The Speaker’s Depth of Character in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece

Summary

THE Rape of Lucrece is a poem of loss. It resembles a long funeral elegy for Lucrece as it retells the forces that cause her acute deprivations. She is robbed of her most prized identity, “that true type” of chastity (1050); she loses her relationship with her husband and with her father, and as a consequence she will lose her own life and the life within her of a future son or daughter if she is pregnant. Critical commentary has analyzed many of the forces that lead to and/or explain her loss. Studies of sexual trauma and gender pressure, of rhetorical intricacy and narrative effect, of ekphrastic influence, of authorial professionalism, and of feminist/political debate help to explain the causes and nature of her bereavement.

As supplement and addition to these investigations, I draw attention to Shakespeare’s narrator or speaker. As he carefully retells the old story, he addresses historical and aesthetic issues as they pertain to Lucrece, but he does so not as a chronicler, a biographer, or a scholar, but rather as a poet figure who seeks not public but personal understanding of Lucrece and, consequently, of himself. He achieves understanding of the ravished chaste wife, I argue, through a process of gradual identification with her, transferring his allegiance from Tarquin to Lucrece, experiencing her rape, replayed obliquely in her addresses to Night, Opportunity, and Time and metaphorically in her study of the great painting. In transferring his initial, implicit allegiance from Tarquin to Lucrece, in re-imagining Lucrece’s experience of the rape, replayed and evaluated in her addresses to Night, Opportunity, and Time, in creating the metaphor of the painting as cultural cause and personal reflection of the rape trauma, and in becoming part of that trauma when he identifies with Lucrece as she contemplates the painting, the narrator reaches, along with her, a flash of recognition. What is responsible for the huge loss that the poem chronicles comes to be seen as not only the violent, traumatic rape of Lucrece by a public figure, Prince Tarquin, but also (and more accurately) as a betrayal by someone cherished.