[In the following excerpt, Bowers examines the structure and style of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, and notes that in both Lucrece and Titus the social and political ramifications are emphasized in extended speeches that serve as verbal emblems.]

From the beginning of his career, Shakespeare seems to have been fully aware of the poetic and dramatic potential of the emblem. While we are indebted to Rosemary Freeman and Henry Green for reviving our modern interest in Renaissance emblem books, questions about the nature and extent of their influence on the technical aspects of Shakespeare's works require further exploration and analysis. On the one hand, emblem books made sophisticated use of iconology inherited from the previous centuries to produce complex visual picturae combined with a verbal explanation of the picture, resulting in a reference book which applied both to personal conduct and to moral philosophy. On the other hand, these books represented a mode of thought common to the period, in which the visual and the verbal continually complemented each other in the theory and practice of artistic communication. The Elizabethan theater proved an ideal medium through which the techniques found in the emblem books could be adapted for audiences already familiar with printed emblems. In his early poetry and drama, Shakespeare frequently developed his scenic units first by presenting a relatively static pictura (like those found in emblem books) in what I will call emblemic scenes; and second, by amplifying and mobilizing these picturae to produce what I will term emblematic scenes. Shakespeare's store of traditional iconic conventions and iconographic associations were employed in new conjuctions in his poems and plays to create scenes which carried the force both of the widespread, printed emblem book and also of the fluid rhetoric of dialogue and the mobile picturae found on the Elizabethan stage.

As examples of Shakespeare's early poetry and drama, the almost contemporaneous Lucrece and Titus Andronicus present and discuss the causes of rape, together with its personal and social consequences. While the focus of Lucrece is on the personal causes and effects of rape, in terms of Tarquin's decision to carry out the rape and the resulting disturbance of Lucrece's psyche which leads to her suicide, Titus Andronicus presents a theatrical version of the essentially similar story of Lavinia's rape, but with greater emphasis on the breakdown of social order. These two areas of private rape and public rapine were widely discussed in Renaissance society, particularly in works of moral philosophy, theology, courtesy, and domestic conduct, as well as in literature and pictorial art of the period. Rapists were often condemned to death, but rape frequently produced more sweeping results of death and destruction to whole societies. The rape victim, too, was always respectfully pitied for her suffering, whether or not she died as a result of the attack. Usually discussed under the headings of chastity or adultery, the rape victim is viewed as an emblem of chastity destroyed; and the stories of such heroines as Proserpine, Philomel, Susanna, Sophronia, Virginia, and Lucretia are most frequently cited.¹

Not only did the examples of these heroines abound in literature, but they also became popular subjects for pictorial artists by the end of the sixteenth century. Several artists portrayed the entire story of heroines such as Lucretia: Henricus Goltzius produced a series of four engravings: 1) the banquet of Collatine, 2) Lucretia and her women spinning, 3) Tarquin's rape of Lucretia, and 4) Lucretia committing suicide. Sometimes the different episodes in the life of Lucretia were painted on one panel, such as that attributed to Biago di Antonio.² In all of these sequences, the illustrated incidents show the virtue of Lucretia and the violent force of the rape, which results in the scene of suicide and ensuing lamentation. The aesthetic effect on the viewer is a personal one, as a result of the cause-and-effect sequence frequently found in Renaissance panels, but beyond that, the individual is usually portrayed in a social setting of family, friends, and others, so that the viewer also gains an awareness of the social and theological implications of violence by and to the individual.

More numerous than the complete histories are representations of the rape scene itself, such as Titian's painting of “Tarquin and Lucretia” … the engraving by Agostino Veneziano, “Tarquin and Lucretia” … or Antonio Tempesta's “Tereus and Philomena”. … In Titian's painting, Tarquin wears scarlet breeches and hose to symbolize his lust, and his right stocking is rolled down to expose his leg and knee, which become symbols of phallic attack. Agostino Veneziano goes one stage further by supplying the copulating dogs to reinforce the symbolism of bestial sexuality in the scene. All three works show the knee in the same position, so that this phallic icon had apparently become standard by the late sixteenth century. Not surprisingly, it was incorporated by Shakespeare in his description of the approaching Tarquin in Lucrece. As Tarquin stealthily breaks through the door locks on his way to Lucrece's chamber (ll. 295-359), he finally makes his entry: “his guilty hand pluck'd up the latch, / And with his knee the door he opens wide” (ll. 358-59). The sexual puns in this episode on Lucrece's “chamber”³ and this iconographic use of the phallic knee produce a proleptic, imagistic rape foreshadowing the actual rape recounted later (ll. 673-93). In addition, the symbol of violence associated with rape, the brandished sword or dagger, is present in all these rape scenes, and Shakespeare likewise adopts the same iconograph, augmenting its predatory implications with the falcon-falchion pun:

This said, he shakes aloft his roman blade,
Which like a falcon tow'ring in the skies,
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings' shade,
Whose crooked beak threats, if he mount he dies:
So under his insulting falchion lies
          Harmeless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcons' bells.

(ll. 505-11)

By far the most popular artistic subject in these representations of rape myths and legends is the victim herself.⁴ In particular, Lucretia is most frequently depicted in the act of suicide, as in Titian's painting, “Lucretia” … or the portrait “Lucretia” by Veronese, where the subject is frequently nude or partly nude to emphasize the virtuous beauty of Lucretia, with the violence of her suicide only hinted at by the presence of a sword or dagger placed almost parallel to the outstretched arm of Lucretia. Sometimes the sword is more evident, as in the beautiful painting by a follower of Cranach, the “Lucrecia Romana” … but the violence of imminent suicide is still de-emphasized by the fact that the sword forms part of the stabilizing compositional triangle. Such triangular forms are usually found in paintings of religious subjects like the Holy Family, and in this painting they lend a tone of martyrdom to the portrait of Lucretia. Moreover, the “Lucrecia Romana” merges with the tradition of the emblem book itself by incorporating a motto-like inscriptio which points out the moral to be heeded: “Satius est mori quam indecore vivere.”

In keeping with the artistic conventions of his age, Shakespeare chose and developed his stories of rape in Lucrece and Titus Andronicus to draw attention both to the private, personal insult and injury of rape, and also to the public, social repercussions which inevitably followed from such a destructive act. For the most part in Lucrece, he dwells upon the faulty reasoning of Tarquin, which leads him to commit rape, and then upon the resulting private dismay and shame of Lucrece who eventually decides on the desperate act of suicide. Throughout the poem Shakespeare makes his heroine a symbol of chastity, while demonstrating in the sequence of scenic episodes the connections between private assault and public decadence. To do this, he incorporates conventional iconographic imagery, emblemic description, and a sequence of emblematic scenes to develop the pitiable demise of Lucrece.

As a part of the increasingly violent imagery associated with rapacious lust developed gradually and subtly during the first half of the poem, the narrator introduces us early and calmly (at this point) to the heraldry seen in Lucrece's face:⁵

But beauty in that white entituled
From Venus' doves, doth challenge that fair field;
Then virtue claims from beauty beauty's red,
Which virtue gave the golden age to gild
Their silver cheeks, and call'd it then their shield;
          Teaching them thus to use it in the fight,
When shame assail'd, the red should fence the white.
This heraldry in Lucrece' face was seen,
Argu'd by beauty's red and virtue's white.

(ll. 57-65)

The face, here literally a herald to the person, provides also a symbolic shield rather in the manner of an impresa to indicate to the viewer the essential attributes of character. In the changing red and white of blush and pallor we find symbols of the intimate relationship of the external beauty and inner virtue of Lucrece, both of which will be soiled later by Tarquin in his deed of rape.

Likewise, hardly more than a hundred lines later, Tarquin reveals his own impresa: just like all of Shakespeare's villains he is well aware of his own evil, which will “live engraven in my face:”

Yea, though I die the scandal will survive
And be an eye-sore in my golden coat;
Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive,
To cipher me how fondly I did dote:
That my posterity sham'd with the note,
          Shall curse my bones, and hold it for no sin
          To wish that I their father had not been.

(ll. 204-10)

His face, unlike Lucrece's heraldic shield of virtue, has now become the engraven impresa of Tarquin's foulness; it will be transformed into a coat-of-arms darkened by “some loathsome dash” as a permanent reminder to future generations of the heinous familial and social ramifications of rape. Again this shield stands at the outset of the poem to point up the viciousness of Tarquin's deed, well recognized by Tarquin himself in his direct speech, in contrast to the innocence of Lucrece's face, described indirectly by the narrator to point up the unselfconsciousness of Lucrece concerning her own virtue and beauty. Moreover, the emblemic description of Tarquin's coat-of-arms foreshadows the crime he is about to commit, and also leads the reader to envision the social dislocations resulting from his rapacious plans. This foreshadowing is of course amplified by the emblemic description of Lucrece as she lies asleep in bed (ll. 365-448). The conventional Petrarchan blazon, intruded upon by Tarquin's assaulting eyes and hands, creates again the proleptic, imagistic rape, like the knee in the chamber door.

One of the sections most puzzling to critics is that of the centrally located diatribes of Lucrece against Night, Opportunity, and Time, after her rape. They are viewed as being annoyingly digressive and as adding little to the order and effectiveness of the poem; in fact Shakespeare is requently viewed as being particularly self-indulgent and immature in including these parts.⁶ However, I suggest that the diatribes form a coherent sequence based on accepted Renaissance precepts of rhetorical amplification and are included for the purpose of enhancing the affective qualities of the poem and of developing the thematic concepts to produce pity for Lucrece. While the poetic impetus here is rhetorical, the method proves once again to be emblematic.

In his standard Tudor treatise, The Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson reflects the views of Quintilian when he recognizes the importance of rhetorical amplification and its function in influencing audience response:

Because the beautie of Amplifying, standeth apte mouyng of affections: … Neither onely are wee moued with those thynges which we thinke either hurtful, or profitable for our selues, but also we reioyce, we sorie, or we pitie an other mannes happe. …

In mouyng affections, and stirryng the iudges to be greued, the weight of the matter must be so set forth, as though they saw it plaine before their eyes, the report must be suche and the offence made so hainouse, that the like hath not been seene heretofore, and al the circu[m]staunces must thus be heaped together: The naughtines of his nature that did the dead, the cruel orderying, the wicked dealing and maliciouse handelyng, the tyme, the place, the maner of his doyng, and the wickednesse of his wil to haue doen more. The man that susteined the wrong, how litle he deserued, how well he was estemed emong his neighbours, howe small cause he gaue hym, how great lacke men haue of hym.⁷

By means of such rhetorical amplification, therefore, the pity of the audience is carefully increased to produce an appropriate aesthetic result. In doing this, the topics of time, place, and manner are included as typical ways of bringing the audience to an increased awareness of the wickedness which has been perpetrated.

No doubt as a consequence of his educational training in rhetoric,⁸ Shakespeare unhesitatingly chose the topics of time and occasion to amplify the devastating effects of the rape on Lucrece. While the rape itself is narrated in only a few lines (ll. 673-86), the enormity of the wickedness could only be realized by such amplification, given particular emphasis by the fact that Lucrece herself complains against Night (the specific and symbolic time) and Opportunity (the occasion), as well as Time (the overriding philosophical aspects of time, mutability, and corruption).

Reflecting the overall structure of the poem, which moves from the specific instance of rape to its resulting personal and social turmoil and destruction, Lucrece bewails the triumphs of Night, Opportunity, and Time, which move from the literal and symbolic darkness of night in which she has been raped, through the presentation of an ominous, though apt, opportunity (or occasion) for sin, to her misfortunes seen in the light of “injurious shifting Time” (ll. 930) which is the “ceaseless lackey to Eternity” (l. 967). At each point of the diatribe Lucrece first describes the attributes of each personified abstraction—Night in ll.764-70, Opportunity in ll.876-89, and Time in ll. 925-31—before applying these characteristics in a kind of subscriptio to her own dire situation and to the troubles of others. At the end, she asks Time to “teach me to curse him that thou taught'st this ill,” only to realize that such cursing will be in vain (ll. 1023-27); her remedy in this case is to commit suicide, for which she will find an appropriate occasion, but not before the reasons for her inner turmoil and despair have been given to her husband, family, and to the reader: “Yet die I will not, till my Collatine / Have heard the cause of my untimely death” (ll. 1177-78).

In a reiteration of the causes and effects of rape, we find one of the most highly emblematic scenes of Lucrece in the Trojan painting or tapestry which Lucrece views and comments on as she awaits the arrival of her family. This analogue of rapacious destruction, alluded to in Titus Andronicus, was to find fullest development, of course, in Troilus and Cressida, where not only destruction of the individual, but also social and universal corruption are the manifest results. In the poem, after an extended narrative ekphrasis of this “piece of skilful painting,” wherein is seen “the power of Greece, / For Helen's rape the city to destroy, / Threat'ning cloud-kissing Ilion with annoy” (ll. 1366-1370), Lucrece herself comes to the painting “to find a face where all distress is stell'd” (l. 1444) and discovers the “despairing Hecuba” who at once becomes a symbol, like Lucrece, of the withering effects of rape on Trojan society:

In her the painter had anatomiz'd
Time's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's reign;
Her cheeks with chops and wrinkles were disguis'd:
Of what she was no semblance did remain.
Her blue blood chang'd to black in every vein,
          Wanting the spring that those shrunk pipes had fed,
          Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead.

(ll. 1450-56)

Lucrece recognizes at once the parallels of her own situation with that of the distraught, suffering Trojan queen, who is the ultimate, symbolic victim of the earlier rape of Helen.

After the pictura of the Trojan War is presented by the narrator, Lucrece comes before it to comment on the situation in lamentations which provide, in effect, a subscriptio on the painted scene of the Trojan War. Following her recognition of the symbolic qualities of Hecuba parallel to her own, Lucrece brings the silent picture to life by commenting with her own voice, so that the wider social implications and significance are clarified for the reader:

“Show me the strumpet that began this stir,
That with my nails her beauty I may tear!
Thy heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur
This load of wrath that burning Troy doth bear;
Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here,
          And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye,
          The sire, the son, the dame and daughter die.
“Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe?
Let sin alone committed, light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressed so;
Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe:
          For one's offence why should so many fall,
          To plague a private sin in general?
.....So Lucrece set a-work, sad tales doth tell
          To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow:
          She lends them words, and she their looks doth
          borrow.

(ll. 1471-84, 1496-98)

Here the close causative relationship of private sin to public destruction is clearly demonstrated, so much so that this emblematic episode functions not only as personal comparatio to Lucrece's own situation,⁹ but also both as a flashback to earlier historical, social destruction as a result of rape, and as a warning of the social results of the present rape of Lucrece.

The emblemic descriptions and emblematic scenes of Lucrece focus on the actual rape and its personal consequences. Readers benefit from a narrative persona who can report and comment on scenes in emblemic fashion, while the interior monologues and debates between Tarquin and Lucrece emblematize the episodes in a rhetorical, quasi-dramatic way. Thus the reader responds both with horror at the brutal, irrational act of Tarquin, and also with pity for the disastrous effects on Lucrece herself. In similar ways, the rape of Lavinia provides the centerpiece of Titus Andronicus: placed literally and emblematically at the midpoint of the play, its affective function is to produce a response of sadness and pity in both characters and audience alike, aided by the choric commentary of Marcus and the heartfelt lamentations of Titus himself.

Immediately after the rape in Titus Andronicus, the rapist sons of Tamora, Chiron and Demetrius, drag on stage the mutilated Lavinia with the comments that, mute and handless, she can only “See how with signs and tokens she can scrowl” (II, iv, 5),¹⁰ so that she might as well commit suicide: “And 'twere my cause, I should go hang myself” sneers Chiron, while Demetrius taunts, “If thou hadst hands to help thee knit the cord” (II, iv, 9-10). Their equation of rape with death would have been recognized as Lucrece-like by the Elizabethan audience, and the mention of signs and tokens doubtless introduced viewers to the essentially emblemic qualities of Lavinia's presence on the stage.¹¹

These emblemic aspects are emphasized once more by Marcus, who, finding the abandoned Lavinia, likens her to a tree “lopp'd and hew'd” of her branches, which would probably have reminded the audience of the well-known arboreal symbol of chastity, the classicial Daphne, now brought to bay and mutilated by her attackers.¹² As Marcus points out, she is also a Philomela figure, but one made even more incapable of communication by her handless inability to identify her ravishers in embroidery. While the audience is viewing the mute and mutilated Lavinia, the long (often-criticized) speech by Marcus serves as the verbal emblem of her sad plight; this static, descriptive lament by Marcus comments on Lavinia as emblem and also serves to introduce the dramatically mobile, emblematic lament by the Andronici in the next scene. Just as the tears and lamentations prevail as a result of the rape of Lucrece, so the tears well up at the end of Act II, Scene iv, in preparation for the more widespread lament to come:

Come let us go, and make thy father blind,
For such a sight will blind a father's eye,
One hour's storm will drown the fragrant meads,
What will whole months of tears thy father's eyes?
Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee.
O, could our mourning ease thy misery!

(II,iv,52-57)

The formal, static, apparently over-long and too ornate qualities of this commentary by Marcus have troubled modern critics, who view the scene as impossible to present effectively on stage;¹³ but when viewed in its emblemic contexts, one must conclude that Shakespeare considered this scene to be both rhetorically and dramatically significant. It presents and glosses the most important event in the play, and gives the impetus to a long string of rapidly-developing episodes which result in domestic and social destruction, accompanied by private and public lamentation. As such, it is seminal to all that follows, so that it would be most unwise to separate this from subsequent scenes, as does the act division of the First Folio. Shakespeare's technique here is, moreover, not unique, for he uses similar emblemic structures in his proximate Romeo and Juliet. Almost identical in position, structure, and function are the two scenes in which Friar Lawrence provides the verbal commentary as two visual picturae emblematicae are created onstage.

Both of these scenes (II,iii and vi) are close together, both contain Friar Lawrence's initial comments on each of the two young protagonists, and both scenes display the choric function of Lawrence after the disappearance of the Chorus figure at the beginning of Act II. In the first of these scenes, Friar Lawrence enters at dawn, carrying a basket which he must fill with “baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.” The first twenty-two lines are filled with imagistic oppositions of nature, such as the smiling morn and the frowning night, the “baleful weeds” and the “precious-juiced flowers,” and “The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb. / What is her burying grave, that is her womb.” He then moves to the different facets of nature, some good, some bad, which “We sucking on her natural bosom find”; then his didactic intent becomes apparent when he comments that, depending on its proper or improper use, nature can turn from good to bad, or bad to good. Just as he reaches this moral turning-point with the abstract motto-like comment that “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified,” the other part of this visual emblem, Romeo, enters, unseen by the Friar, to complete the theatrical creation of an emblem which juxtaposes the basket of flowers held up and discussed by the Friar, on one side of the stage, and on the other the arrival of a young man with all kinds of blossoming potential. The audience itself must recognize the relationship, as the Friar provides an explanatory subscriptio to this visual emblem by way of choric application:

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power;
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

(II,iii,23-30)

By the time the two characters recognize and greet each other, the audience has understood the emblem, realizing that although a situation can be made to go either way, the prognosis for this young man's ability to choose aright is darkly ominous—where “rude will … is predominant.”

Likewise, only a few scenes later (II,vi,9-20), Shakespeare provides an identical emblemic structure, where the Friar gives first an abstract commentary on the failure of intemperate love, before Juliet enters to become a symbol of Vanity as explained by the commentary of the Friar. The remaining parts of both scenes demonstrate, in mobile tableaux with dramatic dialogues, the willful characteristics introduced by the introductory emblems—Romeo (in II,iii) is only capable of “doting, not … loving,” and Juliet herself admits that “my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth.” The increased flexibility and dramatic potential of the complete emblematic units were probably reasons why this type of scene superseded Shakespeare's use of the Chorus figure in this early play.

In the same ways, Act III, Scene i, of Titus Andronicus makes mobile and dramatic the emblem of rapacious destruction found in II, iv. Focused on the personal and family crises of the Andronici seen in terms of the wrongs done to them by Saturnine and Tamora, it ends with family pledges to undertake the final sequence of revenges against Saturnine and Rome. The scene opens with a plea for pity by Titus for his condemned sons (a parallel to Tamora's fruitless pleading to Titus for her own son's life at the play's beginning); his plea goes unheeded, and Titus himself lapses into weeping for the first time, so that his tears “are now prevailing orators” (III,i,25-26).

When Marcus enters with Lavinia, the tears of Titus are only intensified by this sight of his “mart'red” daughter. While editors gloss this adjective as “mutilated,” it no doubt alludes here (in lines 81 and 107, and III,ii,36) to the traditional mutilation of martyrs, so that Lavinia, like Lucrece, is easily associated with martyrdom as well as mutilation. Lavinia stands silent as pictura throughout this scene, while Titus comments at length in emblematic fashion on this “sympathy of woe” (1.148), so that Lavinia's handless and tongueless condition reminds him how he perhaps should do the same and “in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of our hateful days” (11. 131-32).

The immediate result of this pitiable picture of Lavinia ravished is the cruelly ironic cutting off of Titus' hand as a result of another of Aaron's vicious ruses. Like the emulation of lament by Lucretius and Collatine over the corpse of Lucrece, so Lucius, Marcus, and Titus vie for the false honour of sacrificing a hand to release the imprisoned sons, Martius and Quintus. The sacrifice is futile, and as the sons' heads and Titus' severed hand are brought on stage, Titus' tears and lament boil over, past the reason urged by Marcus, past even the traditional icon of despair and rage noted by Marcus (11. 260-262),¹⁴ into a rage which vents itself by family vows for revenge. Like Brutus in Lucrece, Lucius sums up for the audience the misery endured, while he promises the vengeance which is to be carried out in the remainder of the tragedy.

The pathos of this scene is reiterated in the next, when Titus, now a nascent Lear “all mad with misery” (III,ii,9), sits down with Lavinia, a “map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs” (III,ii,12), at a pathetic family repast which foreshadows the tumultuous Procnean banquet scene at the end of the play (V,iii). Now both handless, Titus identifies with Lavinia in her suffering, so much so that he explains how they will both become emblems of sorrow:

In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I, of these, will wrest an alphabet,
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.

(III,ii,40-45)

These scenes at the center of Titus Andronicus do in fact demonstrate how closely parallel they are to the situations and development of the poem Lucrece. In both Titus and Lucrece the rape scene is centrally placed and either narrated (Lucrece, ll. 673-686) or offstage (Titus, II,iv,stage directions). This central location in both works narrows the audience's focus down to the abuse of the individual, from which spring devastating personal and ultimately socio-political consequences. The socio-political upheaveals are only proleptically implied, however, in the development of Lucrece by the use of the battles observed in the Trojan War tapestry by Lucrece in her tearful lament. The actual banishment of the Tarquins and the fall of the monarchy are not included in the poem; instead, only the promise of revenge is made, and the final emphasis is on the pitiable downfall of Lucrece as a result of “Tarquin's foul offence” (l. 1852). Thus the poem ends where Act III of the play ends, while Titus Andronicus further demonstrates the socio-political ramifications stemming directly from the scenes of personal abuse and family grief. As part of this dramatic development, a false masque of Revenge (V,ii) is played out by Chiron and Demetrius as Rape and Murder. The unusual ironic duality of this scene, wherein the characters play themselves while taking on at the same time the traditional allegorical figures of medieval morality drama, provides for the audience instant abstraction of the stage events and also an immediate widening from the specific to the universal. Only in the final horrific scene, which leaves bodies scattered onstage in a triumph of death, do we find attention given to the connections between specific causes and the subsequent social repercussions. As a distraught Titus adopts a Virginius role in killing his only daughter, he reminds us that it is not really he who has killed her:

Not I, 'twas Chiron and Demetrius:
They ravish'd her, and cut away her tongue,
And they, 'twas they, that did her all this wrong.

(V,iii,56-58)

Like Virginius, Titus sees himself as the inevitable instrument by which the violence of others is carried out. Renaissance views of the Appius and Virginia story, often portrayed in Renaissance art …, tended to adopt this exonerative attitude, in the same way that Lucrece exclaims on the point of suicide how Tarquin, by his act of rape, is in effect killing her: “He, he, fair lords, 'tis he / That guides this hand to give this wound to me” (ll. 1721-22). As in the twin engravings by Antonio Tempesta …, of Tereus and Philomena, and the Procnean banquet, the follow-through from rape to death was a frequent Renaissance theme.

In a final crowd scene with Lucius as leader and future emperor, we are reminded (by Aemilius) of the destruction of the Trojan War, which has given “our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound” (V,iii,87), and that it has been caused by the foul sons of Tamora:

Then, gracious auditory, be it known to you
That Chiron and the damn'd Demetrius
Were they that murd'red our Emperor's brother,
And they it were that ravished our sister.
For their fell faults our brothers were beheaded,
Our father's tears despis'd, and basely cozen'd
Of that true hand that fought Rome's quarrel out,
And sent her enemies unto the grave.

(V,iii,96-103)

In the midst of all these “uproars,” which have produced bodies scattered onstage before them in an emblem of death, the underlying cause has been rapaciousness symbolized by the vicious attack on Lavinia. In keeping with the tearful situation in Act III, this culminating episode of the play is replete with lachrymose imagery in a scene of general lamentation for the woe which has riddled society; though wider in scope, it does in fact hark back to the similar scene of familiar lament at the end of Lucrece. Thus the emblem of rape at the center of the play, in the form of the martyr-like Lavinia, has been broadened by the end to an emblem of rapine: the narrowing of focus to the despoliation of the individual is symbolic as well as causative of the more general socio-political upheavals.

The affective purpose of the rape situations in both Lucrece and Titus Andronicus is to develop in the audience a response of pity for the victims who suffer abuse and resulting death. This pity is not to be seen as a condescending sympathy (a common modern view), but rather as a compassionate understanding with a view to amelioration of the situation which causes such abuses; it is what Milton, in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, calls “a true and Christian commiseration.” The imagistic use of tears and the reiterative rhetoric of lament in both poem and play produce pity which evokes in the audience a negative evaluation of the social situations which produce such disruptive and devastating effects. The rapes and the subsequent isolation of the heroines symbolize the disruption of personal and social means of communication. The handless, tongueless, and even tearful, state of Lavinia forces the audience to appreciate anew the necessity for civil discourse, which has been reduced to incomprehensible signs by such rapacious wounds. Even though Lucrece retains the use of her tongue (for which modern critics have condemned her), she is similarly isolated by the rape and suffers the desperate ruminations which result in her pitiful suicide. In both cases, the emblematic purpose is to stir in the audience an awareness of the interrelationships of the individual and the social, of the private and the public, so as to produce an impetus for solving those problems which have such debilitating consequences to our moral, ethical, and social framework. Central and crucial, Lucrece and Lavinia demonstrate the facility with which Shakespeare adopted traditional emblems and incorporated them poetically and dramatically in his early works.

Notes

1. See Henry Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, trans. H. I., ed. Rev. Thomas Harding, The Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), I, p. 417; John Hooper, A Declaration of the Ten Holy Commandments of Almighty God (London, 1550), ed. Samuel Carr, The Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843), pp. 284, 354; Juan Luis Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, trans. Thomas Paynell, (London, 1553?), sigs. E3^v-E4^r, A5^v-A7^r; The Warfare of Christians: Concerning the conflict against the Fleshe, the World, and the Devill, trans. Arthur Golding, (London, 1576), sigs. B6^v-B7^r, pp. 12-13; Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T. B., (London, 1586), sigs. R1^rff; and Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), sigs. Rr4^v-Rr7^r, pp. 308-11. See also my earlier discussion of this background material, “Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981), 3-6.

2. For the sequence by Goltzius, see F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings Engravings and Woodcuts (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, n.d.), Vol. VIII, p. 37; the panel on the history of Lucretia by Biago di Antonio is in the Ca'd'Oro, Venice. I have viewed this in the Photographic Collection, Warburg Institute, London (reference, Mostra, Lorenzo il Magnifico, 1949, 10, p. 70f).

3. The use of “chamber” for the vagina was quite common in Elizabethan drama. See James T. Henke, Courtesans and Cuckolds (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), p. 38; and Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948, 1960), p. 85. Textual quotations from Lucrece are taken from The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince, the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1960).

4. There are innumerable art works depicting the individual victim. For example, there are over fifty different full-length studies of Lucrece commiting suicide, about fifty three-quarters-length, and about fifty half-length studies, including those by many famous Renaissance artists, in the Photographic Collection, Warburg Institute, London.

5. This heraldry has been noted briefly by Muriel C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), p.111.

6. See, for example, the views of F. T. Prince, The Poems, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. xxxiv-xxxviii.

7. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), ed. R. H. Bowers (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962), pp.154-56, fol. 71^v-72^v; see also pp. 157-59, fol. 73^r-74^r. For the significance of Wilson's work in England, see Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 98-110.

8. For discussion of Shakespeare's rhetorical training, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Smalle Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944).

9. See Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 179-80.

10. Quotations from Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974).

11. These emblematic qualities have been noted briefly by Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 105-106, and by Dieter Mehl, “Schaubild und Sprachfigur in Shakespeares Dramen,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West. Jahrbuch, (1970), 19.

12. The story of Daphne hunted by Apollo in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I, became a standard reference for the preservation of chastity. In George Sandys' translation, Daphne appealed to her father to be transformed (into the laurel tree) to prevent rape:

    Helpe Father, if your streames containe a Powre!
    May Earth, for too well pleasing; me devour:
    Or, by transforming, O destroy this shape,
    That thus bétrayes me to undoing rape.

    Daphne is regarded as a symbol of chastity, and Sandys' commentary explains, “Daphne affects Diana, which is chastity.” See George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis (Oxford, 1632), ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 40, 73-74. William Caxton and Arthur Golding also expressed the same views: see William Caxton, The Metamorphoses of Ovid (1480), The Phillips Manuscript, facsimile (New York: George Braziller, 1968), Vol I, Book 1, Ch. 18; and Arthur Golding, Metamorphosis (London, 1612), “The Epistle,” sig. 13^v. For a discussion of the wider implications of the tree image, see Albert H. Tricomi, “The Mutilated Garden in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies IX (1976), 89-105.

13. See, for example, the views of J. Dover Wilson, ed., Titus Andronicus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), Introduction, pp. liii-liv; and G. R. Hibbard, The Making of Shakespeare's Dramatic Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 47-53.

14. The tearing of the hair as a traditional icon of despair is shown in Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976).