SPEECH, SILENCE, AND HISTORY IN THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
IN AN ANALOGY which underscores his perception of poetry as a distinguishing constituent of the aristocratic life, Puttenham introduces his discussion of figures of poetic ornament by comparing the proper "fashioning of our makers language and stile"with a properly dressed gentlewoman:
And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise never so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and civilitie have ordained to cover their naked bodies, would be halle ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselves more amiable in every mans eye, when they be in their richest attire . . . then when they go in cloth or any other plaine and simple apparell. [1]
Puttenham's choice of an elegantly dressed and appropriately made-up lady as metaphor for the nature of an appropriately fashioned poem speaks to the highly gendered nature of Renaissance poetic convention, under whose terms the process of speaking about a woman so often became the process of fixing identities for both female object of desire and masculine speaker. [2] Speech about women eventuated in speaking Woman as a cultural presence, a presence which, despite its
positioning at the apex of a triangulated economy of sexual exchange between men, remained fixed and passive--the subject of others' desire and not the mistress of her own. [3] The rhetorical strategies of sixteenth-century poems are thus eloquent not only of their authors' expertise in manipulating the sexual tropes of poetic making, but also of how these tropes are implicated in situating a work within the discourses of gender definition.
Recent criticism of The Rape of Lucrece has concentrated on reading the poem's high degree of formal self-consciousness as an index to what it might have to say about sex and the social experience of gender.[4] This work, most of it produced by female scholars, creates a sharp contrast with earlier academic generations' virtually unanimous objections to the poem's highly ornamented language. One critic, concentrating on the heroine's apostrophes to Night, Opportunity, and Time after her rape, assigned the flood of Lucrece's distraught speech to normal "human self-delusion (intensified by a feminine proclivity to self-pity and evasive argument)," asserting that by the "long sermon on lust's dishonor" she "preaches" to Tarquin before the rape, she actually "increases its fascination." Indeed, her desperate attempts to persuade Tarquin not to rape her become an invitation: "as if subconsciously she wished force to work his way, but only after she has had time to excuse herself from responsibility."[5] Wholesale rejections of the poem on the grounds of its rich verbal ornamentation have a way of coming to define the ornamentation in sexual terms. Having dismissed the facile misogyny of earlier discussions of the links between language and gender in The Rape of Lucrece, however, modern criticism is increasingly convinced that its seemingly endless deferral of closure is in fact significant as a manifestation of the linguistic resistance of the feminine to incorporation within male master narratives.[6] (Lucrece eventually comes to reject the powers of words properly to name or to help her find a solution to her dilemma: "This helpless smoke of words does me no right".[7]) In such arguments, as well as in Renaissance explications of poetic theory, copiousness appears as a distinctively female property of language, a linguistic property often at odds with social prescriptions of female silence, retirement, and obedience.[8]
My discussion of The Rape of Lucrece will consider varieties of female speech and silence as they help shape Shakespeare's familial Roman ethos. Lucrece finds her desperate voice only to encounter its limitations in a poem deeply informed by Renaissance assumptions about silence and segregation as indices of female chastity; contradictions and oppositions between modes of speech and silence mark the boundaries of her crisis. As a Roman wife and Roman mother, Lucrece is wholly consecrated to her duty as steward of her husband's and her sons' honor, a duty bound up with self-imposed separation and enclosure. (In Painter's "Second Novell," the adventurous "yonge Romaine gentlemen" find her literally "in the middes of her house" on the night of their fateful wager.[9]) In sleep, in death, however, her body is mysteriously and multiply voiced: evidencing her chaste perfection yet inviting Tarquin's rape, vindicating her innocence and proving Tarquin's guilt. While the conventional Petrarchanism of the poem's opening produces Lucrece as an emblematic work of art, imagining the "silent war of lilies and of roses" in her complexion (71), the uncontrollable intensity of Tarquin's desire dangerously destablizes this poetic attempt to name her precisely. The poem accomplishes this disruption of formal categories of female description and the kinds of patriarchal male-female relationships they produce and reproduce by heightening the customary language of static perfection to hazardous extremes. On the verge of rape, Tarquin perceives the sleeping Lucrece in idealized, transcendent language more evocative of a tomb effigy than a living woman. Her head is "entombed" between "hills" of her pillow; "like a virtuous monument she lies" (390-91). The rape is a perverted performance of the consequences of Lucrece's ideals of self-sacrifice, as Tarquin escalates the abstraction inherent in Roman languages of female behavior by seeing her as more closely resembling a graven image than a living being. Continuing its presentation of the impact of constructions of feminity and feminine behavior on history, the poem informs us that Lucrece's body alone--first appropriated in the initial wager between her husband and his friends as a prize in a homosocial ritual of display, exchange, and rivalry, and appropriated again in death by Brutus's political opportunism--possesses sufficient eloquence to move the people against the Tarquins' tyranny and force a change in the form of Roman government.
The Rape of Lucrece thus, indeed, suggests a powerful connection between gender, speech (and silence), and power. The poem turns its vision of the special place reserved for Roman women under the powerful system of pietas on the pivot of its treatments of its heroine's volubility, so that questions of her silence or of her verbal openness resonate throughout the rape and its aftermath. In mounting his narrative poem on received understandings of the familial structure of Roman society and on contemporary formulations of the social and sexual behavior of aristocratic women, Shakespeare broadens and deepens the meaning of the materials he borrows from Ovid and Livy. He creates a new work with a graver, more rigorous sense both of cultural obligation and of the nature of the bonds between the roles of women and the maintenance of the families on which culture and commonwealth were based.
Both of Shakespeare's major sources place Lucrece's tragedy within a historical frame, but neither of them concentrates as particularly on her fate as he does. Livy treats the rape and suicide as a virtual parenthetical aside in his account:
For when as Tarquinius Superbus by his prowd tyrannicall demenure, had incurred the hatred of all men: he at last uponthe forcible outrage and villanie done by Sex. Tarquinius (his sonne) in the night season upon the bodie of Lucretia; whosending for her father, Tricipitinus, and her husband, Collatinus, besought them earnestly not to see her death unrevenged,and so with a knife killed herself: he I say, by the meanes of Brutus, especially was driven and expelled out of Rome,when he had raigned five and twentie yeares.[10]
Ovid's Fasti expands its narrative of Lucrece's plight, but similarly locates its recital within a larger narrative of the Tarquins' deceit and cruelty: Sextus Tarquinius "burned, and, goaded by the pricks of an unrighteous love, he plotted violence and guile against an innocent bed."[11] As he was to do in his Roman plays, Shakespeare endeavors to discover the ethical significances of a political event-here, the Tarquins' exile and the change in the form of government-through linking such events to his exploration of character. Here, though, he alters the usual practice in his Plutarchan plays by choosing so radically to reorient the emphases in his sources, lingering as Ovid and Livy do not over the states of mind of the rapist and especially of his victim. The poem establishes a much more direct link between the rape and the political result than is available in the Roman historians, in an early presentation of Shakespeare's concern with the links between familial and civic bodies.[12]
Lucrece's female body, as has already been suggested, is the primary arena for the poem's classicized development of the relationship between private sexual matters and matters of state. In its foregrounding of the domestic sphere, Shakespeare's Lucrece takes its place among other early modern writings on the social significance of women's roles as mothers and wives, an extremely popular mode during a period which, as one modern historian has suggested, may have been undergoing a "crisis in gender relations."[13] Such a notion of a particular crisis in the relationships between men and women seems of a piece with the widespread anxiety and even paranoia about the future of the realm that marked the 1590s, but also takes on new power given that so much of that anxiety turned on the old queen's apparent refusal to name an heir and settle the succession: she had never behaved as a conventional woman, and the nation now seemed to be on the verge of reaping the whirlwind. Peter Wentworth used the traditional familial rhetoric of power even in his protestation that the queen's failure to marry had made it impossible to give that rhetoric a physical embodiment in the shape of heirs of her body: a ruler's responsibility toward her subjects is, to be as gods and natural fathers and mothers: for the resemblance that is betwixt the office of God towards man his creature, and parentes towardes their Children, is the ground and certaine cause, why these high names are communicated and given unto you by the spirit of God . . . . As therefore you are our head, shew your self to have dutifull care and love to your bodie.
Wentworth appealed to the queen as the "nursing mother" of her people, describing her subjects as "wee your children."[14]
This notion of the incorporation of hierarchical inferiors-whether subjects or children--into the loving parental body of state places itself within common familial representations of the nature of power and authority in Tudor and Stuart England. Many Marian exiles consistently used Mary Tudor's sex as a serious proof in their arguments against the legitimacy of her rule, and even the defenders of Elizabeth Tudor's right to the throne frequently felt themselves obligated to explain that her royal blood decontaminated the impropriety of a woman exercising authority.[15] Observers of the queen's success during her lifetime at forging means of coexistence between her sex and her political authority recognized that at bottom, she was playing no mere game. Gender and gender roles bodied authority, and declining to contract a marriage was seen as one way of preserving her power:
The reigns of women are commonly obscured by marriage; their praises and actions passing to the credit of their husbands; wheras those that continue unmarried have their glory entire and proper to themselves. In her case, this was especially more so; inasmuch as she had no helps to lean upon in her government, except as she herself provided . . . no kinsmen of the royal family, to share her cares and support her authority. And even those whom she herself raised to honour she so kept in hand and mingled one with the other, that while she infused into each the greatest solicitude to please her, she was herself ever her own mistress. [16]
For Sir Francis Bacon, the queen's ownership of her body was directly indexed to her maintenance of her power. Marriage inevitably "obscures" the accomplishments of a female ruler, while singleness ensures that her glory will remain as "entire," as uniquely her own, as will her virginal body. Remaining sexually closed denied her heirs of her body, but permitted her entry into public speech.
For nonroyal women, spinsterhood was a less likely resort. Yet, in entering marriage, women also entered a relationship whose rules and practices worked to limit their autonomy in strict and specific ways. Although a woman would retain ownership of any land her family made over to her in her marriage contract, for example, only her husband was legally entitled to any profits from the land. Any "moveables" she took with her into the marriage-clothes, furniture, money--became her husband's property. Since women received money more often than property at marriage, they were immediately placed in a position of economic dependence. The effect of such laws was to give a material presence to an increasingly explicit ideology of gender difference and of the necessity of controlling women.
This connection between theories and practices on the proper position of women within marriage is complicated by its placement within two systems of social hierarchy, that of rank as well as that of gender? It has frequently been observed that prescriptions for the silence, retirement, and obedience that the conduct books deemed proper behavior for wives often varied in rigor according to the social station of the audiences for which a particular book may have been intended. Hence, Heinrich Bullinger's Christen State of Matrimonye held that there were reasonable limits to the retirement that his readers among the urban bourgeoisie might seek for their daughters. If the seclusion were too strictly enforced, it was likely "ether to make them starke foles or els to make them naughtes when they shall once come abrode into companye"[18] In contrast, English translations of conduct books more consciously aimed at an elite ideal reader tend to urge markedly more severe restrictions. The Diall of Princes advocates wifely submission to the will of husbands, even for "Princesses and greate dames." In fact, the leisure enjoyed by ladies of rank created special emphases to the general prescriptions of seclusion. Not only did staying home spare her husband's finances, since it required a less stylish and extensive wardrobe than excessive gadding about, but it also limited women's exposure to opportunities for mischief and therefore to others' libellous speech: "For if the poore wife, the plebyan, goe out of her house, she goeth for no other cause, but for to seeke meate: but if the riche, and noble woman goeth out of her house, it is for nothing, but to take pleasure."[19] Unsupervised taking by beings who were commonly esteemed to be "fraile, spitefull, and given to revenge"[20] unnecessarily exposed women to slander and scandal. Because of this acknowledged moral weakness, wise women would at least attempt to cultivate "shamefastnes, which is the onely defence that nature hath give women, to keep their reputatio, to preserve their gravitie, to mainteine their honor, to advance their praise."[21]
In exploring the possibility of accomplishing this kind of moral exchange between innate feminine frailty and higher spiritual and social purpose, George Wither's theological commentary on the emblems in Rollenhage's Nucleus (1613) also works from an assumption of woman's inescapably sexualized nature. According to Wither, a woman's yearning for adornment in fact expresses her desire "to please her Lovers, or her Husband's Eyes." Under the proper circumstances, this desire can transform her into a "documentall signe" of virtue:
For, hee may bee thy Glasse, and Fountaine too.His Good Example, shewes thee what is fit;His Admonition, checks what is awry;Hee, by his Good advise, reformeth it;And, by his Love, thou mend'st it pleasedly. [22]
While arguing that women are indeed capable of recognizing and seeking virtue, Wither's rhyme also centrally assumes that vanity and seductiveness are such elemental parts of female nature that women will rely on them even in such a spiritual undertaking as practicing the subordination proper to wives. Attempting an ideological recasting of these manifestations of the waywardness of womanhood by linking them to obedience and pliability instead of to willfulness and lust, Wither's argument also works to gender the desire to seduce and to find a compelling functional necessity for it even within his less harshly antifeminist conception of woman.
In social practice, the primacy given to sexual matters in the social construction of female reputation seems often to have subsumed the other categories of appropriate female behavior, so that silence and submissiveness were seen as the behavioral evidence of the chastity which was the keystone of female honor.[23] Conversely, the behavior of willful, talkative women was seen as an index of their proneness to other, more grievous sexual enormities. Since "the honor of women is such a nice and charie thing, that it is not lawful for them to thinke, much less to speake, of many things, which men may freely both talk of and put in practise," one theorist adjured, women intending "to preserve their gravitie, must be silent not only in unlawful, but even in necessary matters, unles it be very requisite that they should speake of them."[24] One writer put his disgust for women who violated rules of silence, retirement, and modesty into a jangling rhyme which makes explicit the connections between public, verbal and private, sexual behavior:
Maides must be seene, not heard, or selde or never,O may I such one wed, if I wed ever.O Maide that hath a lewd Tongue in her head,Worse than if she were found with a Man in bed. [25]
That social rank was a significant indicator of an individual woman's relative ability to subvene the gendered rule of silence is supported by the large representation of aristocrats among the growing number of Renaissance women whose writings are being rediscovered, or in many cases, discovered now for the first time, and put into circulation.[26] And yet, birth into extraordinary social privilege was not necessarily a prerequisite for the achievement of a public voice; the careers of Renaissance women writers from bourgeois or lesser backgrounds demonstrate both an awareness and a sophisticated and self-conscious manipulation of prohibitions against women's public speech.[27] Still, some surviving evidence suggests that one of the stresses in the unhappy aristocratic marriages in the period may have been the partners experience of contradiction between adjuration to female obedience and self-effacement on the one hand, and the wife's sense of incomplete acknowledgment of her independent possession of rank and social significance before the formation of her marriage on the other.[28]
In studying women in marriages where aristocratic rank is not an issue, however, troubling possibilities created by the clash between exhortations toward female self-effacement and the will toward speech still present themselves. Setting out to memorialize a loved wife who died young after childbirth, Philip Stubbes's A Christal Glasse for Christian Women explicitly praises Katherine Stubbes' silence as exemplary to her sex: "She obeyed the commandement of the Apostle, who biddeth women to bee silent, and to learne of their husbands at home . . . She was never knowne to fall out with any of her neighbors, nor with the least child that lived, much lesse to scold or brawle as many will now a daies for every trifle, or rather for no cause at al." In the interest of praising Katherine Stubbes's absolute "integritie of life," however, her widower describes a woman who carried the injunctions to silence and unworldliness to aggressive extremes. "[S]o solitary was she given, that she would verie seldome or never, and that not without great constraint (& then not neither, except her husband were in companie) goe abroad with any, either to banquet or feast, to gossip or make merry (as they tearme it) in so much that she hath beene noted to do it in contempt and disdaine of others."[29]
We do not know, because Philip Stubbes does not tell us, whether Katherine Stubbes had some particular physical reason to believe she would not survive childbirth; certainly death in childbed was common enough. At any rate, as soon as her pregnancy became known, he reports, she started telling her husband and friends "not once, nor twice, but many times, that she should never beare more Children: that, that child should be her death, & that she would live but to bring that child into the world." Stubbes, struck by the fact that his wife's prediction of her death did come to pass, takes it as evidence of a special revelation "unto her by the spirit of God."[30] She took to her bed as her pregnancy advanced, and prayed for death: "I thinke it long to be with my God, Christ is to me life, and death is to me advantage."[31] She rejected even her pet dog as a meaningless vanity before making her profession of the Protestant faith and asking her husband not to mourn her. She died at the age of nineteen after four years of marriage.
Although Philip and Katherine Stubbes were proto-Puritan city dwellers, Philip Stubbes' memorial reconstruction of his wife bears resemblance both to conduct books aimed at elite audiences, in its commendation of her extreme retirement from worldly affairs, and to Catholic-authored tracts, which tended to foreground chastity in their disussions of female conduct and character.[32] As the author of The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), Stubbes was already known for his disgust at the unnecessary display and boldness of modern habits of dress for men as well as women.[33] A Christal Glasse for Christian Women, its very title evoking not only reflection but also the lingering spiritual ideal of virginal female bodies as fragile vessels, hortus conclusus, focuses this revulsion from worldly things on gender and sexuality. Her husband's report of Katherine Stubbes's refusal to display herself unnecessarily, her awareness of the dangers of intemperate speech, her careful rationing of her innocent pleasures, consults a broader set of cultural materials in its construction of her virtue than might have immediately suggested themselves to him in terms of class or religion. If, according to these writings about women, modesty is for them "an naturall vertue,"[34] and that "vertue" is as intimately bound as Stubbes believes it to be with the refusal to make an unnecessary spectacle-either verbal or visual--of oneself, the irrefutable evidence offered by pregnancy of the sexual opening of Katherine Stubbes posed a challenge to the integrity and persuasive power of the extension of his Puritan strictures on speech and display to the arenas of sex and gender. An earlier writer of Puritan sympathy, declaring that the "tricksynes" manifest in women's desire to adorn their bodies with "trappynge trinkets so vayne" smacked of "popishe idolatry," warned that such self-displaying impulses were clear signposts on the road to whoredom:
And loke well, ye men, to your wives trycksynes,
whyche is to shamefull wyde,
Or some wyll not stycke, or it be longe,
to horne you on everye side.[35]
The Puritan ideals attributed to her by her husband and the less specific cultural exposure to the equation of openness with
immodesty performed a powerful dual solicitation of Katherine Stubbes.
When the conduct books and the ideologies of womanhood they transmitted advised women to stay at home and "nat medle with matters of realmes or cities," because their own houses are "cite great inough"[36] for any legitimate purpose, their formulaic language encodes this association of social intercourse with illicit sexuality. They also place the home in an analogical relationship with the public world which was the proper province of men; careful stewardship of her household was, for a woman, functionally the same as honorable conduct in the public realm was for men. Geffrey Whitney informs his readers that his emblem of Uxoria virtutes, illustrated by a woman standing on the back of a tortoise holding a chain of keys with her hand at her mouth,
represents the vertues of a wife,
Her finger, staies her tonge to runne at large.
The modest lookes, doe shewe her honest life.
The keys, declare shee hath a care, and chardge,
Of husbandes goodes: let him goe where he please,
The tortoyse warnes, at home to spend her daies.[37]
That at some point her duties toward her household and her obligation to maintain proper vigilance over her sexuality could possibly come into conflict was a terrible irony implicit in doctrines of women's sovereignty. In its concern with speech and silence, and the sexual resonances of both, The Rape of Lucrece demonstrates its extreme sensitivity to ideologies of womanhood and to the contradictions they may contain.
Shakespeare's Lucrece is a watershed in treatments of the story. Before him, historians wrote about its poliltical lessons and moralists debated the meaning of her suicide; after him, imaginative writers highlight its sexual aspects.[38] Translating Livy, Machiavelli declared that the Tarquins were banished from Rome not because of the rape committed by Sextus Tarquinius, but because his father Lucius Tarquinius "had violated the laws of the kingdom and ruled tyrannically . . . . Hence, if the Lucretia incident had not occurred, something else would have happend and would have led to the same result."[39] Thomas Heywood's The Rope of Lucrece (1609) preserves the basic elements of the classical narrative, but alters its emphases by ending with a single combat between Tarquin and Brutus in which they both receive death wounds, instead of with the suicide. Heywood's Lucrece also interpolates "severall Songs in their apt places, by Valerius the merry Lord among the Roman Peeres" which oddly contrast with Lucrece's misery.[40] Later treatments of or allusions to the Lucrece materials seem to lack Shakespeare's awareness of the bonds between verbal and physical openness, so that they present the places of licit and illicit sexuality in their stories under very different aspects. Heywood's transformation of the legend into a play about Sextus Tarquinius, which ends not with the momentous internal change in the structure of Rome's government but with the triumphal extension of Rome's power over the rebellious "Tuscans," is only one example. Elsewhere, poets attempt to rewrite the Romanized system of value
within which the rape must inevitably appear as disaster. In rebuking the "hated name / Of husband, wife, lust, modest, chaste or shame" which impedes a return to a Dionysian golden age, Thomas Carew's "A Rapture" pictures its Lucrece reading her Aretino and learning
how to move
Her plyant body in the act of love.
To quench the burning Ravisher, she hurles
Her limbs into a thousand winding curles,
And studies artfull postures, such as be
Carv'd on the barke of every neighbouring tree
By learned hands, that so adorn'd the rinde
Of those faire Plants, which, as they lay entwinde,
Have fann'd their glowing fires.[41]
Writing nearly a century after Shakespeare, Nathaniel Lee in Lucius Junius Brutus (1680) spares little concern for Lucrece's suffering at the hands of Tarquin as he pursues interests in political reform. The rape becomes only a pretext for his crafty Brutus to rouse the commons to antimonarchical fury, and Brutus demands as well that his son Titus renounce his faithful love for Tarquin's illegitimate daughter to prove his allegiance to his father's political vision. One hundred years after Lucrece, Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage (1694) remembers Shakespeare's heroine in the epilogue to this overwrought tragedy of chastity and faithful love:
Now tell me, when you saw the Lady dye,
Were you not puzled for a Reason Why? . . .
We women are so Whimsical in dying.
Some pine away for loss of ogling Fellows:
Nay, some have dy'd for Love, as Stories tell us.
Some, say our Histories, though long ago,
For having undergone a Rape, or so
Plung'd the fell Dagger, without more ado.
But time has laugh'd those follies out of fashion:
And sure they'l never gain the approbation
Of Ladies, who consult their Reputation.
For if a Rape must be esteem'd a Curse,
Grim Death, and Publication make it worse.[42]
For Southerne's generation, the idea that rape could be experienced as a tragedy capable of irrevocably changing the life of a family and the progress of a state has become the subject for playhouse joking. In its worldly mockery of Lucrece's suicide, however, the epilogue also names Lucrece's dilemma: for her, rape is indeed a powerful "Curse," and the possibility of "Publication" of the fact that she is no longer chaste does compound her fear and shame. The act that Southerne judges as a folly impetuously committed by ladies who are insufficiently attentive to matters of "Reputation" is, in Shakespeare, deemed necessary precisely because of Lucrece's pained devotion to the good names of her husband and sons. His poem can admit of no safe vantage point from which a violated gentlewoman might at her leisure calculate the wisest course of action.
Shakespeare's version distinguishes itself by its presentation of the rape as both a personal and a social disaster, a crime against family, city, and the meaning of Roman history as well as against Lucrece's person. It recognizes that the bodies of men and women lie at the center of the notion of a familial state, and that Tarquin's crime violates the chaste vessel through which patriarchal authority transmits itself. Even before the rape, the poem's Argument tells us that Lucius Tarquinius seized power "after he had caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murd'red" (3-4): the rape confirms the Tarquins' defiance of the value of kinship. The Fasti specifies that the murder only took place at the instance of Lucius Tarquinius' wife, Sextus Tarquinius' mother Servia Tullia. After having urged her husband to kill her father, the previous king of Rome, she reveled in the murder and the power her husband gained through it by having her coachman drive her chariot across her father's face as he lay dead and unburied in the public streets: "Crime is a thing for kings" (365). This supreme example of un-Roman and unwomanly contempt for the dignity of fathers and families shadows her son's later disregard of his obligations toward his friend Collatine and offers another instance of the way in which the Lucrece materials contain within them hints of later elaborations of the internally contradictory and self-destructive roles played by women in matters of state.
Shakespeare continues to explore the implications of the connection between female chastity and family honor in following Ovid's detailing of Tarquin's threat to kill both Lucrece and one of her slaves and place their bodies together in her bed. In imitating and enlarging upon this Ovidian detail, however, Shakespeare elaborates on its Roman vision of the connections between shame and sexual behavior. Here is the relevant passage in Ovid:
"Resistance is vain," said he "I'll rob thee of honour and of life. I, the adulterer, will bear false witness to thine adultery. I'll kill a slave, and rumour will have it that thou were caught with him." Overcome by fear of infamy, the dame gave
way.[43]
While retaining the incident and even the Ovidian pairing of "honour" and "life," Shakespeare markedly personalizes Tarquin's threat. Rather than the vague "rumour will have it" that Lucrece was unfaithful to her husband with a social inferior, Tarquin vows that he will "kill thine honour with thine live's decay" by placing the dead slave in her bed and actively "[s]wearing" to witnesses that "I slew him, seeing thee embrace him":
So thy surviving husband shall remain
The scorful mark of every open eye;
Thy kinsmen hang thy heads at this disdain,
Thy issue blurred with nameless bastardy;
And thou, the author of their obloquy,
Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes,
And sung by children in succeeding times.
(516,518-25)
Lucrece's horrified response to Tarquin's threat to inflict a publicly discussed "blemish that will never be forgot" (536) against her posthumous reputation and the good names of her husband and children similarly enlarges upon the Ovidian original. The argumentation comes to a premature end when Tarquin puts out the light and muffles Lucrece's head in her mantle so that she can neither see nor speak as he rapes her. Shakespeare in effect provides a more specific imagining of the sexual crime than Ovid does through verbal dilation on the wretched consequences of Lucrece's unwilling disclosure to Tarquin's "greedy" (368) vision and to the persuasive, delineating powers of public speech and display in making or unmaking her social presence.[44] The "fear of infamy"-of having the fact that another man besides her husband has known her sexually widely spoken of--is what forces Lucrece to yield and ultimately, what causes her to embrace suicide as a solution to her shame.
As noted above, twentieth-century critical scorn for The Rape of Lucrece's obsession with speech has concentrated on its impassioned apostrophes to Night, Opportunity, and Time. In arguing that speech and gender are in fact centrally important to the poem's production of Rome as a place where the violation of a respectable matron must resonate in the life of the state, I would like to concentrate instead on a relatively less-observed aspect, its ekphrasis of the fall of Troy. Embedded within it narration of Lucrece's changing experiences of her social and sexual objectification, the ekphratic representation of her examination of the "piece / Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy" (1366-67) exemplifies the way in which its formal concerns voice its perceptions of gender and history.[45] Shakespeare's elaborate description of Lucrece beholding Hecuba beholding Priam's murder establishes a receding historical vista on the substantive presence of domestic matters in matters of state: the fate of Hecuba, who will suffer the sight of the deaths of her husband, her children, and her civilization, and who will be driven into speechless madness by it, comes to shadow that of Lucrece, who will silence herself in grief and fear over the welfare of her husband and sons. Also present in the Troy tapestry is Helen, whose powerful desirability seemed to so many observers to invite the rape which set into motion the events culminating in the end of a world. George Wither performs this kind of narrative moralizing in his explication of an emblem of two urban gallants fighting while a woman looks out her upper window watching them. The engraving is surrounded by the Latin motto "Ubi Helena Ibi Troia," and the epigraph for his poetic discussion reads "Where Hellen is, there will be Warre; / For, Death and Lust, companions are."[46] Lucrece's ekphrasis rewrites the masculine and historical orientations of epic to find woman--mother, mistress, wife, sexual prey--deeply inscribed within. This gesturing at epic may indeed be initiated with the description of Lucrece's eager contemplation of the tapestry, in which echoes Aeneas's somber discovery of the Troy story carved on the walls of June's temple when he shipwrecks at Carthage in Aeneid 1. Like Aeneas, Lucrece weeps to find in the depiction of "Troy's painted woes" (1492) a physical representation of the vastness of her own anguish.
The tapestry depicts Hecuba's face, "a face where all distress and dolor dwell'd," in grief-numbed contemplation of "Priam's wounds,"
Which bleeding under Pyrrhus' proud foot lies.
In her the painter had anatomiz'd
Time's ruin, beauty's wrack, and grim care's reign;
Her cheeks with chaps 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 shrunk pipes had fed,
Show'd life imprison'd in a body dead.
(1446,1448-56)
The death of her husband, father of her fifty sons, is only the beginning of the grief and rage which will alter Hecuba's human form; Metamorphoses 13 tells us briefly that she "lost (after all) her womans shape, and barked all her lyfe / In forreine countrye" (489-90).[47] A fuller description of the Trojan queen's tragic destiny appears later in 13, where she witnesses the death of her daughter Polyxena, who is ritually sacrificed by Neoptolemus at the demand of the shade of his father Achilles; on her death, the Greeks will be granted favorable winds for their voyage home. The post-Homeric accretions of the stories of Polyxena and of Iphegenia, whose father Agamemnon sacrificed her so that the Greeks might have fair winds on the voyage to Troy, complete the framing of the epic story of Troy's fall by episodes turning on the sacrifice of daughters. Ovid uses the Polyxena story to introduce the affective emotion that is his trademark in the Metamorphoses, providing Shakespeare's Lucrece a suggestive point of connection between the private sorrows of mothers and wives and the larger tragedies affecting world orders. The Ovidian description of Polyxena's death might even furnish a textual model for Lucrece's carefully histrionic public Roman suicide, as she expresses concern for her mother's suffering, excites the pity and admiration of the priest who will perform the execution, and, bearing "too the verry latter gasp a countenance devoid of feare," fell with "a care such parts of her too hyde / As womanhod and chastitie forbiddeth too bee spyde" (571-73).[48]
After bewailing the death of her daughter, Hecuba thinks to take some comfort in the survival of her last, son, little Polydorus, who has been delivered into the safekeeping of Polymnestor, King of Thrace. But on the way to the waterside where she will be carried back to Greece as Ulysses's slave, she discovers Polydorus's body, torn by the "mighty wounds" (644) inflicted by his cruel guardian, and the sight drives her mad. Pretending that she wishes to give him a sum of gold she had hidden for Polydorus' use, she persuades Polymnestor to accompany her away from the main body
And beeing sore inflamed with wrath, caught hold uppon him, and Streyght callyng out for succor to the wyves of Troy at hand, Did in the traytors face bestowe her nayles, and scratched out His eyes: her anger gave her heart and made her strong and stout.
(671-74)
As the shocked Thracians pelt Hecuba and the other Trojan women with stones, her rage transforms her flesh: "And as she opte her chappe / Too speake, in stead of speeche she barkt" (681-82).
Her own sorrow and frenzy over the senseless destruction of her family are powerful enough to rob Hecuba of her humanity, to send her off "howling in the feeldes of Thrace" (685). The outrages she suffers as mother and wife are the losses whose signs Lucrece observes and responds to in the painter's representation of her' "Of what she was no semblance did remain." Like Hecuba, she has endured the violation of the family bonds whose existence gave her place and meaning, and she finds in Hecuba's image the will to voice her own outrage:
"Poor instrument," quoth she, "without a sound,
I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue,
And drop sweet balm in Priam's painted wound,
And rail on Pyrrhus that hath done him wrong,'
And with my tears quench Troy that burns so long,
And with my knife scratch out the angry eyes
Of all the Greeks that are thine enemies.
(1464-70)
Lucrece, who has found her identity to this point in silence, chastity, and enclosure, finds herself vowing to speak the "woes" of one who is doubly voiceless--both because the Hecuba who inspires her is only a "painted" image of a real woman, and because the legendary queen was involuntarily metamorphosed into a howling animal.
Hecuba's loss of voice and her reduction to a subhuman state figure in other imitations of Ovidian texts than The Rape of
Lucrece. Perhaps ironically, given my own argument here on the centrality of speech and enclosure in Shakespeare's poem, these later references to Hecuba tend also to emphasize her voicelessness, although to rather different effect than I believe presents itself in Lucrece. Cooper's Thesaurus, for instance, omits any reference to a physical transformation, noting instead that after all her losses, "she finally waxed madde, and did byte and stryke all men that she mette, wherfore she was called dogge, and at the last was hyr selfe kylled with stones by the Greeks." George Sandys's Ovid's Metamorphoses English'd is conventionally pious about Hecuba's fall from glory:
Shee having lost by violent death so many of her valiant sonnes, seene her husband slaughtered before the Altar of
Jupiter, Cassandra ravish't in the Temple of Minerva, Astianar throwne from the top of a tower, Polixena sacrificed on
the tombe of Achilles, fallen from the greatnesses of birth, and the glory of Empire, to that contempt and poverty, that
none would have accepted her as a Servant, had shee not beene cast by lot upon Ulisses: which affords a sad
consideration of humane instability, and may abate their pride, and confidence who too much insult in prosperity; high
fortunes confining steepe praecipitations.[49]
Sandys continues his interpretation, though, by addressing the specific meanings of Hecuba's transformation into a dog. Careful on the one hand to undercut the persuasive power of Ovid's fantastical account by characterizing her metamorphosis as "feigned," he nevertheless also asserts that her change "was not only derived from her contemptible condition, but from the acerbity and fury of her sorrow, expressed in revilings and execrations: for which they threw so many stones at her, as buried her under their burden." Finishing his account of Hecuba's place in the Metamorphoses, Sandys adds that "there is a place called Cynosema, which signifies the tombe of the Bitch," known as Hecuba's grave.[50]
Alexander Ross's Mystagogus Poeticus Or the Muses Interpreter is more explicit than Sandys in connecting Hecuba's particular transformation to her intemperate and unwomanly speech:
And truly, not un fitly may the impudent railing speeches of some women be compared to the barking of dogs; neither is there any thing more like barking Cur, then a railer, or scold, which if they would duly consider, they would be more moderate in their tongues, and circumspect of their words. [51]
characterizing the metamorphosis as "imaginary," such as afflicts those "disturbed" men who "imagine themselves to be Wolves and Dogs," Ross rejects the notion of metamorphosis and insists that "Hecuba was still a woman, though she seemed to her self to be a dog." He cites Euripides's Trojan Women in support of his view that "she was so bold and violent in her mouth," and suggests that the stories say she became a dog "because the Grecians used her like a dog . . . being impatient of her railing tongue." [52]
Sandys' linkage of Hecuba's change to her verbal expression of her grief and Ross's notion of her "violent" mouth are both formed by an early-modern sensibility of the appropriateness of silence to womanhood.[53] Ross is especially vehement on Hecuba's inappropriate volubility:
When Jupiter had sent the rain-bow, to perswade Priamus to go to Achilles and redeem Hectors body from him,promising his assistance, his Wife Hecuba would have diswaded him from going, under pretence, that Achilles was crueland in no ways to be trusted; yet Priamus would not hearken to her, but preferred Jupiters command to her advice. Iwish Adam had been so wise as to prefer Gods commands to his wifes counsel: too many women like Hecuba, stick notto counsel their husbands in things contrary to Gods laws: and too many husbands are so uxorious as to hearken to theirwives, and prefer their foolish counsels to the wisdom of God.[54]
In looking at Hecuba gazing aghast on her husband, Lucrece examines a tapestry of bereavement in which also figure the deaths of the queen's last children, the extinction of her seed as well as of her civilization. ("At once both Troy and Priam fell," remarks Golding's Ovid.[55]) Concern for the good names of her husband and children was, of course, uppermost in her mind as she faced Tarquin's assault. Reading the moment where Hecuba experiences the last losses which will push her beyond the limits of human reason and human speech, Lucrece finds a voice for them both; but in finding a voice in which to speak both her fury and Hecuba's, she also locates herself within a story which would be read and reread as exemplifying the perils of female speech.
Given the poem's guiding assumption of the existence of mutually constitutive bonds between the family and the state, Lucrece's position as mistress of her husband's household already gives her considerable cultural presence. However, Lucrece's use of the Troy ekphrasis as demonstration of its insistently historical definition of the rape carries within the stories of Hecuba and Helen inconsistencies and ambivalences strong enough to destabilize the ekphrasis' value as the heroine's point of entry into coherent narration of the tragedy that has befallen her.[56] Commentators read Hecuba's violence against men--however justified it may be--as a provocation; in response to her demonstrative anger, she is punished by madness. Lucrece's own guilty identification with Helen's image in the tapestry further attests to this internal contadiction in commentators' remarks on the Trojan women. Depsite her innocent possession of the "wounderfull beauty" which spurs men to commit any transgression in order to possess her, Helen is nonetheless "the onely occasion of the tenne yeres syege, and finall destruction of the moste famous cities of Troye."[57] The stories about the fates of Hecuba and Helen as they figured in the fate of Troy simultaneously narrate those ladies' responsibility to the strictures governing their gender; foregrounded at the appropriate moments within the epic tradition, they are additionally judged by their nonfulfillment of their social contracts as women, mothers, and wives.
The poem's will to historicize the rape also functions to differentiate male and female capacities for authoritative speech. Tarquin finds himself struggling for words as he plans the rape of his friend's wife, finally settling on the military vocabulary belonging to his public role as the heir of the Tarquins. He vows "invasion" (287); his heart, the "alarum striking" (433), gives his lust "the hot charge: (434); his hand climbs "the round turrets" (441) of her breasts. Compelling her to submit, his speech "like a trumpet: sounds "a parley" (470-71) before he scales the "never conquered fort" (482) of her body, "to make the breach and enter this sweet city" (469).[58] Although he claims to be compelled by desire for Lucrece, he describes her effect on him in terms which more obviously oppose him to Collatine in the civic and martial world than they link him to her: the sight of her beauty breeds in him "new ambition" to oust Collatine from his seat on the "fair throne" (411; 413) of her body, for example. Aware that in surrendering to the impulse to rape his friend's wife he will forfeit all claims to Roman nobility, he implies that the enormity of the crime he contemplates and the depth of the moral abdication it requires manifests his possession of a superheroic indifference to the obligations and responsibilities of order ("Crime is a thing for kings")? Under the terms of this military language and the unitary identity of Roman men, the rape demonstrates his possession of the same traits of daring and initiative which are valued in his public life.
To be sure, a certain amount of self-persuasion is necessary before Tarquin can successfully eroticize his aggression and rivalry with Collatine. Before he can attack Roman familial institutions through committing the rape of Lucrece, he must first conquer his own best instincts and loyalties. His "will" (417) proves stronger than either his "reason's weak removing" (243) or his "frozen conscience" (247), so that his "servile powers" (295) triumph over his mind. Indeed, this triumph seems to be produced through his rhetorical willingness to manipulate his standing as Collatine's friend and as Lucrece's superior to secure his goal. He does not merely threaten her with sexual assault, but also invokes the entire power of his presence--a man, a warrior, a governor--in Roman culture as a weapon to use against her. The poem describes Tarquin's theatrical threats from Lucrece's perspective:
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
Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcons' bells.
(505-11)
After the rape, Lucrece attempts to express her sense of desolation through invoking the civic purpose she knows has been destroyed.
My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee,
Have no perfection of my summer left,
But robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft. In thy weak
hive a wand'ring wasp hath crept, And suck'd the honey which
thy chaste bee kept.
(836-40)[60]
As a woman, the language of civic order is not properly hers to begin with. As Tarquin's sexual victim, she is no longer privately chaste, and therefore also becomes incapable of her indirect public performances of familial and civic virtue. As does Tarquin, Lucrece, too, ultimately despairs of the powers of rational speech and analysis to resolve her crisis. Betrayed by the authority of stories to shape experience, forced into reliance on foreign vocabularies by her violent exile from the sanctity of her seclusion, faced with the loss of her customary significances within her family and household, Lucrece chooses suicide as the welcome and literal end to this voiceless oblivion.
Perhaps ironically, the sudden shock of her histrionic public suicide-so at odds with her previous identity as a proper Roman matron, so astonishing to her husband and father--is what returns her to the shelter of her cultural role. In death, Lucrece restores her relationship to her family, even as she commits this ultimate defiance of the rules of privacy and female enclosure:
"O," quoth Lucretius, "I did give that life
Which she too early and too late hath spill'd."
"Woe, woe," quoth Collatine, "she was my wife,
I owed her, and 'tis mine that she hath kill'd."
"My daughter!," and "My wife!" with clamors fill'd
The dispers'd air, who holding Lucrece' life,
Answer'd their cries, "My daughter!'" and "My wife!"
(1800-1806)
In a formula that acknowledges the incongruity of the action which restores her propriety, Ovid salutes her as a "matron of manly courage. "[61] In death, she finally achieves persuasive eloquence as politic Brutus delivers an interpretation of her life and her death which resists all undoing, all contradiction. Incorporating her again within the course of Roman history, he uses her body as a speaking emblem of the republican virtue whose source the Tarquins have insulted. His audience vows with him to "show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / And so to publish Tarquin's foul offense" (1851-52)--thus making incontrovertibly public the sexual and domestic segregation to which she devoted her life. Renouncing speech and history, Lucrece is nonetheless appropriated for the purposes of both. The conclusion of the poem speaks the contradictions and perils inherent in Renaissance productions of doctrines of female sovereignty.
Notes
1. George Puttenham, The Arte of Englishe Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; rpt. 1970), 137.
2. See, for example, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "The Politics of Astrophil and Stella," SEL 24 (1984): 53-63; Maureen Quilligan, "Feminine Endings: The Sexual Politics of Sidney's and Spenser's Rhyming," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 311-26; and Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
3. Nancy Vickers writes persuasively about the presentation of the feminine as the object of descriptive masculine speech in "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95-115.
4. Besides Vickers, see Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 80-168; Katharine Eisaman Maus, "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece," SQ 37 (1986): 66-82; Robin Bowers, "Inconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Lucrece," ShakS 14 (1981): 1-21; Nancy Vickers, "'This Heraldry in Lucrece's Face'" Poetics Today 6 (1985): 171-84; and Tita French, "'A Badge of Fame': Shakespeare's Rhetorical Lucrece," EIRC 10 (1984): 97-106. Patricia Parker's brilliant Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), ranges far into Shakespeare and eighteenth-century literature, but 8-17 and 126-32 are particularly relevant to a discussion of the rhetorical construction of gender in Lucrece.
5. Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 19, 16. Bowers cites these and other dismissive passages on p. 1 of her essay.
6. One useful theoretical exposition of this argument is Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in this Text?," NLH 14 (1982): 117-54.
7. The Rape of Lucrece, line 1027. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), and hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text.
8. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 26-31; Ann Rosalind Jones, "Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics," in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennehouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 39-72; and Lynda E. Boose, "Scolding Bridles and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member," SQ 42 (1991): 179-213.
9. William Painter, The Pallace of Pleasure (New York AMS Press, 1967), 1:18.
10. The Romane History Written by T. Livius of Padua, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1600), 2.
11. Trans. Sir James George Frazer (London: William Heinemann, 1931), 113.
12. Stephanie H Jed's stimulating Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), is primarily concerned with fifteenth-century Italy and barely mentions Shakespeare's Lucrece at all, but I have still found it immensely suggestive for the present study of the links between constructions of gender and constructions of historical and social meaning. Jed is concerned with the transmission of the written records out of which later readers can establish such meaning. Informed by philological and etymological methods, she makes a connection between chastity and "castigation," the process through which early Renaissance editors and scholars produced their pure versions of ancient texts, and also narrowed the meanings of Lucrece's rape and suicide. She argues that the historical uses made of Lucrece's rape-especially the belief that it was significant only in that it provided a pretext for the change in Roman regimes--provide a prime example of the way in which the humanistic rediscovery of the past and modern generations' own practices in reading the Renaissance and classical past are themselves deeply implicated in the erasure of women from records of history and culture. In telling and retelling the story of rape and the consequent triumph of republican virtue, Renaissance humanists effectively removed Lucrece and made Brutus the hero of the newly philologically chaste narrative. Jed's observation that the authority of received history may "discourage us from questioning the literary structures within which we work" (5) speaks both to the resourcefulness of the rhetorically informed feminist criticism I acknowledge in n.4 above in affirming the connection between gender, genre, and text, and to my discussion, below, of the barriers Lucrece encounters in attempting to read the Troy tapestry and thus to define herself as a historical actor.
13. David E. Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122.
14. A Pithie Exhortation to her Majestie for Establishing Her Successor to the Crowne (London: 1598), 6, 8.
15. Paula Louise Scalingi reviews much of this material in "The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1516-1607," The Historian 41 (1978): 59-75. Two books by Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), esp. 47-63, and The Rise and Fall of Ann Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), offer useful discussions of the practices of sixteenth-century queenship. Louis A. Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 1 (1983): 61-94; Leah S. Marcus, "Shakespeare's Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny," in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 135-54; and Pamela Joseph Benson, "'Rule, Virginia': Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene," ELR 15 (1985): 277-92, are three useful discussions of literary representations of the cultural phenomenon of powerful women.
16. "On the Fortunate Memory of Elizabeth Queen of England," in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (Boston: Brown & Taggard, 1860), 11:450. Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), is concerned with the strategies developed by Renaissance English authors for addressing the problem of how most gracefully to implicate a virgin queen in the literature and social practices of courtship.
17. See Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), esp. 102-4.
18. Trans. Miles Coverdale (London: 1541), n.p.
19. Trans. Sir Thomas North (London: 1577), f. 90.
20. Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T.[homas] B.[owes], (London: 1586), 503.
21. Edmund Tilney, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (London: 1586), n.p.
22. In A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne (London: 1635), 91.
23. While my discussion here is fairly closely focused on female sexual behavior as an indicator of social reputation and on the links between sexual openness and female speech, I am not entirely following Lawrence Stone's influential conclusions about rigidly patriarchal Renaissance families first formulated in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), esp. 90-104, argues that patriarchal and companionate marriage historically coexisted and bases his case on a much broader base of English evidence than does Stone's concentration on the aristocracy. Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), denies Stone's thesis of fundamental change in the pattern of English families from patriarchal to more companionate models, the change occurring sometime during the enlightenment. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) marshals comprehensive English evidence to argue the existence of companionate, affective family bonds since the medieval period. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century [London; Routledge, 1919; rpt. 1982), emphasizes the range of public, commercial activities that nonaristocratic women engaged in, and their social consequences.
24. de la Primaudaye, French Academic, 517.
25. Peter Stallybrass cites Robert Tofte's marginal gloss in his translation of Bernardo Varchi's The Blazon of Jealousie (London: 1615) in his important essay, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern England, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 126.
26. Besides Mary Ellen Lamb on the women of the Sidney-Herbert circle, see Barbara Lewalski,; Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
27. See Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 1-7 and 11-35, on the adaptive strategies displayed in women's texts.
28. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 660-64; and Alice T. Friedman, "Portrait of a Marriage: The Willoughby Letters of 1585-1586," Signs 11 (1986): 542-55. Lewalski's account of the career of Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset and Montgomery, 125-51, is particularly suggestive of how women could experience patriarchal institutions both as a source of pride and a source of social frustration.
29. Philip Stubbes, A Christal Glasse for Christian Women London, 1592, 2.
30. Ibid., 4.
31. Ibid., 5.
32. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), was one of the first scholars to note the pervasiveness of adjurations to chastity in the conduct books, and to discuss how this advice contributed to the cultural formation of English gentlewomen. Margaret Lael Mikesell, "Catholic and Protestant Widows in The Duches of Malfi," Renaissance and Reformation 19 (1983): 265-279, believes that Catholic-authored works tended to value chastity more than Protestant-authored tracts, which she believes more often advance obedience as the cardinal virtue for women.
33. E.g., "So that when they have all these goodly robes uppon them, women seeme to be the smallest part of themselves, not naturall women, but artificiall Women, not women of flesh & blod, but rather puppits, or mawmets of rags and clowtes compact together" (n.p.).
34. George Whetstone, An Heptameron of Civill Discourses (London: 1582), 119.
35. Charles Bansley, A Treatyse Shewing and Declaring the Pryde and Abuse of Women Now A Dayes (London: 1550). Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation, 1520-1570 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), cites an equally suggestive incident of a man who, haled before an ecclesiastical court on the charge that he had called his neighbor a whore, attempted to excuse himself by explaining that he hadn't meant a "whore of her body," but "a whore of her tongue" (80).
36. Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Thomas Paynell (London, 1540), E 2.
37. A Choice of Emblemes, ed. Henry Green (London; 1866; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 93.
38. I began thinking about the embedded and antecedent texts of The Rape of Lucrece after first reading Ian Donaldson's The Rape of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Donaldson's study, which traces treatments of the Lucrece story from Livy through the eighteenth century, persuasively demonstrates both the extraordinary vitality of the narrative in western cultures and the relationships betwen versions of Lucrece's life and death and changing interpretations of Roman value. He discusses Shakespeare's Lucrece, 40-56. His broader comparative anaylysis is usefully complemented by the attention of Stephanie Jed to the material and social circumstances under which the Lucrece story was transmitted specifically in Renaissance Italy.
39. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses of Livy, trans. Leslie J. Walker, S.J. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 3:468-69.
40. See, for example the bawdy catch performed by two Roman nobles and a comic servant after the rape: "Did he take the Lady by the thigh man? . . . And now he came somewhat nie man . . . . But did he do tother thing man? . . . And at the same had he a fling man." Heywood's play was evidently a popular one, being printed four more times after 1609; I cite the fifth edition, including authorial emendations, of 1638, from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood (London: 1874; rpt. London: Russell & Russell, 1964), 5:161,233.
41. In The Poems of Thomas Carew, With His Masque Coelum Britannicum, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 52.
42. In The Works of Thomas Southerne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), ed. Robert Jordan and Harold Love; 2:84. Donaldson discusses Southern's play, 87-88. For further treatments of the Lucrece materials, see Laura Bromley, "The Lost Lucrece: Middleton's The Ghost of Lucrece," PLL 21 (1985): 258-74; Saad El-Gabalawy, "The Ethical Question of Lucrece: A Case of Rape," Mosaic 12, no. 4 (1979): 75-86; and Harriet Hawkins, "Myth and Morals," EIC 34 (1984): 79-87.
43. Frazer, 115.
44. In the biographical and place-name supplement to his Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1565), Thomas Cooper's discussion of Lucrece's rape also emphasizes her fear of public shaming as a reason for yielding to Tarquin: "For feare of . . . shamefull reproch and infamie, rather than for dreadde of death, as after appeered, she suffered the violence of the wicked advouterer." As though conscious of the power of adultery, even forced adultery, in making and unmaking female reputation, however, Cooper finds it necessary to end his entry by adding that "the example of Lucrece shoulde never be a cloke for light women to excuse the unfaithfull breach of wedlocke" (n.p.).
45. The general bibliography on ekphrasis in Renaissance poetry is not as large as I expected it to be. I use the term here as James A. W. Heffernan does in his useful discussion, "Ekphrasis and Representation," NLH 22 (1991): 297-316, to refer specifically to "the verbal representation of graphic representation" (299). Heffernan finds that true ekphrasis is distinguished by its impulse to establish a narrative for its description of a static image, a characterization which certainly holds true for the Troy ekphrasis in Lucrece; to his remarks I would add that graphic images of events or characters in the Troy story, while physically stable, often carry unstable and fluctuating sets of interpretive associations, so that the image offers what may turn out to be only an uncertain opportunity for fixing narrative meaning. Other discussions I have drawn on in this section include Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; rpt. 1987), and John Hollander, "The Poetics of Ekphrasis," Word and Image 4 (1988): 209-19.
46. Collection of Emblems, 27. Judith Dundas, "Mocking the Mind: The Role of Art in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece," SCJ 14, no. 1 (1983): 13-22; S. Clark Hulse, "'A Piece of Skilful Painting' in Shakespeare's Lucrece," ShS 31 (1978): 13-22; Elizabeth Truax, "'Lucrece! What Hath Your Conceited Painter Wrought?'," Bucknell Review 25, no. 1 (1980): 13-30; and A. Robin Bowers, "Emblem and Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece and Titus Andronicus," SIcon 10 (1984-86): 79-96, all discuss the Troy tapestry's meaning in the poem. Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), discusses the Troy ekphrasis' roots in Aeneid 1-2 and Metamorphoses 12, 30-36.
47. I cite Arthur Golding, The .XV. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (London: 1567; rpt. London; Centaur Press, 1961); here, line 261.
48. This emphasis on the propriety of Polyxena's death survives in George Sandys's Ovid's Metamorphoses English'd (Oxford: 1632), which notes that "then when shee fell, shee had a care to hide / What should be hid; and chastly-decent dide" (435). In their concern for inscribing Roman and female senses of propriety in this moment of death, Sandys and Golding may be following Fasti, whose description of Lucrece's death also includes this implied connection between posture and chaste decency: "Even then in dying she took care to sink down decently: that was her thought even as she fell" (117).
49. Sandys, Ovids, 447.
50. Ibid., 448.
51. Alexander Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus (London, 1648), 157.
52. Ibid., 158.
53. Hecuba's transformation into a barking dog is missing from at least three medieval treatments of the Troy materials. The Laud Troy Book, ed. J. Ernst Wulfing (London: EETS, 1902) and The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, ed. George A. Panton and David Donaldson (London: EETS, 1869 and 1874) place Hecuba's madness and stoning after Polyxena's death but omit any mention of a transformation. The Seege or Battayle of Troy, ed. Mary Elizabeth Barnicle (London: EETS, 1927) omits Hecuba's madness entirely and skips right from Polyxena's death to Helen's return to Menelaus. The strange image of a "violent" mouth recalls Houlbrooke's report of the woman with the whorish tongue, or Tofte's assertion that a maid with a "lewd tongue" is virtually the same as a fornicator. In all three cases, the open mouth (and the associated vaginal orifice) which these unruly women inappropriately show the world becomes the focus of critiques of their violations of gendered behavior.
54. Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, 159.
55. Metamorphoses 13.488.
56. Compare my position here with that of Battenhouse, who asks of the poem's portrayal of Lucrece's act of reading, "With how much self-undertanding is she capable of reading? Her shallowness as an explicator of great art can then become for us both amusingly pathetic and a caveat for explicators like ourselves" (23).
57. Cooper's supplement. He notes that Paris's seizure of Helen was the second rape she suffered: she was first abducted "at the age of nine yeres by Theseus." For further discussion of treatments of the stories of Helen and their relation to woman's place in generic traditions, see Gotz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 223-41; and Mihoko Suzuki, The Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic.
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