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Redeeming Lost Honor: Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2009

Jan H. Blits
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Abstract

The essay examines Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, which portrays the love of honor animating political life in early Rome. Demonstrating the relation of the soul and the city, the poem depicts the psychology of honor, envy, and shame; the near identity of moral worth and public reputation; the close connection between deeds and truth, action and speech; the insufficiency of moral intention; the city as an association of fathers; the relation between the inner and the outer man, soul and body; manly courage as proof of feminine chastity; the private effects of a fully public life; and, generally, the simultaneously self-denying, self-affirming core of Rome's political life. The essay concludes by considering why Shakespeare, in presenting a historically accurate portrait of early Rome, puts it in the mouth not of a Roman, but of a medieval or Renaissance narrator.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 411 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

1 Johnson, Samuel, Johnson on Shakespeare, in Works, 18 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958)Google Scholar, 7:65. See also Goethe, J. W., Conversations with Eckermann, January 31, 1827Google Scholar. Even earlier, though, Shakespeare's grasp of Rome had its defenders. “I am sure he never touches on a Roman Story, but the Persons, the Passages, the Manners, the Circumstances, the Ceremonies, are all Roman.” Nahum Tate, Letter preceding The Loyal General, A Tragedy. “There [is] something in … Coriolanus, as it was writ by Shakespear, that is … truly Roman.” John Dryden, quoted in Smith, D. Nichol, Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903), 309Google Scholar. “In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, not only the Spirit, but Manners, of the Romans are exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shewn, between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former and of the latter.” Alexander Pope, Preface to Edition of Shakespeare, in D. Nichol Smith, 53. “Of all Shakespeare's historical plays, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely.” Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), 316Google Scholar.

The controversy continues to this day. See, e.g., on the one side, Adelman, Janet, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. 57ff.; Taylor, Myron, “Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the Irony of History,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 301–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sorge, Thomas, “The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Howard, Jean E. and O'Connor, Marion F. (New York: Methuen, 1987), 225–41Google Scholar; Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 204–30Google Scholar; and, on the other side, Bloom, Alan, “The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar,” in Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 75–112Google Scholar; Cantor, Paul, Shakespeare's Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Blits, Jan H., The End of the Ancient Republic: Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar” (Lanham: Rowman, and Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar; Blits, Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare's “Coriolanus” (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Blits, New Heaven, New Earth: Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra” (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009).

2 E.g., 64, 85, 93, 197, 205–7, 209, 214, 343, 345, 569, 620, 629, 630, 701, 712–14, 743–44, 753, 764, 791, 802, 847, 879, 882, 913, 923–24, 928, 973, 1074, 1082, 1246, 1287, 1480, 1484, 1513, 1519, 1555, 1661, 1694, 1697, 1727–29. References are to Lucrece, The Poems, ed. John Roe, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

3 Donaldson, Ian, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 45–46Google Scholar. See also Battenhouse, Roy W., Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 10–39Google Scholar.

4 Erasmus, , Copia, 2.11, trans. King, Donald B. and Rix, H. David (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), 67Google Scholar.

5 Sallust, Catiline Conspiracy, 7.3, in Heywood's Sallust, trans. Thomas Heywood (1608; repr. London: Constable and Co., 1924), 61–62. See also, e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.58.

6 The Roman concern for honor is not limited to nobles: “There is no rank too humble to be touched by the sweetness of glory” (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, 8.14.5); “[Even] slaves bitterly resent insult” (Gellius, Attic Nights, 10.3.7). On slaves preferring to be whipped than slapped and believing that death and beating are more endurable than insulting words, see Seneca, De constantia, 5.1. See also Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2001), e.g., 1.1.1–45; 2.1.224–257; 2.2.156–58; 2.3.156–206; and Blits, Spirit, Soul, and City, 11–15, 82–84, 98, 106–11.

7 The Romans of course also have separate words for each, virtu and fama. For honestas as virtue, see, e.g., Cicero, De officiis, 1.5, 6, 152, De finibus, 1.61, 2.37–38, 2.45; for honestas as reputation, see, e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.31, 66; Gellius, 1.3.23ff.; on the word's ambiguity, see Cicero, De finibus, 2.48.

8 Also 27, 45, 142, 145, 146, 156, 516, 574, 834, 841, 842, 1184, 1186, 1190, 1608, 1705.

9 Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, 12.

10 Livy, History, 1.57.7; Ovid, Fasti, 2.729–42. For competition among Roman women in contests of chastity, see Livy, 10.23.8; Valerius Maximus, 8.15.12; Pliny, Natural History, 7.120. For fierce competition among Roman children, see Cicero, De finibus, 5.6; also Coriolanus, 1.3.58–68. For the pervasiveness of contention in Rome, note also the “silent war” between Lucrece's beauty and virtue and their “ambition … to fight” for supremacy (52ff.), the “debate” and “disputation” in Tarquin's mind between dread and desire, conscience and will (171–245), the “strife” between life and death (402–6), and the competitive woe between Collatine and Lucretius, husband and father of Lucrece (1791–806).

11 “[H]er passing beauty and her approved chastity set him on fire and provoked him thereto.” Livy, 1.57.10; The Romane Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (1600; London: Able Roper, 1659), 33. See also Ovid, 2.765–66.

12 Ovid, 2.765.

13 “Tarquinius in great pride … that he had by assault won the fort of a woman's honour, departed thence.” Livy, 1.58.5; Holland, 34.

14 For the analogy of Lucrece to the city, see, further, e.g., “Honour and beauty … / Are weakly fortressed …” (27–28); “Lucrece' sov'reignty” (36); “This siege that hath engirt [Collatine's] marriage” (221); “Affection is [Tarquin's] captain” and displays a “gaudy banner” (271–72); “now [Tarquin] vows a league, and now invasion” (287); Lucrece's breasts are “[a] pair of maiden worlds unconquered,” “worlds [which] in Tarquin new ambition bred” (408, 411); Tarquin is “like a foul usurper,” who “From this fair throne … heave[s] the owner out” (412–13); Tarquin's desires are “like straggling slaves for pillage fighting,” while his “heart, alarum striking, / Gives the hot charge, and bids them do their liking,” and his hand, “Smoking with pride, marched on to make his stand / On her bare breast, the heart of all her land, / Whose ranks of blue veins,” as his hand “did scale, / Left their round turrets destitute and pale” (428–41); his hand is a “[r]ude ram, … batter[ing]…[the] ivory wall” of “Lucrece's body” (464); she is a “poor citizen” (465); his tongue, “like a trumpet,” “sound[s] a parley” (470–71); he seeks “to conquer [her] with all [his] might” (488). See also 285–301, 383, and Lucrece's comparison of herself and ravaged Troy (“As Priam [Sinon] did cherish, / So did I Tarquin,—so my Troy did perish” [1546–47]).

15 See, further, e.g., Kahn, Coppélia, “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece, ” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 52–54Google Scholar; Vickers, Nancy J., “This Heraldry in Lucrece's Face,” Poetics Today 6 (1985): 175–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Gaius, The Institutes, 1.55, 64.

17 Miola, Robert A., Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Consider 302ff. and 1170–71 in light of the Roman household's including the physical building in addition to household members (see, e.g., Seneca, Letters, 41.7). Note also, in this context, that Tarquin's crime is incestuous. Lucrece is his cousin's wife (“[H]e is my kinsman, my dear friend” [237]); see Livy, 1.57.6, 60.4, where Collatine's full name (“Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus”) appears.

18 Cicero, Republic, 2.8; Livy, 1.8.7; Plutarch, Romulus, 13.2–6, Roman Questions, 58 (278d).

19 See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 2.24–27; Plutarch, Romulus, 22.3–4. Marriage was obligatory. The censors publicly excoriated and penalized Romans for not marrying and not having children (Valerius Maximus, 2.9.1; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.25.7). The first divorce in Rome did not occur until two-and-a-half centuries after the historical date of Lucrece, some five hundred years after Romulus; grounds for the divorce were the wife's failure to bear children (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.25.7; Gellius, 4.3, 17.21.44; Valerius Maximus, 2.1.4).

20 For feminist criticism on the sexual politics of Lucrece, see, e.g., Vickers, Nancy J., “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece, ” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Parker, P. and Hartman, G. (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95–115Google Scholar; 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; Breitenberg, Mark, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahn, Coppélia, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 27–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Cicero, De partitone oratoria, 91.

22 See, e.g., Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 16.1–2; Livy, 3.44.4; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 20.13.2–3.

23 E.g., 52–56, 203, 521, 637, 708–9, 756, 792–94, 800, 810–12, 829, 1222, 1252–53, 1339, 1342–44, 1353–55, 1506–12, 1661–62. On the face as the “image of the soul,” see Cicero, Orator, 18.60; Seneca, Letters, 11.10; Juvenal, Satires, 9.18–20.

24 E.g., 228, 372–78, 519–20, 637, 673–76, 746–53, 758, 782–84, 830, 1013–15, 1084–93, 1142–43, 1339–44, 1352–58. See, further, Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 1384b36; Cicero, De officiis, 1.127; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, 3.92; also Antony and Cleoptra, ed. John Wilders, Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995), 3.11.51–54, 4.14.72–78.

25 For the two senses of shame, see Riezler, Kurt, “Comment on the Social Psychology of Shame,” The American Journal of Sociology 48 (1943): 457–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 190–245, 357, 377, 499, 504. Lucrece, for the same reason, expects the same for him (603–23, 628–30, 813–19) as well as for herself (e.g., 807–12, 1082–92, 1342–44, 1352–59).

27 On the power of shame in governing early Rome, see, e.g., Cicero, Republic, 4.6.6, 5.4.6; De partitone oratoria, 23.79; Livy, 10.9.6. Also Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 16.1–2; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 20.13.3.

28 With the verb “tyrannise,” the actual rape begins. See Platt, Michael, “The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands,” Centennial Review 19 (1975): 65Google Scholar.

29 E.g., 124–26, 162–68, 762–805, 1092. See, further, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 11.2.4.

30 E.g., 12–14, 1491, 1523–24. See, further, Plutarch, The Roman Questions, 13 (266f–67a).

31 E.g., 356–57, 729, 745–46, 775–84, 799–812. See, further, Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 3.7; Livy, 9.7.3.

32 See, e.g., 52–70, 1156–76. Note the repeated double senses of Tarquin's “will,” at once “desire” and “genitalia” (128, 129, 243, 247, 302, 352, 417 [twice], 486, 487, 495, 614, 625, 700, 707, 1633). See, further, Maus, Katharine Eisaman, “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See also, e.g., 53, 768, 810–11, 813–26, 1033, 1052–55, 1188–90, 1202–4, 1637–38, 1643. The words “fame,” “defame,” “infamy,” “name,” “nameless,” “record,” “story,” “book,” “lecture,” “praise,” “blame” and “slander” appear at least sixty-one times in Lucrece.

34 And, conversely, “The fault unknown is as a thought unacted” (527).

35 158, 201 (twice), 410, 455, 571, 642, 748, 911, 940, 1050, 1059, 1060, 1075, 1094, 1112, 1141, 1220, 1313, 1347, 1532, 1841. See also “troth” (571, 885, 1059).

36 2, 48, 50, 77, 86, 228, 292, 642, 888, 927 (twice), 940, 1075, 1097, 1512, 1560, 1743. See also 326.

37 See also Ovid, 2.734. For the weakness of speech, see also 1016–29, 1284–88, 1296–1302, 1318–30, 1613–17, 1706, 1779–85, 1828ff.

38 For the ambiguity of “excuse,” see 114, 225, 235, 238, 267, 1073, 1316, 1614, 1653, 1715.

39 On the question of Lucrece's “voice,” see, e.g., Vickers, “Blazon”; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare; Berry, Philippa, “Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992): 33–39Google Scholar; Enterline, Lynn, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Cicero, De oratore, 1.88; Valerius Maximus, 1.Pref.; Livy, Pref., 10; Anonymous, Ad herennium, 4.62; Quintilian, 12.4; Varro, On the Latin Language, 6.49.

41 On the power of songs as exempla, see, e.g., Valerius Maximus, 2.1.10.

42 Quintilian's boast does not diminish the importance of sententia in Rome (see Quintilian, 8.5.1–8). Characteristically Roman, they are commonplace in Lucrece. Among many instances, see, e.g., 201, 460, 530–31, 560, 853–54, 872, 1125, 1127, 1252–53, 1581–82, 1687, 1769.

43 Ad herennium, 4.62.

44 See, e.g., Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 4.2; Horace, Satires, 1.4.105–6. See, further, Barton, Carlin A., Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 70Google Scholar. Hence the great effect on Lucrece of the painting of the fall of Troy (1366–1568).

45 Augustine, The City of God, 1.19.

46 See, e.g., Cicero, De officiis, 1.79.

47 Augustine, 1.19.

48 Livy, 1.58.7.

49 E.g., 1070–71, 1700–708. See, further, Livy, 1.58.10.

50 Cicero, Republic, 2.46. A woman's infidelity is punishable by death in early Rome; see Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2.25.6–7; Gellius, 10.23.3–5.

51 Horace, Odes, 3.5.27–20.

52 Blits, Ancient Republic, 51; Barton, Roman Honor, 44–46. Consider 134ff., in this context.

53 Cicero, De finibus, 5.64; Valerius Maximus, 5.8.4; Frontinus, Stratagems, 4.1.13; Lucan, Civil War, 4.465–581.

54 Lucrece becomes an example spurring “manly shame” (1777). See, e.g., Cicero, De finibus, 5.64; Quintilian, 5.11.10; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.82.3. To Ovid, she shows herself to be “a matron of manly spirit” (animi matrona virilis [2.847]). To Valerius Maximus, she proves herself the example of Roman chastity, whose “manly spirit” (virilus animus) Fortune mistakenly placed in a woman's body (6.1.1). And, to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, she demonstrates that she has “the noble spirit of a man” (andros eugenous phronema), though by chance given a woman's nature (4.82.3).

55 See, e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 2.48.

56 Platt, “The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for which it Stands,” 70.

57 The Roman monarchy had been elective until “Lucius Tarquinius, for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus, had caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murdered, and, contrary to the Roman laws and customs, not requiring or staying for the people's suffrages, had possessed himself of the kingdom” (Arg., 1–5). On private matters becoming the causes or occasions of revolutions, see, e.g., Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 1.20, 6.53–59; Aristotle, Politics, 1303b17–4a17; Plutarch, Precepts for Governing a Republic, 32 (824f–825d); Machiavelli, The Prince, 17.

58 Livy, 1.59.11–12; Ovid, 2.837–52; Plutarch, Publicola, 1.3–4; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.67.2, 70.4–5; also Julius Caesar, 1.2.156–59.

59 Livy, 2.1.8–10.

60 Shakespeare seems to agree with Machiavelli that Brutus simply takes advantage of the opportunity provided by Lucrece's rape and suicide to rid Rome of monarchy; see Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 3.5.

61 Plutarch, Publicola, 6.4; North's Plutarch, 8 vols. (1579; reprint, London: David Nutt, 1895), 1:255; see also Valerius Maximus, 5.8.1.

62 Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, 20.1. The Romans do, of course, kill Romans who seek to become king, as Brutus has them swear they will do. The killings are to preserve, not to overthrow, the Republic. On the punishment of Manlius Capitolinus, e.g., see Plutarch, Camillus, 36.2–7; Livy, 6.20. See, further, Coriolanus, 3.1.264ff.

63 Nor does it seem mere coincidence that Brutus was able to understand the Pythia's words that he who first kissed his mother would rule Rome (Livy, 1.56.10–12; Ovid, 2.713–20). A life of dissembling had taught him to appreciate ambiguity.

64 Ironically, centuries later a putative ancestor will claim Brutus's contemptuous cognomen as his proud family name; see Julius Caesar, 1.2.156–59; Plutarch, Brutus, 1.

65 Julius Caesar, 2.1.53–54; Livy, 1.59–60; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.70.5–71.1. On the name of king now becoming intolerable to the Romans, see Cicero, Republic, 2.52; Livy, 27.19.4.

66 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.84.2; 5.1.3, 2.3, 6.4, 7.2–5; Livy, 2.3–4; Plutarch, Publicola, 3.3–5.2.

67 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 5.8; Livy, 2.5.5–8; Plutarch, Publicola, 6.

68 Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2000).

69 E.g., the archaic plural (643, 1229), the archaic use of the definite article before the relative which (1368), the old dative (e.g., 207, 978), hath and doth always in place of has and does (36 and 66 times, respectively), and altogether 130 uses of –th endings for third-person singular present indicative verbs. See Partridge, A. C., A Substantive Grammar of Shakespeare's Nondramatic Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 44–77Google Scholar.

70 The tropes for which Lucrece is frequently faulted are ones that the leading teachers of rhetoric in Shakespeare's day strongly recommend. See, e.g., Erasmus, 1.11 (archaic words), 13 (enallage and apostrophe), 14 (antonomasia), 15 (periphrasis), 16 (metaphor), 17 (reciprocal metaphor), 18 (allegory), 19 (catachresis), 21 (metalepsis), 22 (metonomy), 23 (synecdoche), 25 (comparatives), 26 (change of relatives), 27 (amplification), 28 (hyperbole), 29 (meiosis), 30 (compositio), 31 (syntax); 2.5.2–3 (prosopopoeia and topographia); and for the treatment of exempla in particular, 2.11 (commendation, amplification, extension, comparison, antithesis, sententia, simile). See also Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909); Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1971).

Fittingly, the poem's most distinctive trope mimics the tension inherent in redeeming lost honor. While words with negative or privative prefixes (“de-,” “dis-,” “in-,” and “un-”) or the negative or privative suffix “-less” are very frequent, in their most distinctive form they are coupled with their opposite, sometimes to contradict or contrast with them (e.g., “haply … unhapp'ly” [8], “peer … peerless” [21], “untimely … timeless” [43–44], “justly… unjustly” [189], “Shape … shapeless” [973], “rest … restless” [974; also 1124], “harmless … harmful” [1723–24], “live … unlived” [1754]), other times to unite or complement them (e.g., “happy … hapless” [1045], “helpless help” [1056], “honour … dishonoured” [1186], “lifeless life” [1374], “guiltless … guilty” [1482], “fame … infamy” [1638]). On antitheses both pairing and parting, see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1409b33ff.