Abstract
Venus and Adonis was a great success, and Shakespeare came to dedicate another narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to the young Earl of Southampton. In this dedication, Shakespeare had promised to write a more grave work, a promise he fulfilled in this poem about the rape of a virtuous woman and the founding of the Roman republic with the banishment of the king-rapist—Tarquin. Shakespeare takes up a story that Ovid had told in Fasti and Livy had included in his History of Rome. The chastity of Lucretia is a foundational myth of the Roman republic that Livy and Ovid both represent. The rape of Lucretia has been as much a tale for the late twentieth century as it was for the ancients like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus and for Shakespeare and his contemporaries.1 For Ovid, the rape of Lucretia was part of a context in which Fasti represented the tensions and anxieties of late Augustan Rome by examining Roman monuments, religion, legend, history, and character. His representation, as Carole Newlands has observed, differed from that of Livy, who had made her rape a prelude to the public theme of liberty by stressing that, like Philomela, she had suffered a personal and private tragedy.2 In other words, Livy’s tale of a woman’s sacrifice for her country becomes Ovid’s exploration of who gets to speak and who remains silent.3 Ovid is using time, reflecting on the calendar, to consider history and mythology, the politics of ideological foundations. The tension between private shame and public revenge lie at the heart of this story.
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Notes
See, for example, Eliane Fantham, “The Fasti as a Source for Women’s Participation in a Roman Cult,” Ovid’s “Fasti”: Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium, ed. Geraldine Herbert-Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23–46
Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).
See Carole Newlands, Playing with Time: Ovid and the “Fasti” (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–2
See Anthony James Boyle and Roger D. Woodard, introduction to Ovid, Fasti (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), xxxv
This theme of private and public has been a part of the debate on Shakespeare for many years. Long after the writing of my analysis of Lucrece, it persists. On another view of republicanism, and one that is detailed and suggestive, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 1
Since this analysis of Lucrece was written in 1988 (and presented at the Shakespeare Association of America), more work has appeared on the poem that relates to the analysis I presented (see also note 1 above). See, for example, Catherine Belsey, “Tarquin Disposessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 315–35
Colin Burrow, “Introduction,” The Complete Poems and Sonnets, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Catherine Belsey, “The Rape of Lucrece,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–107.
For a discussion of narrative theory, see Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 169–86.
Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 117
For a more general view of the relation of the poem to the tragedies, see Harold R. Walley, “The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy,” PMLA 76, no. 5 (December 1961): 480–87.
For a pertinent discussion of King John, see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 169–70.
R. Rawdon Wilson has looked carefully at narrative in Lucrece. His able and interesting analysis concentrates on ekphrasis, which is especially relevant for the discursive picture of Troy (1366-1568). He extends his argument to embedded narratives and their conventions and rhetorical strategies such as copia, listing, characterization, interior monologue, recursiveness, reflexivity, alternate tales, and fictional worlds. See Wilson, “Shakespearean Narrative,” 39–59. For a discussion of the verbal and pictorial (iconographical), see Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 175–94
David Ronsand, “‘Troyes Painted Woes’: Shakespeare and the Pictorial Imagination,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature 8, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 77–97
Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 66–82
Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 (1987): 25–76.
For a perceptive book on Shakespeare’s rhetoric and poetics, but one that really concentrates on the plays, see Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2000).
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). The Rape of Lucrece. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_3
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