To ‘See Feelingly’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece 

Teachers rarely use Shakespeare’s narrative poems. They are, after all, long, difficult to read. And they may seem a harder ‘sell’ than the usual plays or sonnets which, whatever you can say about them, come with some advance promotion. Yet, as I hope to demonstrate here, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece offers students a rich and provocative introduction to Shakespeare. More specifically, ROL  involves students directly in profound debates about how meaning and truth are determined while engaging them in significant acts of historical and literary consciousness. Indeed, ROL demands that students answer a question at the heart of their learning lives: what does it mean to take responsibility for the self in a context in which much is predetermined and yet the truth of any single answer can not be assured?  

            Though ROL has sparked some interest among critics now and then, the teaching of Shakespeare, since its commencement in the eighteenth century, has long been slanted towards tragedy and, consequently, the dilemmas of the men who figure as their protagonists. Since the late 1970s and 80s feminist critics have argued that reading and teaching such tragedies as representative of a transcendent, a-historical Shakespeare whose heroes constitute the male qua human experience does an injustice to both Shakespeare and his readers. Querying the social construction of gender roles, feminists argue, is not only useful in understanding Shakespeare’s representations of men and women, but constitutes a favorite subject of his comedies and tragedies alike. Lear’s and Hamlet’s fear of women, like Macbeth’s and Romeo’s fear of being one, helps us understand the contexts in which their tragedies take shape (Garner and Sprengnether 1996). Similarly, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines such as Portia, Viola and Rosalind demonstrate that masculinity and femininity may be less a matter of physiology than of performing in accord with social conventions (Orgel: 1996).  Yet understanding such social conventions, Shakespeare shows us, demands a highly acute consciousness wary of simplistic generalizations. What does it mean to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman,’ Shakespeare repeatedly asks us to consider? Here in this time and place or in that?  And what do such possibilities mean for the production of a good society—that is, one where justice and safety create the space for human freedom? 

            In his retelling of the once renowned and much debated case of the rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare takes on these issues more explicitly than in any other work. The story of Lucrece--wife and daughter of nobles serving under the tyrannous Tarquin the Proud whose rape by the King’s son leads to her suicide--constituted the basis of long-standing debates in ancient, medieval and early modern societies. Her suicide is thought by some to be a valiant act of heroism: in killing herself she destroys the evidence of Tarquin’s ‘conquest’ and constitutes the grounds for a political rebellion that culminates in the establishment of the Roman Republic—the ancestral government of England and its political offspring. She is, in this view, a model of chastity as feminine virtue par excellence. A woman whose physical beauty corresponds with her moral purity, she represents the proper object and subject that a good society creates and defends. The competing view of Lucrece argues that, in taking her own life, she is unfeminine and sinful. In her self-sacrifice, she behaves in an aggressive and prideful manner reserved for Roman men. More significantly, as Augustine first argued, she confuses her (polluted) body with her (untainted) mind, and kills what only God has the authority to destroy.

In choosing to re-present Lucrece’s story there is no question that Shakespeare enters this debate. But he does so not to decide the question once and for all, as many might have, but to open that question up to his readers—that is, to create a poetic opportunity to act as judges of Tarquin and Lucrece and the acts of violence they undertake. In doing so, he offers students a rare opportunity to develop their interpretive and reasoning skills in response to an open question of grave consequence: what is the nature of truth in a world where the same oppositions between self and other, between mind and body, between reason and feeling that appear to make meaning possible also lead to violence and death? 

Shakespeare frames this question first by side lining the political context of the story in an ‘Argument’ that prefaces the poem itself. Much like the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s ‘Argument’ lays out the complete plot of the story at the start, allowing readers to focus on how rather than what happens. In another move that suggests his interest in the social consequences of individual choice, Shakespeare narrates the poem in the omniscient third person but situates the reader consistently and overwhelmingly inside the minds of Tarquin and Lucrece as they struggle with the effects of Tarquin’s violence. Like long, extended soliloquies, these internal monologues are the primary evidence upon which we must base our judgments. 

This intersection of gender psychology and literary form drew me to teach ROL   for the first time. Planning a course on gender and genre in Shakespeare, I wanted to attend to his narrative poems along with the sonnets and plays and found ROL the most compelling of his two (Venus and Adonis is the other). Focused on getting the students interested in such a long and apparently demanding poem, I prepared a short introductory lecture about the historical background and psychological emphasis of the poem and prepared notes on the nature and significance of its various formal elements: Shakespeare’s beginning in media res; his use of apostrophes, ekphrasis, synoeciosis, mythological and literary allusion, iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. In doing so, I functioned as many English teachers do by stressing thematic and formal aspects of the text in question. In the process I became excited about the power of Shakespeare’s treatment of the subject of rape. Like many teachers of less than contemporary texts, I consistently look for ways to connect the social and political dilemmas of Shakespeare’s day to those my students face in the twenty-first century. There seemed a good chance, I thought, that the nature and consequences of rape might ignite their interest more than the seemingly distant issues of kingship, courtship or familial order at work in many of his plays.

Then, the day before we were to begin discussion of the poem, a woman was raped in broad daylight in a restroom on campus. Suddenly, the subject of rape was no longer theoretical, if it ever truly could have been, but a matter of immediate personal and collective consequence. As we settled in to begin our discussion that first day, the grief, anger and sense of mistrust generated by such violence hovered like smog around us. Despite the formal and antiquated nature of the poem’s language, it no longer seemed but a literary representation of an ancient historical event. Rather, it appeared a startling instance of the power of the literary imagination to awaken a complex sense of our historicity: Shakespeare’s representation of rape, the students’ suddenly understood, was at once far from and intimately connected with their own. A profound effect of this paradoxical historical consciousness was the fact that to many in the class, not least myself, the assumptions of neutrality and objectivity usually at work in our critical approaches to the poem were thrown on the table. Prepared to consider the representation of gender in the poem as an objective means of discerning its meaning, we were suddenly challenged to consider the relationship between the practical objectivism of such theories and the social commitments betrayed by our varying responses to the immediate violence of rape. Being male or female or conventionally masculine or feminine was no longer a matter for cold analysis exclusive of feeling. Indeed, the relationship between analysis as pure objectivity and social violence loomed before us like the Sphinx’s riddle: we couldn’t make sense of much without making sense of that.

Obviously, no one wants or needs to have the tragic events of Shakespeare’s work

function as a prerequisite to understanding. Yet as the Chinese wisely remind us, all crises are a form of opportunity. Reading ROL in the wake of an on-campus rape opened our eyes to the uses of the literary imagination in the development of the social judgments and human understanding required by us as members of a community upon which we depend for both justice and safety. Who determines what rape is or means? And based on what criteria? Is rape a crime against property as its Latin roots suggest, a crime against women, or a crime against those ‘feminized’ as less powerful? Indeed, who decides what it means to be a man or woman? And how do these notions figure in what we conceive of as human freedom and the meaning it depends on? How, ultimately, can we reconcile our often idealistic answers to these questions with the far more complex history of human relationships?  Can we begin to make judgments about the relationship between self and other that don’t recreate the violent oppositions we seek to prevent? Can we, that is, combine mind and heart to ‘see it feelingly,’ as Shakespeare’s Gloucester puts it, in order to imagine a world in which rape is unthinkable?    

As my brief description of our first day’s discussion suggests, reading ROL in the wake of a rape within our learning community made clear to us that resolving among differing points of view about the nature of human experience and its social effects is not simply a matter of disinterested judgment. Indeed, as we were to discover, Shakespeare’s poem directs us pointedly to the question of our relationship to each other and the significance of the ways in which we imagine such relationships in the stories we tell. It does this by demanding that its’ readers enter the longstanding debate about Lucrece—an act of interpretation (story-telling) and judgment (meaning-making) that involves difficult and significant choices. Doesn’t Shakespeare’s poem, some of my students demanded that first day, just reenact the violence of rape by offering us a conventionally passive, beautiful woman whose virtue can only be preserved by her death? No, no, other students wanted to insist! Shakespeare gives us something else—not a despairing Lucrece but a vengeful one! The great power of Shakespeare’s poem lies in the fact that strong cases can be made for either of these views. While Lucrece’s speech following the rape demonstrates her thoughtful progression from shame to rage to grief to the possibilities for obtaining justice, the narrator tells us that ‘men have marble, women waxen minds/And therefore are they formed as marble will’ (1240).[i]  While divesting Lucrece of guilt for the shame of rape, the claim of ‘feminine’ weakness is simultaneously, Shakespeare makes clear, the ground of the shame itself.

Shakespeare points us toward this fact early in the poem in his representation of the rapist himself. In a stunning portrait of a rapist’s psychology, Shakespeare allows his readers to follow Tarquin’s thoughts as he moves physically and emotionally towards sexual violence. Provoked at first by envy of Collatine, Lucrece’s husband, ‘that meaner men should vaunt/ That golden hap which their superiors want’ (41-42), Tarquin is forced to reconcile the forms of masculine honor—physical prowess and familial continence—that sustain his sense of self with the fear and consequent rage he feels at his implied inferiority to Collatine. In the process, Tarquin offers the reader the conventional platonic account of feeling as the source of suffering and dishonor. “‘O shame to knighthood and to shining arms!/ O foul dishonour to my household’s grave!/…/A martial man to soft fancy’s slave!’”(197-200). Feeling, or ’fancy’ in his telling is transient—‘A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy’(212), a weak and insupportable because selfish pursuit set against the hierarchies of military and familial order that preserve the social good. Masculinity, and the honor it confers, is the product, Tarquin and the narrator make clear, of seeing the self in relation to other men.

Such relationships of power and the threat of subordination and annihilation they assume helped us to make sense of Shakespeare’s interest in the gendered nature of shame and the consequent significance of his representation of Tarquin’s vulnerability as he moves toward violence against Lucrece. As a man, Tarquin’s ‘surviving shame,’ as he calls it, is the consequence of his actions, rather than an attribute of his being. It is the residual effect and the lasting consequence of his choices that determines his relationship to others. While he tries to convince himself, and Lucrece, that secrecy will elide the issue of shame—“’Shameful it is—ay, if the fact be known’”(239)—the narrator makes clear that the shame that follows upon his actions is, like his sense of self, inextricable from his relationship to other men.

Thus when Tarquin uses a perverse version of the Socratic notion that ‘the good person cannot be harmed’ in arguing for the rape, we were initially confused. Such self-reliance is meant to free us, my students asserted, from the transient demands of our feelings, not authorize them! The irony seems clear when, using the language of imperial conquest, Tarquin proceeds to convince himself of the justice of his violence by suggesting that in following his desire he arms himself with a form of courage motivating even the weakest of soldiers. “’Affection is my captain,’” he declares, “’and he leadeth,/ And when his gaudy banner is displayed, / The coward fights and will not be dismayed’” (271-273). The meaning of the line seemed simple enough: Shakespeare reiterates the Socratic subordination of feeling to reason in offering the negative example of the rapist’s choice of  ‘affection’ rather than reason as his guide toward violence. It is feeling that gets Tarquin into trouble and if we want to avoid his mistakes…. But wait, Shakespeare says something quite different about Tarquin and the role of feeling in his act of violence in his description of Tarquin’s final thought before the rape itself. Here is how he describes it, 

His hand that yet remains upon her breast—

Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall—

May feel her heart, poor citizen distressed,

Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall,

Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal.

This moves in him more rage and lesser pity

To make the breach and enter this sweet city.

                                                (463-469)

By pointing to Tarquin’s fear of human connection upon feeling Lucrece’s beating heart and, further, by suggesting the psychological motive for Tarquin’s crime in his consequent rage at his own ‘weakness’ in feeling for her, Shakespeare invites us to rethink the conventional subordination of feeling to reason in the making of social judgments. What Tarquin refuses here is not an idea of Lucrece but the shame of realizing what it means to him to ‘feel her heart.’ As my students quickly perceived, Tarquin’s rage here is the consequence of his fear of his own vulnerability, a literal and figurative impermanence captured in the image of a shaking hand.

As these lines suggest, how Shakespeare and his readers imagine the relationship between reason and feeling shapes not only how we understand the meaning of Tarquin’s rape and Lucrece’s later suicide, but how consequently we view the possibilities of our own human community.  The politics of citizenry, Shakespeare argues here, are acted out in miniature in our response to those weaker than ourselves. Assuming that it is Tarquin’s faulty rationality or his inevitable desire that lead him to rape Lucrece argues that there is in fact no possible emotional connection between Tarquin and Lucrece and hence no alternative to the rape that doesn’t rely on other forms of violent opposition. Feeling and reason in such readings are defined as opposing terms: either there is no reason which isn’t in fact motivated by feeling or the function of reason is to resist and transcend the embodied and hence transitory claims of feeling. Such arguments are regularly used by a range of readers to clarify Shakespeare’s philosophical affiliation with either humanism’s transcendent celebration of ‘man’s’ capacity and need for purely rational judgments or as illustration of his proto-postmodern grasp of the purely subjective nature of human existence. Both, however, reenact the gendered opposition of reason and feeling that is queried in the passage above.

If, however, as our class discovered, we examine the gendered nature of Tarquin’s identity and its role in determining his sense of his choices the poem suggests that the opposition between reason and feeling is less a solution to the violence at issue than its cause. In this reading, it is Tarquin’s inability to locate a form of masculinity that allows his judgment access to an authorized claim of feeling that connects him to others. For Tarquin all feeling, whether lust or empathy, constitutes a challenge to his sense of identity and the self-sufficiency it requires. He rapes, Shakespeare’s use of martial and imperial metaphor makes clear, not to gain something so much as to overcome something: the thought that his social value may be dependent upon the life—in this case Collatine’s—of another.

Reading Shakespeare’s opening representation of Tarquin in this way didn’t resolve the debate about Lucrece, but it did move us to think hard about how Shakespeare chooses to represent such a controversial historical figure and how our conceptions of shame and gender roles might help us make sense of it. Certainly, in taking up the case of Lucrece, Shakespeare takes on the vexing problem of representing a woman who is at once a figure of shame and virtue. In doing so, Shakespeare can not escape the gendered terms that constitute the story itself as well as his own historical moment:  the politics of rape, suicide and revenge in ancient Rome and early modern England fix the terms of the narrative in a patriarchal logic that Aristotle puts quite succinctly:

[I]t is both natural and expedient for the body to be ruled by the soul, and for the

emotional part of our nature to be ruled by the mind, the part which possesses reason. The reverse, or even parity, would be fatal all around. This is also true as between man and other animals; for tame animals are by nature better than wild, and it is better for them all to be ruled by men, as it secures their safety. Again, as between male and female the former is by nature, superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject. And this must hold good of mankind in general.

            --Aristotle, The Politics 1254b2--

The hierarchical binary articulated here, in which women, nature, the body and its feelings, are subordinated to men, civilization and reason, is echoed in Shakespeare’s poem by the narrator and Lucrece herself. Her violated body is ‘polluted,’ ‘corrupted,’ and even in death, ‘Some of her blood still pure and red remained/ And some looked black, and that false tarquin-stained’ (1742-43). Unlike Tarquin, Lucrece bears the shame of Tarquin’s violence in her body for it is in her body—as a ‘good’ woman—that her virtue lies. Confronting the historical consciousness of gender at work in the poem raised profound questions for my students about how any individual escapes the cultural conventions of their own historical moment to make meanings that resist oppression and violence—especially when such meanings constitute the unquestioned values of one’s community.

The trouble, Shakespeare makes clear in his depiction of Lucrece, is that all ‘truths’ are compounds made up of experience, knowledge, belief, desire and possibility. It is no surprise then to find the pre-rape Lucrece is a kind of masculine fantasy of female as commodity.  Her existence, as Shakespeare tells us in the ‘Argument’ is defined by waiting, yet a waiting that is less process than object. In a game the men devise to test their wives’ virtue, the wives of the other Roman soldiers are ‘all found dancing, and revelling, or in several disports’ when their husbands return unexpectedly.  Lucrece, however, is engaged in the act of ‘spinning amongst her maids.’ As handbooks of the period explain, while productive of a certain domestic product, handwork in the case of noblewomen was aimed at prohibiting rather than generating female activity and the forms of existence associated with it.  John Taylor offers the following recommendation for English women in 1631, ‘It will increase their peace, enlarge their store, / To use their tongues less and their needles more’ (Aughterson 1995: 211).

            Historicizing Lucrece’s feminine virtue with a look at what the injunction against idleness meant for women in Shakespeare’s time helped us see the profound difference between the virtuous pre-rape Lucrece and the problematic because violent post-rape Lucece that Shakespeare, following the historical sources closely, offers us.  One of the most significant aspects of Shakespeare’s poem is how much ‘tongue’ Lucrece is allowed after the rape. Indeed, there is no way to make sense of the poem without reconciling the early Lucrece, who lives to wait upon the desires of others and the later figure, whose speech queries in voluminous and pointed form the nature of her own existence. By historicizing ancient and early modern notions of gender with the help of Aristotle and Taylor, it was not hard for the students to recall the connections between Aristotle’s subordinated categories—the body, feeling, women, wilderness—and the fear of social impropriety and disorder such connections implied. Such impropriety entails, Aristotle’s argument for social good makes clear, individual shame--the sense, to put it simply, of being inadequate to one’s community. 

            Asking ourselves what the connection is and should be between body, feeling, voice and community, we began to understand a distinction between guilt and shame that writer Nancy Mairs explains in describing the shame entailed by her rebellious disabled body. ‘I feel guilt or embarrassment for something I’ve done; shame for who I am. I may stop doing bad or stupid things, but I can’t stop being. How can help but be ashamed?’ Speech, Mairs argues, constitutes a crucial form of resistance to such objectification in its assumption of community. ‘[S]peaking out loud is an antidote to shame,’ Mairs claims.  ‘I can subvert its power by acknowledging who I am, shame and all, and in doing so, raising what was hidden, dark and secret about my life into the plain light of shared experience’ (Mairs 1994: 276-77).

Such ‘speaking out loud’ is what Shakespeare allows Lucrece to do. What Shakespeare represents in Lucrece’s post-rape discourse, students discover, is a struggle to imagine the self beyond the hierarchies of value that predicate the rape itself—powerful, powerless--as well the assumed options—to live in shame or die in sin—that follow from it. It’s important to note that the early Lucrece of the poem is conveyed to us through the voices of others, Tarquin and the narrator, and that we only hear from her directly when she is threatened with violence. Suddenly bereft of the physical safety which her status as the wife of Collatine and the daughter of Lucius have provided, Shakespeare suggests that she must now negotiate her relationship to Tarquin and later her husband and family without benefit of men’s surety. Perhaps most importantly, the Lucrece of the Argument and early portion of the poem is incapable of imagining other women unlike herself whose ‘shame’ guarantees the value of her ‘virtue.’  While she fails to convince herself in the end of the possibility of another kind of life than the one she’s lost, her speech marks a space between her despair in it and the terms that produced it and another kind of existence in which feeling and the human connection it assumes is sustainable. In her apostrophe to Night and Time, in the ekphrasis, and in her final speech to her father and husband, Lucrece explores the nature of the shame both imposed on and experienced by her as a consequence of the acts of another. Throughout her speech, Lucrece seeks to tie her feelings to her commitments to others. By ‘speaking out loud,’ as Mairs would say, Lucrece defies the injunction to silence literally made by Tarquin and figuratively imposed on all women as objects of shame. Unlike Tarquin’s speech, Lucrece’s aims at constructing a world in which her feeling can inform her judgment and thus reconstruct the sense of social identity the rape has undermined. Thus the significance of her reading of other feminine figures of suffering, such as Philomel and Hecuba, lies not in her failure to find in them examples of heroic action but in the sense of shared feeling they provide in her struggle to reconstruct a world in which her commitments to others do not conclude in violence but in community (1128-1148; 1443-1470). 

            In doing so, Lucrece offers a significant model of reading in the pursuit of justice, reading as an act of constructing the social subject, whose virtue is not decided in opposition or abstraction but by relation to others like and unlike herself. The feelings she expresses--grief, rage, empathy, hate, and pity among others—help her negotiate between abstract arguments about ideal human existence and the fact that the meaning of her life must be sought and finally found in her relationship to others. Lucrece’s suicide in this reading is neither the mark of her ‘quasi-masculine’ heroism nor the sign of absolute feminine passivity. While an act of violence against herself, her suicide constitutes an act of despair in the possibility of living in a world where terror of feeling results in the violence of her immutable shame and Tarquin’s rape. Like all subjects, Shakespeare’s poem suggests, Lucrece’s judgment, like our own, is and should be shaped by feeling for others. To be completely objective, or as she puts it, to have ‘true eyes’(748), is not, she makes clear, to be a subject at all and consequently, unable to judge the justice of any act, including her own.  In hundreds of lines and the better part of the poem, Lucrece explores exactly what her shame means in a culture in which women’s identities are dependent on their status as sexual property. As Catherine Belsey explains, Lucrece’s grief, like rape itself, ‘call[s] into question the distinction taken for granted by so many modern readers between mind and the organism of which it is a part’ (Belsey 2002: 331). The violence done to Lucrece is neither solely to her body nor her psyche. Given that inescapable fact, her conclusion that the dramatic staging of her victim status via suicide offers the best possibility of justice is much harder to judge as a failure of objectivity. The meaning of human freedom for lives punctuated by death and shaped by inescapable social practices seems suddenly less a matter of self-sufficiency guaranteed by absolute truths and more an opportunity to join our hearts and minds in speaking against the shame that brings both Tarquin and Lucrece to seek the recourse of violence.

Indeed, while reading a poem about rape makes consideration of social context inevitable, the traditional practice of the English classroom inclines toward a formalism that makes the expression of feeling entailed by such considerations often difficult. In my class’s case, the distance usually provided by academic consideration of such historical and social events was destroyed by our recent experience of the very violence at issue in the poem. Yet, as English teachers often remind their students, to read from one’s particular social commitments remains dangerous: be careful, we advise, remain objective! Avoid the word ‘I’ or use it sparingly! The reasons for such practical objectivism are clear when faced with any piece of writing in which the ‘I’ dominates everything else. Yet as I began to realize in teaching ROL, understanding Shakespeare’s representation of Tarquin and Lucrece and hence the nature of rape itself forces us to recognize the crucial role of feeling in all social judgments—not least those we make in judgment of other’s stories.

The ambiguity at work in ROL—as narrative poetry and as history—makes any recourse to pure facts impossible. What facts we know—that Tarquin raped Lucrece, that Lucrece committed suicide, that rape is shame-full--do not, Shakespeare makes clear, lead to any guaranteed truth in judgment. What answers readers of Shakespeare’s poem come to about Tarquin, Lucrece, the causes and thus the meaning of their violence, and the possibility of justice in such a world, can be girded only by the force of each student’s heartfelt reasoning and the clarity of his or her own commitments. In doing so, students discover the power of the human voice—Shakespeare’s and their own—to join heart and mind in the creation of community and the possibilities for meaning and freedom it suggests. Teaching Shakespeare, ROL, reminds us, should be an exercise in discovering the power of the human voice, never a matter of simply documenting it.  

Mary Janell Metzger

Department of English

Western Washington University