[In the following excerpt, Camino draws parallels between The Rape of Lucrece, Renaissance practices of mapmaking, and colonial conquest. The critic contends that the poem can be viewed as an expression of the “imperial ‘achievement’ of patriarchy” that resulted in the sublimation of both colonized populations and women in general.]

When Lear placed the map before him, he was aware that his signs would effect an irreversible division of his kingdom. With this gesture he fragmented not only his state but also his psychic integrity. As the Fool notes, Lear's partition turned the world upside down:

When thou clovest thy crown i'th'middle, and gav'st away both parts, thou bor'st thine ass on thy back o'er the dirt …

thou mad'st thy daughters thy mothers … thou gav'st them the rod and putt'st down thine own breeches …

thou hast pared thy wit o'both sides, and left nothing i'th'middle.

(1.4.156-59, 168-70, 183-84)¹

The divided map stands for Lear's emasculation, that is, for his loss of a sense of identity, which was given by his class, his gender (now he has “nothing in the middle”), and their power relationships. The prominent position the map occupies in this play is determined by the remarkable developments in cartography that stimulated and were stimulated by an age of exploration, discovery, and conquest.

The increase in the production of maps and chorographic descriptions in the early modern period was inextricably enmeshed with colonialism, the rise of nationalism, and bourgeois individualism. Countries were rendered meaningful and intelligible, their surfaces were fixed, and they were internalized as objects with a historical reality.² Significance was inscribed in the texts which stood for the emerging nations, and was in turn reified in the “body natural” of the king whose physical being was assimilated to that of his territory.³

As texts, maps recorded and created geographical, religious, and political beliefs. The “mapping impulse”⁴ was consequent upon a desire to decode the unreadable, to imprint every blank space, to efface the void, which would often become tragic for those to be colonized. This drive, as I see it, was not merely geographical or macrocosmic: the discursive fragmentation of the female body effected by blazons participated in the same dialectic. To borrow Peter Stallybrass's formulation: “as the nation-state was formed according to new canons of incorporation and exclusion, so was the female body refashioned.”⁵ My analysis of the relationship between the topological and the feminine in Shakespeare's Lucrece will be precisely aimed at reinscribing woman as terra incognita. In other words, I shall present “Lucrece” as a space framed by a patriarchal power in which sexual and political conquests are aspects of a particular definition of masculinity.

Renaissance princes, like Charles V or Henry VIII, used their full-length portraits as propaganda in a religious and nationalistic struggle. Their virility, emphasized by their prominent codpieces, was an aspect of this all-conquering thrust.⁶ This masculine notion found, however, a stumbling block in the England of Elizabeth who, nonetheless, managed to become an “honorary man” by enshrining her chastity and crafting an icon out of it. Marion Campbell has summed up this interesting process as follows:

Unlike the modern state, which is defined territorially with power vested in neither the ruler nor the ruled, the Elizabethan body politic was contained within the natural body of the Queen. … With its inviolable frontiers, moral purity, and unchanging physical state, virginity became the connecting link between the natural and political bodies. … Elizabeth … presented her virginity as the single most important guarantee of her country's safety, a personal virtue that was simultaneously a political asset.⁷

This was made apparent, for instance, when Phillip II sent his armada and she pursuaded her subjects that the defense of the English borders was the defense of her own body; that their honor rested upon preserving her virginity from Phillip's intended rape.⁸

The publication of Shakespeare's Lucrece in 1594, six years after the armada fiasco, would probably conjure up images of that frustrated attempt and its topical associations.⁹ Lucretia's violation had marked the end of the Roman monarchy and the beginning of the republic. Her story was extremely popular and had been rehearsed by, among others, Chaucer, Gower, and Painter. Lydgate's Serpent of Division, written early in the fifteenth century and reprinted in 1590, used Tarquin's rape as a warning against the dangers inherent in tyrannical systems of government. A similar admonition was voiced in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour and in Holinshed's Chronicles.¹⁰ That the rape of a woman's “body natural” could precipitate a positive change in the “body politic” of the country could not, however, pass unobserved. The Marian mythology evolved around the figure of the Virgin Queen might relate Elizabeth with Lucretia as a paragon of female integrity. The possibility that the absolutist Tudor rule could be overthrown would, however, place the Queen in Tarquin's position and therefore question this image. Shakespeare needed then to contend with the paradoxical political readings of a myth of female heroism and virginity already built into the language.¹¹

Shakespeare's poem is preceded by a prose narrative, “The Argument,” which follows closely the sources he used.¹² It begins on an evening during the siege of Ardea, a city some thirty miles away from Rome, when Tarquin and other warriors blazoned the virtue and beauty of their respective wives. Unaware of his effect upon Tarquin, Collatine “extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia.” Since martial words had to be supported by evidence and action, they went to see for themselves what their wives were doing and found that, other than Lucretia who was “spinning amongst her maids,” they were all “dancing and revelling, or in several disports.” The chastity and the beauty of the contest's winner, Lucrece, “inflamed” Tarquin's lust and after they returned to the camp he went back and “ravished” her. She then dispatched messengers to her father and husband, made them swear that they would avenge her, told them what had happened, and stabbed herself. Upon Brutus's suggestion, they paraded her corpse around Rome where the people rebelled against the tyranny of the Tarquins, who were exiled, and a republic replaced their monarchy.

The outline of events presented in the Argument allows Shakespeare to start the poem in medias res. The sequential order of events is altered and many a significant element of the traditional story is relegated to the background or removed. The beginning, as Tarquin posts from Ardea with the rape of Lucrece already in his mind, adds momentum to the initial pace and narrows its focus to Tarquin's oncoming sexual transgression. As we are soon informed of the previous events by a flashback, the role of Collatine's rhetoric in the tragedy to come is highlighted. This, as Richard Lanham has observed, is a telling departure from the main sources of the legend:

Livy adds her chastity as an attraction. … But in Shakespeare's pamphlet … Tarquin falls in love from report only. … Not beauty but envy stimulates Tarquin to ultimate rashness. … He wants to rape Lucrece because she is pre-eminent in virtuous womanhood. … Shakespeare has so pointedly removed the obvious motive—sight of the beloved.¹³

The modification of the sources serves to foreground what in the poem is the motif that prefigures the tragedy to come. Not only are the wager and the sight of Lucrece absent, but it is explicitly Collatine's praise that “inflames” Tarquin's desire. That his bragging is the catalyst of the subsequent action is clearly stated by Shakespeare:

For he the night before, in Tarquin's tent
Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state;(14)
What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent,
In the possession of his beauteous mate;
Reck'ning his fortune at such high proud rate
          That kings might be espoused to more fame,
          But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.
.....Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apologies be made,
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is Collatine the publisher
          Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
          From thievish ears, because it is his own?

(15-21, 29-35)

Lucrece's undoing is clearly the outcome of Collatine's initial textualization of the economies of her beauty and her virtue. To borrow Nancy Vickers's words:

Lucrece thus reveals the rhetorical strategies that descriptive occasions generate, and underlines the potential consequences of being female matter for male oratory. … In Lucrece, occasion, rhetoric, and result are all informed by, and thus inscribe, a battle between men that is first figuratively and then literally fought on the fields of woman's “celebrated” body.¹⁵

A rhetorical display is the primary cause of Tarquin's loss of self-control, of his failure to keep his passions under his own “rule.” He, who should have framed his physical and his political bodies, surrenders to the drives of his “body natural” so that social disruption comes from him who should uphold law and order. Sexuality thus becomes politics when the king becomes “soft fancy's slave” (200):

“Thou art not what thou seem'st, and if the same,
Thou seem'st not what thou art, a god, a king:
For kings like gods should govern everything.
Hast thou command? by him that gave it thee,
From a pure heart command thy rebel will.
I sue for exiled majesty's repeal;
Let him return, and flatt'ring thoughts retire.
His true respect will prison false desire,
          And wipe the dim mist from thy doting eyne,
          That thou shalt see thy state, and pity mine.”

(600-602, 624-25, 640-44)¹⁶

As with Lear, Tarquin is presented as the source and the consequence of the political upheaval that ensues.

Tarquin's conquest of Lucrece's body is, in Shakespeare's poem, an ambitious quest that contains the seeds of the conqueror's self-destruction:

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 bankrout in this poor rich gain.

(134-40)

We are, nonetheless, made to understand Tarquin's conflict because we are offered in the first part of the narrative a vision of his hesitant self contemplating his victim and poised in a struggle to conciliate his erotic desire and his inability to satisfy it without destroying a part of himself. His sexual urgency and his guilt are simultaneous and the split subjectivity that results from this self-alienation is a sign of the exile from the interior coherence Tarquin loses by robbing his kinsman, Collatine, of his lawful property.¹⁷

It is precisely that relationship which informs Tarquin's inner “disputation,” his fear of a dishonor that will be forever printed on his “golden coat [of arms]” (205). In his balance of prospective gains and losses Lucrece is but a blank space. Moreover, his “black deed” (226) is unjustified because Collatine has done no offense he wishes to avenge:

“Had Collatinus kill'd my son or sire,
Or lain in ambush to betray my life;
Or were he not my dear friend, this desire
Might have excuse to work upon his wife,
As in revenge or quittal of such strife:
          But as he is my kinsman, my dear friend,
          The shame and fault finds no excuse nor end.
Shameful it is—ay, if the fact be known.
Hateful it is,—there is no hate in loving.
I'll beg her love,—but she is not her own.”

(232-41)

Tarquin's “theft”¹⁸ of his kinsman's property not only effectively breaks the male bonding they had formed in their military campaign, but puts in question the existence of boundaries between the political and the psychological selves.

Because Tarquin's society is centered upon men and their interests, “feminine” attributes (such as softness, diffidence, or cowardice) are, of course, devalued and their “masculine” military counterparts (such as aggressiveness, pride, or prowess) are celebrated for their own sake. Furthermore, since the rape of women seems to have gone hand in hand with the conquest of land throughout history,¹⁹ it is the same masculinist mode of thought that made Tarquin identify with an all-male fellowship and that stimulated his wish to rape Lucrece. He therefore marches toward her accompanied by images of warfare:²⁰

Affection is my captain, and he leadeth;
          And when his gaudy banner is display'd,
          The coward fights, and will not be dismay'd.

(271-73)

He progresses thus until he opens the door of Lucrece's chamber with his knee. He then draws the curtain from the bed and watches Lucrece's body, which lies “at the mercy of his mortal sting” (364). It is from his position that we participate in a voyeuristic exercise whereby the body he is to “sting” is dehumanized in a Petrarchan blazon:

Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,
Coz'ning the pillow of a lawful kiss,
Who therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,
Swelling on either side to want his bliss:
Between whose hills her head entombed is,
          Where like a virtuous monument she lies,
          To be admir'd of lewd unhallowed eyes.
Without the bed her other fair hand was,
On the green coverlet; whose perfect white
Show'd like an April daisy on the grass,
With pearly sweat resembling dew of night.
Her eyes like marigolds had sheath'd their light,
          And canopied in darkness sweetly lay,
          Till they might open to adorn the day.
Her hair like golden threads play'd with her breath:
O modest wantons, wanton modesty!
Showing life's triumph in the map of death,
And death's dim look in life's mortality.
Each in her sleep themselves so beautify,
          As if between them twain there were no strife,
          But that life liv'd in death and death in life.

(386-406)

Lucrece is here described as a “map of death”: her head is “entombed” and she is a “virtuous monument” covered by flowers (marigolds, daisies, lilies, and roses);²¹ she is a composite icon of worldiness and vanity, surrounded by hills and arranged with a lavish display of flowers. These flowers, as Shakespeare writes in the sonnets, blossom and wither; they are at the same time a memento mori and a celebration of life. Conventional though it may be, this imagery is striking in this context because the whole poem is set indoors and crowded with images of diverse enclosures, dark houses, prisons, and fortresses. By contrast, “the sight of Lucrece asleep is transformed into an apparition of spring and fragile innocence.”²² In her sleep, she is a map on the vanitas theme reminding Tarquin of the eternal presence of the great leveler, death. Lucrece's “map of death” speaks about mutability and the worthlessness of material and sensual possessions, rather like the skull in the cartouche placed on North America by Hondius which warned explorers of the transitoriness of life and the futility of their ambition.²³

The trope of the female body as a synecdoche of sexuality and death is thus reinforced not only by the image of the map but also by that of the garden, which represents the ability of humans to dominate their environment, and also, as Terry Comito notes, mortality and the meaninglessness of worldly riches: “The garden is an image of fruition, order, and completeness; and at the same time, and by the same token, it is an image of growth, process, and mutability. It is at once a privileged place and witness to the effects of time.”²⁴ The recurrent cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death that corresponds to the seasons made gardens at the same time tropes of both worldly ambition and contemptus mundi. Lucrece's bucolic landscape is therefore further associated with the idea of death not only for its paradisal connotations but also because the presence of flowers and maps assimilates her body to a conquered plot of land that has been conveniently landscaped.²⁵ The classical “monuments” that figured prominently in gardens and in tombs further suggest an intricate relationship between gardens, vanitas, and women's bodies.

The description of Lucrece as a “map of death” follows the contemporary pattern of rhetorical conventions that are often grouped under the label “Petrarchism.” Through her problematic relationship with various flowers, mountains, grass, marble, and metallic elements, Lucrece is drawn as a cartographic landscape where her body is effaced. Her “rosy cheek” is, in this figuration, like the wind rose of a map, the north of which is indicated by the “lily,” which was often used to point the north in maps from the mid-sixteenth century.²⁶ The convergence between these mapping ornaments and the Petrarchan erotic description is not merely coincidental. Blazons mapped a body, that of a woman, to be appropriated, in the same way that the mapping of land served to facilitate its invasion. Lucrece is a colonial fortune, a “jewel” to be enjoyed by the conqueror. Her blazon is nothing other than the fragmented map of an alien landscape, of an impossible geography that had to be brought under control.

It is worth noting that the writer who popularized blazoning, Petrarch, was not only devoted to the study of maps but was also himself “the author of a Syrian itinerary and a map of Italy.”²⁷ That maps and blazons were Renaissance artifacts that circumscribed land and women by reducing them to discursive and fixed coordinates is corroborated in the poem when Shakespeare explicitly refers to Lucrece's face as “that map which deep impression bears” (1712). And the same trope is deployed to describe as a “map of woe” Lavinia's face after she has been savagely raped and mutilated.²⁸

For Patricia Parker this blazoning of Lucrece is already expressed as a potential rape. She analyzes the intricate relationship between “exploration, inventory and blazon” and concludes that

The verbal display of a woman, opened up to view by her possessor; the narrative inventory of a feminized America … the Baconian description of the parts of nature … and the expansive display of an English owner's property … all participate in an imagery of opening and controlling something gendered as female before spectators and possessors gendered as male, in a process in which ostentatious display, copia, or “increase” is constrained within an economy of mastery and ownership.²⁹

The image of a feminized America to which Parker alludes is a figure often represented as waiting to be raped by Europeans so that she would be made to “bear” the “impression” of civilization. … The similarity between the naked vulnerable bodies of Vespucci's “America” and Titian's Lucretia. … reinforce the notion that both bare “bodies” are reifications of conquest as a gendered process. These two images convey two sequential moments of a “rape”: the conqueror's initial sense of wonder as he gazes at the body he is to conquer and his violent possession of the female body. The interpretation given by Michel de Certeau to Jan van der Straet's etching is worth quoting at length:

Amerigo Vespucci the voyager arrives from the sea. … Before him is the Indian “America,” a nude woman reclining in her hammock, an unnamed presence of difference, a body which awakes within a space of exotic fauna and flora … an inaugural scene: after a moment of stupor … the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history. From her he will make a historied body—a blazon—of his labors and phantasms. She will be “Latin” America … she is a nuova terra not yet existing on maps—an unknown book destined to bear the name Amerigo, of its inventer. But what is really initiated here is a colonization of the body by the discourse of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, “savage” page on which Western desire will be written. It will transform the space of the other into a field of expansion for a system of production. From the moment of a rupture between a subject and an object of the operation, between a will to write and a written body (or a body to be written), this writing fabricates Western history. The Writing of History is the study of writing as historical practice.³⁰

Like Vespucci, Tarquin, after a “moment of stupor” and estrangement, makes Lucrece's body his own possession; he makes her a map, the text where he writes the history of his tyranny.

The main argument Tarquin uses to persuade Lucrece to consent to her rape consists in threatening her with her husband's dishonor (514-25). She tries to make him aware of the consequences of his crime (568ff.) but he silences her appeal and departs,

A captive victor that hath lost in gain,
Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,
The scar that will despite of cure remain.

(730-32)

Lucrece's rape is made to appear as Tarquin's emasculation. He has, in other words, lost forever an identity that was contingent on a display of “macho” attitudes among other men. His error is not that he rapes a woman but that he rapes Lucrece, the private property of his kinsman, rather than, say, an Ardean woman.

Lucrece is then Tarquin's “newfoundland”: a country to be invaded, a stronghold to be “taken,” a “walled” city to be conquered, a map on which to place his shield, a body made to “bear” the colonizer's “impression.”³¹ To materialize such conquest Tarquin signs it with his own hand which he places upon her “turrets”:

His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,
His eye commends the leading to his hand;
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride, march'd on to make his stand
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;
          Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,
          Left their round turrets destitute and pale.

(435-41)³²

Lucrece's text bears Tarquin's impresa. His text is, however, hermetic for her before he forces his way into her room. Indeed, it is her innocence that prevents her from knowing his intentions:

But she that never cop'd with stranger eyes,
Could pick no meaning from their parling looks,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies
Writ in the glassy margents of such books;

(99-103)

Contemporary theories about the different humoral composition of the sexes are of particular relevance for an understanding of the tropes deployed in those passages. Women's humors were considered to be cold and moist and this constitution was thought to retain the “impressions” made upon them. In contrast, men's harder makeup enabled them to inscribe women's bodies. These notions are clearly expressed in the Artistotelian digression on womanhood that surrounds the pathetic scene in which Lucrece's maid cries when she sees her mistress's distress:

For men have marble, women waxen, minds
And therefore are they form'd as marble will;
The weak oppress'd, th'impression of strange kinds
Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill.
Then call them not the authors of their ill,
No more than wax shall be accounted evil,
Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.
Their smoothness, like a goodly champaign plain,
Lays open all the little worms that creep;
In men as in a rough-grown grove remain
Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep;
Through crystal walls each little mote will peep;
          Though men can cover them with bold stern looks,
          Poor women's faces are their own faults' books.

(1240-53)³³

Woman was a field to be furrowed, the site where men wrote their own history; she was to reflect a man's identity by fulfilling the (re)productive role to which she had been assigned by a division of labor, which, some argue, became increasingly restrictive as cities grew and industries began to develop.³⁴

The same discourse in which women were “maps” made to “bear” men's “deep impressions” made them often responsible for the very marks of those “impressions.” Only through her suicide, Lucrece believed, could she oppose the deeply rooted tradition that questioned the testimony of raped women. Only by showing that she cared less about life than about her chastity would her contemporaries understand that she had neither enjoyed her rape nor consented to it willingly; she acted to preserve the honor of her men.³⁵ Her words, thus, had to be believed and ratified by her husband:

Here folds she up the tenure of her woe,
Her certain sorrow writ uncertainly.
By this short schedule Collatine may know
Her grief, but not her grief's true quality;
She dares not thereof make discovery,
          Lest he should hold it her own gross abuse,
          Ere she with blood had stain'd her stain'd excuse.

(1310-16)

Lucrece's acceptance of such a paradigm is expressed therefore in an immolation aimed at preserving the patriarchal system that forced her to act in the way she did. Her final motto addressed to womankind corroborates the idea that her self-destruction is nothing more than partiarchy restored. In the name of the masculine code of honor she has championed, she affirms that she will not be the excuse of other women:

“No, no, quoth she, no dame hereafter living
By my excuse shall claim excuse's giving.”

(1714-15)

Subject to textual determinism, Shakespeare's Lucrece turns the knife against herself in order to re-present Tarquin's conquest on the map of her body:

“Faint not, faint heart, but stoutly say ‘So be it’;
Yield to my hand, my hand shall conquer thee;
Thou dead, both die, and both shall victors be.”

(1209-11)

With this gesture Lucrece effectively reinscribes Tarquin's rape with her own hand.³⁶ It is only in this final moment that she acquires power over those around her: the knife that was instrumental to her rape is now central to making a reversal in the relationship between the sexes. But this knife is both the symbol and the means of a masculine power: it is a visible weapon, the mark of which is engraved effectively upon Lucrece's body, the body of her text. The rape of Lucrece is both the physical violation of a “woman,” Lucrece, and Lucrece's self-annihilation; that is, the violence she inflicts on her own body, on her text, and on woman. It is in a man's hand, Brutus's, that such a weapon will finally become the icon of Lucrece's power(lessness). All that she commands is the tragic victory of a doubtfully heroic death.³⁷ Brutus, the artificer of the political upheaval that would banish the Tarquins, can then become a hero who deposes a tyrant rather than a fanatic rebel, and he does so by virtue of vindicating the chastity and the castigation of a woman.³⁸ And Lucrece is finally made to be the loyal embodiment of a particular sense of femininity and holiness consisting largely in harming oneself for the love of others. Not surprisingly, then, men used her destroyed body in order to erect a paragon of female heroism on which they wished women to model themselves.

Lucrece's suicide breaches the symmetrical pattern normally obtaining in revenge tragedies. Brutus signals a possible alternative when he tells Collatine:

“Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself that should have slain her foe.”

(1826-27)

And it is precisely Brutus who breaks the lamentation over Lucrece's dead body and restores the potentially unending chain of revenge by aiming his wrath against Tarquin. He extracts the knife from Lucrece's wound and makes it the focus of an oath that will be reenacted in Hamlet and in The Revenger's Tragedy. His publication of her rape fuels the upheaval that deposes the Tarquins and, as Donald Cheney observes, recalls Collatine's initial praise of Lucrece:

By publishing Lucrece's virtue, Collatine had diverted energy from war to lust; now it is for Brutus to publish her virtue in such a way as to provoke Tarquin's banishment and his own accession to power in Rome. Such publication makes Brutus a playwright of sorts, a rhetorician who knows how to show Lucrece to best advantage and win the applause of the people; but language is being used in the service of political rather than purely artistic, sentimental goals: history is being written, or revised.³⁹

When Brutus draws the knife, Lucrece's blood flows out; and as the serum and the clot separate she is hemmed in by the polluted black blood of the terra incognita mapped by Tarquin's “discovery” and the “untainted” blood of her own landscape:

And bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who like a late-sack'd island vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood
          Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
          And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin
          stain'd.

(1736-43)

Her divided blood surrounds a corpse that, like the newly conquered Caribbean islands, had been “unpeopled” and ravaged by ferocious colonization.⁴⁰

Shakespeare made Lucrece the locus where the contradictions of domestic and political conquest met. She is conquered territory beyond and within one's own borders. The Roman and the New World imperial enterprise merge in the conquest of the landscape of woman's body:

Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquered;
Save of their lord, no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honoured.
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred;
Who like a foul usurper went about,
From this fair throne to heave the owner out.

(407-13)

Lucrece's breasts are a composite map made of two “ivory globes” hemmed in by the blue of the “Ocean Sea.” The cartographic Petrarchan blazoning uses the conventional “ivory” to contrast Lucrece's dazzling white skin against Tarquin's Etruscan “foulness.” It is precisely the purity of these immaculate “maiden worlds” that excites his ambition to encompass the globe, his urge to place his banner upon her body, his mimetic desire to rob the lord whose exclusive “yoke” Lucrece “bears.” The blue ocean that surrounds the globe Tarquin is about to conquer turns red and black at the end as Lucrece's blood abandons her lifeless body. The cause of his ultimate banishment is his unfortunate choice of a “plot” that had already been discovered, mapped, named, and inscribed by another man.

Political and domestic conquests are thus made to converge in Lucrece as aspects of the discourse of tyrannical princes. To treat one as metaphor for the other not only reduces the scope of patriarchy's reach in this poem but also diminishes the devastating effects of the violence effected on the female body by sublimation. The rape of Lucrece was the imperial “achievement” of patriarchy: a structure of power that reaches all strata of society, not separating the geographical from the domestic realms.⁴¹ Roman and Elizabethan Lucreces are mediums through which men communicate, fight, and effect political turmoils. Not surprisingly, the “new” regimes rest upon the foundation of woman's mutilated body;⁴² so that woman is nothing other than the unlucky terrain where political struggles are fought and her sexuality the liminal space where a culture establishes its coordinates and fixes its boundaries.⁴³

After Lucrece's suicide Shakespeare closed the narrative hastily.⁴⁴ Given the politically sensitive environment in which he lived, he would obviously be cautious when presenting a change from an absolutist monarchy to a republic achieved by breaching a woman's chastity. Elizabeth might be identified with Lucrece insofar as she had assimilated the integrity of her realm with her virginity. Such an association would come to an end if she were seen as a (to be deposed) monarch and a rapist. Like Tarquin's short-lived happiness, Elizabethan conquests entailed irreconcilable paradoxes. Nowhere are those contradictions more apparent than in a poem where conquest entails the alienation of the conqueror and the destruction of the conquered. The weapons used to construe the Elizabethan sense of nationhood were therefore the same that would be deployed to conquer strange worlds. But outside England and beyond the physical borders of the modern masculine “individual,” all women and all landscapes were realms that could be opened to discovery: bodies the maps of which had to be drawn in order for them to be conquered.

Notes

1. All Shakespeare references are to the relevant Arden edition. Francis Barker analyzes Lear's gesture as a split in the interrelated domains of the self, the family, society, and the kingdom, in The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 33.

2. It is significant to note that the name of America caught on when it was printed on a map included in Waldseemüller's Cosmographiæ Introductio (1507). See Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 24-52. I am grateful to Kadir for letting me see this section of his book before its publication. On this topic see also my “Mapping terra incognita: The Reification of America in the Works of Cortés, Vespucci and More,” in Travellers' Tales, Real and Imaginary: The Hispanic World and Its Literature, ed. Alun Kenwood (Melbourne: Voz Hispánica 1993) 169-87.

   Richard Helgerson analyzes the relationship between the rise of nationalism in England and the Saxtons' atlas in “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 326-61.

3. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

4. The idiom comes from Svetlana Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: John Murray, 1983), 119-68.

5. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 130. Stallybrass offers an expanded version of these Bakhtinian ideas in Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

6. On the association of power and sexuality in those portraits, see Catherine Belsey and Andrew Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I,” in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktions, 1990), 11-13; also Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 303-40.

7. Marion Campbell, “Inscribing Imperfection: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Elizabethan Court,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 20 (1990): 244-45.

8. This is clearly conveyed in the “Armada” portrait. See Montrose, “Elizabethan Subject,” esp. 315, and Belsey and Belsey, “Icons of Divinity,” esp. 11-15. The study of Elizabethan iconography has produced a copious literature. See especially Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); and Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Ark, 1975).

9. The poem was written while the theaters were closed (1592-94) due to an outbreak of the plague, and was published as Lucrece. The title The Rape of Lucrece was first used in the 1616 quarto. Lucrece became extremely popular and was reprinted four times between 1594 and 1600 (E. P. Kuhl, “Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” Philological Quarterly 20 [1941]: 352).

10. See ibid., 354-55.

11. Ian Donaldson offers a comprehensive review of her “myth” throughout history in The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

12. Shakespeare's main sources were Ovid's Fasti (2.721-852) and Livy's Historia (1.57-60). See T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 108-12.

13. Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 95-96. As Patricia Joplin puts it, “rape is the price Lucrece pays for having been described” (“The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” Stanford Literature Review [1984]: 102). See also René Girard, “Envy of So Rich a Thing,” in A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 21-28.

14. This line, for Girard, “sounds as if Collatine were undressing Lucrece in the midst of his fellow soldiers” (22). Eric Partridge gives some Shakespearean references for “jewel” used as a synonym for maidenhead. The citation in Lucrece is the only example Partridge notes in which “jewel” is equated with female married virtue (Shakespeare's Bawdy [London: Routledge, 1947], 128). See also Marlowe's use of “diamond” in The Jew of Malta, ed. Richard van Fossen (London: Arnold, 1965), 2.3.49ff.

15. Nancy Vickers, “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Routledge, 1985), 96.

16. The same appeal is used throughout this speech (600-44) and also in 651-55, 659-60, and 666.

17. Tarquin is then precisely at the intersection between two modes of discourse and of being, at the threshold of modern “civilization.” His conflict is at the crossroads between a “shame” culture and a “guilty” one. The guilt is, as Paul Ricoeur remarks, a “‘means’ used by civilization to tame aggressiveness” (“Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979], 309). Freud outlined this as follows: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt, it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (“Civilization and Its Discontents,” in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. [London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74], 21:84). Of course, as Sander L. Gilman argues, “Freud continues a discourse which relates the images of male discovery to the images of the female as object of discovery” (“Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 257).

18. Coppélia Kahn remarks that in Lucrece and in Cymbeline “the chaste wife is seen as a precious jewel which tempts the thief; in both works, the husband's boasts initiate the temptation, in effect challenging his peers to take that jewel” (“The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 [1976]: 53). The word rape, from the Latin rapere meaning “to seize,” meant originally “theft of property” (OED sb.²1). This meaning is complemented by that of the physical violation of a woman against her will in the early modern period.

19. See the remarkable review Susan Brownmiller offers in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1976), 23-87.

20. An alternative reading of the significance of military metaphors in the poem is offered by Michael Platt in “The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands,” Centennial Review 19 (1975): 59-79.

21. The conventional symbolism of flowers and gardens used to describe Lucrece's body parts had been part of the Marian cult which was taken over by Elizabeth.

22. J. W. Lever, introduction to The Rape of Lucrece (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 10.

23. A reproduction of this cartouche can be seen in James A. Welu, “The Sources and Development of Cartographic Ornamentation in the Netherlands,” in Art and Cartography, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160. In the same volume Juergen Schultz's article, “Maps as Metaphors: Mural Map Cycles of the Italian Renaissance” (97-122), mentions some allegorical maps on the vanitas theme, among which

    The large thirteenth-century world map in Hereford cathedral in England … shows the Last Judgement above the map proper, together with inscriptions announcing the Day of Judgement and imploring mercy. Around the planisphere itself are inscribed the letters M-O-R-S, characterizing the earth as the realm of death. The map expresses the transitoriness of earthly existence and thereby reinforces our understanding of the finality and universality of the Last Judgement.

    (112)

    The vanitas theme is also prominent on the title page of Purchas his Pilgrimes. A facsimile of this remarkable engraving, which includes, among various icons, Elizabeth's death monument, James sitting on a map of the British isles, and a globe encircled with the inscription “vanitas vanitatis,” is reproduced in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625; rpt. Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905), xxxvi. I am grateful to Michael Neill for bringing this engraving to my attention.

24. Terry Comito, “Caliban's Dream: The Topography of Some Shakespeare Gardens,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981): 40. John Roe compares this passage with a similar one in Ovid and reads the paradox of life in death as a contradiction resolved in paradise. See his introduction to The Poems, ed. John Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 28-30.

25. The obsessive landscaping and the recurrent colonialist trope of the “planting” of people, customs, and the like seems to me to illustrate a frantic desire to convert the whole earth (people included) into a domesticated set of symmetrical pot plants.

26. See Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography, rev. and enlgd. R. A. Skelton (London: C. A. Watts, 1964), 144.

27. See ibid., 144.

28. Titus Andronicus, 3.2.12. For a survey of Shakespeare's references to maps, see Victor Morgan, “The Literary Image of Globes and Maps in Early Modern England,” in English Map-Making, 1550-1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: British Library, 1983), 46-56.

29. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 138, 154. Montrose argues that this “textualization of the Other” is a gendered “act of symbolic violence, mastery, and self-empowerment,” in “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 6.

30. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv-xxvi. An analysis of this engraving is offered by Montrose in “The Work of Gender.” I am indebted to Montrose's article for bringing this remarkable engraving and de Certeau's reading of it to my attention.

31. It is worth mentioning that two of the most remarkable map makers, Hondius and Mercator, also wrote calligraphy treatises. See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 205. Goldberg illustrates, throughout the book, the violence of the scene of writing; he also offers an interesting reading of two remarkable title pages in which feminine sexuality is seen to be the result of “masculine inscription” (137-45).

32. Further references to Lucrece as a city or a fortress abound in the poem. See, for example, lines 438-48, 464-69, and 1170-74.

33. The Artistotelian humoral physiology deployed in this passage is often used as an explanation for women's subordinate position. See Ian MacLean's The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 42-64; also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984); and Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Shakespeare made use of this metaphor of women as books to be inscribed in Measure for Measure:

    Women?—Help heaven! Men their creation mar
    In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail;
    For we are soft as our complexions are,
    And credulous to false print.

    (2.4.126-30)

    Further examples occur in Twelfth Night, 2.2.28-31; Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.47-51; and Othello, 4.2.72-73.

34. Alice Clark argued that capitalism brought with it the downgrading of domestic work and therefore of women's status; see Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; rpt. London: Routledge, 1982). See also Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 175-99; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); and Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper, 1979). A contrasting view is offered by Judith C. Brown in “A Woman's Place Was in the Home: Women's Work in Renaissance Tuscany,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Differences in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 206-24. Joan Thirsk reviews both positions in Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 1-21.

35. Carolyn D. Williams explores the meanings of rape and relates them to the sparse conviction rates during the early modern age in “‘Silence, like a Lucrece' knife’: Shakespeare and the Meaning of Rape,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993) 93-110. She concludes that had Lucrece been an Elizabethan she would have had very little chance of having her case brought to court. The possibility of Tarquin's being convicted of rape could be considered negligible indeed. Her analysis is based on the figures given by Nazife Bashar in “Rape in England between 1550 and 1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance, ed. The London Feminist Group (London: Pluto, 1983), 28-42. I thank Williams for letting me see her article before its publication.

36. Roy Battenhouse sees that “she guides the knife downward into her bosom. Emblematically, we have been shown martyrdom in an obscene mode, a religious ‘dying’ which Shakespeare hints, figuratively, is a kind of masturbatory self-rape.” Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 28.

37. St. Augustine had presented the dilemma that was to be at the center of this debate as follows: “if she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?” The City of God, trans. Henry Betterson, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Bk. 1, chap. 19, 29-30.

38. Stephanie Jed analyzes this attitude in Coluccio Salutati's version of the story in Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Philippa Berry's analysis of Lucrece's “voice” renders a different reading of Lucrece's power in Shakespeare's poem. See her “Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992): 33-39. An alternative perspective on female eloquence appears in Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘dilation’ and ‘delation’ in Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Routledge, 1985), 54-74. See also Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, esp. 8-35, 81-85, and 97-125; also Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), esp. 37-67 and 103-41; Lynda E. Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 179-213; and Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours.”

39. Donald Cheney, “Tarquin, Juliet, and Other Romei,” Spenser Studies 3 (1982): 116.

40. Michael Goldman sees that “In all cases the figure of the crowd is used to suggest some sort of varied population inside the body, a throng of multiple possibilities or competing selves”; see Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 22. I am, however, inclined to see in this trope the traces of the conquest of the New World which was being emptied out by colonization and epidemics.

41. Using Coppélia Kahn's words, “patriarchy as a family state and a way of defining sex roles was indistinguishable from patriarchy as the basis of all social thinking.” See Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press), 13.

42. As Platt (“The Republic for Which It Stands,” 76) puts it, “the new regime will be a regime of fathers and husbands. … In defense of the most private of properties, the chastity of one's wife, the regime is erected.”

43. To borrow Joplin's formulation: “female chastity is not sacred out of respect for the integrity of the woman as person; rather, it is sacred out of respect for violence. Because her sexual body is the ground of the culture's system of differences” (“The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” 38). Boose (“Scolding Brides,” 195) also illustrates that women are “creatures whose bodily margins and penetrable orifices provide culture with a locus for displaced anxieties about the vulnerability of the social community, the body politic.” Similarly, Stallybrass and White (The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, 144) argue persuasively that “one cannot analyse the psychic domain without examining the processes of transcoding between the body, topography and the social formation.” These studies are informed by Mary Douglas's seminal Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpt. London and New York: Ark, 1984).

44. Donaldson (The Rapes of Lucretia, 117) presents Shakespeare's ultimate rashness as a sign of his “royalism.” Kuhl, however, argues that “In Lucrece, in short, Shakespeare denounces (along with other matters) crumbling outworn political theories—and he does it precisely at the time when these outworn political beliefs were uppermost in the minds of men” (“Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” 358-59).

I wish to thank Mac Jackson for his “peculiar” support. Carmen Maroto's help is deeply appreciated. Her own work for MAP (Medical Aid for Palestine) has helped me to see more clearly the pragmatics of map-making. For comments, suggestions and much else I am grateful to Louis Montrose, Roger Horrocks, and Christine Arkinstall. Above all, I am deeply indebted to Michael Neill. While I (re)produce some “graver labor,” this article is dedicated to him.