4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece

Lucrece¹Close tells a story about possession and dispossession. The woman at the centre of the narrative is treated as the proper possession of her husband – or perhaps her father: propriety evidently defines women as property in Shakespeare's Rome. But possessions can be expropriated and property owners may be dispossessed. Tarquin takes improper possession of the faithful wife of his comrade-in-arms on the basis of an irresistible desire and, thus possessed, in the distinctive sense that he is impelled to act against his own judgement, Tarquin loses his self-possession and, as a result, his identity as friend, kinsman, prince, Roman lord. At the last, publicly exposed, shamed by Lucrece's suicide, and driven in consequence from what was his proper place in Rome, along with the entire royal family that has taken possession of the city, Tarquin is doubly dispossessed by a woman's constancy.

Recent criticism is divided on the sexual politics of the poem. Reacting incisively against those male readers who had followed St Augustine to find Lucretia guilty of vainglory or, worse, colluding with her own rape, critics influenced by feminism have predominantly seen Shakespeare's Lucrece as, instead, the victim of patriarchal values, whether the passive object of a struggle between men, or complicit in her suicide with masculine misogyny.²Close A minority of other equally feminist arguments, however, powerfully defend her as an exemplum of female virtue, or hold her up as a model of resistance to patriarchy.³Close Since each of these opposed but still broadly feminist cases can seem remarkably persuasive, is it possible that Shakespeare's text is less univocal in its thematic project, or less stable in its signifying practices, than the existing arguments have been inclined to acknowledge?

To a degree, the opposition between the two possible feminist readings is built into the term ‘rape’ itself. So apparently categorical, so decisive as condemnation of the perpetrator, in relation to the person injured the word equivocates. On the one hand, victims of rape are the helpless objects of outside violence; on the other hand they actively resist the rapist, demonstrating by their behaviour that the act is carried out against their will. Indeed, it is this contradictory combination of passivity and resistance that defines the event as rape,⁴Close at least in modern Western usage, if less certainly in 1594, when the term included abduction, as well as sexual violation. To the extent that equivocation is a precipitating element in cultural change, as meanings shift, give way or narrow to specify alternative ways of interpreting the world, perhaps we can also read Lucrece in its historical difference as marking a moment of early modern cultural redefinition, which is registered in the story of possession and dispossession it recounts?

The text does not appear to equivocate, however, in its endorsement of woman as property. Collatine, the proud husband, cannot contain his own conjugal happiness, but is evidently compelled to assure his fellow soldiers, ‘What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, / In the possession of his beauteous mate’ (Lucrece, lines 17–18).⁵Close And if the narrative voice reproaches him here, the reason is neither his proprietory attitude to his wife nor, indeed, his identification of her as a precious asset, but his public announcement of the value of the goods he possesses:

  why is Collatine the publisher

Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown

From thievish ears, because it is his own?

(ll. 33–5)

Meanwhile, Lucrece herself does not challenge these mercantile comparisons either, though after the rape she understandably narrows their reference. Lucrece twice alludes to her body as her husband's ‘interest’, figuring it as his investment or share in a company (ll. 1067, 1619); she also describes her chastity as stolen ‘treasure’ (l. 1056), a lost ‘jewel’ (l. 1191). And the narrative itself confirms her account, defining the betrayed Collatine as ‘the hopeless merchant of this loss’ (l. 1660). While these images do not necessarily imply any lack of tenderness between the couple – on the contrary, the marital relationship is depicted as warmly affectionate – they seem to take for granted that wives belong to their husbands.⁶Close Tarquin himself perceives that, while she is not lawfully his to possess, she is also ‘not her own’ (l. 241). And at the end of the poem the desolate Lucretius and Collatine compete for the right to lament her death on the basis of ownership:

The father says, ‘She's mine.’ ‘O mine she is,’

Replies her husband, ‘do not take away

My sorrow's interest; let no mourner say

  He weeps for her, for she was only mine,

  And only must be wail'd by Collatine.'

‘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 ow'd [owned] her, and ‘tis mine that she hath kill'd.’

  The dispers'd air, who holding Lucrece' life

  Answer'd their cries, ‘my daughter’ and ‘my wife’.

(ll. 1795–1806)

But if the text nowhere overtly challenges the image of woman as the proper possession of her father or her husband, the tragedy it recounts depends precisely on the instability of this understanding of human relations. Her death – and, indeed, in a sense the rape itself – place Lucrece beyond the reach of them both: ‘The one doth call her his, the other his, / Yet neither may possess the claim they lay’ (ll. 1793–4). The story in its entirety might invite us to ask, moreover, whether either was ever justified in counting on the possession he had so confidently claimed. Property is always subject to theft and jewels can change hands. In the event, the ‘treasure’ that Collatine is fool enough to ‘unlock’ verbally in Tarquin's tent (ll. 15–16) is explicitly plundered by Tarquin himself, who breaks locks to come at it, and who becomes in turn a burglar,⁷Close a merchant-venturer (l. 336), and perhaps a pirate, for the purpose: ‘“Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize; / Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?”’(ll. 279–80).

If it is true, however, that Collatine's boasting represents the immediate cause of Tarquin's desire, it is equally evident from a long tradition of medieval narrative, which readily found its way into Renaissance drama, that keeping wives locked up is no guarantee of security either. The problem is neither the carelessness of husbands nor, indeed, the inconstancy of wives, but the expropriability of all property. Shakespeare's narrative indicates as much from the beginning, insisting on the mutability of conjugal proprietorship:

O happiness enjoy'd but of a few,

And if possess'd, as soon decay'd and done

As is the morning's silver melting dew

Against the golden splendour of the sun!

An expir'd date cancell'd ere well begun!

Honour and beauty in the owner's arms,

Are weakly fortress'd from a world of harms.

(ll. 22–8)

This emphasis on the insecurity of ownership, reflecting back so immediately on Collatine's boast, surely invites the reader to reconsider in an ironic light the text's free indirect formulation of a joy in riches held, we might now notice, on loan: ‘What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, / In the possession of his beauteous mate’ (ll. 17–18). All earthly goods are conventionally ‘lent’, of course, but perhaps some forms of temporal enjoyment are more transitory than others.

Meaning, as Jacques Derrida's early work consistently argued, depends on difference and, in consequence, on the trace of the other in the self-same.⁸Close We cannot understand a term, or recognise a condition, without an implicit awareness of its differentiating other. Joy in ownership, the pleasure of possession, depends on the possibility of loss or dispossession. Collatine's treasure is precious precisely to the degree that it can be stolen; his happiness, intensified by sharing it with his friends, is thereby put more thoroughly at risk. As medieval and Renaissance misers repeatedly reveal, to have is, paradoxically but by definition, to want – in one of a number of ways. Avarice is insatiable; usurers risk what they have to increase their wealth; the rich overspend and end in poverty. The text predicates this of Tarquin, but the observation might equally fit Collatine's case. In this respect, at least, the two are oddly interchangeable:

Those that much covet are with gain so fond

That what they have not, that which they possess

They scatter and unloose it from their bond;

And so by hoping more they have but less,

Or gaining more, the profit of excess

  Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,

  That they prove bankrout in this poor rich gain.

(ll. 134–40)

Both Heather Dubrow and Joel Fineman have independently (and brilliantly) noted that the poem's recurring trope is synœciosis, or what Puttenham in his encyclopaedia of Renaissance poetics calls ‘the Crosse-couple’.⁹Close Synœciosis brings contraries together to form oxymoronic or paradoxical truths: to hope more is to have less; to gain is to lose; excess of pleasure brings grief. Coincidentally, one of Puttenham's examples of the cross-couple casts light on the puzzle of line 135 of Shakespeare's poem: ‘what they have not, that which they possess’. In Puttenham's instance, ‘The covetous miser, of all his goods ill got, / As well wants that he hath, as that he hath not’.¹⁰Close Following an eighteenth-century reading, both F. T. Prince and John Roe attribute the poem's observation to a Latin tag, ‘Tam avaro deest quod habet, quam quod non habet’ (‘what he has is as wanting to the miser as what he has not’),¹¹Close but Puttenham's rhyme implies that the sentiment was proverbial in early modern English too. That Shakespeare invokes a condensed version of this commonplace is not, I think, accidental, since his line 135 (‘what they have not, that which they possess’) itself condenses the oxymoron on which his rendering of the story turns. Possession does not gratify desire for Collatine or Tarquin, since they do not in the event possess what they take into possession. Oppositions do not hold: impropriety invades the proper; violence intrudes into the supposed security of Collatine's home; dispossession inheres in marriage perceived as ownership. At the same time, however, in expropriating Lucrece, Tarquin loses possession of his own faculties, and in consequence, he will go on to lose the kingdom he was to have possessed.

Tarquin, who takes violent and unlawful possession of what does not belong to him, is a thief, and if in this he betrays his friend and kinsman, he is at least faithful to etymology, since rape is theft (from the Latin rapio, rapere, raptus¹²Close). The Oxford English Dictionary gives three main meanings for ‘rape’: seizure of goods, abduction (especially of a woman) and sexual violation. All three senses were in circulation in 1594. But the story of the rapacious Tarquins goes further back. The synoptic Argument that prefaces the poem begins with an older narrative concerning the father of Shakespeare's villain:

Lucius Tarquinius (for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus) … 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 … possessed himself of the kingdom.

Tarquin the Proud had taken violent and illicit possession of Rome.

What is the relation between the prose Argument and the poem that follows it? The Argument gives more contextual detail; it is also more political. The poem reduces the action to the rape and its aftermath, and dwells on the emotions of the protagonists. While the poem focuses on the personal significance of their respective predicaments for Tarquin and Lucrece, the prose specifies the implications of the rape for Rome. Latinate in its sentence structure and relatively detached, the Argument concludes with Brutus's bitter invective against the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud, the resulting exile of the entire Tarquin family, this time by popular consent, and the end of the Roman monarchy. It thus begins with usurpation and ends with the installation of the Republic. Shakespeare's immediate sources for Lucrece were an extract from Livy's annals of Rome and an episode from Ovid's Fasti. The Argument and the poem, I suggest, represent different genres: prose, like Livy's, as befits history; poetry, like Ovid's, for interaction between individuals, dialogue, intensity of feeling.¹³Close

Though Lucrece expands on the material given in the Latin sources, in general the narrative follows closely the events they record. Yet the story of Tarquin senior, Tarquin the Proud and his violent seizure of the throne, is not given in the passages of Livy and Ovid that Shakespeare evidently had open in front of him. Instead, Tarquin's refusal to consult the people, derived ultimately from Livy, comes from a Renaissance commentary on another book of the Fasti, in an annotation of Ovid's own account of the violence itself.¹⁴Close According to Ovid, Tarquin the Proud, incited by his wife, murdered the king, her father, and ascended his throne, where he held the dominion seized from his father-in-law. Ovid's phrase is ‘sceptra … rapta Superbus habet’.¹⁵Close This ‘rape’ as theft, introduced into Shakespeare's Argument from another (not very esoteric) source, anticipates the rape of Lucrece. In the Argument's words, Tarquin the Proud brutally ‘possessed himself of the kingdom’ that belonged to his father-in-law, just as the rapist, Sextus Tarquinius, took brutal possession of his kinsman's wife, and ‘like a foul usurper went about, / From this fair throne to heave the owner out’ (ll. 412–13).

The tyranny of Tarquin the Proud is recounted in Book 6 of the Fasti. The rape of Lucretia, meanwhile, occurs in Book 2. Ovid's story of Lucretia is immediately preceded by an account of the prior treachery of the rapist, Sextus Tarquinius, who took possession of a neighbouring tribe, the Gabii (‘made them his own’¹⁶Close) by a trick. Pretending to be unarmed, Tarquin presented himself to the Gabii as their friend and offered to join with them against his father. Once he had secured their trust, however, he killed their leaders. This appalling betrayal was marked by an omen: from between the holy altars of the Gabii, a serpent came out and seized the sacrificial organs from the extinguished fires (‘exta rapit’¹⁷Close). The parallel between Tarquin the rapist and the rapacious snake might well have suggested the figurative ‘lurking serpent’ of Shakespeare's poem (l. 362), who insinuates himself into the sanctity of another's hearth and home on the basis of trust and stamps out his own torch as a prelude to taking possession of Collatine's wife's sexual organs in the most sacred domestic place, their marriage bed. If so, political history is repeated in the poetic narrative, just as it is in the recurring imagery of Lucrece as a city besieged, conquered and colonised by Tarquin.¹⁸Close The state politics of the Argument, in other words, inform the sexual politics of the poem, and the personal is seen as continuous with the political.

Rome expanded by colonising its neighbours, taking into possession many of their subjects as slaves. The ultimate instance of human beings as property, slavery was not, however, confined to ancient Rome: Shakespeare's poem belongs to the period of the developing English slave trade. A slave appears in the margins of the story of Lucrece – as Tarquin's redoubled threat to her reputation, her husband's standing and the purity of the bloodline.¹⁹Close

‘Lucrece’, quoth he, ‘this night I must enjoy thee.

If thou deny, then force must work my way:

For in thy bed I purpose to destroy thee;

That done, some worthless slave of thine I'll slay,

To kill thine honour with thy life's decay;

  And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him,

  Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him.

So thy surviving husband shall remain

The scornful mark of every open eye;

Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain,

Thy issue blurr'd 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.'

(ll. 512–25)

Ironically, the would-be adulterer appeals to the chaste wife on the basis of dynastic family values but, in the process, the slave is identified as ‘worthless’ and seemingly dispensable. Adultery with a slave is evidently seen as more degrading than infidelity with a prince, and a bastard who inherits the slave's namelessness would shame the family even more than the ‘“slavish wipe”’ that in line 537 of the poem brands slaves themselves.

The threat is not carried out. In Shakespeare's account Tarquin uses force instead, gagging Lucrece with her own nightgown to smother her outcry. In anguish after the rape, she curses Tarquin ‘“to live a loathed slave”’ (l. 984), and then affirms that he is one already (l. 1001). But figuratively both the poem and her own eloquence have anticipated her here. In accordance with a metaphoric commonplace of the period,²⁰Close passion enslaves the desiring Tarquin. His faculties, which should obey him absolutely, grow proud, ‘Paying more slavish tribute than they owe’ (l. 299). His mutinous veins, a disorderly rabble in place of a disciplined force, run out of control, ‘like straggling slaves for pillage fighting’ (l. 428). Pleading for release, Lucrece appeals to him to remember that he is to be a king; if he submits to ‘“Black lust, dishonour, shame, misgoverning”’ (l. 654), he loses all semblance of nobility: ‘“So shall these slaves be king, and thou their slave”’ (l. 659).

This new instance of the cross-couple is too much for Tarquin and he at once enacts another: he surrenders to the revolt of the slaves, now specified in Lucrece's miniature allegory as black,²¹Close and overpowers his victim, protesting that he will hear no more (l. 667). Already the Roman lord is other than he is, dispossessed of his own identity: he himself forsakes himself (l. 157); ‘he himself himself confounds, betrays’ (l. 160, cf l. 341). Impropriety supplants the proper; the prince becomes a bondman, so that Lucrece exclaims, ‘“In Tarquin's likeness I did entertain thee: / Hast thou put on his shape to do him shame?”’ (ll. 596–7).

The poem's image of Tarquin beside himself, slave to an insatiable desire beyond the reach of Law, is strangely Lacanian 350 years avant la lettre. In a manner that closely resembles Jacques Lacan's doomed, desiring subject, in command of everything but its own desire (and thus, paradoxically, in true control of nothing whatever), the king's son, dissatisfied with what he already possesses, wants precisely what, because it is forbidden, will destroy him and all he already has. In the same way, the poem observes,

  in vent'ring ill we leave to be

The things we are, for that which we expect;

And this ambitious foul infirmity,

In having much, torments us with defect

Of that we have: so then we do neglect

  The thing we have, and all for want of wit,

  Make something nothing by augmenting it.

(ll. 148–54)

Tragically, Tarquin knows in advance the consequences of his crime. The ‘“scandal”’ (l. 204) in every sense of that term, as flagrant transgression, disgrace and discredit, will mark for ever his identity, his proper place in the symbolic order of language and culture. This position, inherited from the father and transmitted to his descendants, is held, in Lacanian theory, on condition of submission to the symbolic Law, and symbol-ised heraldically in the feudal imagery of Shakespeare's Rome. Tarquin foresees his breach of familial property and propriety literally marked in the signifier of his own lineage, the emblem that declares his title, his proper entitlement to the name he passes on:

‘Yea, though I die the scandal will survive

And be an eyesore in my golden coat;

Some loathesome dash the herald will contrive,

To cipher me how fondly I did dote

That my posterity, sham'd with the note,

  Shall curse my bones, and hold it for no sin

  To wish that I their father had not been.'

(ll. 204–10)

But the Lacanian Nom/Non-du-Père, the subject's own Father's Name-and-Prohibition, which is the guarantee of a place in the symbolic order, is powerless in this instance to banish desire:

‘My will is strong past reason's weak removing:

  Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw

  Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.'

(ll. 243–5)

The maxim, the proverb and the moralising wall-hanging – all inscriptions of the Law that is the source of identity– prove ineffectual against the force of the will, which dispossesses the rational subject who respects property and propriety.

I do not take the parallels between the sixteenth-century poem and twentieth-century psychoanalysis as evidence of the timeless truth of Lacan's account, still less as proof of Shakespeare's universal wisdom. On the contrary, the model of the psyche that links Lacan to Shakespeare seems to me to be Augustinian, and it is perhaps here, rather than in his reading of the story of Lucretia, that Augustine plays a significant part in the construction of Shakespeare's poem. For Augustine the primal sin was disobedience, and its punishment since the Fall is the continuing disobedience of the human will. This is supremely evident in the instance of sexual desire, so the story goes, which is not only anarchic in itself but is intensified by prohibition. Desire is not purely a matter of the flesh but involves the soul: the shame of desire is that the soul cannot command either its own wishes or the body. Appropriately, both men and women now experience the penalty for disobedience to God in Eden as disobedience to themselves, and this, Augustine explains, is demonstrated by the unruly behaviour of the sexual organs, which no longer obey the commands of reason, but act – or refuse to act – in accordance with their own unaccountable reflexes.²²Close

When Michel de Montaigne vividly records the willfulness of our ‘disobedient, skittish, and tyrannical member’, he reaffirms the Augustinian story in its strong form for the Renaissance, as well as for subsequent French culture, treating desire in consequence as incompatible with legality.²³Close Lacan in his turn inherits Montaigne's scepticism, along with the image, in his nomination of the unruly phallus as the signifier of unconscious desire, which originates as the residue from submission to the symbolic Law, and forever conflicts with its prohibitions.²⁴Close

In Shakespeare's poem, Tarquin's irresistible ‘will’, which both repudiates reason and distorts rational argument, is invested with all the ambiguity of the term in the period. At once psychological and physiological, the will is both appetite and penis.²⁵Close Tarquin's struggle is a ‘disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will’ (ll. 246–7); when reproof and reason subdue his will, it is reanimated by Lucrece's beauty (ll. 489–90); after the rape it is reduced by revulsion, ‘His taste delicious, in digestion souring, / Devours his will that liv'd by foul devouring’ (ll. 699–700). The insurrection of the flesh leaves the soul defaced and dispossessed, ‘thrall / To living death and pain perpetual’ (ll. 725–6), and Tarquin steals away ‘like a thievish dog’ (l. 736), no longer a prince and, indeed, figuratively no longer a human subject, but caught and held in a double instance of the cross-couple which brings together the military and economic metaphors that have all along defined his project: ‘A captive victor that hath lost in gain’ (l. 730).

St Augustine's point about the unruly member is that, since the Fall, only divine grace can ensure obedience to the divine will. By ourselves, we cannot help ourselves. In Lacan's psychoanalytic secularisation of the story, rebellious desire will triumph in one way or another. The victory of Shakespeare's metaphorical slaves, their assertion of sovereignty over the son of the king, results in the psychological condition that Lucrece calls ‘“exil'd majesty”’ (l. 640), and although the immediate consequence of the slaves' revolt is rape, the long-term effect will be the exile of the Tarquin dynasty and the installation of the Roman Republic. By pushing the familiar trope of the hero enslaved by his passions to the point of synœciosis, crowning the slaves who subjugate the prince in Lucrece's ‘“So shall these slaves be king”’ (l. 659), Shakespeare's text recapitulates by analogy the political narrative of the Argument in the story of the personal psychomachia that takes place at the heart of the poem.

If the story is set in Rome, Lucrece itself belongs, of course, to an England that had been involved in the African slave trade, however surreptitiously, for something like forty years.²⁶Close It is hard to see the poem as sympathetic to any of the slaves it invokes, or ready to condemn the pernicious practices taking place with the consent, no doubt, of some of its early readers. On the contrary, Lucrece explicitly aligns the figurative slaves with evil; at the mercy of black slaves, Tarquin becomes a rapist. At the same time, possessions that they are, slaves can revolt, as Roman history so surely demonstrated, and in this way they too throw into relief the precariousness of ownership. Ironically, then, in one respect at least, the slaves are ultimately aligned in their oppression with the poem's oppressed heroine, as they are with the avenging Brutus, who was obliged to lie low during the reign of Tarquin the Proud and wrongly supposed a fool. The resistance of all these victims of tyranny combines not only to exile the Tarquins but to change the form of government, and if the Republic did not succeed in doing away with either slavery or rape, this electoral political regime was at least precious enough to motivate a later Brutus to assassinate a friend in its defence.

The assertion of Tarquin's tyrannical will to possess the wife of his kinsman marks the low point of the story for both the central figures: ‘He thence departs, a heavy convertite, / She there remains, a hopeless castaway’ (ll. 743–4). Tarquin's deliberations, which grow closer to psychological turmoil, have resulted in the rape of the poem's central figure: Lucrece's turmoil, by contrast, gradually issues in deliberation, which also leads to action. But is her suicide any more than a grim repetition of Tarquin's violence, as Lucrece carries out the murder he threatened? Indeed, she herself points to the irony: ‘“I feared by Tarquin's falchion to be slain, / Yet for the self-same purpose seek a knife”’ (ll. 1046–7). More specifically, at the moment of death, Lucrece insists on drawing the attention of the bystanders to the parallel: ‘“fair lords, 'tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me”’ (ll. 17г1–г). Coppélia Kahn reads the death of Lucrece as another misogynist act in a thoroughly patriarchal story of the brutal consequences of rivalry between men. In killing herself to preserve Collatine's honour, Kahn argues, Lucrece stays within the structure of militaristic conquest and masculine conflict that motivated the rape in the first place. ‘The “Roman blade” that Tarquin flourishes over Lucrece is the same one that she turns against herself, and her death sanctions the continuation of the same force’.²⁷Close

I see the persuasiveness of this, but I want to suggest an alternative emphasis. Every repetition necessarily differs from the action it repeats, if only by virtue of being a repetition and not the event itself. In this case, the differences are palpable. If Tarquin is driven to his act of violence by an uncontrolled desire that is deaf to his deliberations, Lucrece stages hers as a result of her deliberation, even in distress. Tarquin acts at night, by stealth, and in a darkness he himself creates. Lucrece acts before an audience – not only her family, but other members of the Roman community – and by daylight explains the significance of her deed, in order to enlist their intervention. She offers her death as a model for their treatment of the rapist: ‘“How Tarquin must be us'd, read it in me”’ (l. 1195). Brutus swears on Lucrece's knife to drive the Tarquins from Rome; so if Tarquin's blade is the same as hers, hers is the same as Rome's against tyranny.

Kahn's argument concedes this last point but does not regard it as diminishing the misogyny of the text. The story of Lucretia was widely read as a myth of the founding of the Republic, and in this version of the narrative the rape is treated as virtually allegorical, or at best is seen as no more than the final instance of tyrannical rule, the last straw that broke the people's back.²⁸Close In discussions of the political allegiances of Shakespeare's text, Lucrece's story easily becomes incidental. My own view, however, is that rape – and the horror of rape – is at the heart of the poem, but that sexual politics and state politics are interwoven, not that one is a stand-in for the other. If we read the text as a critique, what it criticises is a model of both marriage and government that works to no one's advantage, not the husband's and not, in the end, the tyrant's. As Kahn herself pointed out, in an earlier essay that brilliantly inaugurated the feminist rescue of the text, the poem's account of the rivalry between men over possession of a woman ‘questions the wisdom and humanity of making property the basis of human relationships’.²⁹Close

The ‘hopeless castaway’ that Tarquin leaves behind after the rape is at first ‘frantic with grief’ (ll. 744, 762). She rails against time, night and Tarquin himself, and then, recognising that words solve nothing, determines to kill herself. She does not at any stage think of asking her husband what she ought to do. On the contrary, ‘“I am the mistress of my fate”’, she announces as confidently as grief permits (l. 1069). These are not the thought processes of a helpless victim of patriarchy or a mere pawn in a masculine power struggle. Finally, after the high Roman fashion, she performs before the assembled representatives of the community the act of violence that justifies their resistance: ‘“fair lords, 'tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me”’ (ll. 1721–2).

Familiar with titillating images of flesh as the solitary Lucretia commits suicide in the Renaissance tradition of high art,³⁰Close we might easily forget that in Shakespeare's text she is dressed in mourning, and that she carries out the act in the presence of other soldiers besides the husband she has summoned for the purpose. And there was an alternative visual tradition that much more closely resembles Shakespeare's account. A German illumination of the 1540s, in a work of history commissioned by the mayor of Augsburg as a gift for Henry VIII, shows the separate stages of the story occurring in different parts of the picture. The rape takes place in an upstairs room against the victim's will: Tarquin holds a weapon and seizes her wrist; Lucretia turns her head away, and attempts to cover her naked body. Fully clothed, however, her eyes cast down, she kills herself, with evident deliberation, in the foreground below. And in between, as her body is borne out into the streets, Brutus stands on a platform exactly at the centre of the image, inciting the Roman citizens to rebellion.³¹Close Here, too, the implications for the state are made clear, without diminishing either the violence of the crime or the dignity of the heroine.

By her death Lucrece dissolves her shame, erases the threat of bastardy to Collatine's lineage, and motivates political action. In the event, it is not her proprietary husband and father who exact the revenge she asks for: they are evidently too distraught with grief. But Brutus, as representative of the Roman community, throws off his protective mask of folly and rallies the citizens, with the result that, in the last two lines of the poem, ‘The Romans plausibly [with applause, by acclamation] did give consent / To Tarquin's everlasting banishment’ (ll. 1854–5).

The position of ‘consent’ as the rhyme-word of the final couplet in a story about rape might prompt us to give it some weight. Brutus secures the consent of the Roman people to a change in the mode of government. Lucrece, by contrast, is not asked to consent to Collatine's boasting. More important, the text goes to some lengths to clarify the fact that she does not consent to the rape. In Ovid and Livy she reluctantly yields in response to the threat of the slave; Augustine raises the question whether ‘(as she herself alone could know) she consented, betrayed by her own involuntary desire’, in another instance, presumably, of the unruly sexual reflex that for Augustine is the heritage of fallen humanity.³²Close But Shakespeare's text – at this point, at least – is as unequivocal as language can make it. Tarquin interrupts her appeal, puts out the light, gags Lucrece with her own nightgown, and rapes her, ‘Cooling his hot face in the chastest tears / That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed’ (ll. 682–3). The appalling character of this action is represented as the forcible bodily violation that, at the same time, impugns the identity of a faithful wife and eradicates the personal sovereignty of a human subject.

Collatine sees his wife as a possession. Lucrece does not challenge this subject position in words, but enacts another. Only once does she ask the male audience she has summoned for their views, and her question concerns the ethical implications of the loss of chastity under duress:

    ‘O speak’, quoth she:

  ‘How may this forced stain be wiped from me?

What is the quality of my offence,

Being constrained with dreadful circumstance?

May my pure mind with the foul act dispense?'

(1700–4)

The justice of Lucretia's suicide has been queried by St Augustine (‘if she was chaste, why was she killed?’ he asks³³Close), and again in our own period by both the Augustinian critics and those who see her as complicit with patriarchal values. Lucrece concludes that her death is necessary, but her attempts to make sense of the issue bring the text once again to the cross-couple, synœciosis, the union of contraries at the outer edge of what it is possible to say.³⁴Close Lucrece never doubts that she has lost her innocence, but the problem that leaves is whether she is consequently guilty. In a culture that values lineage, the honour of the father involves the purity of the mother: the reproductive process cuts across any understanding of culpability as a purely individual matter:

‘If, Collatine, thine honour lay in me,

From me by strong assault it is bereft:

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.

‘Yet am I guilty of thy honour's wrack;

Yet for thy honour did I entertain him:

Coming from thee I could not put him back,

For it had been dishonour to disdain him.'

(ll. 834–44)

The paradoxes of propriety lead to an oxymoron: ‘“O unseen shame, invisible disgrace! / O unfelt sore, crest-wounding private scar!”’ (ll. 827–8). The worst reproach to Collatine is that the rape should be known; yet concealed, kept private, it still pollutes his dynasty, damaging the coat of arms that publicly registers the purity of the line of descent. Marriage is not just a state of mind, not just institutional partnership, but mating, parentage, genealogy.

And yet it is not only Collatine's honour that is at stake: the symbolic Law that confers identity constructs Lucrece as a loyal wife, and Tarquin has deprived her of that ‘true type’ (l. 1050). Propriety, she believes, demands atonement for this loss, and it is her proper place that only her death can restore: ‘“Mine honour be the knife's that makes my wound; / My shame be his that did my fame confound”’ (ll. 1201–2).³⁵Close When Nancy Vickers assembles the images of heraldry in the poem to interpret their implications, she treats dynastic honour purely as a matter between men, ignoring Lucrece's perception of her own place in the symbolic and cultural order. Paradoxically, Vickers thus effaces Lucrece's resistance more fully than the text she denounces for its misogyny.³⁶Close Tarquin may repudiate the ethical instruction of a painted cloth, but Lucrece has a proper respect for the painting that tells the story of Troy and justly allocates praise and blame. Her own symbolic future is a deep concern:

‘The nurse to still her child will tell my story,

And fright her crying babe with Tarquin's name.

The orator to deck his oratory

Will couple my reproach to Tarquin's shame.'

(ll. 813–16)

She dies to set the record straight,³⁷Close but it is the record of her own life that is at stake:

‘So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred,

  For in my death I murder shameful scorn:

  My shame so dead, mine honour is new born.'

(ll. 1188–90)

If the term rape equivocates, as I have suggested, defining the victim as at once passive object and resisting subject, Lucrece's suicide, repeating the crime, also equivocates in its distinct but parallel way. Her final victim-isation, rendered by her own hand, is at the same time the ultimate act of self-determination; the object of violence is simultaneously the subject as agent of her own judicial execution.

Part of our difficulty, I believe, in sympathising with the heroine's reasoning here results from the dualism that would increasingly come to represent common sense from the moment when Descartes would in due course identify the person with consciousness. For Cartesians, and subsequently for a whole epoch, what we were was synonymous with what we thought, with the mind and its intentions. St Augustine, arguing that nuns who had been raped were not obliged to take their own lives, also located virtue in the mind, so that no blame attached to the victim.³⁸Close But elsewhere, as I have indicated, he assumes a more complex relation between reason and physiology.

Both options were available in the early modern period, before the Enlightenment effectively reduced the person to the cogito. It is the men in Lucrece who opt for such a reduction, when they answer the heroine's agonised question, ‘“May my pure mind with the foul act dispense?”’ (l. 1704) ‘With this they all at once began to say, / Her body's stain her mind untainted clears’ (ll. 1709–10). But Lucrece herself knows better:

  with a joyless smile she turns away

The face, that map which deep impression bears

Of hard misfortune, carv'd in it with tears.

(ll. 1711–13)

Here sorrow marks the body in the form of a sad smile, dejection, weeping. And if grief is registered physiologically, calling in question the distinction so easily taken for granted by modern readers between mind and the organism of which it is a part, so, too, is rape, which violates flesh as well as self-respect, organic integrity at the same time as personal sovereignty.

Rape, in other words, deconstructs the opposition between mind and body which an exclusively dualist culture came to see as obvious. Even in our own period, victims of rape commonly feel physically violated, tainted, changed irrevocably. As one modern rape victim commented, ‘The police have told me to consider myself still a virgin. They reckon what happened had nothing to do with my choice. That's fine in theory, not quite so easy to put into practice when I am becoming increasingly uneasy that I could be pregnant’.³⁹Close Lucrece evinces the same fear (ll. 1062–4). Like her male interlocutors, the modern police conflate the person with intention, consciousness. But despite the chronological and cultural gap dividing them, both women know that chastity is lost in the real, not just in the psyche; pregnancy is a material condition; and rape constitutes a perpetual reminder that we are organic beings like any other.

Lucrece's culture, whether Roman or early modern, is not our own, and her struggle to arrive at a remedy for her loss is conducted in other terms than ours (which is to say, in terms of other meanings). And yet, in a post-Cartesian world, influenced by psychoanalytic accounts of the person as an organismin-culture, we can surely recognise the difficulty she too faces. If, she reasons, the body is a temple inhabited by the soul, its earthly housing, it follows that damage to one distresses both:

‘Her house is sack'd, her quiet interrupted,

Her mansion batter'd by the enemy,

Her sacred temple spotted, spoil'd, corrupted,

Grossly engirt with daring infamy.

That let it not be call'd impiety,

  If in this blemish'd fort I make some hole,

  Through which I may convey this troubled soul.'

(ll. 1170–76)

And yet, she reflects, in one sense death solves nothing, since it cannot restore the lost condition of the body, identity, or the freedom to choose. Moreover, if there is guilt, it surely belongs to the soul, not the battered body, which is only to be violated all over again by suicide. ‘“Poor helpless help, the treasure stol'n away, / To burn the guiltless casket where it lay!”’ (ll. 1057–7). ‘“Helpless help”’: synœciosis, the trope of deconstruction, insists on the incursion of the differentiating other into the self-same. The remedy is paradoxically a repetition of the cause; release from the consequences of Tarquin's crime also re-enacts it. The limits of meaningful language have been reached.

There is no logical solution. To live on casts doubt on her honour, her person, her symbolic place; death, on the other hand, punishes a crime she did not commit. Neither innocent nor guilty, Lucrece does the best she can. She publicly places the blame where it belongs; she erases the possible taint on the family name; and she reaffirms her own sovereignty in an action that is deliberately and independently chosen. The effect is a change of regime to one based on consent: propriety will no longer be synonymous with property.

In 1594, when the poem appeared, the story of Lucrece was ancient history. And yet the change it records in the meaning of the proper was remarkably contemporary. Marriage, at least in fiction, in Protestant propaganda and in the conduct books, if not yet in social practice, was no longer arranged, dynastic and proprietary. Instead, it was beginning to be based on romantic love, shared values and more than formal consent.⁴⁰Close Even while Capulet, for instance, is busy arranging his daughter's marriage in the old way, he urges on Paris the importance not only of Juliet's agreement but also of her affection:

But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,

My will to her consent is but a part,

And she agreed, within her scope of choice

Lies my consent and fair according voice.

(Romeo and Juliet, 1.2.16–19)⁴¹Close

Rape, too, was changing its meaning. Previously a form of theft, an offence against the property of a husband or father, rape was separated from abduction in statutes of 1555 and 1597: for the first time the legal issue began to be seen, however tentatively, as one of consent.⁴²Close

Meanwhile, in English state politics, although the monarchy would remain, becoming ever more absolutist in its pretensions for another fifty years, there were glimpses, at least, of an alternative based on consent, and republican Rome was often invoked as its model. In 1601 William Fulbecke published a history of Rome, abridged for popular consumption, which recounted with considerable narrative and stylistic verve the ‘factions, tumults and massacres’ of the last years of the Republic. Fulbecke's story begins earlier, however, ‘When vainglorious Tarquine the last of the Romaine kings for the shamefull rape of Lucrece committed by one of his sonnes, was banished from Rome’.⁴³Close The new office of tribune of the people was created in due course, and Rome ‘was turned from an Aristocracie, from the rule of them that were manie and mightie, to a plaine and visible Democracie or estate popular, adminstred by the voyces of the multitude and magistrates, and by the united consent of the whole corporation’.⁴⁴Close Once this consensual government was established, Fulbecke records, Rome began to flourish morally and politically; but as soon as either the Senate or the people appropriated an unequal share of power, ‘dismal discord’ inevitably followed.⁴⁵Close

It is Fulbecke's word ‘consent’ that interests me here, rather than the question of his (or Shakespeare's) republicanism, though it is worth noting that Richard Field, who published Lucrece, also issued Fulbecke's Historicall Collection.⁴⁶Close ‘Consent’ occurs twice in Shakespeare's prefatory Argument, and again in the final couplet of the poem. It indicates, in my view, that possession – whether legitimate, like Collatine's, or usurped, like Tarquin's – was no longer acceptable as a model of human relations. The rape of Lucrece, her suicide and the dispossession of the Tarquins all demonstrate its instability in practice. Consent does not eliminate problems, but it must be better. I suspect that even in the twenty-first century, we have yet to realise the full meaning of this word both in sexual politics and in the state.

But if Lucrece's story promotes consent, it does so literally over her dead body, which is paraded through the streets of Rome to put on display the iniquity of the Tarquins. Jane Newman has pointed out that Lucrece becomes an agent of change only when a man acts on her behalf. As she explains, the recurring references to Philomel in the poem draw attention to a different but familiar story, which Shakespeare's poem does not tell but invokes at intervals in the course of its narrative. Women can act on their own behalf: in Ovid's rendering Philomel and her sister Procne respond to Philomel's rape by killing the son of the rapist and feeding him to his father, thus arresting the line of descent literally with a vengeance.⁴⁷Close A feminist Lucrece, Newman argues, would surely have killed Tarquin, not herself. Even Brutus thinks she might have done better: ‘“Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so, / To slay herself, that should have slain her foe”’ (ll. 1826–7).

On the other hand, while the revenge of Philomel and Procne inventively reverses the implications of rape as a crime against the dynastic family, it stays within the problematic of assault as the appropriate response to assault. Though it is women who act in this case, they do so without challenging the existing agonistic and individualistic framework. But there are, as Lucrece demonstrates, two options. One is to repay crime with a fitting punishment. That is the mode of Philomel and Procne. The other is to challenge the cultural values that promoted the crime in the first place. This is what Lucrece does. Possession represents an inherently unstable model of human relations; it is Collatine's boast of what he possesses that motivates Tarquin's desire to take possession of another's wife. Lucrece does not punish Tarquin: instead, she involves her audience is a process that goes beyond revenge. Indeed, what follows goes beyond Lucrece's own instruction. To enlist the community, it appears, is to surrender the right to personal vengeance and submit to the will of the people. Tarquin is not killed, in the event, but banished from a new political order founded not on possession but on consent.

The difference of Lucrece's behaviour, we might therefore argue, is defined in Shakespeare's references to Philomel by the trace in her story of this other option. Philomel appears in The Rape of Lucrece not as an avenger but after her metamorphosis into a nightingale, leaning her breast against a thorn to keep her woe alive for all to hear (ll. 1135–6). Rather than reproduce the external aggression of the perpetrator, Lucrece's self-inflicted, public wound intercepts the sequence of personal attack and counter-attack and, in the process, brings the horror of the crime to the attention of the community. Lucrece thus calls into question the values of her culture (as all good feminists should). The installation of the Republic that is the consequence of her act affirms a model of state politics based on consent. Meanwhile, at the historical moment of the poem's widespread appeal, free and unconstrained consent was in the process of becoming the only acceptable basis of marriage.

Lucrece's story demonstrates that the proper does not stay in place: the trace of the other destabilises the self-same. Perhaps the cross-couple, trope of deconstruction and thus of the instability of meaning, can be seen as the figure of cultural and political change. The story of Lucrece also indicates, however, that change for the better does not happen of its own accord. On the contrary, we need to take a hand. It would be encouraging to be able to believe that the hand in question will never again need to hold a knife.