a subgenre.

In certain regards all the poems in that subgenre, including Shakespeare's, are very similar. To begin with, they repeatedly allude to the perils of praise, condemned in Drayton's “Matilda” as a “fond pratling Parrat” (l. 153),⁵ and of praise's bastard brother, flattery. Chute's “Beawtie Dishonoured” includes a passage on the subject that could serve as a gloss to Collatine's tragically ill-considered boast about Lucrece's beauty:

For till thou first with thine vnhappie storie,
Ecchoing relations of my worth and me:
Intitul'dst my name to my bewties glorie,
Vnworthie knowne, of such a worth to be
          Though not performed in so royall measure
          Yet then I ioy'd a life of quyet pleasure.

(ll. 486-491)⁶

And these complaints repeatedly draw attention to the moral ambiguities involved in the process of persuasion, with Daniel actually bodying forth those dangers in his portrait of the woman who tempts Rosamond:

Shee set vpon me with the smoothest speech,
That Court and age could cunningly deuise:
The one autentique made her fit to teach,
The other learnt her how to subtelise:
Both were enough to circumuent the wise.

(ll. 218-222)⁷

Wise, Rosamond is not, and she is easily circumvented by the wiles of rhetoric.

Another similarity between these poems and Shakespeare's narrative is their concern for the political implications of what Lucrece herself terms “private pleasure” (l. 1478).⁸ Drayton makes explicit an implication in several other poems: a ruler's sexual aggression is a symptom of his tyranny. In “Matilda” we witness lust distorting the king's relationship not only with the title character but also with his other subjects: he actually banishes Matilda's father, a loyal follower, on trumped-up charges, lest she be protected by her parent. As I have already suggested, the complaints in this group are very concerned with the nature of power, whether it be the sexual power of a woman or the political power of a monarch. One way Churchyard transforms Jane Shore's complaint in the Mirror into the version he published in his Churchyards Challenge (1593) is by lengthening the heroine's demonstration that she used her own power judiciously; this passage increases our sympathy for her, but it also draws our attention to larger questions about power and the powerful. Similarly, Lucrece adduces Renaissance commonplaces on these issues when she pleads with Tarquin:

This deed will make thee only lov'd for fear;
But happy monarchs still are fear'd 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.

(ll. 610-616)

The popularity of this subgenre in Elizabethan England may in fact be traced at least in part to its treatment of power. In attempting to seduce their subjects, the monarchs in these poems raise broad questions about the abuses of royal prerogatives, questions that extend far beyond the compass of sexual behavior; hence such works are indeed a mirror for magistrates, including the ruler currently occupying the throne of England. But because Elizabeth could hardly be faulted for the particular abuse on which the poems focus, the betrayal of innocent maidens, any potential criticism of her is tactfully deflected. Matilda's defense of her own virginity even involves a tribute to the Virgin Queen.

Despite the links between The Rape of Lucrece and the complaints in question, when we read Shakespeare's poem we are mainly aware of suggestive distinctions: The Rape of Lucrece includes the “notes of rufull plaint” that Joseph Hall mockingly ascribes to the complaint tradition (Virgidemiarum, 1.5.2),⁹ but this symphony is in a different key. One of the most obvious distinctions is structural: rather than basing his whole poem on Lucrece's complaints (as Middleton was to do in his version of it, The Ghost of Lucrece), Shakespeare incorporates those declamations within a larger narrative. As we shall see, that decision shapes our responses to Lucrece and to the genre we are exploring. But another difference between The Rape of Lucrece and the other poems in the subgenre I have defined is even more significant: Shakespeare repeatedly renders the values and assumptions of the complaint problematical, generally by directing our attention to the psychological implications behind issues treated more uncritically and straightforwardly in those other complaints and in A Mirror for Magistrates itself. In some cases he simply allows a subterranean idea in the more sophisticated complaints to surface; in other instances we can find no precedent at all for the questions he is raising.

What Chute terms “monster fame” (ll. 31, 493) plays as important a role in the 1590s complaints as in the Mirror. On the whole, however, it is a clear-cut role. Fame is dangerous, we are told, because it brings the king reports of his potential victim's beauty. At the same time, fame encompasses a concern for reputation that is presented as at the very least understandable; thus these poems typically begin with their heroines lamenting the fact that their names have been forgotten and begrudging the reputations of women with similar or even less virtuous histories. Matilda implies that she has been mistreated not only by the king who failed to seduce her but also by the poets who failed to celebrate her:

Shores wife is in her wanton humor sooth'd,
And modern Poets, still applaud her praise,
Our famous Elstreds wrinckled browes are smooth'd,
Call'd from her grave to see these latter daies,
And happy's hee, their glory high'st can raise.
          “Thus looser wantons, still are praised of many,
          “Vice oft findes friends, but vertue seldome any.

(ll. 43-49)

But the poem nowhere develops the subterranean implication of this conventional passage: however pure she may be in other ways, Matilda's desire for fame is suspect. Such a criticism does emerge from “The Complaint of Rosamond,” as a few recent scholars have pointed out.¹⁰ Because Rosamond is distinguished from other complaint heroines by certain psychological mannerisms, such as a marked predilection for blaming others for her downfall,¹¹ we are encouraged to scrutinize many aspects of her self-portrayal more closely than would otherwise seem appropriate. When we do so we see some of the dangers of fame: her preoccupation with it helps to generate her fatal vanity, while her tendency to transfer her guilt to others is particularly manifest in her diatribes against fame. But Daniel, like Drayton, does not pursue the question; it remains for Shakespeare to look more deeply into the moral and emotional consequences of too deep an interest in fame.

The characters he evokes in The Rape of Lucrece, like their counterparts in the Roman plays, are concerned to the point of obsession with their reputations; they are always in the public eye and yet always also utterly, tragically alone. Shakespeare emphasizes their involvement with public opinion by the way he adapts one detail from his sources:

They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence,
To show her bleeding body thorough Rome,
And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence.

(ll. 1850-52)

Foregrounded by their position in the final stanza of the poem, these lines ensure that the narrative that has opened on a reference to publishing—

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

(ll. 33-35)

—also concludes on one. The verb “publish” has several possible meanings in these passages, including (as in Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.47) “proclaim,” but one of the most salient glosses is “make public.”¹²

Indeed, throughout The Rape of Lucrece, as throughout Troilus and Cressida, the characters' most private actions (or other people's ill-informed speculations about them) are continually made public through a network of surveillance and slander: images of eyes and mouths reflect a world whose citizens are engaged in gazing on and gossiping about each other. Thus within only a few pages (ll. 71-112) Tarquin stares lustfully at Lucrece, she returns his gaze uncomprehendingly, he muses on her husband's boasts about her beauty, and in turn praises Collatine to her. And shortly afterward he threatens her with what she literally considers a fate worse than death: being the object of slander.

This emphasis on performing in public, under scrutiny, helps to establish Lucrece's Rome as what anthropologists have termed a shame culture.¹³ According to traditional definitions, the inhabitants of guilt cultures suffer from the failure to fulfill internalized values, while their counterparts in shame cultures primarily fear the disapproval of others. One should not push these parallels too far (not least because anthropologists are themselves questioning and revising the categories), but it is significant for our purposes that shame is connected to exposure, the very fear that dominates so much of Lucrece's behavior. She often seems more concerned with how the rape will affect her fame than with her own judgments about it. And it is significant, too, that shame is associated with precisely that experience that informs and deforms the milieu Shakespeare is evoking: a threat to one's identity.

If one lives one's life before spectators, one may come to feel like an actor performing a part. And in fact the poem does adduce theatrical metaphors at a few key moments. Attempting to justify the rape to himself, Tarquin declares, “My part is youth, and beats these from the stage” (l. 278). An appropriate image for his psychomachia, the allusion to acting hints at Tarquin's awareness that the most private actions are in a sense done on a public stage. (The line also exemplifies the flashes of psychological insight that illuminate the characters of this poem, often occurring just when Shakespeare's portraits seem to be at their most conventional and least acute. If one is an actor, then one is adopting a persona rather than behaving normally: thus this metaphor offers Tarquin a way to distance himself from his crime, while at the same time proleptically hinting to the audience of the real loss of identity that that crime will generate.) Lucrece herself adopts what is in effect a theatrical image for her behavior: ironically, in order to convince Collatine of her honesty, she must play her part like an actress:

Besides, the life and feeling of her passion
She hoards, to spend when he is by to hear her,
When sighs and groans and tears may grace the fashion
Of her disgrace, the better so to clear her
From that suspicion which the world might bear her.

(ll. 1317-21)

She fears, in short, that “to be direct and honest is not safe” (Othello, 3.3.378).¹⁴

The author of The Rape of Lucrece also deviates from other complaints by rendering the concept of guilt problematical. In the Mirror and the 1590s imitations of it, virtuous figures like Matilda experience no guilt. Its presence in former sinners such as Rosamond is an important sign of repentance and an earnest of their future redemption. Lucrece's guilt, in contrast, is yet another pathological symptom, a key to the complexities of her character rather than the state of her soul.

Although many readers have ignored the acuity of the characterization in The Rape of Lucrece, it is in evidence throughout the poem, and nowhere more so than in Shakespeare's subtle anatomy of Lucrece's guilt. Despite (and to some extent because of) the horrors to which she is subjected, certain patterns remain constant in her. The most central—and most relevant to her guilt—is her proclivity for seeing experience in terms of absolutes, of clear and simple values, and of constant and comforting pieties.¹⁵ Thus, like her predecessors in A Mirror for Magistrates, she greets every situation with a sententious generalization:

The aged man that coffers up his gold
Is plagu'd with cramps and gouts and painful fits,
And scarce hath eyes his treasure to behold;

(ll. 855-857)

O opportunity, thy guilt is great!

(l. 876)

Such generalizations are, of course, common in Renaissance poetry, but that fact need not preclude their use to characterize an individual temperament.¹⁶ Shakespeare activates the potential psychological significance of these sententiae, encouraging us to read them as manifestations of Lucrece's sensibility, by incorporating into her speech patterns many additional demonstrations of her belief in absolute verities. Thus she delights in antitheses, the ultimate expression of a world of blacks and whites:

My honour I'll bequeath unto the knife
That wounds my body so dishonoured.
'Tis honour to deprive dishonour'd life;
The one will live, the other being dead.

(ll. 1184-87)

My woes are tedious, though my words are brief.

(l. 1309)

                                                                                Thou worthy lord
Of that unworthy wife that greeteth thee.

(ll. 1303-04)

And in fact she repeatedly alludes to blacks and whites in the most literal sense, notably in her apostrophe to night.¹⁷

Equally significant is her use of predication:¹⁸

My husband is thy friend;

(l. 582)

“Thou art,” quoth she, “a sea, a sovereign king,

(l. 652)

Time's glory is to calm contending kings.

(l. 939)

Copia and apposition, both of which are common in her speech, function very like predication, for they too assign qualities to an object:

O unseen shame, invisible disgrace!
O unfelt sore, crest-wounding private scar!

(ll. 827-828)

O night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke.

(l. 799)

The habits of thought and habits of speech that we have been tracing help to explain Lucrece's guilt. For someone so committed to absolutes and antitheses, there can be no middle ground: if, as she firmly believes, she no longer merits the epithet “Lucrece the chaste” (l. 7), then she must exemplify the other extreme, the corruption represented by Tarquin himself. Thus when she declares, “But when I fear'd I was a loyal wife: / So am I now,—O no, that cannot be!” (ll. 1048-49), she is demonstrating her inability to define loyalty in terms more complex than the absolute ones she had previously used: she cannot recognize that though in one sense she has been unchaste and unfaithful to her husband, those definitions of chastity and fidelity are inadequate to the circumstances of a rape. When she describes herself as “she that was thy Lucrece” (l. 1682), she is not only anticipating her suicide but also manifesting in extreme form the consequences of her habit of predication: when predication breaks down, when she cannot avow “Lucrece is chaste,” then in some important sense Lucrece ceases to exist. She becomes merely, as she herself puts it, an empty casket.

But it is also significant that women who have been raped typically suffer from irrational guilt. If the poem charts the patterns of a particular temperament, it also documents the reactions produced by a particular situation and in so doing further intensifies the differences that distinguish it from other complaints in its subgenre. Many modern studies of rape have demonstrated that its victims characteristically blame themselves for the attack and, in particular, for not fighting enough.¹⁹ While one could not uncritically adduce all the findings of twentieth-century scholars to illuminate an Elizabethan evocation of a Roman event, it is not unlikely that certain responses to the trauma of rape would recur in different cultures. And Lucrece does in fact exemplify the guilt often associated with modern rape victims, as well as many of the other reactions that have been observed in them:

“Poor hand, why quiver'st thou at this decree?
.....Since thou could'st not defend thy loyal dame,
          And wast afeard to scratch her wicked foe,
Kill both thyself and her for yielding so.”

(ll. 1030, 1034-36)

This passage also testifies that even early in his career the author of Hamlet and Macbeth was acutely sensitive to the tortured and tortuous rationalizations spawned by guilt. Shakespeare is in fact borrowing the convention of speakers addressing their own bodies from the well-established formulas of the Senecan set speech.²⁰ But he skillfully adapts that convention to the complex patterns of Lucrece's psyche. She is attempting at once to castigate and to defend herself, a paradox for which we ourselves no doubt can find all too many analogues in our own behavior; by blaming her hand she is simultaneously criticizing herself and deflecting that criticism onto only one part of her body, with the implication that the rest may be less guilty. In a poem crammed with instances of synecdoche, she in effect invokes that figure while also rejecting it through the claim that the part is not in fact the whole. If, as we have seen, Tarquin adduces a theatrical metaphor to deny his own responsibility, his victim here attempts to accomplish the same ends through a different trope.

Not only Shakespeare's treatment of fame and guilt but also his exploration of sexuality distinguishes The Rape of Lucrece from the other complaints in the subgenre we are scrutinizing. Impelled by lust and unencumbered by scruples, the monarchs in those poems single-mindedly pursue their prey; their motives are not anatomized in any detail. Shakespeare, in contrast, does dissect the motivations behind the rape he portrays, concentrating especially on the interplay between sexual desire and competition:

Perchance his boast of Lucrece' sov'reignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king;
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be.
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
          His high-pitch'd thoughts, that meaner men should
          vaunt
          That golden hap which their superiors want.

(ll. 36-42)

Shakespeare's treatment of another aspect of sexuality, the concept of chastity, is equally complex. The heroines in other complaints may sinfully abandon or sedulously guard their chastity, but neither they nor their readers experience any doubts as to the definition of that virtue. It remains uncomplicated even in “The Complaint of Rosamond,” in many respects the most sophisticated poem of the subgenre, save for The Rape of Lucrece itself. We simply recognize, so to speak, that nice girls don't. In scrutinizing Lucrece's guilt and the reactions of other Romans to the rape, Shakespeare, in contrast, renders the idea of chastity very complicated.

On the one hand, on some level Lucrece has indubitably been unfaithful to her husband.²¹ This is a particularly grave offense in her society; the poem portrays a culture that glorifies the sanctity of the family with an unthinking fervor worthy of the Moral Majority. Yet even citizens of that culture, the Roman knights to whom she tells her tale, unite in declaring that “Her body's stain her mind untainted clears” (l. 1710). Shakespeare's examination of chastity is further complicated by the curious imagery suggesting that Lucrece is virtually virginal despite her marriage: “Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden worlds unconquered” (ll. 407-408). While “maiden” could merely signify “that has not been conquered, tried, worked, etc.,”²² it seems more than likely that discordant connotations of virginity would continue to adhere to the word. Behind these lines, I would suggest, lies an implication that we also find in Shakespeare's Roman plays: Roman matrons are typically so cold and restrained that even sex itself seems curiously without passion.²³ Although these troubling hints are never followed up in the course of the poem, they do make Lucrece's view of chastity even more complex, further distinguishing this poem from the other complaints that invoke that concept.

The Rape of Lucrece complicates and criticizes not only the ethical values raised by other complaints but also the ethical response they so often adduce, pious sententiae. The complaints we are examining are nowhere closer to the Mirror than in their straightforward and sententious didacticism.²⁴ Admittedly, some moral points are made more subtly—the obvious instance is the ironic portrayal of Rosamond²⁵—but by and large these poems are unashamedly direct in pointing to ethical lessons. The dying Matilda, for instance, shares with us her “pure thoughts” (l. 918), which include a paean to chastity and a critique of “fond preferments” (l. 932). In contrast, as we have observed, the moral truisms that Lucrece delivers are more significant as symptoms of emotional tendencies in the speaker than as sources of eternal truths. We learn from judging and rejudging—and often misjudging—the events before us, rather than from garnering the judgments of others.

This analysis of Lucrece's sententiae points to one of the most important—and most intriguing—ways Shakespeare renders the values of the complaint problematical: associating the genre with Lucrece herself, he suggests that limitations in the complaint mime limitations in her own sensibility, and vice versa. Given the popularity of that genre in the 1590s, we may well assume at first that Lucrece's proclivity for it reveals nothing significant about her own temperament: Shakespeare is merely following a fashion. But by referring so pointedly and so frequently to the act of delivering complaints, the poem foregrounds the use of the form. Thus Lucrece draws attention to her own predilection for the genre:

In vain I rail at opportunity,
At time, at Tarquin, at uncheerful night;
In vain I cavil with mine infamy,
In vain I spurn at my confirm'd despite;
This helpless smoke of words doth me no right.

(ll. 1023-27)

Moreover, because Lucrece's complaints do not constitute the entire poem but rather are embedded within it, we can play them against the other responses to grief that Shakespeare charts in the poem. Comparing them to the declamations delivered by her husband and father and contrasting them with Brutus' espousal of action rather than lamentation, we recognize that the complaint represents only one of many possible ways of responding to experience, a choice that may reflect the sensibility of a particular character rather than the author's indiscriminating adoption of a literary convention.²⁶

Hence we begin to see Lucrece's complaints as symptomatic of her temperament. Her belief in absolutes lends itself naturally to the hyperbolic utterances of the declamation: exclamations, not subjunctives, are her natural mode. And the fact that she criticizes her own rhetoric but continues to employ it is yet another symptom of the divisions in her being. We share her impatience at the length of her speeches, recognizing that she is getting too carried away with emotion, as Shakespeare's Venus does under very different circumstances. The conventional length of those speeches, in other words, comes to seem a sign of something individual about Lucrece herself. For Shakespeare is qualifying the common Renaissance belief that language provides a useful purgative for our emotions.²⁷ When carried to an extreme, he demonstrates, it may exacerbate, not purge the passions: “For sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell / Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes” (ll. 1493-94).

This is not to say, however, that the text supports the cynical appraisal of Lucrece's histrionics proffered by some critics. To assert, for example, that Lucrece is “seizing the occasion to enjoy a good rant” or to refer to her “elephantine ego”²⁸ is to ignore the sympathy for his heroine that Shakespeare builds. His detailed anatomies of both the horrors of Tarquin's behavior and the values of Rome make her emotion seem an understandable reaction to the rape, if not an ideal one. And the poem balances its expositions of Lucrece's melodramatic self-absorption against frequent reminders of her unselfish concern for Collatine. If her complaints suggest that her responses to grief are in some sense unhealthy, we are also reminded that they are very understandable. Like Desdemona—whom she resembles in many other respects as well—Lucrece evokes compassion and respect even as we recognize her limitations.

If, then, other authors in the subgenre here defined hold certain truths to be self-evident, Shakespeare is concerned to challenge those verities; in the course of writing his complaint he calls in question many of the values in which that genre is rooted. In a sense we should not be surprised to find that he—or any writer—does so. We too often forget that parody and the most straightforward literary imitation are simply two ends of a spectrum. Nonetheless, the extent to which Shakespeare questions and even undermines the values of his genre is unusual. Why does he do so?

Part of the answer lies in the habit of mind that Rosalie Colie so perceptively anatomizes in relation to his plays. As she points out, Shakespeare is prone to see in literary “forms” of all types representations of the forms of human behavior.²⁹ Doing so evidently encourages him to explore the psychological and moral dangers a genre may both present and represent. Indeed, recognizing how frequently and how skillfully Shakespeare adduces the literary patterns of genre to represent the psychological patterns of human experience should warn us against the simple distinctions between the rhetorical and the mimetic that, as I suggested earlier, have formed and deformed our approach to The Rape of Lucrece.

Shakespeare's approach to the complaint is, then, characteristic of the way he reshapes genres in his dramatic oeuvre as well. But the subgenre that we have been exploring was especially likely to provoke in him a response that is critical in the several senses of that adjective. On the one hand, he was probably very attracted to the form, particularly because its preoccupation with the uses and abuses of power echoes the ideas he was exploring in his history plays. On the other hand, the simplistic didacticism that marks—and mars—A Mirror for Magistrates and its many heirs and assigns must have troubled the writer who was to guy such habits of thought by creating a Polonius. Writing the type of complaint he did allowed him to criticize the form even as he was writing within it, much as the authors of the formal verse satires of the 1590s both delight in and deplore elaborate rhetoric.

This reflexive type of literary imitation proved singularly appropriate for the work in question. The poem that repeatedly undermines its own genre bodies forth many other types of internalized conflicts; in this regard (as in so many others), form and content are inseparable in The Rape of Lucrece. The very plot is based on the notion of an enemy within the city walls: a Roman is attacked not by a barbarian but by a Roman. The society that Shakespeare portrays is an organism attacking its own tissues: the familial and military values on which it is based are responsible for the tragedy, in that Lucrece justifies her suicide by citing obligations to her family, while her rapist excuses his attack by invoking military metaphors. And, of course, the characters themselves are self-destructive: Tarquin is repeatedly described in terms of a civil war, while Lucrece literally takes her own life.

These internalized divisions are mirrored on the rhetorical level as well: one of the most common figures is syneciosis, defined by the Renaissance writer Angel Day as “when one contrary is attributed to another, or when two diverse things are in one put together.”³⁰ Thus we encounter enough oxymora to satisfy even a sonneteer: “niggard prodigal” (l. 79), “naked armour” (l. 188), “living death” (l. 726), and so on. The internal tensions in these figures are intensified in the case of one formulation that recurs several times in the poem, phrases like “lifeless life” (l. 1374), in which opposites have the same etymology. In these cases the expectation of congruity is based not only on the relationship between subject and modifier but also on the visual and etymological similarities between the terms; hence the conflict between them is all the more striking.

Throughout The Rape of Lucrece, as we have seen, the complaint itself enacts a pattern very like that of these tropes. Although Shakespeare treats certain characteristics of his subgenre, notably the concern for power, with great respect, he also criticizes the assumptions of that literary type, much as instances of syneciosis undermine the very comparison they establish. For The Rape of Lucrece is as didactic as A Mirror for Magistrates, but what it teaches us above all is the danger of the simplified values promoted by other works in its own genre. Later in his career Shakespeare was to compose dramas that may be termed “problem comedies” not only in that their values are ambiguous and their conflicts unresolved but also in that they render comedy itself problematical. In The Rape of Lucrece he writes what we may justly consider a problem complaint.

Notes

1. Richard Wilbur, introduction to William Shakespeare, The Narrative Poems, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 18.

2. See esp. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 113-117.

3. On that tradition, see, for example, Lily B. Campbell, ed., introduction to The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938); Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; rpt. Oxford, 1956), esp. chap. 7; E. M. W. Tillyard, “A Mirror for Magistrates Revisited,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson (Oxford, 1959).

4. Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 102-130.

5. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard H. Newdigate, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1931-1961).

6. All citations are to [Anthony Chute], Beawtie Dishonoured written vnder the title of Shores wife (London, 1593).

7. Samuel Daniel, Poems and “A Defence of Ryme,” ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (London, 1950).

8. All citations from The Rape of Lucrece are to The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London, 1960).

9. The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool, 1949).

10. See esp. Ronald Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition: Dramatic Irony in The Complaint of Rosamond,” Studies in English Literature, 15 (1975), 21-36. Clark Hulse also notes that the concept of fame is problematical in the poem (Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic [Princeton, 1981], p. 63).

11. Compare Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition,” p. 25.

12. OED, s.v. “publish.”

13. See Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York, 1958), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. Ian Donaldson interprets the negative reactions readers have had to various versions of the Lucrece story in terms of the change from a shame culture to a guilt culture (The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations [Oxford, 1982], pp. 33-34).

14. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1969).

15. For an argument different from my own, see Bickford Sylvester, “Natural Mutability and Human Responsibility: Form in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” College English, 26 (1965), 505-511; he claims that absolutes are seen as a positive value in the poem. Yet another approach to the question of absolutes is offered by R. Thomas Simone in Shakespeare and “Lucrece”: A Study of the Poem and Its Relation to the Plays, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 38 (Salzburg, 1974), p. 168; he suggests that Lucrece is the victim both of dualism and of man's vision of an ideal.

16. Paul Cantor observes that Shakespeare's Roman characters typically rely heavily on proverbs (Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire [Ithaca, 1976], pp. 109-110). His suggestion that this habit reflects a reluctance to think for oneself is as relevant to Lucrece as to her counterparts in the Roman plays.

17. Robert J. Griffin also notes the allusions to night and day but interprets them differently (“‘These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold’: Patterned Imagery in Shakespeare's Narrative Poems,” Studies in English Literature, 4 [1964], 50-51).

18. Compare Joseph A. Porter's analysis of Richard II's use of predication (The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Trilogy [Berkeley, 1979], chap. 1).

19. Many psychologists and sociologists have analyzed this reaction. See, for example, two studies by Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, “Rape Trauma Syndrome,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 131 (1974), 983, and Rape; Victims of Crisis (Bowie, Md., 1974), p. 39.

20. On the characteristics of the Senecan set speech, see esp. Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech, trans. T. S. Dorsch (London, 1961), pp. 215-252. Other relevant studies include John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893), esp. pp. 14-41; T. S. Eliot, “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” in Selected Essays (New York, 1932), pp. 52-61; G. K. Hunter, “Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case-Study in ‘Influence,’” Shakespeare Survey, 20 (1967), 17-26.

21. Saint Augustine goes so far as to raise the possibility that Lucretia actually welcomed the attack. See The City of God, trans. George E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1957-1972), I, 1.19.

22. OED, s.v. “maiden.” Prince unpersuasively suggests that “maiden” merely signifies “chaste” (p. 87).

23. On this issue in the Roman plays, see Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome, esp. pp. 22-23.

24. Compare Campbell, Mirror for Magistrates, esp. pp. 48-51.

25. On Daniel's mode of didacticism, see Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition”; his thesis is that the poem's didacticism resides not in direct statement but rather in its ironic presentation of its heroine.

26. On the significance of the temperamental differences between Brutus and Lucrece, compare my article, “The Rape of Clio: Attitudes to History in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” English Literary Renaissance, forthcoming.

27. For an analysis of that belief, see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana, 1984), pp. 57-61.

28. Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1976), pp. 103, 107. Robert L. Montgomery, Jr., also observes that Lucrece gets carried away with her own passion, but his criticism of her behavior is more temperate (“Shakespeare's Gaudy: The Method of The Rape of Lucrece,” in Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed. Thomas P. Harrison et al. [Oxford, Texas, 1967], esp. pp. 32-33).

29. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), esp. chap. 1.

30. Angel Day, The English Secretorie (London, 1595), p. 95. After completing this essay I heard Joel Fineman's paper, “The Temporality of Rape,” at the 1984 Modern Language Association convention. He too notes the presence of syneciosis in the poem but interprets the significance of the figure very differently from the way I do.