Chastity and Unreason in Shakespeare's “The Rape of Lucrece"

Chastity and Unreason in Shakespeare’s
“The Rape of Lucrece”

Shakespeare’s second narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece”, although an early literary effort, certainly deserves study for the remarkable manner in which it describes the guilt-ridden psyche of Tarquin in terms of certain Elizabethan faculty-psychology concepts; it also deserves attention for anticipating in an embryonic form certain motifs and concerns which Shakespeare was to develop in his later plays. In another sense, it also anticipates the version of love as a descent to the bestial level or “lust in action” which Shakespeare has described in his celebrated sonnet (129) in antithetical and paradoxical terms:

Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,
Pest reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad– 

Almost every line of this sonnet is an accurate gloss, as it were in retrospect, on Tarquin’s behaviour in the poem.

Written in the mode of a moralistic exemplum, popular in the sixteenth century, the Lucrecenarrative may well have been titled: “The Tragedy of Tarquin and the Complaint of Lucrece”, as Lever has described it.¹ The first part of the poem centres on the psyche of the “Lust-breathed Tarquin”, the second part of the poem, not so successful in aesthetic terms as the first, is mostly in the “complaint” medium where Lucrece, more an emblem of wounded honour and ravished chastity, functions mostly as “a declamatory voice” on Night, Opportunity and Time. Although her extensive monologues account for the heavy pace of the second part of the narrative, they elaborate the ramifications of Tarquin’s crime as an aspect of the nature of things, of a “tainted world” where Opportunity frustrates both virtue and goodness in nature and man (“ ’Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason”, 1.880) where Time is in one aspect the “universal healer” and, in another, the harbinger of decay and oblivion ravishing monuments and antiquities. Truly, the poem has much importance as a repository or “barn” ² for the later Shakespearean motifs, and on that account alone remains of absorbing interest. While Shakespeare’s interest in Tarquin’s demoniacal drive to evil, reminds us of what he was to do later in Macbeth and Othello, the details on the Troy cloth and the addresses to Time and Opportunity prefigure Shakespeare’s later treatment of the themes of tragic folly, of wars and lechery (as Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida were to exemplify).

Whatever shortcomings the poem may have, there is no mistaking the early Shakespeare’s remarkable poetic prowess and ability to launch straightaway into the theme of his choice by means of appropriate imagery and statement.” In the opening stanza itself, the mental frame in which Tarquin leaves the besieged Ardea to lay a different kind of siege in Collatium, this time the citadel and “the waist of Collating’s fair love”, is suggested by the statement that he is being borne “by the trustless wings of false desire” (1.2). This “false desire” is further characterized as “lightless fire” (1.4) lurking “to aspire, and girdle Lucrece the chaste”. ³ Clearly, Tarquin right from the beginning is shown as following a course leading to a descent rather than the usual ascent of love, in seeking to “quench the coal which in his liver glows (1-47)”. ⁴

Against this image of Tarquin as activated by “desire” is that of Lucrece within whose face virtue and beauty are engaged in a silent war of lilies and roses” for interchanging each other’s seats (1.70). If Tarquin is a “devil”, she is described as an “earthly saint” little suspecting the evil designs of her “false worshipper.” The epithets used for Lucrece are “chaste”, “modest”, “holy-thoughted” (1-384). Later on, her face, asleep on the soft pillow, is compared to a “virtuous monument” (1-391); the imagery used to describe her sleeping beauty has a preponderance of the elements of light and white colours–“lily”, “coral”, “ivory”, “snow-white” – making her thus a symbol of married constancy and virtue (11. 386-399).

The theme of burning lust and its unhappy results lends itself easily to a didactic treatment, and Shakespeare indulges in it lavishly in his desctiption of the inner turmoil of Tarquin and Lucrece’s complaints. After pointing out that the coveting of greater profits only ends in the loss of the present gains for uncertain future benefits, Shakespeare goes on to describe how the doting Tarquin is taking such a hazard in “pawning his honour to obtain his lust” (1-156). There is even a suggestion that such a course is a kind of self-betrayal:

And for himself himself he must forsake;
Then where is truth, if there be no self-trust? (11.157-58)

The moralising manner adopted to describe the inner state of Tarquin recalls some of the medieval allegorical methods; those of a Gower or Lydgate. Tarquin is not like Aaron the Moor,⁵ an unregenerate villain wilfully persisting in a course; he is rather like Macbeth, very much aware of the enormity of the sin he is going to commit. The manner in which his psychomachy is described makes it obvious that he is a slave of his “corrupt will” guided by his “captain” “affection” (1.271). In terms of Renaissance faculty psychology, he would have been recognised as having been impelled to action by the twin alliance of will and appetitive affections against reason’s hegemony. In the psychic turmoil, which is adequately described, the lower faculties like will, fancy, affections and eyes, rebel against reason’s sovereignty making her a helpless and “spotted princess.” Like the youthful Troilus who finds that “reason and respect” make “livers pale and lustihood deject,” the equally young and rash Tarquin also scoffs at “reason” and “respect” as values that should guide only old men, not a youth like himself:

Then childish fear avaunt! debating die!
Respect and reason wait on wrinkled age!
My heart shall never countermand mine eye!
Sad pause and deep regard beseems the sage;
My part is youth, and beats these from the stage;
Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize. (11. 275.80)

Since his purpose and ends are dark and ignoble, night provides him the necessary cover for his crime, with the uproar and tumult in his heart chiming in with the death-boding cries of owls and wolves (night’s accomplices). One hears similar kind of forebodings in the cries of wolves and owls in Macbeth too; Tarquin’s situation foreshadows that of Macbeth whose psychomachy and guilt-ridden awareness of the enormity of his deed the mature Shakespeare would develop and describe with greater skill and subtlety. If Macbeth knows that he, as Duncan’s host, “should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife himself” (Macbeth, I. vit. 15-16), Tarquin too is aware that to be “a soft Fancy’s slave” is to violate the very ideals of knighthood to which he was committed by his birth and upbringing;

O shame to knighthood and to shining arms!
O foul dishonour to myhousehold’s grave!
O impious act, including all foul harms!
A martial man to be soft fancy’s slave! (11. 197-200)

The debate in his mind, on the eve of his performance of the deed, reveals his recognition that he is selling eternity to “get a toy” (trifle):

What win I if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week,
Or sell eternity to get a toy? (11.211-14)

He is conscious that he has no rational cause for the deed he is contemplating, “this siege that hath engirt his (Collatine’s) marriage” (1.24). In a sense, Tarquin is deliberately and knowingly committing what the Renaissance recognised as a sin.

Rightly, he is described as a victim of “hot-burning will”, the conventional language used for lust. Tarquin goes on to affirm:

My will is strong past reason’s weak removing: (1.243)

The function of reason–both as a directing faculty and as a counselling power – has become too “weak” to curb strong “will”; the inversion of the epithets “strong” and “weak” fairly indicates the psychological inversion that has taken place in his soul. That he has dispensed with “good thoughts” and has come to rely on “the worser sense” (or senses) is the theme of the narrator’s comments at the end of the debate:

Thus graceless holds he disputation
’Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will,
And with good thought makes dispensation,
Urging the worser sense for vantage still; (11. 246-249)

In contrast to this image of intemperate heat that marks the inward turmoil of Tarquin, images of quite another order, suggestive of light and tranquillity, are used for the description of the sleeping beauty, Lucrece, whose head resting on the pillow is likened to “a virtuous monument” (1-391) or “an April daisy on the grass” (1.395). Rhetoric “supervenes” as she awakes and asks him why he commits “this ill.” Tarquin’s reply suggests that his reason has been overpowered by his doting “will.”

“Thy beauty hath ensnar’d thee to this night,
Where thou with patience must my will abide,
My will that marks thee for my earth’s delight;
Which I to conquer sought with all my might;
But as reproof and reason beat it dead,
By thy bright beauty was it newly bred.” (11.485.490)

The argument that his “will” – meaning here lust – although beaten dead by “reason” for a while was again resurrected by her “bright beauty” only strengthens the conclusion that reason, which ought to have held supreme, has abdicated before the powers of the heart-will and the baser affections.

“But will is deaf, and bears no heedful friends;
Only he hath an eye to gaze on beauty,
And dotes on what he looks, ’gainst law or duty.” (495-97)

It is as a creature at the mercy of “affections” and lawless “will” that Tarquin would project himself. He speaks as if the course and power of affection were irresistible.

“But nothing can affection’s course control,
Or stop the headlong fury of his speed.
I know repentant tears ensue the deed,
Reproach, disdain and deadly enmity;
Yet strive I to embrace mine infancy.” (500-04)

Summoning reason and argument to her aid, Lucrece tries to fortify the forces of reason in the Roman Prince who is standing menacingly over her, sword in hand. Reminding that he is “a god, a king” and that “kings like gods should govern (control) everything” (1. 603), she persuades him to be himself and to rely on his princely wisdom, not vile “lust.” In other words, she reminds him that it is his duty, to be king of his passions as well as his subjects:

I sue for exil’d majesty’s repeal:
Let him return, and flattering thoughts retire,
His true respect will prison false desire,
And wipe the dim mist from thy doting eyne,
That thou shalt see thy state, and pity mine. (11.640-44)

The appeal is thus for a return of true regality in him (implicitly reason’s regality), a sovereignty which alone will check “false desire” and remove the “dim mist” from his “doting eyne.” Lucrece thus combines political lesson with moral philosophy in her persuasion which, however, has no effect on Tarquin overruled by passion. Tarquin himself describes his state of mind when he brushes aside Lucrece’s reasonable appeals:

“Have done”, quoth he; “my uncontrolled tide
Turns not, but swells the higher by this let.
Small lights are soon flown out, huge fires abide...” (645-47)

Before accomplishing the rape, Tarquin threatens that “enforced hate” shall “rudely tear” her if Lucrece does not yield to his lust (668-69). It has been argued that the chaste Lucrece should have either defended herself to the death or killed Tarquin, and that her suicide after the rape does not altogether absolve her of complicity. D.C. Allen has stated how, for the sixteenth century, the tragedy of Lucrece was something of a casuistical problem and how Speron, among the other humanists, remarked that a truly chaste woman would have died before surrendering but “Lucrece abandoned her virtue just as a distressed ship jettisons its cargo.” Regarding the poem in the light of the Renaissance controversy on Lucrece’s suicide, which clearly goes against Christian ethics, Allen surmises that Shakespeare, however much impressed by the tragic import of the story, must have felt “that it must be glossed in terms of Christian options”.⁶ It must be remarked, however, that as far as Lucrece’s surrender to Tarquin’s lust is concerned, Shakespeare presents her as having had no other option but to surrender when Tarquin threatened that her attempts to resist would only lead to a further defilement of her image. Brandishing his “insulting falchion aloft”, the Roman prince warns that he would kill a slave and throw her into his bed so that the world might think she was guilty of adulterous intentions. There can be no mistake about the sympathetic portrayal of Lucrece’s behaviour during this episode, however questionable on ethical grounds, her later act of suicide might appear.

The moralising over the aftermath of Tarquio’s guilty deed may sound rather too lavish and pat for modern taste. All the same, a few details in the description of Tarquin’s psychomachy deserve attention for the light they throw on Shakespeare’s use of the current psychological concepts. The consequences of Tarquin’s act, in moral terms, are dwelt on at length:

This momentary joy breeds months of pain;
This hot desire converts to cold disdain.
Pure chastity is rifled of her store,
And lust the thief, far poorer than before. (11.690-93)

The loss in moral terms is thus immense for it has not only tarnished his reputation in history but even “his soul’s fair temple.”

Besides, his soul’s fair temple is defaced,
To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
To ask the spotted princess how she fares. (11.719-721)

The “spotted princess” here is unmistakably Reason who is described in this period variously as a queen, as counsellor, and a “princess”. ⁷ The plight of the “spotted princess,” helpless in her castle besieged by her subjects–passions, is further elaborated in the following stanza which extends the meaning of the fortress consistently used in this section of the poem:

She says her subjects with foul insurrection
Have batter’d down her consecrated wall,
And by their mortal fault brought in subjection
Her immortality, and made her thrill
To living death and pain perpetual;
Which in her prescience she controlled still,
But her foresight could not forestall their will. (11.722-728)

The princess here is a spokesman for the rational soul who in theory ought to have ruled her subject-passions but who could not “forestall their will” or prevent them from battering down “her consecrated wall”. She recalls to our mind Spenser’s allegorical figure Alma (Book II, Canto 9, Faery Queen) whose castle is also described as having been subjected to an insurrection by the senses or passions, and who fortunately could count on King Arthur and the temperate Guyon to quell the insurrection. By contrast, the princess in Tarquin’s soul is “spotted” because she has neither the help of grace nor temperance to quell the rebellion; the narrator’s suggestion earlier on, while commenting on the inward struggle, was;

Thus gracellessholds he disputation
’Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will (11.246-47)

The epithet “frozen” before “conscience” a word of religious import, amplifies the meaning of another religious term “graceless” in the above passage. Lacking grace and inherent temperance, Tarquin, the comment suggests, has gone too far on the downward path to be able to act otherwise.

The metaphor of the siege plays an important part in the poem, and is a natural form of expression in an age accustomed to think of love in terms of a battle and a siege. The idea of siege here has, however, an ironic aspect in revealing the aggressive intention of the ravisher. It is equally ironic that while he is attempting an attack on Lucrece’s castle of virtue, a parallel attack on the “consecrated walls” of the inner fort of his soul is simultaneously taking place, as is evident from the passage on the “spotted princess” just discussed.

The metaphor of the siege and fall gets an extended play again in the later episode of the Troy Cloth (11.1366–1561) as well as the passage (11.1170-1176) preceding that episode. The Troy painting episode is not fortuitous altogether, for it serves as an objective correlative for the troubled emotions of Lucrece. In this episode, there is a clear equation between Tarquin and Sinon, on the one hand, and the fortress of Troy and Lucrece’s body on the other:

For even as subtle Sinon here is painted,
So sober sad, so weary and so mild,
…        …        …        …
To me came Tarquin armed to beguile
with outward honesty, but yet defil’d
With inward vice. As Priam him did cherish
So did I Tarquin,–so my Troy did perish. (11.1541-47)

The comparison of Lucrece’s body to Troy (“so my Troy did perish”) may have, according to D. C. Allen, some intimations of certain Renaissance allegorical interpretations of Vergil’s Aeneid. Citing Petrarch, Landino and Fabrino among other Renaissance allegorizers of Vergil, Allen has pointed out how Troy for them stood for the human body, plagued by sensual pleasures, which was abandoned by Aeneas (the ideal man) led by his mother celestial Venus so that he might seek divine sapience in Rome. In a like manner, Lucrece too feels impelled to leave her “Troy” (her body) ravaged by Tarquin-Sinon, so that her untainted soul may be preserved intact. It is significant that in the last section of the poem Lucrece offers justification for her suicide in terms of the metaphor of the fall of her fortress, the well-known Renaissance commonplace for the human body:

Her (Soul’s) 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,
Then 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. (11. 1170-76)

The image of “Her sacred temple spotted...corrupted, Grossly engirt with daring infamy” is an image recalling, at once, the sacred temple of the “spotted princess” used earlier for the inward soul of Tarquin. The implication here is however slightly different; it is not the soul which is “spotted” and “corrupted” but its habitat the body, which is, and must be abandoned for that very reason. Allen has argued that while Aeneas had “divine sapience” as his goal for abandoning Troy ravaged by sins, Lucrece has no such higher ideal or motive for abandoning her body. “Unfortunately, she does not aspire to divine sapience but to pagan honour. Unled by the celestial Venus, her maculate body appears to control her decision more than her immaculate soul, which, according to her own statement, only endures in “her poyson’d closet.”

Surely, it is difficult to imagine Lucrece as anything mort than an emblem of Roman honour and fidelity. At the same time, I find it difficult to go all the way with Allen in contending that Lucrece’s suicide, patently unchristian, takes something away from her tragic stature and that “Shakespeare read the story in its Christian context.” Curtis Brown Watson has given evidence of the fact that the Elizabethans shared the Pagan-humanist attitude towards suicide as a means of vindicating one’s honour and that in spite of the Christian taboo against it, the Elizabethans had a secret admiration for it in certain circumstances. Watson also relates the incident of an Elizabethan soldier, as narrated in Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Fight of the Revenge, who imitated the Roman practice in order to escape disgrace. Is it necessary, then, to view all incidents or events involving ethical dilemmas (like Othello’s suicide) in Shakespeare’s works strictly within the Christian framework of values? The Elizabethan attitudes towards such issues were ambivalent.

Lucrece’s motives for suicide are presented in the context of the Roman concept of honour and it is the fear of dishonour and shame that seems to be her overriding motive for taking the course she did.

My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife
That wounds my body so dishonoured.
’Tis honour to deprive dishonour’d life;
The one will live, the other being dead. (11.1184-87)

It is obvious that Lucrece wants to take away (“deprive”) “dishonour’d life” so that only honour may live, “the other (i. e., dishonour) being dead.” It is the same concern for honour as public esteem as underlies her statement just before her suicide;

“No, no,” quoth she, “no dame hereafter living
By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving.” (11.1714-15.)

Considering the importance attached to “honour” as a social virtue, as the esteem of the community that survives one’s death, Lucrece’s action would appear to be “rare and wonderful,” as the Renaissance understood it, and not “a little beyond forgiveness” as Allen understands it. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Lucrece is clearly sympathetic as Allen himself admits. Her exit from life, like the exits of other Roman figures in Shakespeare, has its own tragic dignity, largely motivated by an agonising concern for honour as reputation which the Elizabethans too cherished.

In the final analysis, Shakespeare’s Lucrecepoem may be regarded as presenting two concepts of love; love as lust or descent, undermining the rational faculties of the soul (Tarquin), and love as a rational concern for chastity and fidelity in marriage (Lucrece). As F. T. Prince has observed in his excellent introduction: “Venus and Adonis treats sexual desire in the spirit of romantic comedy; Lucrecedoes so in the spirit of tragedy.” Although its spirit may be tragic, the poem has an obsessive moral concern as is evident in the over-elaborate addresses to Time, Night and Opportunity, and an equally elaborate description of the episode of Troy. This obsessive moral concern takes something away from its merit as narrative art. True to its genre, it ends on a moral note showing what kind of retribution visits the deeds of unreason; the bland statement at the poem’s close draws pointed attention to the fact that Tarquin had to suffer “everlasting banishment” (1-1855) as an inevitable consequence of his unreasonable “lust in action.” The miseries of Lucrece, like the Trojan war, cast a curious light on the history of man. The poet takes the opportunity to speculate in the manner of the chorus in classical tragedy:

“Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many more? (11. 1478-79)

These lines, although written in the sixteenth century, have an authentic ring of universal appeal, transcending all ages, and could have only come from Shakespeare.

References

^l J. W. Lever “Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems”, A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Eds. Kenneth Muir and Schoenbaum. (Cambridge, 1971) P. 123.
² D. C. Allen, “Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece” Shakespeare Survey –15 ( 1962) p. 94.
³ Citations and line numbers refer to the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, Ed. F. T. Prince (London, 1961)
⁴ Liver as the seat of passion was a commonplace notion of Renaissance faculty psychology. If Tarquin’s love had been rational, its seat would not have been the liver but the mind; likewise, he would not have placed such reliance on the evidence of eyes unchecked by reason and other higher faculties. It was generally held that whatever the eyes perceived as love-worthy was to be ratified by reason, the highest and god-like faculty in the human microcosm.
⁵ How Tarquin foreshadows Macbeth in some respects becomes clear when we compare him with Aaron who is an unrepentant villain glorying in his wicked nature. Compare, for example, Aaron’s reply to Lucius’ question, “Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?”

Aar.Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day...
Wherein I did not some notorious ill;

(Titus Andronicus, V. 1.123-127; the reference here is to the Tudor Shakespeare, Ed. Peter Alexander.)
⁶ Shakespeare Survey–15 (1962), Pp. 90-91.
⁷ See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964), P. 161, for his gloss on this line that the “spotted princess” is Reason. Reason appears as a Queen in Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei(1606).