SOURCE: Kietzman, Mary Jo. “‘What is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?’ Lucrece's Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic Agency.” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 97, no. 1 (August 1999): 21-45.

[In the following essay, Kietzman analyzes the character of Lucrece and her role as a female complainant—a poetic trope that originated in classical verse. The critic argues that Lucrece uses her complaint to redefine herself and to come to terms with her ethical dilemma, noting that Shakespeare used this same device in Hamlet.]

In his 1598 marginalia to Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer, Gabriel Harvey differentiated Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet from Venus and Adonis, saying that “the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: but his Lucrece and his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort.”¹ Clearly the former two works were linked in Harvey's mind, but precisely how is uncertain. That both could “please the wiser sort” echoes Shakespeare's own description of Lucrece in his dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton as a “graver labor.” Commentators have generally read Shakespeare's adjective “graver” to mean that he would follow his rendition of a light mythological poem (popular in the 1590s) with another generic tour de force in a more serious vein. Lucrece does, in fact, resemble complaint poems immensely popular throughout the 1590s, in which a female speaker utters self-disclosing expressions of grief about a loss or lack. However, I will argue, as Harvey implies, that Lucrece is much more than a generic exercise and that for Shakespeare it represents a self-defining poetic moment connected on a much more fundamental level to his Hamlet.²

In Lucrece, Shakespeare experimented with the complaint as a flexible rhetorical instrument for dramatizing a character's mental life as (to quote Lars Engle) “a creative source of revaluations in a matrix of communal understanding.”³ Partly through a comparison with Hamlet, I will establish Lucrece as the archetypal Shakespearean complainant who not only emotes but also returns obsessively to the causes and consequences of events which have turned her world upside down, trying retrospectively to render her experience coherent.⁴ John Roe, the only commentator who has written on the connection between the two works, notes that both Lucrece and Hamlet experience self-division and that both must come to terms with a life that has become unbearable due to circumstances beyond their own contriving.⁵ Roe argues that Shakespeare locates Lucrece and Hamlet within ethical dilemmas “to stifle dissent and to produce sympathy” for Hamlet's revenge and Lucrece's suicide.⁶ I develop Roe's insight that both Lucrece and Hamlet must come to terms with self-division as well as with an impossible predicament, but unlike Roe, I believe Shakespeare represents protagonists who actively assess their particular ethical dilemmas as they complain. The complaint mode enabled Shakespeare to dramatize practical rationality, a complex responsiveness to one's concrete situation that captures the sheer complexity and the agonizing difficulty of choosing who to be and how to act.⁷

Just as characters such as Lucrece and Hamlet use complaint to redefine themselves in complex situations, Shakespeare used the mode to authorize his own poetic vocation. In The Rape of Lucrece, he dramatizes his relationship to the classical tradition of female complaint and the tradition's early modern revival in order to declare both his filial relationship with classical poets (such as Ovid) and his originality. Classical epics are well stocked with abandoned or abused women, the forsaken and mourning wives and lovers who vainly attempt to change the course of action. According to Lawrence Lipking, they exist because the hero requires a foil: “It is through Andromache that Hector knows himself a man, through Dido that Aeneas learns what it means to be a Roman.”⁸ Even in Ovid's Heroides, which foregrounds female plaintive discourse, the heroines are defined by the lovers they address and, although they express their desires and grievances and examine the causes of their situations, the expression of emotions does not result in self-transformation. Shakespeare found this conventional opposition between active men and plaintive women imaginatively compelling. He invokes the contrast by juxtaposing Tarquin and Lucrece and reiterates it relentlessly in his tragedies.⁹ However, unlike his classical forebears, Shakespeare undermined the speech/action dichotomy by representing the complaint as a form of discursive agency.¹⁰ Complaint provided a poetic mode that enabled Shakespeare to represent characters who create themselves not by acting but by talking—more precisely, by engaging in a process of deliberation that always involves interrogating cultural givens and rewriting them, if only imaginatively. As early as Lucrece, Shakespeare exposes the limitations of action conceived simplistically as an escape from the process of conscientious deliberation. As Tarquin commits to action only in reaction to the potential confusion and constraining effects of wordy deliberation, so his successor, Macbeth, explicitly imagines his act as being opposed to words: “Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives” (Macbeth, 2.1.61). Macbeth further appropriates Tarquin's rape of Lucrece as a model of agency that will enable him to murder Duncan (“wither'd Murther, / … With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design / moves like a ghost” [2.1.52-56]). Like Tarquin, Macbeth suffers a self-inflicted wound and learns that hewing and hacking one's way out of the “thorny wood” (3.2.181) of internal or external constraints may result in temporary gains, but the consequently diminished self will not be able to sustain them.

Shakespeare presents the complaint in The Rape of Lucrece as a means to transformative action through deliberation. Lucrece rewrites herself as she complains, and she commits suicide understanding that her social world would have to be thoroughly overhauled to accommodate a self who has come to terms with her own violation.¹¹ As Harvey perceived, the analogue to Shakespeare's Lucrece is the feminized hero of Hamlet who cannot act like a conventional revenger because he has too many thoughts. Like Lucrece, Hamlet gradually recognizes the strength of his attempt to come to terms with Denmark's corruption and with his own feelings of meaninglessness by unpacking his heart with words (as mad as those words may sometimes seem). Both Lucrece in her complaints and Hamlet in his soliloquies—many of which are complaints—investigate and scrutinize the nature of each situation and each person they encounter as well as their particular responses to them.¹² As a result, both characters might be considered practical reasoners in Aristotle's terms: they respond to what is before them with full sensitivity and imaginative vigor, not discounting what is there to be seen and felt out of evasiveness, abstractness, or a need to simplify.¹³ They stay in the “thorny wood” of deliberation and “emerge” from the copse of their respective dilemmas only when they have traced and retraced their footings and realize fully the implications of the experience of entanglement for their lives: there is no escape—nothing beyond the dialectic of being one who “rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns” (3 Henry VI, 3.3.175). Hamlet and Lucrece thus accept both their inevitable subjection to constraining forces and their ability to assess and rewrite their contingent positions.¹⁴

Although Shakespeare used the figure of a complaining woman to develop a model of practical reasoning and ethical agency, we should not conclude that he had any special sympathy for women's experiences.¹⁵ He appropriated a figure that had been used as a tool of poetic self-definition in the English tradition since the fourteenth century and was enjoying a renaissance of popularity in the 1590s, but he did so in a strikingly different way—in order to call attention to himself and further his own project of authorial self-development. When Shakespeare's Lucrece was printed in 1594, it numbered among seven complaint poems published in a brief span of two years: Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond (1592); Thomas Churchyard's The Tragedy of Shore's Wife (1593); Anthony Chute's Beautie Dishonoured (1593); Thomas Lodge's The Complaint of Elstred (1593); Richard Barnfield's The Complaint of Chastite (1594); and William Drayton's Matilda (1594). This was the flowering of an Ovidian complaint tradition that began with Chaucer, who draws directly on Ovid's Heroides in his own collection of spoken and epistolary laments in The Legend of Good Women (circa 1372-86). Moreover, he learned from Ovid's Metamorphoses how to incorporate the complaint into narrative poetry so as to multiply points of view, to interpose a contemplative and frequently emotional dimension within the narrative representation of experience, and to claim a degree of authority for the limited perspective of a human storyteller. Chaucer admired and imitated Ovid's “feminism”—his representation of contradictory perceptions instead of a clear vision of experience.¹⁶ By denying the centrality and singularity of the male viewpoint, Ovid deheroized mythic material and made room for the woman's point of view.¹⁷ Ovid's strategy seems to have been particularly important to Chaucer in the early phases of his career. In The House of Fame, for example, Dido's lament after Aeneas's betrayal inspires the dreamer/narrator's confidence in his own point of view and, by extension, enabled the young Chaucer to establish his own voice.¹⁸

From the late fourteenth century onward, the female complaint allegorized a contest for cultural power and authorial rights. This certainly held true into the sixteenth century, when this allegorized contest became overtly politicized. Elizabethan complaints that frequently depict female subjects threatened by powerful patriarchs were directly influenced by Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a collection of versified English biographies and histories.¹⁹ The structure of each “biography” is dichotomous: the complaint of the disempowered is usually contrasted to a narrative representing the destructive effects of masculine ambition. The complainant's personal account not only exposes political corruption, but also dramatizes the exercise of social conscience.²⁰ The authors of Mirror for Magistrates biographies used the complaint as a form of political commentary, expressing their own grievances while maintaining the decorum that required masculine weaknesses be projected onto women. In the hands of sixteenth-century poets, the complaint became an influential socioliterary code through which fictions of masculine selfhood and desire (ambition for power, honor, and place) could be interrogated while experimenting with the creation of other modes of subjectivity in which vulnerability and dependence are expected, acknowledged, and explored.

Richard Helgerson has argued that imaginative writers of Shakespeare's period felt vulnerable and marginalized; many reiterated the story of the prodigal son in their narratives and often explicitly identified with him.²¹ Working before models of English authorship were well established, Renaissance writers were aware of violating their culture's mode of acceptable social comportment, which involved submission and service to authority. Their awareness of creating an identity rather than living a culturally imposed one bred feelings of insecurity, which may account for the proliferation of powerless subjects (prodigals and victimized women) in Renaissance narratives. Moreover, Mark Breitenberg has discussed how Petrarchism enabled masculine heterosexual desire in the 1590s by providing clearly defined roles that compensated for or repressed feelings of vulnerability, uncertainty, and helplessness.²² In the complaint poems popular during the same decade, plots are generated by the masculine desire of characters like Tarquin who seek to repress fears of their subjected status. Complaint poems expose supposedly enabling narratives as ultimately disabling; such narratives configure desire as an escape from the reality of subjection into an illusion of autonomy. The complaint mode is the antithesis of Petrarchism because it expresses a desire to know oneself, a desire to submit to passions, a desire to be dependent on and thereby vulnerable to others, and a desire to create a role rather than submit to a predetermined one. By encoding masculine desire in the complaints of female subjects, male authors expressed (albeit obliquely) their own psychic complexity without undermining masculine social authority.

Likewise, speaking as a woman enabled Shakespeare to develop a poetic voice, to stake a claim in England's literary tradition, and to assert the potential social value of a poetic career. Shakespeare, however, surpasses his contemporaries and even his classical predecessors by creating speech as a kind of agency. Jane Newman has argued that Shakespeare read the classical tales of female victims such as Philomela and Hecuba selectively, eliminating the potential for female violence in order to create a Lucrece palatable to patriarchal ideology.²³ I believe, though, that Shakespeare creates a character who reenvisions the past to create new options for herself, thus mirroring his own developmental process. In Ovid's Metamorphoses and Euripides's Hecuba (the primary sources for the stories of Philomela and Hecuba respectively), the female protagonists resort to violence because speech is physically impossible (Tereus rips out Philomela's tongue) or because the speaker's culture is deaf to her idiom (Odysseus cannot understand Hecuba's suffering).²⁴ When Lucrece speaks for Hecuba, she creates an option for agency that did not exist for women in the classical sources—speech that reconstructs the self and transforms others simultaneously. Similarly, Hamlet struggles with and finally accepts reflective, feeling speech (poetry) as having the power to transform both the speaker and his audience, a truth intuited as he watches and listens to the player speak for Hecuba.

Reading The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet in relation to one another clarifies the originality of Shakespeare's treatment of subjectivity and self-assertion. In Lucrece, Shakespeare self-consciously uses the complaint to transform characters from types of villains and victims to dynamic, changing subjectivities who listen to themselves, ponder their own speeches, and, to differing degrees, change following their consideration.²⁵ Real change begins only when characters change themselves: in the earlier work, only the sacrificial victim Lucrece has this insight, and, given her social location, she can hardly be expected to act on it. In Hamlet, Shakespeare goes further to explore how a complainant can intervene in external events. As a prince, Hamlet has more room to negotiate his social world than Lucrece does hers. Hamlet's complaints expose characters who lack the determination to think their way free of discursive fields that predetermine meaning—Laertes and Fortinbras, for example—and who act under the illusion of agency.²⁶ As the play progresses, Hamlet's historionics enable him to adopt the conventional revenge plot. As he focuses on his dilemmas without trying to solve them, he reaffirms and strengthens his attachment to the values in question.²⁷ Hamlet authenticates his agency by complaining. The insight and understanding he gains through the process of deliberation involve his whole soul, so when he is called on finally to intervene in external events, he responds with a readiness that he understands “is all” (5.2.222).²⁸ As a result, his action, unpremeditated as it is, cannot help but be an authentic creation.

It is undoubtedly true that Shakespeare wrote poems and plays interrogating patriarchal systems because he understood the pressures that patriarchy exerts on its members.²⁹ But in Lucrece Shakespeare advances an Ovidian feminism less as grievance than as cultural service. Through the character of Tarquin, Shakespeare anatomizes a profound contradiction in patriarchal structures. Perhaps he understood that traditional roles were not flexible enough to enable individuals to accommodate themselves to a world no longer founded on stabilizing medieval structures but more accurately imagined as a market of often incommensurate and competing values.³⁰ Tarquin inhabits, but fails to come to terms with, this kind of world. The first half of the poem represents the disastrous effects of appropriating preexistent roles that supposedly enable masculine agency through ambitious self-assertion but actually lead only to a suppression of choice and an evasion of responsibility. Tarquin senses this truth even before he commits his act. “What win I if I gain the thing I seek?” (line 211), he sensibly asks himself and answers, “a dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy” (line 212).³¹ He knows that impulsive action is irrational: “Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? / Or sells eternity to gain a toy?” (lines 213-14). As he intuits, commission of a mindless act gives only momentary delight while the long-term effects are ruinous: he does to himself what he has done to Lucrece. As Lucius Tarquinius's army besieged Ardea, so Sextus Tarquinius besieged Lucrece to possess a body whose breasts are described as “a pair of maiden worlds unconquered” (line 408); but in doing so “his soul's fair temple is defaced” (line 719) and he knows “that through the length of time he stands disgraced” (line 718). Tarquin also knows (as does Macbeth) that self-assertion that avoids painstaking consideration of contingencies undermines the natural relational structures that enrich and sustain the self.

What prevents men from acting rationally is their association of doubt, delay, and complaint with feminine passivity. In Lucrece, Brutus stereotypes the discursive modes necessary to preserve masculine dominance when he rallies the Romans to political action after Lucrece's death. He condemns complaint as an impotent form of discourse:

Why Collatine, is woe the cure for woe?
Do wounds help wounds, or grief help grievous deeds?
Is it revenge to give thyself a blow
For his foul act by whom thy fair wife bleeds?
Such childish humor from weak minds proceeds.
Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself that should have slain her foe.

(Lines 1821-27)

Brutus successfully frightens the Romans into action with feminized images of themselves as complainants. By the time readers encounter this passage, they are prepared to regard his use of the conventional antithesis (action versus speech) skeptically since Tarquin has applied the same antithesis to the ends of raping Lucrece and destroying himself. We are, however, encouraged to presume that Brutus's attitude is pervasive in Roman culture and that its pervasiveness is partially responsible for Tarquin's violent act.

Complaint is not, however, a gender-specific mode for Shakespeare. Tarquin appears most human in the moments before he decides to act when he expresses his qualms of conscience in a complaint. While he complains, we see him neither as “devil” nor “false worshipper” (lines 85-86). In fact, the narrator prefaces Tarquin's complaint by describing him as one of so many “troubled minds” who lies awake “revolving / The sundry dangers of his will's obtaining” (lines 126-28). While “pale with fear he doth premeditate” (line 184) his course of action, Tarquin is not yet a thief of chastity but a troubled mind in a tormenting dilemma.³² In his complaint, Tarquin reveals an awareness of his constrained or subjected situation: he cannot act willfully but must consider the repercussions of his acts on abstract values enshrined in Lucrece, on his own self-image (manhood, knighthood, family name), on his reputation, and on his relationship with his kinsman Collatine. Tarquin's situation, as Shakespeare represents it, is confusing, faced as he is with a plurality of competing values. Without the clear path out of the woods which a single value would give him, Tarquin is lost and ultimately swayed by fear and lust. He seems to recognize that the goods which constrain him are valuable, although heterogeneous, and cannot be sacrificed without some loss. If Lucrece is one of many valuable things he wants, how can he decide whether he should take her? He gives no indication of simplifying the problem of choice by using a single standard to measure his alternatives. While he could adopt pleasure as a measure and imagine possessing Lucrece as the most pleasurable of his goods, he does not. He knows he will have to suffer the shame of seeing himself as “soft fancy's slave” and leave a legacy of scandal to his surviving family. As Tarquin revolves in his “inward mind” the suffering that is both prelude to and consequence of his fantasized rape, he diminishes the pleasure or even the usefulness (to masculine self-definition) that he associates with Lucrece as an object of pursuit.

Deliberation heightens his awareness of contingency, which in turn renders him less capable of choosing. Paralyzed by indecision, Tarquin's imagination creates a scenario for the subjection he is experiencing: “If Collatinus dream of my intent, / Will he not wake, and in a desp'rate rage / Post hither this vile purpose to prevent” (lines 218-20)? In imagining a social context which designates Lucrece as the possession of another man with whom he can compete, Tarquin turns from the realistic indeterminacy of his situation, grasped and even fostered by complaint, to a discourse of masculine competition in which his role (hence, his choice) is predetermined. When he imagines being caught in his attempt by Collatine, Tarquin locates his fear in the context of a masculine competition, where fighting to win is an expected and appropriate response. Fear as imagined by Tarquin renders him powerless in speech and deed: “Will not my tongue be mute, my frail joints shake, / Mine eyes forgo their light, my false heart bleed?” (lines 227-28). To resist the effects of fear that renders him a mute coward, Tarquin experiments with framing and justifying the proposed rape as male competition:

Had Collatinus killed 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.

(Lines 232-36)

In his contention “Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will” (line 247), Tarquin's initial concern that the contemplated rape will violate Collatine's honor ultimately compels him to initiate (by rape) a battle where male honor is the only thing at stake. He further rationalizes his plot by reminding himself that Lucrece “is not her own” (line 241)—that she has no rights in a patriarchal order. Appropriating the discourse of masculine competition enables Tarquin to act because it gives him a script for acquiring honor: to face the enemy courageously and claim his prize.³³ By the end of his complaint, this is exactly what he plans to do:

I'll beg her love. But she is not her own.
The worst is but denial and reproving.
My will is strong, past reason's weak removing.
          Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw
          Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.

(Lines 241-45)

Tarquin acknowledges that his plan is irrational and that he will lose much more honor than he will gain in his anticipated campaign, but he also declares that his strong will is past “reason's weak removing.” The martial discourse he has misappropriated provides him with a comforting role, however illusory.

The discursive stereotypes that Shakespeare's men appropriate to enable their wills develop in opposition to the tears and recrimination of female complaint. Tarquin concludes with a resolution to act because deliberation has rendered him childish with fear and aged with reasoning. He cannot tolerate the confusion of his inward self and desperately seeks an alternative in action:

Then childish fear avaunt, debating die!
Respect and reason wait on wrinkled age!
My heart shall never countermand mine eye.
Sad pause and deep regard beseems the sage;
My part is youth, and beats these from the stage.
          Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize;
          Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?

(Lines 274-80)

The narrator emphasizes that the martial role, although totally inappropriate for Tarquin in this context, calms his fears.³⁴ He can see obstacles as trials rather than constraints; instead of being subject to his emotions, he “pursues his fear” (line 308). In a curious passage prefacing Tarquin's complaint, the narrator remarks:

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.

(Lines 134-37)

Yet he seems to sympathize with Tarquin by suggesting that all people are self-interested and all face impossibly confusing situations of choice. If the “aim of all is but to nurse the life,” life does not have a single need or even a single category of needs but a plurality of them: “honor, wealth and ease in waning age” (lines 141-42). To gain wealth, we may have to sacrifice honor. Likewise, to be honorable, we may have to forgo riches: there is no easy way to achieve life's multifaceted aim for which Shakespeare says, “there is such thwarting strife / That one for all or all for one we gage” (lines 143-44).

Is strife the inevitable outcome of having to choose? The unnamed second murderer in Richard III feared the case to be so: to gain advancement, perhaps even to live in society, a man had to be resolutely self-concerned. He considers that a man quite literally may be unable to afford his conscience, and he tries to rid himself of his own in these terms:

I'll not meddle with it, it makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbor's wife, but it detects him. 'Tis a blushing shame-fac'd spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that (by chance) I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turn'd out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it.

(1.4.134-44)

Like Tarquin, this man wants to believe for simplicity's sake (and for a purse of gold) that conscience is his womanish enemy, so he endeavors to trust himself by repressing the cacophony of interior voices. Of course, this strategy fails miserably, and its failure suggests that trusting the self must involve the self-reflection and the reflexiveness of complaint, in which inner voices are given free play. In Lucrece, Shakespeare condemns self-fashioning by a careless pursuit of goods imagined as exchangeable and expendable:

Such hazard now must doting Tarquin make,
Pawning his honor to obtain his lust;
And for himself himself he must forsake.
Then where is truth if there be no self-trust?

(Lines 155-58)

The self should not be violated or divided for the sake of a fleeting joy. When deliberation led Tarquin to the conclusion that satisfying his desires would mean sacrificing all else that was valuable to him, he should have gauged once and for all and trusted the voices of his inward mind. He needed to stay in the woods, continuing the conference with himself.

Although Tarquin's complaint fails to produce the correct response, his commission of a self-destructive act does not signal the powerlessness of complaint to intervene in ethical reality; it simply means that Tarquin is evasive. He does not fully confront the situation by allowing himself to see vividly its implications for his life and the lives of others.³⁵ His intellectual grasp of the imagined situation is deficient because it lacks an emotional component. By contrast, Lucrece's complaint enables ethical perception because she does not evade her emotions. They figure as her potential salvation because they prevent her from appropriating a culturally dictated course of action. Because her body has been violated, Roman society considers Lucrece unchaste and disloyal. She knows this intellectually, but her emotions—the qualitative measure of her experience—propose that Tarquin did not ravish her of her loyalty: “When I feared I was a loyal wife / So am I now.—O no, that cannot be: / Of that true type that Tarquin rifled me” (lines 1048-50). Like Tarquin, Lucrece is influenced by a preexistent reading of her experience (rape as contamination) and the accompanying antidote (self-sacrifice). Lucrece commits suicide, however, not just because of such conventional views but rather in response to her husband Collatine's unsympathetic treatment of her. At the poem's end, when she tells her tale to him and asserts that her mind “still pure / Doth in her poisoned closet ye endure” (lines 1658-59), Collatine does not respond. She waits, watching him intently, but when he does not speak, she apologizes for causing him grief. The silence—which she must read as rejection—is punctuated by perfunctory promises of aid when she asks that her violation be avenged, but it is not broken until, in obvious frustration, she exclaims: “O, speak! … / How may this forced stain be wiped from me? / What is the quality of my offence, / Being constrained with dreadful circumstance?” (lines 1700-1703). She asks the lords for social affirmation of her right to acquit herself, and they respond somewhat obligatorily: “With this they all at once began to say, / Her body's stain her mind untainted clears” (lines 1709-10). Lucrece kills herself only after she recognizes the lack of social supports necessary to sustain a dynamic and self-renewing subjectivity.

Until that point, the suicide option primarily generates further plaintive deliberation, much as the revenge imperative generates Hamlet's soul searching. She knows that suicide is morally wrong (the soul's death); moreover, she recognizes the irrationality of throwing body and soul away when only the body has suffered violation:

‘To kill myself,’ quoth she, ‘alack, what were it
But with my body my poor soul's pollution?
They that lose half with greater patience bear it
Than they whose whole is swallowed in confusion.
That mother tries a merciless conclusion
          Who, having two sweet babes, when death takes
          one,
          Will slay the other and be nurse to none.’

(Lines 1156-62)

Lucrece understands choice by vividly imagining how a mother would respond to the loss of a child. She would not kill her other child because each is uniquely valuable in and of itself. Similarly, Lucrece regarded her body's chastity and her soul's purity as living things to be nurtured. She knows that to single one out as more valuable than the other is self-deluding rationalization that requires sacrificing her motherly ethics to the patriarchal code of values. The emotional component of Lucrece's complaint enables a truly rational response, forcing her to find her own terms for dealing with past events and future options.

Lucrece's emotions keep her grounded in her own perceptions, but the exercise of deliberative imagination in her complaint enables her to grasp fully the experience she has had and to reconstruct herself as a contingent subject who controls her fate by making her own interpretative judgments. Deliberative imagination interprets reality instead of creating unreality. Shakespeare refers to this aspect of imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream as “shaping fantasies” (5.1.5) and in the complaints of Lucrece and Hamlet, he illustrates the way shaping fantasies help us grasp and respond authentically to complex reality.³⁶ Lucrece uses her imaginative capacity for free fantasy on only one occasion when she imagines “some dark deep desert” to which she could retreat with Philomela, where their “sad tunes” would catalyze change and humanize their animal listeners (lines 1144-47). The vignette reveals a powerful desire not only for self-expression but also for escape to a world in which expression would create change. Significantly, Lucrece cannot fantasize a human world in which such a desire could be realized; as a result, her imagination's creation of unreality does not further practical reasoning.

Alternatively, deliberative imagination, active throughout Lucrece's complaint, encourages reasoning by recalling the particulars of past experiences and linking them to the case at hand; it requires Lucrece to construct her own reading of events. I agree with Philippa Berry that Lucrece masters the forces that constrained her—Tarquin's coconspirators Night and Opportunity—through language—not, as Berry argues, through a “magical and incantatory power of poetic language,” but rather a language that facilitates rational deliberation.³⁷ Lucrece begins to understand the effects of her constrained social position when, after blaming herself for the “wrack” of Collatine's honor, she recognizes that “for thy [Collatine's] honor did I entertain him / Coming from thee, I could not put him back” (lines 842-43). She played her conventional role which entrapped her. Considering Tarquin's impropriety and wondering why “kings be breakers of their own behests” (line 852), she sees her position in a patriarchal economy as the treasure that is traded, guarded, and stolen to mark the status of competitive males: “The aged man that coffers up his gold,” though he cannot use his wealth, watches it like “still-pining Tantalus” (lines 855, 858); when he dies or exhibits weakness, he leaves the treasure open “to be master'd by the young, / Who in their pride do presently abuse it” (lines 863-64). Collatine's absence and his proud proclamation of his wife's chastity, “the treasure of this happy state” (line 16), gave Tarquin the opportunity to filch it. Lucrece goes on to connect the sinful actions of men like Tarquin, the usurping son, and even Collatine (implicitly compared to Tantalus) with Opportunity, whom she personifies and indicts for supporting ambitious plots that satisfy secret and private desires only temporarily, at the expense of right, law, and reason. Like Tarquin, Lucrece recognizes that opportunistic plots are both self-destructive and socially destructive; but unlike Tarquin, she knows that it takes a certain amount of social power to transcend one's subjected reality and bend situations to one's will. She knows this because, like the majority of subjects, she lacks this “magical” social power and depends on others for the satisfaction of her needs. Lucrece obviously sees herself as victimized by Opportunity, who placed Tarquin in a position to seize the treasure and to leave Lucrece “poor, lame, blind” to cry fruitlessly out for Opportunity. In an attempt to imagine other ways of emplotting temporal experience, Lucrece turns to Opportunity's superior, “Misshapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night” (line 925) whose glory is constructive change—“to calm contending kings, / to unmask falsehood and bring truth to light” (lines 939-40). Although time cannot “return to make amends” for mischief wrought upon her, Lucrece's deliberative imagination can. It enables her to review past events and consider how she might have acted to “prevent this storm and shun [Time's] wrack” (line 966).

The concluding section of Lucrece's complaint is a model of practical reasoning that involves the whole soul—emotions as well as imagination—and dramatizes the fact that words, far from being antithetical to action, are the only means to self-determination. While waiting for Collatine to arrive, Lucrece reads an anti-epic painting where Hecuba is the true hero and the conventional nominal heroes are all guilty of causeless destruction that encourages one man's lust.³⁸ Because she identifies with Hecuba, reading the painting becomes a way for Lucrece to recognize and speak for her past self and thus to reshape herself as a subject with significantly greater understanding and interpretive power.

According to the narrator, who proposes that the painting provides a “means to mourn some newer way” (line 1365), Lucrece's reading is a continuation of her complaint that accomplishes new things. As a formal whole, the painting focuses Lucrece's hermeneutic activity and challenges her to make an equally whole interpretation. She responds to the particular parts of the painting that affect her, but she must exercise her imagination in order to grasp the whole:

For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Griped in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head
Stood for the whole to be imagined.

(Lines 1422-28)

Since the parts of this painting relate to a sequence of events, an interpretive whole will be a narrative. Lucrece's interpretations are described by the narrator as “tales” which she adds to the painted images: “So Lucrece, set awork, sad tales doth tell / To pencilled pensiveness and colored sorrow / She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow” (lines 1496-98). The painting exists as a means of communication and the effort to read it involves dialogic interaction.³⁹ “Hecuba” is cooperatively created by the painter who supplies her image (a “liveless life”) and by Lucrece who animates the image with her own subjectivity and experience. Lucrece's past experience provides the narrative ground. Since her reading operates as self-realization and since such interpretation of character inevitably names the self, the picture of “Priam's Troy” bears unusually striking resemblances to Lucrece's own story.⁴⁰ As she registers these resemblances, Lucrece comes to view the painting as her past. The ability to make a narrative of her own tragedy as well as of the destructive effects of masculine ambition is potentially empowering because it gives Lucrece control over the forms and meanings of her own being—a being which had for so long been determined by the stories of others.

Tarquin experienced his subjection as weakness and therefore assumed a prewritten martial role. Lucrece demonstrates that subjection to constraints does not have to entail loss of personal agency. In the self-portrait she creates by reading the painting, Lucrece identifies with Hecuba, speaks for her, and chooses to position herself in relation to an other for whom she feels responsible. The narrator suggests that Lucrece comes to the painting looking for an image of herself—“to find a face where all distress is stelled” (line 1444). Although the painting contains many images of distress, the narrator accounts for Lucrece's identification with Hecuba by suggesting that the women share a subjective space: “Many she sees where cares have carved some, / But none where all distress and dolor dwelled / Till she despairing Hecuba beheld” (lines 1446-48). It is unclear whether “despairing” refers to Lucrece before she finds an image that reflects her experience or to Hecuba responding to the loss of husband and city. The women are united by a shared experience of despair coupled with the position of subjection from which both view events. Lucrece's identification with Hecuba is an act that involves self-transformation.⁴¹ She “spends her eyes” on the “sad shadow” and “shapes her sorrow to the beldame's woes” (lines 1457-58), apparently willing to lose or change herself in order to understand the other. Although her foregoing complaint shows her awareness of her contingency, Lucrece does not view this as a strength until she consciously connects herself to Hecuba and in doing so constructs her subjectivity as social and historical (in opposition to the males' construction of her as a true type of chastity).

Though Hecuba is important as a representation of another woman with whom Lucrece can identify, she is even more important to Lucrece's self-fashioning as a figure that represents her past self victimized by Tarquin. When Lucrece projects her own experience of transformation onto Hecuba—“Of what she was no semblance did remain” (line 1453)—it is clear that Lucrece has not found a present self-image so much as an image of an old self. Its inarticulateness prompts Lucrece's regrets and she condemns the painter who did Hecuba “wrong / To give her so much grief and not a tongue” (lines 1462-63). When she sees herself in Hecuba silenced by the painter's art, she is moved to recast the female subject position by adding her voice to Hecuba's shadow. The painter controls Hecuba through his point of view and his medium; he gives her the appearance of cries and bitter words but no language. Lucrece challenges his point of view as a limited one which she can undermine with a representation in which Hecuba becomes an eloquent, heroic complainant:

‘Poor instrument,’ quoth she, ‘without a sound:
I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue,
And drop sweet balm in Priam's painted wound,
And rail on Pyrrhus that hath done him wrong,
And with my tears quench Troy that burns so long,
          And with my knife scratch out the angry eyes
Of all the Greeks that are thine enemies.’

(Lines 1464-70)

To recuperate Hecuba and, by extension, Lucrece's old self, Lucrece imagines her own voice as an instrument of justice that accuses the guilty, supports the innocent, and condemns the masculinist heroic ethos that destroyed Troy.⁴² In the three stanzas that follow, Lucrece voices Hecuba's complaint, which finally blames Paris (and by extension, Tarquin). When Lucrece begins by attacking Helen as “the strumpet who began this stir” (line 1471), we recall the way she mistakenly blames herself for the rape. But when she rightly accuses the one who transgressed for satisfaction of his “private pleasure” and pleads that “guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe” (line 1482), Lucrece seems to liberate herself. Whether or not she absolves herself of personal guilt, by speaking for Hecuba, to some extent Lucrece frees herself from the past.

Experience has apparently changed Lucrece from a rather naive wife to an active reader of character and situation, although how and when such a momentous change occurred remains unspecified. Unlike Tarquin, she does not change as the result of a willed choice. She only becomes conscious of her change when she reflects on events in her complaint. Shakespeare seems to suggest that personal growth and development are continuous with the subject's experience of temporality.⁴³ Self-fashioning may operate less through an exercise of will toward a particular end than by recollecting the self from a point when the subject is in a position to chart the trajectory of the past.⁴⁴ When a speaker complains, she is generally in a position from which either she can look forward and abandon self-reflection by reenacting an old plot or she can reflect on past experience to see how her responses shaped her development or progress.

Not only does reading the painting give Lucrece a measure of control over events that had once determined her, it also allows her to re-experience them imaginatively and respond differently. Although she almost misreads Tarquin again in the figure of Sinon, the text of remembered experience intervenes and enables Lucrece to correct her mistake:

‘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.’

(Lines 1534-40)

As Sinon moves “onward to Troy with the blunt swains” (line 1504) he appears heroic; yet she is no longer deceived. Having learned that absolutes inadequately describe people or events, Lucrece uses her interpretive power to surmise the largely invisible whole from a visible part. She concludes her revisionary reading of the epic painting somewhat strangely, however, with a direct assault on the canvas, tearing “the senseless Sinon with her nails; / Comparing him to that unhappy guest / Whose deed hath made herself herself detest” (lines 1564-66). By applying the adjective “senseless” to Sinon, the narrator reminds us that Lucrece attacks an image, and her aggression has no real consequence. Although his intent might be to render Lucrece powerless once again, the narrator, focusing on the inefficacy of her violent action, forces the reader to recognize that her real agency lies in her ability to read experience and rewrite herself so as to suggest new ways of imagining subjectivity and agency.

Shakespeare dramatizes Hamlet trying to think his way out of a complex situation of choice in much the same way Lucrece does—by complaining.⁴⁵ Common critical parlance describes Hamlet as soliloquizing, but in his most famous soliloquies, he laments the meaning-lessness of his existence, the corruption of Claudius's court, and his inability to revenge his father's death. Moreover, he sees himself as womanish, “a whore” who must “unpack [his] heart with words, / And fall a-cursing like a very drab, / A stallion” (2.2.585-87).⁴⁶ The similarities that I will sketch between Lucrece and Hamlet suggest that the two works were part of a single continuous project—to explore ways of representing characters who effectuate change in themselves and others by discursive response rather than violent reaction. Shakespeare extends the work he began in Lucrece by creating another character who complains but who, because he is a male prince, is less constrained by his social role. As Polonius explains to Ophelia, Hamlet may walk “with a larger teder … than may be given you” (1.3.125-26). Hamlet has the opportunity to act out his responses to individuals and events in a way that Lucrece could not. His madness can be understood as a form of practical reasoning acted with others instead of performed in a solitary complaint; and his antic behavior, like that of an improviser, expresses his responses to particular situations and individuals as well as the ebb and flow of his moody mental tides. By providing a context for emotional expression and modulation, role playing enables Hamlet to rewrite “the book and volume of [his] brain” from which he could not “wipe away … All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past” for the sake of his father's command (1.5.99,103). When he puts “an antic disposition on” (1.5.172), Hamlet can be the enraged critic of obsequious subservience, the abandoned lover, the disenchanted son, and even the murderer. In the course of the drama, he imagines himself in all of these roles, none of which “denote [him] truly” but which are, rather, exploratory gestures (1.2.83). The unfortunate, random killing of Polonius, for example, becomes an act of self-discovery because it enables Hamlet to examine the chaotic effects that directly result from playing the revenger's role.⁴⁷ Engle similarly notes that Hamlet creates images of hidden or repressed horrors in order to exorcise, forgive, understand, or change them, but his reading downplays the way in which Hamlet's performances reflect internal process.⁴⁸ Engle defines Hamlet's performative agency as redoing what he finds in the world around him: mirroring the discursive shows of others and inviting them to react. If (with Engle) we view Hamlet as primarily a manipulator of discourses, this will diminish his character's particularity, the very thing that weighs on him when he insists to Gertrude that he “knows not seems” (1.2.76-77). Engle's Hamlet looks distressingly like Polonius, who also manipulates discourses, albeit less successfully, and stages dramas baiting his hook with falsehoods to catch the carp of truth. Unlike Polonius, Hamlet gets beyond the arras of seeming by staging his own emotional and imaginative truths and by reading his own responses as well as those of his audience. By act 5, Hamlet has decided that to choose and act authentically, he must “defy augery” in favor of cultivating flexibility, responsiveness, and openness to his actual situation.

This is an extremely hard-won conclusion. Through much of the play, Hamlet moves forward either by fixing his intellect on revenge or by hoping against all hope to become revengeful. His father's “word” creates static interference, making it difficult for Hamlet to embrace the role of complainant/improviser as a self-created means to remember Old Hamlet. His reading of the player's performance in the “Hecuba” speech is a crucial moment in his own development. Although he still struggles intellectually with the familiar dichotomy of speech and action, his complaint registers emotional and imaginative responses that show him beginning to gravitate toward a mode of discursive agency. Hamlet's complaint begins by invoking the antithesis between passivity and activity. The player's passionate response “in a fiction, in a dream of passion” reminds him of his own lack of response (2.2.552). When he reflects more particularly on the fact that a dead woman's suffering evoked the player's passion, his wonder may be compromised by a slight disgust:

… And all for nothing,
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculty of eyes and ears.

(2.2.557-66)

The player's causeless identification with Hecuba elicits a complex response from Hamlet that, in part, shames him enough to resolve to do something.⁴⁹ His shame might be the result of vicariously identifying with the mobled queen. When he imagines what the player would do with his motive, Hamlet's language becomes suddenly violent: the player would put aside tears quickly enough to drown, appall, make mad, confound, and cleave. Yet in the remainder of his complaint, Hamlet moves away from his fixation on violent revenge to acknowledge himself as a speaker and an agent who must find a way to put his penchant for histrionics to constructive use. He even chastises himself for being like “John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,” who “can say nothing” (2.2.568-69, emphasis added). Unless we see it as deriving from an interpretation of the player's performance, Hamlet's choice to use a play “to catch the conscience of the king” rather than to fat “all the region's kites with [the] slave's offal” comes out of nowhere (2.2.605, 579-80). Hamlet has the player perform a speech (“chiefly lov'd”) from a play he deems excellent—“caviary to the general” (2.2.437). He knows the speech by heart but listens as the player describes Pyrrhus revenging his father Achilles's death. Pyrrhus is portrayed as inhuman, resembling Night, “Black as his purpose” “horridly trick'd / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons” (2.2.453, 457-58). Even when he pauses before slaughtering Priam, he is referred to as a “painted tyrant,” a phrase that echoes Shakespeare's epithets for characterizing Tarquin. Hamlet urges the player forward, saying “Come to Hecuba” whose “instant bursts of clamor” while watching her husband hacked to death “unless things mortal move them not at all, / Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven, / And passion in the gods” (2.2.515-18). Hamlet himself is attracted to Hecuba, who has suffered a loss, and to the player whose sensitive nature he shares; moreover he is fascinated by their passionate speech that has the power to transform those who listen to it. When, after hearing the speech, Hamlet asks the player if he could memorize an additional twelve or sixteen lines to be inserted in The Murder of Gonzago, he is clearly availing himself of histrionic performance as a viable mode of agency. By the end of the complaint which follows, he has decided on a course of action that will give him “grounds more relative” for indicting Claudius and a vehicle to “catch” the King's conscience—the staged play. By contrast, Pyrrhus (who figures revenge as violent action) does not move him at all.

When in his last words to Horatio, Hamlet says “the potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit” (line 353), the description links his spirit to the morning/mourning cock silenced finally by something that crows louder. This important line reflects a shift in how Hamlet understands his own value. He finally recognizes as a strength his attempt to come to terms with Denmark's corruption and with his own feelings of meaninglessness in wordy complaints and deliberations. He remembers his father in words when he rants the true story of Claudius's deed into Denmark's ear and when he stirs the conscience of Claudius and Gertrude, humanizing them by reinstating their God-given faculties of “looking before and after” (4.4.37). By “crowing” all kinds of feelings and ideas throughout the play, he exposes the wrongs done to his father and criticizes the immortality and hypocrisy growing rank in Claudius's court. He functions like the cock of Marcellus's description that purifies the night by doing something extraordinary: singing through it. Of course, mad Ophelia is the only character who literally sings in the play, but Hamlet's series of soliloquies and public historionics amount to an extended and much more rationally controlled song that represents Shakespeare's rigorous analysis of the woman's part in action.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, “App. B, no. 18,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974), p. 1840. All references to Shakespeare's plays will be to this edition.

2. Harold R. Walley describes the poem as a discursive and explicit presentation of a pattern of thought that Shakespeare would return to repeatedly in the tragedies. See Harold R. Walley, “The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy,” PMLA 76 (1961): 480-87.

3. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago, 1993), p. 6. My psychologizing claim that Shakespeare used the complaint to dramatize the process by which individual characters were able to read themselves and their environments complements Lars Engle's materialist argument that Shakespeare's plays give us characters engaged in assessing the stabilities and pitfalls of an economy.

4. As Linda Kauffman recognizes, Ovid used the complaint to dramatize an interpretive process that bears a striking resemblance to the psychological procedure, which involves the same effort to interpret, to account for repetitions, and to assess the structure of desire. See Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), p. 43.

5. John Roe, “Pleasing the Wiser Sort: Problems of Ethics and Genre in Lucrece and Hamlet,” Cambridge Quarterly 23 (1994): 99-119, esp. 107 and 113.

6. Ibid., p. 118.

7. For a full description of Aristotelian “practical rationality,” see Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990), pp. 54-105.

8. Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago, 1988), p. 134.

9. R. S. White remarks on the pairing of a figure of pathos with each of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists, citing Lavinia, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia. White argues that Shakespeare does this to invite readers/viewers to use their feelings as touchstones of truth and to analyze the deficiencies in the world of male and political dominance. See R. S. White, Innocent Victims: Poetic Injustice in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1986).

10. Lorna Hutson argues that the power of eloquence came to be accepted as a form of social agency during the sixteenth century. See Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1994).

11. In his published lectures on fine art, G. W. F. Hegel typifies Shakespeare's characterization in much the same way I do: Shakespeare “concentrates characters in their limitations. While doing so, however, he confers on them intelligence and imagination; and, by means of the images in which they, by virtue of that intelligence, contemplate themselves objectively as a work of art, he makes them free artists of themselves.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), quoted in Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 54.

12. The claim has been made that Shakespeare originated character-revealing or psychological soliloquy. See Lloyd A. Skiffington, The History of English Soliloquy: Aeschylus to Shakespeare (New York, 1985), pp. 87-97; and Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Soliloquies, trans. Charity Scott Stokes (London, 1987). But the similarity of Lucrece and Hamlet reveals the inaccuracy of this view because Lucrece herself is Ovidian. See also Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Differences in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985), pp. 41-42.

13. See Nussbaum, p. 84.

14. For a particularly relevant paradigm that maps the middle ground between the humanist self and the fragmented postmodern subject—between freedom and determinism—see Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London, 1993).

15. Joan DeJean discusses the extent to which Ovid as well as his French “disciples” were personally invested in the representation of female subjects. See Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago, 1989), pp. 60-115. Lipking is skeptical that male authors would ever do anything but “use” female subjects to advance their own interests, although he acknowledges other more benevolent motives that include self-definition, becoming more human, or experiencing the divine (Lipking, pp. 127-70).

16. DeJean (pp. 61-62) claims that use of the term “feminist” has gained currency in classical studies to designate male authors who reverse the narrative focus of traditional accounts. Constance Jordan also defends the use of the adjective when applied to early-modern male authors whose narrative practice is based on a multiplication of viewpoints and a recognition that individuals and social groups experience life differently. Jordan finds the larger epistemological project of such discourse—to historicize knowledge processes—to be favorable to “feminism.” See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), p. 309.

17. For Ovid as a feminist, see Howard Jacobson, Ovid's “Heroides” (Princeton, N.J., 1974).

18. Aeneas's betrayal of Dido and her subsequent suicide guide the poem's narrator to a personal interpretation that takes the form of a lament for women who “doth amys / To love hym that unknowen ys.” See Geoffrey Chaucer, “The House of Fame,” lines 269-70, quoted from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).

19. For a discussion of complaint in this work, see Lily B. Campbell, ed., Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1983). Heather Dubrow notes the similarities between Mirror for Magistrates complaints and those written in the 1590s. She somewhat arbitrarily refers to the latter as a “subgenre” and attempts to differentiate Shakespeare's Lucrece from what she sees as a conventional portrayal of female subjects in complaint literature. See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), pp. 142-51.

20. For a fuller discussion of early modern complaint, see Mary Jo Kietzman, “Means to Mourn Some Newer Way”: The Role of the Complaint in Early-Modern Narrative (unpublished dissertation, Boston College, 1993), which studies the complaint as a “mode”—an expressive form whose function remains relatively consistent throughout the period. Often embedded in more conventional narrative kinds, complaints question or complicate the rules of genre and, consequently, the rules of life, action, and speech to which genre rules refer. Spoken by women or other socially marginal figures who are neither autonomous nor able to determine themselves by willful self-assertion, complaints enable authors to represent subjects who achieve a degree of self-determination by becoming fully conscious of their constrained situation when they recreate it in a complaint narrative. See also John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and the “Female Complaint”: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991).

21. See Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976).

22. Mark Breitenberg, “The Anatomy of Masculine Desire in Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 430-49.

23. Jane O. Newman, “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 304-26.

24. John Velz argues that Ovid's rape victims are languageless sufferers, quite unlike Shakespeare's highly articulate Lucrece. See John Veltz, “The Ovidian Soliloquy in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 1-24, esp. 9.

25. Though he does not explicitly identify it, Harold Bloom is talking about complaint when he says that Chaucer gave Shakespeare “the crucial hint that led to the greatest of his originalities—the representation of change by showing people pondering their own speeches” (Harold Bloom [n. 11 above], p. 54).

26. See Eagle (n. 3 above), p. 66.

27. See Nussbaum (n. 7 above), p. 66.

28. Recall also that Hamlet has instructed Horatio to observe Claudius's response to the play with “the very comment of [his] soul” (3.2.39). It is one of the many moments in the play which show Hamlet demanding that feeling informs choosing in order to counter “monster custom” (3.4.161).

29. See Claire McEachern, “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 269-90, esp. 273.

30. Engle, p. 10.

31. All citations from The Rape of Lucrece are taken from William Shakespeare, The Narrative Poems, ed. Alfred Harbage and Richard Wilbur (New York, 1966) and will be given parenthetically in the text.

32. Engle (p. 2) describes Shakespeare's characters as agents on whom a plurality of value systems converge and who must decide how to act profitably within their individual value economies.

33. The “script” that enables Tarquin's aggression and ambition derives from Renaissance reading of epic narrative. David Quint argues that Renaissance writers uncovered the inherent violence of epic ideology, which involves projecting a foreign “otherness” onto an enemy defeated in a linear narrative with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 11, 33. Linda Gregerson also notes that Renaissance writers, including Shakespeare, destabilized the iconic status of epic. See Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge, 1995), p. 29.

34. Katherine Eisaman Maus remarks on Tarquin's employment of a few crucial metaphors to make his decisions—love as war being the most significant. See Katherine Eisaman Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82, esp. 67.

35. For an account of the role of emotion and imagination to Aristotelian practical reasoning, see Nussbaum, pp. 80-81.

36. For an explanation of Aristotle's phantasia as a capability that is more inclusive than imagination as a faculty that creates unreality, see Nussbaum, p. 77. Shakespeare's reference to imagination as “shaping fantasies” suggests that he understood the faculty in its more inclusive Aristotelian sense.

37. Berry is, to my knowledge, the only other commentator to suggest that Shakespeare's Lucrece resists being wholly appropriated by patriarchal discursive structures with a complaint that enables her to replace Tarquin as the controlling figure in the narrative and to become a partially independent historical agent. See Philippa Berry, “Women, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 33-39. Most recent critical commentary on the poem reads Lucrece as playing out an ideological script that blames the victim, allows her to internalize guilt, and defines her as an agent of political change solely in terms of a male's ability to avenge her. See Coppélia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-72; 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, 1985), pp. 95-115; Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, Ind., 1989); and Mercedes Maroto Camino, “The Stage Am I”: Raping Lucrece in Early Modern England (Lewiston, N.Y., 1995).

38. T. W. Baldwin points out that Shakespeare drew on Virgil's Aeneid to create the sequence of scenes that describe the painting Lucrece reads; an identical scene arrests Aeneas's attention in Dido's palace at Carthage. See T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., 1950), pp. 142-46. I see Chaucer's influence as more important than Virgil's. Chaucer (n. 18 above) wrote a redaction of the Virgilian scene in The House of Fame: the dreaming narrator reads the story of Troy's fall and Aeneas's journey, including his betrayal of Dido, “writen on a table of brass” in Venus's temple (line 142). The narrator opens by imitating Virgil: “I wot now synge, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man”; but his own voice does not emerge until he identifies with Dido's sufferings (lines 143-44). Chaucer suggested to Shakespeare that interpretation might be used to represent Lucrece's self-authorizing gesture.

39. For the phrase “dialogic interaction,” see Wolfgang Iser, “The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature,” New Literary History 7 (1975): 7-35.

40. See R. Rawdon Wilson, “Drawing New Lessons from Old Masters: The Concept of ‘Character’ in The Quijote,” Modern Philology 78 (1980): 120.

41. Dubrow, by contrast, claims that Lucrece's identification with Hecuba may be natural but reflects the same emotiveness and passivity that have characterized her behavior all along (see n. 19 above, p. 112). And Richard Lanham similarly describes Lucrece's identification with the painting as a “sentimentalist's dream.” See Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn., 1976), p. 106.

42. Berry (p. 34) describes Lucrece's complaint as Shakespeare's vehicle for raising questions of political justice.

43. Compare Anthony Giddens's criticism of most writers on the philosophy of action who treat acts, intentions, purposes, and reasons as if they were distinct elements strung together in action. By doing so, philosophers have abstracted agency from the temporality of day-to-day conduct. Giddens argues that action always involves narrative reflection, an inherent part of our being in time: “What this literature ignores, is the reflexive moment of attention, called into being in discourse, that breaks into the flow of action which constitutes the day-to-day activity of human subjects. Such a moment is involved even in the constitution of ‘an action’ or of ‘an act’ from the durée of lived-through experience.” See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), p. 55.

44. Freeman (n. 14 above), p. 9.

45. Maynard Mack and Harry Levin have pointed out that the entire play occurs in an atmosphere of ambiguity, irony, and interrogation. See Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-23, and Harry Levin, The Question of “Hamlet” (New York, 1959).

46. Avi Erlich argues that Hamlet adopts a female role not only to satisfy his conflicts with his weak father but also to manage his dangerous mother without having to kill her. See Avi Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father (Princeton, N.J., 1977), pp. 172-73. Marilyn French characterizes Hamlet as feminine because his primary mode of responding to life—to experience and articulate his experience privately—is feminine. See Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York, 1981), p. 147.

47. I am grateful to Sunjay Singh for pointing this out to me.

48. Engle (n. 3 above), p. 72. Marjorie Garber also argues for a connection between therapy and discursive re-enactment, stressing that revenge is but the dramatization and acculturation of the repetition compulsion. She does not, however, claim that Hamlet grows to understand his ghosts and his compulsions. See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York, 1987), pp. 124-76.

49. Engle argues that Hamlet admires the player's integration, his willingness and ability to embrace fully an external discursive script (p. 69). I agree, but feel that Hamlet is responding to the player's reading of the classical narrative. The player never becomes Pyrrhus; he observes him critically. While he observes Hecuba, he also identifies with her because the actor (like the female complainant) is first and foremost a speaker.