As a boy growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare was educated at what was known as The King’s New School, established by Edward VI in 1553. There he received a humanist, European influenced education that centred on the Greek and Roman classics. Among his favourite writers was Ovid (born c.43 B.C.E.) Especially influential on the young Shakespeare’s imagination were Ovid’s Metamorphoses – fantastic and religious tales of transformation – and the Fasti, largely historical tales. Among these Shakespeare would have learned the tragedy of Lucrece.

 The first time Shakespeare’s name appeared in print was in 1593. He signed the dedication to his twenty-year-old patron, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton (1573-1624) of the comic, erotic and tragic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. This was printed by Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon contemporary and near neighbour, Richard Field (1561-1624), whose family lived on Upper Bridge Street. Field was another former Stratford-upon-Avon grammar-school boy who made his career in London. Venus and Adonis would become the most frequently reprinted of Shakespeare’s works during his lifetime. The following year Field printed The Rape of Lucrece.

This ‘graver labour’, as Shakespeare had promised his patron, is a narrative poem of 1855 lines, around 600 lines longer than Venus and Adonis. It is an unrelentingly intense work about lust, suffering, guilt, shame, distress, lament, and suicide. It is also political. Sextus Tarquinius (Tarquin), son of King Tarquinius Superbus, raped Lucrece, the wife of Collatine, in 509 B.C.E., and changed the course of Roman history. The King was banished and Rome became a republic.

Although Shakespeare had already depicted the horror and trauma of rape in Titus Andronicus, his research into and adaptation of Lucrece’s story clearly had a profound and lasting effect on him. Her emotional turmoil anticipates Hamlet (1600-1) who, like Lucrece, finds his grief reflected back to him through a depiction of the Sack of Troy. Othello (1603-4), like Lucrece, stabs himself in front of an assembled group of witnesses. As Macbeth (1606) girds himself to murder King Duncan, he imagines the rapist Tarquin’s ‘ravishing strides’, and, in Cymbeline (1610-1611), Giacomo recall’s Tarquin as he visually rapes the sleeping Imogen. Shakespeare would return to the adaptation of classical history into tragic form for Julius Caesar (1599), Antony and Cleopatra (1606), and Coriolanus (1608).

There are four main movements in Shakespeare’s narrative: Tarquin’s lustful intent and debates with his conscience; his aggressive encounter with Lucrece and the rape; Lucrece’s traumatized reactions; and her suicide and its after effects. Throughout, Shakespeare’s poetry is rich in imagery and sensuality, and nuanced with psychological, physical, and emotional insights.

Tarquin reflects that to rape Lucrece would be to betray his friend, Collatine, who has done him no wrong. He rejects his own insights as nothing more than complacent aphorisms, and realises there is no excuse for what he is about to do.

His tortured journey to Lucrece’s bedchamber and his entering it reads – with Shakespeare’s suspenseful use of the dramatic present tense – like a screenplay. He wants us to imagine the unfolding events as clearly as possible, to be appalled, and perhaps even violated by them. He depicts a visual and aural moving picture of Tarquin’s journey, a reflection of his inner conflict. The glove-maker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon specially mentions Lucrece’s glove and needle, a reminder to his patron of his humble, tradesman’s origins perhaps, which also operates as a possible sexual allusion, pricking Tarquin’s conscience.

Tarquin gazes on Lucrece while she is asleep, sexually objectifying her, and comparing her to unconquered territory. He places his hand on her breast. She wakes, thinks she sees a ghost, and is terrified. Shakespeare does not give Lucrece direct speech but reports her urging Tarquin to tell her the reason for his actions. He tells her it is her fault for attracting him, threatens her with his knife, and tells her if she refuses him, he will murder one of her slaves, accuse her of adultery, and shame her to her husband. If she allows him to ‘enjoy’ her, he will keep it a secret.

This is Shakespeare’s most moralistic work. His moralising is both expansively eloquent and dramatically aware. For example in Lucrece’s rhetorically powerful ‘complaints’ against night, opportunity, and time, and in the descriptions of her overwhelming feelings of guilt. Anachronistically, Lucrece articulates the Christian debate about suicide polluting the soul, but realises her body like the city of Troy has been invaded and destroyed, and her life shamed.

After being raped, Lucrece cannot bear to hear the birds sing, and thinks of Philomel in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who, after being raped by Tereus,turns into a nightingale. There is no such escape for her. She decides to kill herself but to wait until her husband has been told what has happened. She calls for her maid who is concerned to see her mistress in such distress. Lucrece manages to write to her husband, Collatine, asking him to come to her quickly. When he arrives, she tells him what has happened. Collatine weeps for her and with her. She urges him and her father to bring her rapist to justice and put him to death:

                            Even now she sheathèd in her harmless breast

                            A harmful knife, that thence her soul unsheathèd.

                             That blow did bail it from the deep unrest

                             Of that polluted prison where it breathèd.

                             Her contrite sighs unto the clouds bequeathèd.

                                           Her wingèd sprite, and through her wounds doth fly

                                           Life’s lasting date, from cancelled destiny. (Lines 1723-1729).

              The poetic form that Shakespeare employs became known as rhyme royal (after King James I himself had used it). It had been invented by Chaucer for Troilus and Criseyde. The stanzas, which are one line longer than those in Venus and Adonis, require two rhyming couplets instead of one, making their impact inevitably emphatic, ideal for the tragic tone of voice.

              Lucrece is exceptional in Shakespeare’s output because of her unremitting and eloquent articulation of suffering. Her words are passionately lyrical as well as tragic, and her grief and shame because she has been raped are all too relevant in our own time.

Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Shakespeare’s Lucrece

The first edition of Shakespeare’s Lucrece was published in 1594. Its story is brutally simple. While her husband, the Roman Consul Collatine, is away, the virtuous Lucrece offers his friend Tarquin hospitality in their home. Tarquin rapes her at sword-point. On Collatine’s return she tells him what has happened. She takes her own life, while the men banish Tarquin for his crime.

Lucrece is a tragic companion piece to Shakespeare’s successful poem published the previous year. Venus and Adonis tells the story of non-consensual desire from the amorous perspective of the goddess Venus, and, although it ends in the death of Adonis, manages to shape this narrative like a comedy. Lucrece is definitely a tragedy. Together, these poems represent a brief detour from the career Shakespeare was establishing in the theatre, and were prompted by the closure of the playhouses during a particularly fierce outbreak of plague. Both were successes in print, reprinted multiple times and finding a ready readership for their fashionable take on popular contemporary genres.

Lucrece combines two literary forms: the epyllia, or minor epic, typically addressing lesser-known myths or retelling significant stories via a small detail; and the complaint, a voiced monologue, often from a woman’s perspective. Shakespeare dedicated it, like Venus and Adonis, to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, and may well have earned the nobleman’s financial patronage as a result. The poems were his first works to bear his name in print: it would be another five or six years before play titles appeared from the press with his name on them.  Other allusions over the 1590s and beyond imply that for many readers, Shakespeare’s literary reputation was inseparably connected to these poetic titles, rather than the plays for which we now celebrate him.

Shakespeare developed the story of Lucrece from one of his favourite sources, the Roman poet Ovid. A short episode of around 70 lines in his source became an extended treatment of almost 2000 lines (Lucrece is longer than Shakespeare’s shortest play, The Comedy of Errors). This dilation, and the poem’s regular rhyme scheme, give it a horrific slow-motion quality. Within a few words of its opening, Tarquin is described as ‘lust-breathed’: Lucrece’s fate is inevitable, and all the poem’s beautiful imagery and emotional delicacy can only delay, not divert it.

While printed poetry was a career sideline, in other ways, though, Lucrece is clearly the work of a playwright. What turns this brutal account into a disturbingly beautiful and lyrical tragedy is its rhetorical depiction of emotional states. The poem moves between the direct speech of Tarquin, Lucrece, and Collatine. Tarquin’s ‘revolving’ thoughts about the ‘sundry dangers of his will’s obtaining – mingled shame, desire, and acknowledgement of the consequences – meet Lucrece’s attempts to dissuade him from this ‘black payment’ for her hospitality. After he slinks away, with ‘the burden of a guilty mind’, she draws at length on the suffering of Hecuba at Troy to understand her injury and decide what to do next. The baton of reflective, passionate speech is passed in turn to Collatine. But the title of the poem makes clear that this is Lucrece’s story, and her rapist is driven out of the poem after his crime in a way that anticipates his banishment from Rome at the hands of Collatine and his fellows. Nevertheless, the poem’s shifting perspectives and interest in the aftermath of terrible events draw on Shakespeare’s experience of theatre-making and the way drama is constructed through dialogue between, and within, characters.

The consequences of Lucrece’s rape ripple outwards from the domestic space of her home which is violated by Tarquin’s attack. A prose summary appended to the first editions of the poem emphasised the political ramifications of the attack. On hearing Lucrece’s story, the men ‘all vowed to root out the hated family of the Tarquins’. These were the rulers of Rome, and thus the rape prompted a political change ‘from kings to consuls’. This links the poem to Shakespeare’s career-long interest in Roman politics – in classical-historical terms, it is set in the period just before Coriolanus, where strong women again embody an ideal of Roman values; in ideological terms it deploys Lucrece’s dead body for political gain just as Mark Antony does in Julius Caesar. It alsogives Lucrece an almost metaphorical quality – as if she is the vulnerable state of Rome itself, ravished not by a violent man but by tyranny itself. The poem’s final couplet invokes ‘consent’ for the first time, but rhymes it with ‘banishment’: it is used in terms of political suffrage rather than personal autonomy.

But the detail of the story prevents Lucrece from being simply a symbol. She finds eloquent voice in her distress. And one of the unsettling aspects of the poem is the way it eroticises Lucrece, just as Tarquin does. Encouraged to gawp at her ‘lily hand’, her ‘snow-white dimpled chin’, and her ‘breasts like ivory globes circled with blue’, the reader, like the rapist, seeks to possess her lovely body. Part of the appeal of the poem to its eager male readers must have been this fantasy of possession. ‘She’s mine.’ ‘O mine she is’, for ‘she was only mine’, argue Lucrece’s mourning father and husband. Lucrece is always understood in relation to what later feminist cinema critics would call ‘the male gaze’: as the poem itself puts it, she is ‘Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste’.

Shakespeare’s early readers could not forget the pity of Lucrece, and – to adapt the war poet Wilfred Owen – the poetry in the pity. Nor could the poem’s author, who turned his back on narrative poetry, but not on his most famous creation. A decade later, Macbeth, the king’s murderer imagines himself taking ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides’ towards Duncan’s bedchamber, and in Cymbeline, at the end of Shakespeare’s career, Iachimo likens himself to Tarquin approaching Lucrece as he watches another virtuous woman from his hiding place in her bedroom,

A poem about rape, shame, and the societal consequences of male violence is, unfortunately, never just a historical curiosity. Lucrece’s story has inspired paintings, opera, and theatre works, all attempting to negotiate the troubling pleasures of this horrific story.

Emma Smith

Hertford College, Oxford.

Shakespeare’s narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was first published on May 9, 1594 and was dedicated to Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton. This little epic or epyllion concerns the real historical, rape of the chaste Roman matron, Lucretia, by the King’s son, Sextus Tarquinius (Tarquin) around 509 BCE.

The rape and Lucrece’s consequent suicide brought about the end of the monarchy in Rome and thereby inaugurated the Roman republic.

This story had been told many times, most prominently by the Roman historian, Livy in his History of Rome, by Ovid in his Fasti, and by Chaucer in The Legend of Good Women. While Shakespeare’s predecessors had rehearsed the Lucrece story as the foundational narrative of the Roman republic—usually told as a tragedy of state, a kind of fortunate fall, Shakespeare tells the story, instead, in a way that is only incidentally about republicanism and is much more centrally about the violation of a woman’s personhood as itself a foundational political issue rather than as a metaphor for a political event.

Shakespeare, however, endows Lucrece with a degree of personhood, with a full humanity that she does not achieve in his source material, and does so especially through her capacity to articulate— at length— her suffering and name the outrage committed on her person.

There is an alarming correspondence between the central issue the poem raises about how to speak out about sexual violence and the outing of modern day Tarquins by “Me too” and “Balance ton porc,” among others, which have allowed violated women to speak and to be heard. In Lucrece, the rape itself is depicted as a moment of silencing:

For with the nightly linen that she wears,

He pens her piteous clamors in her head

Indeed, Lucrece’s struggle for language to communicate the rape occupies the great majority of the poem:

Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words,

Sometime ’tis mad and too much talk affords.

Looking at the figure of Hecuba in a painting of the destruction of Troy, Lucrece swears the artist “did her wrong/To give her so much grief, and not a tongue” If, as Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “the medium is the message,” then the import of Shakespeare’s poem is made clear by the sheer number of lines (1035 of them) devoted to Lucrece’s reaction to the outrage committed upon her body in contrast to the 686 lines leading up to the rape and the 132 lines after she takes her own life.

Of course, Shakespeare is limited by historical fact so his Lucrece cannot kill her attacker or survive her ordeal, but that Shakespeare’s Lucrece gets to tell her story and to do so at length is of crucial significance both literary and social since, as Dr. Barbara Ziv, forensic psychiatrist testified when she served as an expert witness in the Harvey Weinstein case in January 2020: “I’m not sure I can think of one victim of sexual assault who did not feel humiliated, does not blame herself to some extent, and is not deeply ashamed about it,” she said. “That’s one reason why so many do not go to police, because when you do you lose control over your narrative and your whole life can take a tailspin” (my emphasis).

Dympna C. Callaghan, Syracuse University, NY USA