The (Un)speakability of Rape:

Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Lavinia

Laura Stampler
English Honors Thesis
Stanford University
May 14, 2010

Thesis Advisor: David Riggs

 The (Un)Speakability of Rape:
Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Lavinia

Laura Stampler
Stanford University
May 14, 2010
Thesis Advisor: Prof. David Riggs

Cover picture: Titian’s Rape of Lucretia (Tarquin and Lucretia)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………. 1

Introduction………………………........................……………..... 2

Chapter One: Lucrece…………………………………………….. 7

Chapter Two: Lavinia…………………………………………….. 39

Conclusion………………………………………………………... 60

Works Cited………………………………………………………. 65
Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor David Riggs, for his constant
support, willingness to edit and discuss, and passion for the subject matter. I cannot
imagine this process without your mentorship.

I would also like to thank the other Stanford professors who assisted me with the research
and writing stages of the paper: Professor Norbert Lain for his theories on the Rape of
Lucrece, and Prof. Patricia Parker who generously offered her time and immense
Shakespearean knowledge. Thank you Prof. Alex Woloch and Hilton Obenzinger for
your help during the fall.

Thanks also must go out to my Major Advisor, Prof. Elizabeth Tallent, who has
supported my academic endeavors and personal growth since my freshman year. Thank
you for encouraging me to write a thesis about something that I was passionate about.

Finally, I must thank my family and friends. An especially large thanks goes to Mom and
Dad for your love, encouragement, intelligence, and willingness to drop anything to take
a stressed out call or listen to an idea about a chapter.

Without all of you, this would have never been possible.

1
 Introduction

Introduction

You may trod me

in the very dirt
But still,
like dust,
I’ll rise.
- Maya Angelou

In 1594, a year in which Shakespeare was establishing his own literary voice and

identity as a dramatist, he saw two of his earliest tragedies come into print. The young

playwright completed Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, two works that gave

voice to the marginalized characters of Lavinia and Lucrece. Up until 1594, Shakespeare

had only produced the Henry IV plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps The

Taming of the Shrew. January 23, 1594 at The Rose Theatre is the first known date and

location that Titus Andronicus was produced. Philip Henslowe was the owner of the

theater, and one of his receipts serves as the first historical record of Titus Andronicus.

The play’s first quarto was then published by John Danter on February 6 of that same

year. Three months later, on May 9, The Rape of Lucrece was licensed for printing by

Richard Field. Later in 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.1 His

phase as an apprentice was complete.

Both Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece focus on heroines who have their

roles as pure and archetypal females in Roman society stolen from them when they are

victims of brutal rapes. As rape victims in their patriarchal societies -- both Lavinia and

Lucrece are citizens of ancient Rome but are written by Shakespeare for an Elizabethan

audience -- the two characters lose their fundamental function in society. In fact, there
1
David Riggs, Shakebase, 2004, Stanford University Department of English, 3 May 2010
<http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/shakebase/>.

2
 Introduction

was a strong belief in Roman times that the pollution of women’s honor could be

transferred to their families, forever shaming their names.2 Their rapists were fully aware

of the ramifications of rape, that the act of rape would erase the female victim from

society in terms of the respected role which she had previously held. The consequences

of rape often erased the female from existence as well; the suicide of a rape victim was

deemed the honorable and appropriate course through which the victim could expunge

her dishonor.3

Shakespeare focuses on the dilemma that Lavinia and Lucrece face when

approaching their new status as victims of rape rather than as spotless daughter and wife.

The effects of the crimes against them carry both emotional and physical ramifications.

Whereas the women were once beautiful, their physical appearance is now contaminated

by their spoiled purity. Whereas they were once chaste, they are now defiled. But,

interestingly, whereas they were once rhetorically inoffensive, even reticent, a favored

trait for women in their societies, they now find a voice with which they learn to express

the full range of their emotions and come to terms with their altered state of victim-hood.

Thus, even though Lavinia and Lucrece lose their once impeccable identities and

cherished roles within their societies, Shakespeare endows them with more complex and

individualistic identities, supplying them with the rhetorical and communicative skills to

gain ownership of their interiority and cathartically express it to others in an act of

catharsis.

Their predicament is especially poignant given the uncertainty and

inexpressibility of the crime of rape against a woman in Roman and Elizabethan legal

2
Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1982) 23.
3
Ibid. 12.

3
 Introduction

contexts. While in contemporary Western society, rape is seen as an intimate and

personal crime against the victim’s body and person, this was not the case in the period

from or about which Shakespeare wrote. Given the structure of ancient Roman society,

the violated woman was not fully embraced as the victim of the crime, for rape was seen

as an iniuria publica, a public wrong, rather than an iniuria privita, a private wrong.4 The

word “rape” comes from the Latin verb “rapere” which means, “to seize or take by

force.”5 In the words of a Roman legal dictionary, “raptus” was defined as “The

abduction of a woman against the will of her parents. The abductor (raptor) was

punished with death from the time of Constatntine, under whom raptus became a crimen

publicum and so was the woman (until Justinian) when she had consented.”6 Thus, rape

was considered a property crime against male prerogative rather than a crime against the

female body as the law was codified after time of the rape of Lucrece, which directly led

to the beginning of the Roman Republic. As Cicero wrote in 46 BC, even though it was

unquestionable that Sextus Tarquinus did “break that eternal Law by violating Lucretia,”

there was actually “no written law against rape at Rome in the reign of Lucius

Tarquinius.” 7 Therefore, rape was a crime that led to great emotional pain and likely the

death of the victim, be it at her own hand or that of her rapist, but it was not viewed by

the society as a crime against the woman.

Ovid’s classical depiction of the rape of Philomela in the Metamorphoses informs

Shakespeare’s exploration of a rape victim’s emotional trajectory following her assault.

4
George Mousourakis, The Historical and Institutional Context of Roman Law
(Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2003) 30. <http://www.google.books.com>.
5
Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary on Roman Law (Philadelphia: The American
Philosophical Society, 1991) 667. <http://google.books.com>.
6
Ibid. 667.
7
Cicero, The Republic The Laws, Trans: Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 126.
<http://www.googlebooks.com>.

4
 Introduction

When the virgin Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, on a trip to visit her

sister, the now stained Princess of Athens rebukes her attacker with the passionate verses:

The day will come, or late or very soon

When you shall find just payment for your crimes.
I’ll tell the world how you have ravished me,
And if you keep me here within the forest,
I’ll make each rock, each stone weep with my story,
And if God lives, heaven and He shall hear it.8

Believing that she has nothing left to lose, the once soft-spoken Philomela promises to

explore the reaches of her voice and communicate her narrative to all who will listen,

animate and inanimate, mortal and holy. Threatened with exposure as a rapist, Tereus

cuts out Philomel’s tongue in an attempt to make it possible to decry his crime – making

the rape a literally unspeakable act. But although Philomela cannot tell her story through

words, she embraces visual and artistic forms of expression. Taking control over her

identity, she weaves a pictographic story of the crime that has occurred to show to her

sister, Procne. Flung into a bacchic rage of madness,9 the two women decide to kill

Tereus’ children (who are the sons of Procne, the nephews of Philomela) and feed them

to Tereus. Philomela communicates her story through physical art and her anger through

body movements. The victim becomes a performance artist, “her wild hair/ Flying,

leaped up to him, tossing the boy’s/ Blood-dabbed head into his face.”10 During the

women’s escape from the enraged Tereus, the gods take pity and turn them into birds so

that Philomela, whose name translates to “lovely song” in Greek, can forever sing her

story as a nightingale.

8
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Trans: Horace Gregory (New York: Signet, 2009) 179.
9
Jane O. Newman, ""And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness": Philomela,
Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare Quarterly Vol.45 No.3
(1994) 316. <jstor.org>.
10
Ovid. 182.

5
 Introduction

Shakespeare adopts many of these conventions that enabled a forcibly silenced

victim of rape to express her sorrow, outrage, and inner-life through both expanded

speech and performative means of communication. The rapists of Titus Andronicus and

The Rape of Lucrece try to quiet their victims with varying degrees of severity. Taking

note of Tereus’ failure, Chiron and Demetrius violently dismember Lavinia, severing her

tongue and her arms, so that she is unable to communicate either through speech or sign.

Tarquin, on the other hand, attempts to constrain Lucrece’s ability to communicate

through veiled threats and shaming techniques. But whatever the methods that render

their experiences of victim-hood unspeakable, both Lavinia and Lucrece find the strength

within themselves that enables them to overcome their oppressors and work through their

grief through various forms of self-expression. By telling their stories, the women are

able to seek retribution for the crimes committed against them.

The different literary forms of Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece – the

first is a play and the second a narrative poem – highlight the varying ways in which

victimized women can communicate their suffering. These works allow the victims the

ability to express themselves in the manner that best fits their circumstances. In Titus, a

staged production, Lavinia must become a performance artist, using her body to get down

on the ground and hungrily grasp a staff in her mouth. Lucrece, however, exists within

the realm of a narrative poem, meant to be read by the literate elite, which better serves

her private drama of spoken and inner monologue. Be it through speech, movement, art,

song, or literary allusion, Lavinia and Lucrece are both able to overcome efforts to

silence them when they take control of their situations and become the authors of their

own fates.

6
 Lucrece

Chapter One: Lucrece

The story of the rape of Lucrece far predates the Shakespearean era. Painters,

poets, dramatists, and historians have immortalized the tale as a seminal human drama

underlying the birth of an empire. According to the historical legend, under the veil of

night, Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Roman king, breaks into the bedchamber of Lucretia,

a fellow Roman officer’s wife. Prompted first by Collatinus’ boasting of his wife’s

chastity and then by his own observation of her incandescent beauty, Tarquinius forcibly

rapes Lucretia. A woman who once functioned as an exemplar of the virtuous Roman

wife, the violated Lucretia tells her husband, her father, and their fellow soldier Brutus,

which literally translates to “dullard,” of Tarquinius’ crime and then kills herself. Seeing

the opportunity, Brutus pulls the still warm knife from Lucrece’s lifeless body and by that

very weapon swears to overthrow the Tarquin royal family. Rallying the Roman people

around Lucretia’s limp body, Brutus begins a revolution that leads to the exile of the

Roman royalty from the country.11 Thus Brutus ends the Roman monarchy and

establishes the Roman Republic in its place – a republic that would last 450 years and

inspire and inform the foundation of governments for millennia to come.

As Seneca states in his Consolation to Marcia, “To Brutus we owe liberty, but to

Lucretia we owe Brutus.”12 Brutus, who became one of the first consuls of Rome

alongside Collatinus, incited the Roman people to action in 509 BC directly and

11
This is the outline of the story of the rape of Lucretia as presented by numerous
classical historians including Livy, Ovid, Dionysius, Diodorus, etc.
12
Lucius Annasus Seneca, “On Consolation to Marcia,” Moral Essays Trans. John W.
Basore. (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1928-35). <http://stoics.com/seneca_essays_book_2.
html>.

7
 Lucrece

explicitly because the king’s son had violated Lucretia. Thus, Seneca honors Lucretia,

for it is her rape and consequent suicide that serves as the catalyst that inspired men to

political action. When Seneca writes of Lucretia’s role, it is in relation to Brutus, the

revolutionary, and in the context of the Roman revolution.

In a modern context, rape is understood to be a personal and intimate offense.

The scope of its effect is small as it rests primarily within the interiority of the rape

victim and with those who are closest to her. Historically, the exploration of Lucrece’s

rape has not taken her inner experience into account. The classical sources examined in

this paper demonstrate that for the early writers, Lucretia’s experience serves primarily as

a vehicle that incites political change.

In Livy and Ovid’s retelling of the rape of Lucrece, in Fasti II and The History of

Rome from its Foundations, respectively, Lucretia is not given space within the lines of

text to process the crime that has been committed against her, to register her suffering. In

Livy’s historical account, the narrative cuts immediately from Lucretia’s rape -- Tarquin

riding away, “proud of his success” -- to the victim summoning Collatinus, Brutus, her

father, and Valerious to explain the crime that has occurred, followed by her suicide.

Lucretia is resolute in her determination to kill herself, and she does so without question

or self-analysis. Even after Brutus’ and Collatinus’ attempt to assuage her sense of guilt,

blaming Tarquinus completely for the crime, Lucretia is aghast. They can do with him

what they will, she states, but “Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste

women to escape what they deserve.”13 Even in death, Livy establishes Lucretia as a

feminine ideal who wants to serve as an exemplary figure. Adultery – and to Livy’s

13
Livy, The History of Rome from its Foundations, Trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New
York: Penguin, 1971) 83. <http://www.google..books.com>.

8
 Lucrece

mind even the non-volitional adultery occasioned by forcible rape – was an offense that

was punishable by death in Roman society, and Lucretia chooses to set an example for

Roman women as a whole.14 For her, such things are unequivocal. There is not a

moment of hesitation, for “with these words she drew a knife from under her robe, drove

it into her heart, and fell forward, dead,” forever to symbolize both the honorable Roman

Empire and virtuous Roman womanhood. This is not to suggest that Livy shows Lucretia

as entirely unfeeling. She is described as “unhappy,” “in deep distress,” and as having

“tears” in her eyes; however, this is all that is provided of her internal suffering.15

Although Ovid does linger more substantially than Livy on Lucretia’s inner

monologue when Tarquinius first breaks into her room and she realizes what is about to

occur, providing her with more interiority, he, too, moves directly from the scene of her

rape to the scene with her father and husband. Ovid writes:

Now day had dawned: she sat with hair unbound,

Like a mother who must go to her son’s funeral.
She called her aged father and her loyal husband
From the camp, and both came without delay.16

What is important to note about Ovid and Livy’s stylistic choices here is that they never

give readers the opportunity to see Lucretia alone. She is never unaccompanied or

uninfluenced by the physical presence of men, be it a male attacker or a patriarch. She

never exists entirely in her own context and is never seen coming to terms with her

experience as a rape victim. Thus, even though Lucretia is depicted here as an important

figure, she is not allowed to be complex character.

14
Carol D. Williams. “‘Silence, Like a Lucrece Knife’: Shakespeare and the Meanings
of Rape.” The Yearbook of English Studies Vol.23 (1993) 95. <Jstor.org>.
15
Livy 83.
16
Ovid, Fasti, Trans: A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodard (London: Penguin Group, 2000) 204.

9
 Lucrece

The early authors and artists studied here represent Lucretia as a symbol for the

Roman Republic rather than as a three-dimensional character. As scholar Ian Donaldson

writes, “the agent in this story is a man, Brutus; Lucretia, the woman, merely suffers.”17

Yet even Lucretia’s suffering in these works is examined only through the lens of a

patriarchal society. Her suffering is important not because of its effect on Lucretia

herself, but rather because of its larger scale and broader impact on the Roman people as

a whole. Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece The Tragedy of Lucretia illustrates

this perspective18:

The painting is broken into three different panels. The left-hand scene depicts Tarquinius

entering a resistant Lucretia’s home, weapon unsheathed. The right-hand scene shows

Lucretia’s collapsed body, held up by her shocked male relations. The central scene,

which accounts for most of the space on the canvas, is a representation of Lucretia’s dead

body on display for the Roman soldiers. Brutus literally stands over her body, exhorting

the men into revolt. This is the primary – literally the central -- focus of the painting; the

17
Donaldson 10.
18
Sandro Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia, 1496-1504.

10
 Lucrece

dead Lucretia’s impact on the soldiers is the overarching message of the artwork.

Viewers do not see her suffering; they do not see her transformation from pure to

polluted.

It is William Shakespeare’s narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that grants

Lucrece the written space not only to suffer but also to contemplate and understand the

crime that has been committed against her body and her person. Just as Hamlet faces the

paradigm of “to be or not to be,” so Shakespeare allows Lucrece to vacillate between her

potential trajectories as a rape victim in her society and to consider her course of action.

Livy and Ovid omit this crucial step entirely, suggesting that in Lucretia’s mind, it is a

given that she will kill herself and that she will do so after announcing her crime to her

male family members. Shakespeare, however, dedicates 833 lines to the period between

the moment when Tarquin leaves Lucrece’s chamber after the rape to the point when the

messenger brings Collatine and his entourage home upon Lucrece’s command. In this

middle portion of his poem, Shakespeare grants Lucrece the right to come to terms with

her experience and seizer her identity as a victim of sexual assault. While her ideas are

undeniably imbued with the realities of the patriarchal society in which she exists, she is

still able to find her own voice as a woman and as a victim.

While Lucrece’s rape and suicide serve as two key moments of the Shakespeare’s

poem, Lucrece’s complexity is revealed in the intermittent text between those two points.

In fact, C.S. Lewis wrote that the lines that come before the rape in which Shakespeare

describes Collatine’s foolishly bragging about his wife’s unsurpassable beauty and

chastity, a speech which Joel Fineman claims leads directly to Lucrece’s rape,19 were

19
Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape.” Representations,
No.20 (Autumn, 1987): 31 <http://www.jstor.org>.

11
 Lucrece

“three stanzas of digression.”20 While Livy described Collatine’s hubristic description of

his wife at great length, Shakespeare discusses it briefly. Furthermore, Lewis even

believes that this male focused portion was less fascinating than the careful analysis of

Lucrece’s inner turmoil. As Donaldson continues his analysis of Shakespeare’s

interpretation of the story he writes, “No other version of the Lucretia story explores

more minutely or with greater psychological insight the mental processes of the two

major characters [Tarquin and Lucrece], their inconsistent wavering to and fro, before

they bring themselves finally to reluctant action.”21

The narrative form of his poem allows Shakespeare to use direct and indirect

dialogue. The narrator explores Lucrece’s spoken and unspoken convictions and

hesitations in great depth. As Livy and Ovid recount the legend, Lucrece has a less

substantial inner life that is revealed to the readership. Even though Shakespeare’s

Lucrece remains constrained by her society’s expectations for an ideal female character,

the Bard allows Lucrece to establish her own individual interiority. Thus, her suicide is

“reluctant” rather than a given, as it was represented in the preceding classical works.22

This chapter will examine how Lucrece, who is endowed with a spoken and narrative

voice which Lavinia is denied after her tongue is cut from her mouth, uses verbal and

non-verbal forms of communication, including art, songs, and physical movement similar

to theatrical expression or performance art, to come to terms with her identity as a victim,

thus allowing her to be presented to the reader as a more fully realized, more richly

dimensional woman.

20
Williams 109.
21
Donaldson 44.
22
Donaldson 8.

12
 Lucrece

At the beginning of the poem, when Lucrece exists on the page as pure and

undefiled, able to fully embrace her title as “Lucrece the chaste” with her body and soul

(7), she very much falls in line with the characteristics that define the silent female

archetype. Before her body is polluted by Tarquin’s sexual assault and her role as

honorable wife is called into question, Lucrece does not communicate through

vocalization but rather through bodily expression. In fact, up until her rape, the narrator’s

description of Lucrece relies entirely on her physical attributes and movements, as she

says not a word until she is forced to do so in order to stave off her rapist. Until then,

Lucrece masters the art of nonverbal communication. When Tarquin enters her house in

the guise of a solicitous guest and friend to her husband, praising Collatine’s chivalry,

Lucrece responds not with words but rather expresses her immense joy through physical

action; she “wordless so greets heaven for [Collatine’s] success” (120). This graceful

form of signed communication is consistent throughout her naively innocent encounter

with the man who later rapes her. When Tarquin, lost in deliberation over whether or not

he should carry out the rape, recounts their conversation, he lingers on:

How her fear did make her color rise!

First red as roses that on lawn we lay,
Then white as lawn, the roses took away.
And how her hand in my hand being locked
Forced it to tremble with her loyal fear!
Which struck her sad, and then it faster rocked
Until her husband’s welfare she did hear;
Whereat she smiled with so sweet a cheer”
(256-64)
Lucrece speaks via hand gestures, in small movements and in smiles. When he describes

her, Tarquin does not recall speech -- the reader has yet to hear Lucrece’s voice -- but

rather her emotions that are conveyed through bodily movement and facial expressions

that are both innocuous and alluring. Here Tarquin’s ruminations transform Lucrece into

13
 Lucrece

a work of art. Her face is palate on which painted-on blushing reds and fearful whites

interact and play off one another to communicate a story. Lucrece’s emotion is registered

through her beauty and her coloring. This is not the first time that the chaste and silent

figure has been described in such visual and vibrant terms. Earlier in the poem,

Shakespeare writes that “when virtue bragged, beauty would blush for shame;/ When

beauty boasted blushes, in despite/ Virtue would stain that o’er with silver white” (54-6).

As the reds and whites stand in contrast to one another, they fight a “silent war of lilies

and roses” (71). Even the clashing colors battle each other in silence.

As Lucrece’s reactions are entirely linked to her allegiance to and empathy for her

husband, and concern for his welfare, Tarquin finds her expressions of loyalty captivating

and provocative. Tarquin’s desire for Lucrece is based both on physical attraction and

competition with Collatine, who has bragged about his wife’s beauty. It is fascinating

that Tarquin’s recollection of Lucrece fearfully clutching onto his hand when she hears

about danger to her husband is one of the factors that launches Tarquin towards his final

decision to rape the chaste Lucrece (for before this point in the poem, Tarquin was still

debating the crime; but after, he is resolute) because it is handholding that seals the fate

of another innocent Shakespearean heroine. In The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes

witnesses his wife Hermione holding Polixenes’ hand while speaking to Polixenes in

private, it that “hot” action that convinces Leontes that she has been unfaithful, and thus

Leontes decides to sentence his wife to death (1.2.107). Even the innocent gesture of

handholding by the faithful and chaste can doom them.

Shakespeare makes it unequivocally clear that Lucrece herself is an innocent

victim who resists her rapist at every stage of the attack. As Tarquin breaks into

14
 Lucrece

Lucrece’s bedchamber, wandering from the outer courtyards to the inner rooms of the

house, “each unwilling portal yields him way” (309). Nature and Lucrece’s property are

thus depicted as resistant to his incursion, but nevertheless they yield. Lucrece, herself,

never yields. Tarquin attempts many different rhetorical tactics to gain Lucrece’s

consent. Tarquin threatens Lucrece’s eternal honor, swearing that if she does not consent,

he will murder both her and a male slave, placing their two dead bodies naked in bed to

be found next to one another with the appearance of sexual impropriety, Livy writes that

“Lucretia yielded”23 and Ovid that “Overcome by fear for her reputation, the girl was

conquered.”24 Unlike Ovid and Livy’s Lucrece, Shakespeare’s Lucrece doesn’t ever

allow herself to be conquered but was forcibly overpowered to the end. She refuses

Tarquin both physically and verbally. It is only when Lucrece comes to believe that

spoken words are her only possible defense against her stronger assailant that she finds

her voice. When Ovid’s Tarquinius prompts Lucretia to speak, she cannot. But when

Tarquin threatens Shakespeare’s Lucrece, saying that he will ruin her family name by

concocting a story of adultery that will be “sung by children in succeeding times” (523),

slowly Lucrece begins to speak, first with “her pity pleading eyes” (561) but then with

her voice. Lucrece’s first speech to Tarquin comes as a struggle, “her accent breaks…

twice doth she begin” (566-7), but when she is finally able to launch her plea, her

language unfolds with eloquence and grace. Lucrece’s arguments are not only fluent and

well-phrased, but rhetorically sound.

Just as Tarquin employs many tactics to try to convince Lucrece to concede, so

does Lucrece demonstrate flexibility and range in her efforts to stave off her attacker.

23
Livy 83.
24
Ovid 204.

15
 Lucrece

Lucrece appeals to Tarquin with “sighs like whirlwinds… woman’s moans… my tears,

my sighs, my groans” (586-8), begging for him to show compassion. She cries out to

him directly, “To thee, to thee, my heaved-up hands appeal” (638), raising her arms

towards heaven, punctuating her speech with her fluid physical motions. She uses the

rhetorical device of repetition, connoting a desperate plea. She then appeals to his

conscience, which has been conflicted throughout the poem, as she indicts his decency as

a man and as royalty. It is at this point that Tarquin stops her speech, warning that his

“uncontrolled tide/ Turns not, but swells the higher by this let” (645-6), implying that her

verbal resistance only amplifies his lust. Jocelyn Catty writes, “it is clear both that verbal

resistance is the only kind open to her and that this resistance is ineffectual, not just

because it is met with physical violence but because its effect on the rapist is erotically

arousing.”25

While analysis is consistent with what Tarquin expresses to Lucrece, there is an

alternate explanation for Tarquin’s declaration that Lucrece’s protests only make him

more determined in his lust. When Lucrece refuses to yield and continues to beg Tarquin

for his mercy and to forget his sexual inclinations, “low vassals to thy state” (666),

Tarquin cracks. He cannot bear to hear another word from Lucrece and cries “No

more… by heaven I will not hear thee” (667). To ensure her silence, Tarquin then

physically, forcibly quiets Lucrece “with her own white fleece her voice controlled/

Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold./ For with the nightly linen that she wears/ He

pens her piteous clamors in her head” (678-81). Thus the resistant Lucrece is muted.

Tarquin’s action here implies not that he is aroused by Lucrece’s words as much as he

25
Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England, (GB:
Macmillan Press LTD, 1999) 67.

16
 Lucrece

feels shamed by them to the extent that he cannot bear to hear them any longer because

his conscience will block his premeditated course of action. Her words have emotional

power over him but cannot prevent his sexual brutalization of her. Adding to the trauma

of the crime that is being committed against her body, Lucrece is forcibly prevented from

using her voice during her actual rape. Instead intended vocalizations “clamor” inside

her head. Tarquin stuffs Lucrece’s bed-linens, the same linens that he is about to sully,

into her mouth. The act of inserting the bedsheets between Lucrece’s lips mirrors the act

of vaginal penetration that is about to occur. Lucrece has only just discovered her voice

and the power that it holds, but Tarquin contains it easily on a physical level. During her

rape, Lucrece is overpowered by a man both physically and verbally, thus, throughout the

remainder of the lyric narrative she must struggle to reassert control over her body and

voice.

Before fully examining the rhetorical trajectory of the decision-making process

that leads to Lucrece’s suicide, it is important for readers to understand the complexities

that a female rape victim faced in the Roman historical context. Rape was seen as a

property crime against the male possessor as opposed to a physical violation against the

female body. When Collatine describes Lucrece to Tarquin, she is his “treasure” (16), his

“priceless wealth” (17), his “fortune” (19) and his “rich jewel” (34). This description

portrays Lucrece as essentially inanimate, a rich and sparkling cache of riches that can be

possessed or even, potentially, stolen. Catharine R. Stimpson writes, “in Shakespeare

only well-born women are raped, their violation becomes one of property, status and

symbolic worth as well. The greater those values, the greater the sense of power their

17
 Lucrece

conquest confers upon the rapist. Because men rape what other men possess.”26 When

Tarquin deliberates about the moral issues of raping Lucrece, he states, “Had Collatinus

killed my son or sire,/ Or lain ambush to betray my life,… [I] Might have excuse to work

upon his wife” (232-5). This statement suggests that there is a context in which rape

would be an excusable action. In this context, Tarquin is in the wrong morally not

because he attacks an innocent woman, but rather because her husband has done nothing

to warrant a violation of his property rights.

Lucrece is not associated as being a part of her own body leading up to and during

the rape. This depersonalization can be observed when Tarquin blazons Lucrece’s body

directly before the rape. A blazon is text that describes either a shield and/or the human

body; it is a rhetorical form of praise that brings the human body into the artistic realm.

Critic Nancy Vickers notes Tarquin’s use of heraldry in his description of Lucrece’s face,

citing the warring reds and whites on Lucrece’s cheeks as if they were painted on a shield

(71).27 When Tarquin enters Lucrece’s room, he breaks down her body into discreet

components, depersonalizing her by cataloging her body parts: “her lily hand her rosy

cheek,” her lips which he imagines to be “swelling on either side to want his bliss,” “her

eyes like marigolds,” “Her hair like golden threads” and finally “Her breasts like ivory

globes encircled” (386, 389, 397, 407). His passions rise in a rhetorical crescendo until

he can no longer suppress his lust and he grabs her naked breast. Tarquin dissects

Lucrece’s body, effectively separating the parts of her body from one another and,

through objectification, from Lucrece, the woman, herself. He is the artist, molding and

26
Catharine R. Stimpson. Where the meanings are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces.
(Methuen Inc: NY, 1998) 78.
27
Nancy J. Vickers, “This Heraldry in Lucrece’s Face,” Poetics Today Vol.6 No.1/2
(1985) 178. <http://www.jstor.org>.

18
 Lucrece

reshuffling her being. Given the obvious challenges to Lucrece’s individual identity,

Lucrece’s primary struggle is to become her own artist and take charge over her body.

Immediately after describing Lucrece’s rape, Shakespeare comments that she

“hath lost a dearer thing than life” (687), her chastity. Given her social milieu, this

statement is not hyperbolic but reflects Lucrece’s reality. She can no longer serve her

function as a model Roman wife. When Lucrece considers her future, she mourns her

now “hapless life,” crying out, “O, that is gone for which I sought to live” (1045, 51). It

is evident that Collatine did hold Lucrece in high esteem primarily for her purity and

untainted beauty. Now, not only her chastity but also her beauty has been diminished.

She has been transformed -- her once “lively colour kill’d with deadly cares,” and her

once “fair cheeks [now] over-washed with woe” (1592, 1224). Lucrece’s defilement has

spread from her interior to her exterior being. All of the qualities for which she was held

in high regard have been polluted by the rape. Furthermore, as Ian Donaldson discusses

in his book The Rapes of Lucretia, Lucrece is faced with the “transferred pollution” of

her shame that will spread to her family. Lucrece’s husband’s and children’s names will

be forever tainted by the act that was committed against her. 28 This is the family to

whom Lucrece has dedicated her life. Lucrece’s function and purpose has been to

provide her family with honor; to shame them would represent failure in her role as a

Roman matriarch.

Matters for Lucrece and her family are further complicated by the possibility that

Lucrece may be pregnant as a result of the rape. Jocelyn Catty describes Early English

laws from the Elizabethan period that were set out in The Lawes Resolutions of Womens

Rights insofar as they relate to rape law, particularly focusing on the issue of consent and
28
Donaldson 23.

19
 Lucrece

pregnancy. At the time, it was believed that a female could not conceive unless she

climaxed. This created a paradox in the legal response to women who became pregnant

as a result of forcible rape because it was believed that if a woman achieved an orgasm

then it must follow that she enjoyed the sexual intercourse and, therefore, must have

consented to the sexual act. The Lawes Resolutions, in fact, states that if a woman

conceives “there is no rape; for none can conceiue without consent.”29 Even though

Shakespeare’s Lucrece very clearly resisted throughout Tarquin’s assault, for an

Elizabethan reader, her body could betray her mind. If pregnant, Lucrece would be seen

as a willing adulteress (and rape and adultery were viewed as equivalents by Roman

eyes). During the relevant period in Rome, the punishment for making one’s husband a

cuckold was death.30

If Lucrece conceives during her rape, her pregnancy will not only threaten her

own sense of herself, forcing her to ask herself if she could have somehow consented, but

her family as well. Tarquin taunts Lucrece when he tells her to imagine “Thy kinsmen

hang their heads at this disdain,/ Thy issue blurr’d with nameless bastardy” (521-2)—the

shame of a bastard child. In effect, Tarquin is blackmailing Lucrece to keep quiet about

her rape. Evidentally this would mean that the child would be raised as her husband’s to

avoid familial and personal disgrace. Lucrece takes the possibility of her pregnancy very

seriously and during a later lament speaks to the absent Collatine through apostrophe,

declaring that “This bastard graff,” this child by Tarquin, "shall never come to growth,/

He shall not boast who did thy stock pollute,/ That thou art doting father of his fruit”

(1062-4). The bastard child would not only contaminate her family name, but it would

29
Catty 16.
30
Donaldson 24.

20
 Lucrece

also threaten the familial structure as a whole, complicating inheritance and succession.31

The fruit of Tarquin’s loins cannot be allowed to germinate. Lucrece must end the

presumptive child’s life, along with her own. This is also interesting because if Lucrece

is viewed as an entirely Roman character then this legal concept would not have occurred

to her, but if she is Elizabethan, then it would have.

Following her rape, Shakespeaer’s Lucrece contemplates her status as a victim,

but never questions the fact that her life as she has come to know it is over and that her

suicide is necessary. In Roman times, to kill oneself after being raped was customary.

Suicide was the honorable course of action. Lucrece is universally depicted as a woman

with unyielding conventional values and this stringency defines Lucrece’s reality. Saint

Augustine argued against this reasoning, retroactively protesting Roman laws and

appealing to the judges’ sensibilities with respect to rape victims’ suicides. In The City of

God Against the Pagans, he declares his opposition to Lucrece’s suicide for ““When

physical violation has involved no change in the intention of chastity by any consent to

the wrong, then the guilt attaches only to the ravisher, and not at all to the woman

forcibly ravished without any consent on her part.”32 Under Augustine’s reasoning, only

one person, the rapist, committed adultery, yet the innocent soul, the female victim, is

punished. But Augustine views Lucrece in terms of Christian doctrine when she exists in

a pre-Christian society. While the Christians were more concerned with the state of the

soul, the Romans gave greater credence to the importance of pride and of personal

property.33

31
Donaldson 24.
32
Saint Augustine, City of God, Trans: Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003)
28. <http://books.google.com>.
33
Donaldson 50.

21
 Lucrece

Carolyn D. Williams writes that Lucrece exists in the diametrically opposed

contexts of “shame” and “guilt” cultures; Rome would value “shame” culture while

Augustine and the Christians value “guilt”. Her “shame” lies in the fact that in spite of

her protests during the crime, her body was still irrevocably defiled and “her physical

condition determines her status.” The state of her “guilt” would be contingent upon the

state of the victim’s mind during the attack. Thus her shame de-emphasizes the

importance of speech while the alleviation of her guilt depends on it. She must prove to

herself that she was not guilty of a crime.34

Hence, when Lucrece speaks about the crime that has been committed against her

and the state of her soul after the sexually violation, she is not questioning the

inevitability or correctness of her end fate of suicide but rather considering how she is

going to get there. John Roe likens Lucrece’s behavior to that of Hamlet insofar as they

both experience “self division” due to circumstances outside of their personal control.

They both experience ethical dilemmas and use the form of complaint to sort out their

reasoning.35 Every aspect of Lucrece’s final fatal act appears to come easily and

naturally in Livy and Ovid. But this is not the case for Shakespeare’s Lucrece. To begin

with, Lucrece just doesn’t know which course of action she should take, whether to kill

herself immediately and alone or later in front of her family. She is unsure how she

should communicate her crime, if at all. Through a long process of wavering back and

forth, questioning her every belief, Lucrece learns to become the master of her voice and

34
Williams 94.
35
Mary Jo Kietzman, ““What Is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?” Lucrece’s
Complaint and Shakespeare’s Poetic Agency.” Modern Philology, Vol.97, No.1 (Aug., 1999)
22. <http://www.jstor.org>.

22
 Lucrece

convictions even if, in her social context, she is helpless, in a situation that mandates

death by her own hand.

Immediately following her rape, Lucrece is reduced to a primal speechless and

animalistic state. Lying ravished on the ground, Lucrece “like a wearied lamb lies

panting there,” unable to catch her breath or speak a word (737). She then, “desperate,

with her nails her flesh does tear” in an attempt to scratch away what both she and her

society perceive as her fault, her beauty, and to further mar her newly ruined body (739).

But, now that her mouth is no longer stuffed, Lucrece cannot stay silent for long.

Lucrece, for the first time completely alone, has space and freedom to explore her

emotional state through a rambling and confused monologue, which is how Shakespeare

registers her confusion. Testing the limits of her rhetorical abilities, Lucrece’s first

statements are surprising given her hitherto pure and moral character. Likening Tarquin

to the night, she wishes him to rape the “silver-shining queen,” the moon, and the stars,

“her twinkling handmaids too,” so that she will have “co-partners in [her] pain” (786,

787, 789). Modern psychologists tell us that victims of assault experience various stages

of anger before reaching acceptance.36 Therefore, it is understandable that Lucrece

would behave in a manner that is darker and out of character. Deeply affected and

darkened by the sexual assault, Lucrece’s voice is now opened to the expression of more

sinister inclinations. She has been left to “bear the load of the lust [Tarquin] left behind”

(734), and Lucrece’s wish for Tarquin to rape others is an example of her spreading his

lust as she wishes more rape upon others. Livy and Ovid did not portray Lucrece as a

selfish woman, but her desire to be surrounded by other victims in Shakespeare seems to

36
Psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ theories of the five stages of grief after death have
been applied to rape in a study by Utah State University.

23
 Lucrece

suggest a moral ambiguity within a character who has been traditionally depicted less

equivocally. As her range of emotional and moral responses is enlarged, she becomes a

more complex character.

Grappling to understand the implications of her rape, Lucrece’s speech is fraught

with ambivalence. She wavers between whom she blames, be it herself or Tarquin or

another, and at what point in time she wants to die. She changes her mind as to whether

she wants to regale the Roman masses (or even her husband) with the story of her

violation or keep it an intimate secret. There are very few constants; “Sometime her grief

is dumb and hath no words/ Sometime ‘tis mad and too much talk affords” (1104-5). Her

ability to speak with eloquence, if at all, is as unpredictable as her emotional state.

At first, Lucrece questions the extent of her own guilt in the rape—she does not

know if she should be blamed for having entertained Tarquin (841). But then, less than

100 lines later, she blames him entirely, calling him “guilty” four times to begin four

consecutive lines (918-21). This repetition of the word “guilt” is like the hammering in

of a nail. Lucrece say it again and again, and with every repetition, Tarquin’s culpability

becomes more and more embedded in her mind.

At this crucial moment in the text, Lucrece realizes that she has the power to be

the author of her own fate. She even declares, “I am the mistress of my fate” (1120).

During her rape, Tarquin told her that “thou with patience must my will abide-/ My will

that marks thee for my earth’s delights” (486-7). This assertion is a play on both “will”

meaning “penis” and also that he will “mark” her, essentially write on her. Lucrece

becomes a textual body of which Tarquin is the initial writer, making her read the story

24
 Lucrece

that he has written.37 Hence, the assault is written on her face. Lucrece wishes that day

would never break for she fears that the sun will expose her sin and “like water that doth

eat in steel,/ Upon my cheeks what helpless shame I feel” (755-6). She is afraid that her

face has been marked and her shame will always be visible as it is painted on her visage.

The rising sun is feared for the “light will show character in my brow/ The story of sweet

chastity’s decay” (807-8). She fears that her story has been written on her face where

Tarquin has written it for her. She experiences guilt and shame both inside and out. Yet,

this changes when she attributes blame to Tarquin. When she announces his culpability

again and again, crying as she speaks, Lucrece realizes that her tears have the power to

“blot old books and alter their contents” (948). She can rewrite her story and alter the

shame that Tarquin has written upon her. Lucrece’s tears can wash away the offensive

story. She has the power to speak for herself and to author her own fate.

This first revelation of her own authorial power propels Lucrece to spring into

physical action to take charge of her destiny. Lucrece decides to end her shame

immediately, searching high and low for some “desperate instrument of death” (1036),

resolute in her determination to die. But then, just as easily as the idea came to her, it

leaves. Lucrece decides that it would be senseless to kill herself after so recently fearing

death by Tarquin’s hands.

Lucrece then moves onto her next dilemma: what she should say to her husband.

Lucrece could have killed herself and been done with it; Collatine might never have

known and could have been spared from the dishonor. At one juncture, Lucrece calls out

37
Amy Greenstadt. “ “Read it in Me”: The Author’s Will in Lucrece.” Shakespeare
Quarterly. Vol. 57, Iss. 1 (Spring, 2006). <http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFulltext
.do?id=R03835603&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft>.

25
 Lucrece

to her absent husband saying, “I will not poison thee with my attaint” proposing that

instead she will lie, “My tongue shall utter all; mine eyes like sluices,/ As from a

mountain spring that feeds a dale,/ Shall gush pure streams to purge my impure tale”

(1076-8). Lucrece has embraced speech but will use her now loose tongue to comfort her

husband rather than to ruin him by informing him of her misfortune. This passage

exemplifies Lucrece, once again, not rewriting but rather recreating her story. Entirely

through her own process and volition, she has decided, herself, to keep her tale a secret.

As soon as Lucrece comes to this conclusion, however, her thoughts are

interrupted by the pleasant songs of the morning birds at dawn, a time she had dreaded.

While the light of day may expose truths, however, now it will only reveal Lucrece’s

power and command over her destiny rather than the shameful doom that she had feared.

The bird songs inspire Lucrece to explore a different means of non-verbal

communication. Lucrece’s analysis of the songs assists her understanding of the crime

that has been committed against her body and helps her understand the path that she will

choose to take. Throughout Shakespeare’s work, feelings of despair are often expressed

through song when speech does not suffice. Lucrece, however, rejects this form of

coping in the poem. She is not drawn to swan songs as Ophelia and Desdemona will be;

instead, Lucrece speaks with an “untuned tongue” (1215). When thinking of her fate,

“the little birds that tune their morning’s joy/ Make her moans mad with their sweet

melody” (1107-8). Lucrece calls them “mocking birds” (1121), for they appear to mock

her sorrow with their happy songs. While it could be argued that Lucrece’s moans do

bear a certain air of musicality, they are in clashing discord with the chirping of chipper

26
 Lucrece

birds. Thus, it may not be the form of music itself that disturbs Lucrece, but rather the

emotion behind the chirping of the birds.

Lucrece follows her outcry against the birds with the statement, “Come Philomel,

that sing’st of ravishment,/ Make thy sad grove in my disheveled hair… For burden-wise

I’ll hum on Tarquin still,/ While thou on Tereus descants better still” (1128-9, 1133-4).

Lucrece is very different from Philomela who becomes, as Jane Newman described it,

“jubilantly violent” and turns the sword against the victimizer rather than the victim,

herself. The bird is a symbol of triumph here rather than a symbol of lamentation.38

Thus Philomel’s song would be of triumph and more on a plane with the morning

sparrows rather than the sad song that Lucrece identifies with her.

Just as Lucrece has been rewriting her own story, so is she recreating the tale of

Philomela. Lucrece is both giving Philomel a monologue that did not exist in previous

accounts, but she is also using Philomel as a tool to find her own voice and come to terms

with the crime that has been committed against her – a crime that is strikingly similar to

Tereus’ crime against Philomel. In the Shakespearean formulation of her story, Lucrece

is endowed with the voice that was stolen from Philomel. A voiceless Philomel is more

inclined to speak through rash and violent action against others, while Lucrece, who has a

tongue, has a wider range of option. Newman writes, “The apparent contrast of a silent

Philomela robbed of the potential for such an impact on the political moment to which

she belongs, effectively casts Lucretia’s suicide as the only form of political intervention

available to women.”39

38
Jane O. Newman, ""And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness":
Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece." Shakespeare Quarterly
No.3 Vol.45 (1994): 312. <http://www.jstor.org>.
39
Ibid. 308-16.

27
 Lucrece

Inspired by the story of Philomel and her ability to take command, Lucrece

realizes that she must take charge in a different way, one that is consistent with her own

deeply held values. Through lengthy inner struggle, Lucrece determines that she will not

suffer her fate alone and allow the crime that has been committed against her go

unpunished. Although she acknowledges that her chosen path will still lead to her

suicide, Lucrece says, “Yet die I will not till my Collatine/ Have heard the cause of my

untimely death,/ That he may vow in that sad hour of mine/ Revenge on him that made

me stop my breath” (1177-80). She is expressing the anger that a rape victim experiences

after her assault.40 The men will be the ones to avenge her rape. Her death will serve as a

baptism for her through her purifying knife, “My shame so dead, mine honor is new

born” (1190). Lucrece will die, but with the knowledge that her innocence has been

proven and that she will be avenged. Lucrece has rejected the notion of sacrificing her

own needs for the sake of Collatine’s feelings. Strongly, Lucrece declares that Collatine

will “read it in me… this brief abridgment of my will I make” (1195,8). Lucrece, herself,

will become a text to be read, but it is her own autobiographical text. She is now marked

through her own volition, by her own will, instead of by Tarquin, and she has reached

this point by adopting the voice of Philomel (or rather attributing her voice to that of an

infamously wronged woman with whom she identifies.)

No sooner has Lucrece decided to adopt a certain course, than she becomes

lethargic and emotionally conflicted. Her voice becomes diminished in her burgeoning

sadness, and words no longer suffice to express her pain. The finality of her death in

sight, Lucrece is reduced to tears as she “wiped the brinish pearl from her bright eyes…

her face worse sorrow’s livery” (1213,22). As she is overtaken by the resulting emotions,
40
USU Document

28
 Lucrece

she moves towards nonverbal communication and can no longer express herself though

words. When Lucrece’s maid enters and asks what is the matter, Lucrece is unable to tell

her, for even “If it should be told,/ The repetition cannot make it less;/ For more it is than

I can well express… Get me hither paper, ink, and pens” (1284-9). Lucrece has spoken

through the crime until she cannot utter the words any longer. Speech can no longer

alleviate or even express her pain. While Lucrece once believed that speaking Tarquin’s

crime again and again, hammering his “guilt” into her consciousness, would alleviate her

pain, she now realizes that this conviction was faulty. She can never reclaim her identity

as chaste wife. Speech is no longer sufficient to enable Lucrece to fully come to terms

with her fate. She tries to replace speaking with the physical act of writing a letter, but in

the end, that does not suffice either. According to Amy Greenstadt, a letter is not

adequate to express Lucrece’s pain. Thus, Lucrece writes the letter only to summon

Collatine to her side. She must express her woe in person, “when sighs and graons and

tears may grace the fashion,” (1319), or enhance the presentation. Greenstadt writes,

“Lucrece imagines her suicide as constituting part of a greater physical and vocal

performance that will attest to her innocence.”41 Her confession to Collatine must

employ both verbal and nonverbal means of communication.

Lucrece has explored bodily movements, speech and song, but after the letter is

sent she is still desperate to find more effective methods to communicate her grief,

“Pausing for means to mourn some newer way” (1365). When Lucrece comes upon a

tapestry retelling the story of the fall of Troy, she has found a new means by which to

express her complex feelings: art. Interstingly, the art that Lucrece is drawn to is a

tapestry, a craft usually created by women. Recall that in Metamorphoses Philomel told
41
Greenstadt

29
 Lucrece

the story of her rape through weaving. Lucrece experiences an extended moment of

ekphrasis when she retells and even experiences the dramatic scene depicted in tapestry.

She creates and gives voice to Hecuba’s complaint, blames Helen for being a strumpet

(harkening back to her own earlier self-blame), and then identifies the true attacker,

Sinon, liberating herself from guilt.42 Klietzman observes that Lucrece flourishes when

she gives voice to female protagonists who had to resort to violence only because they

did not have a voice – Philomela has no tongue and Euripedes’ Hecuba is rendered

voiceless by a society (and Odysseus) unable understand her suffering.43 Lucrece gives

voice to classically silent women and in doing so finds her own voice, identity, and self-

definition.

Lucrece is able to draw parallels between the inner life of the tapestry’s Hecuba

and the circumstances surrounding her own emotional journey, the loss of her role as

wife, thus confronting her with issues with which she must deal regarding her rape. She

empathizes strongly with the image of Hecuba, whose husband Priam has been savagely

murdered before her eyes, in the work of art, and is able to give the mythical queen, and

herself in turn, a voice and a means through which she can tell her story. It is in

Hecuba’s face that she sees “where all distressed is stelled” (1444) or stored. Hecuba is a

woman who “showed life imprisoned in a body dead” (1456). This dead body could refer

either to the fact that Hecuba is not a living being and exists only within the realm of the

tapestry, or that Hecuba the woman has become emotionally cut off to the world as has

Lucrece. Both women experience intense emotions churning within, which they are

unable to fully express initially, appearing dumb to the world.

42
Kietzman 40.
43
Kietzman 28.

30
 Lucrece

Thus, Lucrece is able to use Hecuba as a mirror to reflect her own emotional

struggles. Hecuba is standing beside the corpse of her dead husband who has been taken

away from her in a bloody, violent manner. Lucrece has been savagely raped and,

therefore, her husband has been stolen from her. Her polluted body bars her from

continuing to fulfill her role as the chaste wife and, thus, her husband can no longer be

her husband. It is “on this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes” (1457), staring at this

portrait of an ancient woman who cannot express her feelings verbally, “And therefore

Lucrece swears he did her wrong,/ To give her so much grief, and not a tongue” (1462-3).

Lucrece condemns the artist who created the tapestry as being at fault because Hecuba is

engulfed in pain and left without a means to communicate her grief. Her tongue has been

stolen. Up to this point, the depiction of Hecuba has been analogous to Lucrece’s

situation. After Lucrece’s rape, it is stated repeatedly that she feels that her tongue has

been stolen from her, and that she is unable to explain or even come to terms with the

nature of the crime that has been committed against her. But here Lucrece turns from

silent victim to champion of the voiceless. Lucrece assures Hecuba that she will “tune

thy woes with my lamenting tongue… and with my knife scratch out the angry eyes/ Of

all the Greeks that are thine enemies” (1465-9). She actually will speak for Hecuba

through her subsequent actions.

After she analyzes the face and story of Hecuba, identifying with the victimized

queen, Lucrece “weeps Troy’s painted woes” (1492) as if Lucrece’s tears were the paint

she associates with the work of art, even though it is, in fact, a tapestry. She not only

feels empathy through identification with Hecuba, but she becomes a creative force as

well. This foreshadows the soliloquy in act two scene two of Hamlet when the title

31
 Lucrece

character is awe-struck as he remarks upon the way a player can express such emotion

during the recitation of a monologue for Hecuba.44 Just as the player Hamlet observes

cried over Hecuba’s words, Lucrece cries over Hecuba’s image and the inner story that

she herself has created for Hecuba – although the players’ emotions are forged whereas

Lucrece’s are real. Their emotional reactions are not the doing of Hecuba (although she is

an inspirational figure who will even be compared to Lavinia in Titus) but the expressive

creation of Lucrece. Hamlet is saddened that the player he sees could cry over paper and

borrowed words while he, himself, cannot be roused to emotional action over the murder

of his father, an act that is presented as having occurred in Hamlet’s life. Lucrece’s

reaction is reminiscent but different; she uses the story of the Trojan queen to tap into her

own feelings about the traumatic events she has experienced in her own life. In a sense,

through her own emotional reality, Lucrece becomes Hecuba. Conversely, the Trojan

queen even begins to serve as a representation of Lucrece’s physical being as she is

described as having “cheeks neither red nor pale” (1510), reminiscent of Lucrece’s own

red and white coloring. According to Greenstadtt, Lucrece learns from Hecuba how to

“carve her visage into a map expressing both loyalty and grief.”45 While initially

Lucrece thought that her fate would be written on her, in fact, Lucrece is shown as

becoming her own artist rather than being a passive canvas.

Finally and most importantly, when examining and interacting with the tapestry,

Lucrece is able to identify and seek her own form of retribution against a figure that

represents Tarquin: Sinon. Lucrece sees the painted face of Sinon and immediately

likens him to her own rapist. The two rapists share both physical and historical

44
Greenstadt
45
Greenstadt

32
 Lucrece

similarities. Donaldson notes that just as Sinon entered Troy through military deception,

so did Livy’sTarquin deceive the people of Gabii, establishing a history of trickery.46

Noting their similarities, Shakespeare wrote:

Here, all enraged, such passion her assails

That patience is quite beaten from her breast.
She tears the senseless Sinon with her nails,
Comparing him to that unhappy guest
Whose deed hath made herself herself detest.
At last she smilingly with this gives o’er:
“Fool, fool,” quoth she, “his wounds will not be sore.”

Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,

And time doth weary time with her complaining;
She looks for night and then she longs for morrow,
And both she thinks too long with her remaining.
Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining:
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps,
And they that watch see time how slow it creeps.

Which all this time hath overslipped her thought

That she with painted images hath spent,
Being from the feeling of her own grief brough
By deep surmise of others’ detriment,
Losing her woes in shows of discontent,
It easeth some, though none it ever cured,
To think their dolor others have endured.
(1662-82)

Lavinia’s scratching of the painting is important since, as established above, Lucrece will

not commit a physically violent act against Tarquin herself. Having the ability to speak

and the political power that her ability to present and shape information gives her, she

need only inform the men in her family of the crime that was committed against her to

allow and perhaps compel them to seek physical vengeance. When she enters the realm

of the tapestry, however, Lucrece has the power to be physically destructive herself and

can destroy the image of Sinon (a stand in for Tarquin), clawing at the image of Sinon

46
Donaldson 10.

33
 Lucrece

with her own nails. This represents a significant and empowering change from when

Lucrece was depicted as scratching at her own skin (739). This is the physical

manifestation of Lucrece taking control over her core, her emotions, her actions that will

lead to her suicide.

According to Professor Norbert Lain, a classics scholar at Stanford University, it

is clear that the rhetorical devices used in these three stanzas convey important

information about Lucrece’s interiority. While these stanzas could appear to prove that

Lucrece is confidently in charge both emotionally and physically, Lain argues that the

syllabic counts, rhyme scheme, and syntax of the lines demonstrate Lucrece’s pain, that

the words she says are pained and could only be spoken by a rape victim.47 The first and

third stanzas are written in perfect iambic pentameter, however in the second, when the

narrator is describing Lucrece’s apostrophe-esque manner of speaking, each line has one

additional syllable. Because of this syllable, when the stanza is read aloud, it sounds as if

Lucrece is choking at the end of each line. This is an example of iconic language, when

the form of the language itself is an accurate representation of what is occurring in the

scene. Lucrece cannot get her words out in a controlled fashion. The effect of the extra

syllabic beat is emphasized by the fact that it is surrounded by perfect iambic pentameter

and that it occurs five times in a row. This is clearly intentional and conveys the

alteration and deterioration of Lucrece’s emotional and physical state.

Lain further explains the way the sounds of the words the narrator uses to describe

Lucrece’s speech also describe Lucrece’s emotional delivery of her rebuke against Sinon.

Shakespeare employs rhyme in this stanza that uses the sound “aining.” The sound is

nasal; Lain calls it “held back,” as if Lucrece has to blow her nose. After the first four
47
Lain, Norbert, Personal interview. 19. Apr. 2010.

34
 Lucrece

lines that convey Lucrece’s unstable choking sounds, by the fifth line she breaks down

into sobs. The words in the line -- “short,” “seems,” “sorrow’s sharp sustaining” -- are all

heavy with “s” and “sh” sounds. They flow into one another, replicating the sound and

rhythm of her sobs as she wishes that night could veil her sorrow once again. Of course,

it is the reader who speaks or subvocalizes these words that carry the sounds of the literal

sobbing. This syntactic and alliterative strategy provokes feelings of intense empathy for

Lucrece as readers experience what she experiences. Shakespeare takes on the role of

director in this narrative poem, making Lucrece’s words, and the reader’s experience of

the words, replicate her interior struggle.48

But Lucrece is not sobbing only for herself. She is weeping “To think their

dolour others have endured” (1682). Lucrece once longed for company in her grief, and

she found it in the characters woven into the tapestry. She has volitionally joined with a

collective identity, into which the reader has been invited as well. Lucrece has now fully

accepted that she is part of a larger Roman whole. Her actions will be undertaken in the

name of the wronged Hecuba, of Philomela, and of future Roman women who will

perhaps suffer a similar fate. In death, Lucrece will become a figure of allegorical

significance.

It is at this moment of ekphrasis that Lucrece, who has been alone in deep self-

reflection, is finally joined by her husband and his fellow soldiers, including her father

and Brutus. The entrance of other characters has the effect of a play with new character’s

entering at a soliloquy’s end. Lucrece’s body and her situation no longer exist in a

vacuum of interiority but are introduced into the context of the real and functioning wider

world. She is a physically changed woman, her once glowing eyes “red and raw,” “Her
48
Lain 4/19.

35
 Lucrece

lively color killed with deadly cares” (1592,3). Just when Lucrece has discovered her

voice, a frightened Collatine “long[s] to hear her words” (1610). Her speech is now

encouraged. Collatine begs to hear what will be her final speech. He is desperate to

know what has caused this change in his wife that is evidenced and communicated by her

altered body. And yet, even though this is the moment Lucrece has anticipated, it is

difficult for her to speak fluently, to produce the right words. In fact, “Three times with

sighs she gives her sorrow fire,” just as it took her multiple attempts to speak directly

after the rape.

Having experienced various other forms of nonverbal communication including

art, song, and ekphrasis, Lucrece must reestablish her ability to use words as a means to

communicate with others. The first thing she says is a warning that “Few words… shall

fit the trespass best” for “in me moe woes than words are now depending” than can

possibly be told by her “one poor tired tongue” (1613-2, 1617). Her tongue is exhausted

because she has been exploring the reaches of her speech from the time of her rape until

the dawn. The true impact of the crime that has been committed against her is essentially

unspeakable.

Lucrece offers a detailed account of the rape against her body, all the while citing

the difficulties it posed for her voice. She speaks of how Tarquin swore that if she did

not submit “I should not live to speak another word,” and of how when she continued to

resist, “My bloody judge forbade my tongue to speak;/ No rightful plea might plead for

justice there” (1648-9). At this moment in the poem, Lucrece is doing the very thing that

Tarquin tried to prevent. She is using her tongue, albeit a tired one, and telling her story.

She is not only asserting and proving her innocence to her husband, but she is taking

36
 Lucrece

power over Tarquin, standing up to his intimidation. She is defying her rapist verbally

one last time, and he can do nothing to stop her tongue.

Through the telling of her story, Lucrece becomes a powerful oratorical force.

Now Collatine is speechless; “with head declined and voice dammed up with woe,” he

cannot react in words (1661). His own “grief” stops his tongue and “what he breathes out

his breath drinks up again” (1666). Lost in a sea of ebbing and flowing sighs, Collatine

has lost verbal power and appears to take on the role of victim, speechless and violated.

He tries to talk, but he cannot. Just as Lucrece has experienced interludes when she has

only been able to express herself with sighs, so Collatine’s voice is lost in aspirations. He

experiences “rage” and “grief” (1671), but he is unable to talk about it. Collatine does

not speak again until after Lucrece’s suicide. He becomes feminized, which gives

Lucrece the space to become heroic.

Embracing the role reversal, Lucrece comforts her husband with her words,

gaining even more vocal expressive power as she does so. She is entirely in control of

the situation before her. The men stand at her command. Lucrece asks directly for the

thing that she so desperately needs, vengeance against Tarquin. The men immediately

swear their loyalty and devotion/ In a crescendo of emotional triumph, Lucrece finally

“throws forth Tarquin’s name: ‘he, he,’ she says;/ But more than “he” her poor tongue

could not speak;/ Til after many accents and delays… ‘He, he fair lords, ‘tis he,’” (1717-

21). Tarquin is to blame, and Lucrece emphasizes this fact again and again. It is a

struggle to emit the words, but Lucrece does, calling out “he” five times in a rushing

climax. Then, in her final act of performance art, Lucrece grabs a knife and stabs herself,

37
 Lucrece

taking charge of a phallic symbol and inserting it into her own body, a recreation of her

rape, an action more powerful than her words and bringing about her death.

The knife Lucrece uses also serves as a pen—Lucrece has written her own final

message on her body, a body that will function as a symbol that instigates and galvanizes

the Roman people. Brutus decides “to bear dead Lucrece thence,/ To show her bleeding

body thorough Rome,/ And so to publish Tarquin’s foul offense” (1850-2). The

opportunistic Brutus does not kill Tarquin as Lucrece requests but rather exiles his family

so that he can take power of Rome. This fact, however, does not decrease the power of

Lucrece’s actions and words. The Roman people will read the story that Lucrece has

written on her own body. Lucrece is the author of her own fate and the fate of Rome.

38
 Lavinia

Chapter Two: Lavinia

Titus Andronicus serves as another study of the way Shakespearean heroines

come to physical and emotional terms with sexual assault given a cultural context in

which, once they lose their chastity, they lose their status and previous roles in society.

Inspired by the Ovidian tales of Philomela and Io, the ancient mythology of Hecuba

during the sacking of Troy, and Livy’s and Shakespeare’s own exploration of Lucrece’s

emotional development following her rape, Shakespeare finally creates his own original

story that turns on rape: the rape of Lavinia.49 In fact, Edward Ravenscroft’s 1687

adapted version of Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia, is given that exact alternate

title, recognizing that Lavinia’s rape is at the crux of Shakespeare’s play.

Enter Empress’ sons with Lavinia, her hands cut off, and
her tongue cut out, and ravished
(2.4)

With this astonishing stage direction, Lavinia enters in one of the most haunting

and powerful images in Shakespeare’s collected works. Even as Titus progresses,

crescendoing in a cacophony of acts of extreme violence including amputation,

cannibalism and murder, Lavinia’s mutilation remains one of Titus Andronicus’ most

poignant and disturbing moments. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage history of

the play reveals that Titus Andronicus has had the power to cause audience members to

faint, particularly at this juncture.50 A review of Dieter Reible’s 1970 production of the

49
There is critical debate as to whether or not Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s own
work, or if it already existed and Shakespeare just contributed an editor’s hand. This thesis is
written with the assumption that Titus was, in fact, entirely written by Shakespeare.
50
RSC “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus.” RSC (2008) 16 Jan. 2010,
www.rsc.org.uk/titus/about/history.html+titus+andronicus+south+africa&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk
&gl=us&client=safari

39
 Lavinia

play in Cape Town, South Africa reveals that although the South African audience,

during the era of Apartheid, was most disturbed by the interracial love child produced by

Tamora and Aaron, “When the ravished Lavinia appeared on the stage pointing the

bloody stumps of her severed hands at the audience and frothing at the mouth because of

her severed tongue, one young man in the audience fainted. Another rushed out clutching

his stomach.”51

Lavinia, the chaste, has just lost her husband, her chastity, and her ability to

communicate through traditional means of human interaction, speaking and writing. Her

condition reflects a more egregious trauma than what is suffered by Lucrece or

Philomela. Although all of the women are raped, their rapists leave them in varying states

of wholeness. Apart from losing her chastity, Lucrece retains all of her other faculties;

Philomela loses her tongue; but Lavinia is reduced to a state of lost purity, tongue, and

hands. Thus, while the sexual crimes are similar, the women’s abilities to mentally and

emotionally process and physically or verbally communicate their victimization differs.

While Lucrece is metaphorically quieted, Lavinia is silenced in a physically violent

manner, her tongue forcibly cut from her mouth. Although Philomela also loses her

tongue, she retains her ability to communicate her story in a dignified manner, silently

weaving her tale into a beautiful tapestry, but Lavinia has lost her hands and her capacity

for dignified or precise expressive functions. Mutilated and muted, Lavinia cannot speak;

she cannot write or weave or sign with phantom fingers on phantom hands. In order to

“speak”, Lavinia must use her entire body. Depending on the director’s vision, she may

be reduced to grunting, crawling on the ground, or throwing up her stumps in a futile

51
Philip C. Kolin, “Bard Shocks” Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (New York: Garland
Pub, 1995) 417.

40
 Lavinia

attempt to illustrate a point. Important elements of Lavinia’s humanity have been ripped

out, hacked off, and stolen from her.

One of the most compelling elements of the play is the scene in which Lavinia

attempts to communicate with those around her after she is maimed. The element of

mystery surrounding what Lavinia is thinking and whether or not she will be able to

explain the crime committed against her and bring her perpetrators to justice illuminates

another significant difference between readers’ understanding of Lavinia as compared to

Lucrece. In addition to being able to communicate verbally, Lucrece exists within the

context of an epic poem. This gives the readers a marked advantage in gaining access to

Lucrece’s internal processes. Lucrece’s thoughts are presented by an omniscient narrator

through poetic exposition. Her thoughts and reactions can be straightforwardly read

through narrative and dialogue rather than vaguely interpreted through observed

movements and facial expressions. With Lavinia, there is no inner dialogue to which the

audience is privy. Lavinia speaks only through movements and non-narrative sounds

prescribed through stage directions; she has no choice but to turn her body into that of a

performance artist. Only through Lavinia’s posturing and movements, her physical

expression, her eyes, can an audience begin to comprehend her true feelings and

motivations.

David Willbern argues that the act of rape itself is at the very core of Titus

Andronicus. The play opens on a scene of two brothers, Bassanius and Saturnitus,

debating over who would make the better emperor of Rome. Bassanius’ appeal to the

Roman people involves outlining his ability to protect the city of Rome from attack. His

language, however, likens his proposed defense of Rome, identified as female, to keeping

41
 Lavinia

a woman safe from a looming sexual assault. He will defend her “passage,” as well as

maintaining her “virtue” and “continence” (1.1.13,15).52 In this description, however, the

act of rape appears to have an impact that is separate from and extends beyond the

feminine experience. While the imagined rape is an attack on the lady Rome, it is felt in

the collective heart of the Roman people. The woman does not have true ownership of

this assault.

Going even further than just the imagery of the rape against Rome, Shakespeare

introduces the concept of rape against Lavinia in the opening act. Lavinia has been

betrothed to Bassanius. After Saturnitus wins the emperorship, however, he asks for

Lavinia’s hand. Happy to have an empress for a daughter, Titus agrees to this

engagement, breaking the promise that has been made to Bassanius. At this point,

Bassanius and Lavinia’s two brothers steal her away so that she can elope with her

previous fiancé. The text does not make it clear as to whether or not Lavinia was a

willing conspirator in this act.

If we are to honor the literal Elizabethan definition of the word “rape” as

abduction by seizure or force, then at this early point in the play, Lavinia is subject to

rape (meaning capture) at the hands of her brothers and Bassanius. Saturnitus rebukes his

brother as a “traitor,” warning him that if he ever comes to power, “Thou and thy faction

shall repent this rape.” Bassanius, however, implies that his brother has no grounds to

make such a threat, asserting that there has been no crime: “Rape you call it, my lord, to

seize my own,/ My true-betrothed love, and now my wife?” (1.1.406-9). This statement

frames rape in male terms. Rape was considered a crime against males. Women existed

52
David Willbern, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus” English Literary
Renaissance (Spring 1978) 172. <http://www.jstor.org>.

42
 Lavinia

as property first of their fathers and then of their husbands; hence, a rape of Lavinia could

not have taken place because she and the accused rapist were already betrothed.53

Lavinia was already his property. This patriarchal understanding of rape leaves no room

for the consideration of the impact of the crime on the female; after all, with this society’s

construct, it is not the woman who has been violated, but rather her male liege.

Given the play’s societal conception of rape, one must ask how violated women

are to come to terms with their victimization. Even though Lavinia has the physical

capacity to speak during this first episode of nonsexual, abduction-based “rape”, she says

nothing about it. Upon Lavinia’s capture, Titus had exclaimed, “Treason, my Lord!

Lavinia is surprised!” (1.1.287). If Titus can accurately speak on behalf of his daughter,

then this assertion implies that Lavinia’s capture was carried out against her will. As

Lavinia remains silent, it is never made clear whether or not she consented to her

abduction. However, she is never asked to speak in her own defense or to talk about the

crime that has been committed against her. Lavinia is merely a pawn in this exchange;

her feelings and will are of no consequence to the male characters or by extension the

power structure of her society.

When analyzing Lavinia’s reaction to her sexual rape that takes place in the

second act, it is crucial to understand the implications of rape in the Roman and

Elizabethan social contexts. Although the play’s male characters grieve for the loss of

Lavinia’s innocence in terms of its value to them, they do not explicitly take her person

into consideration in the aftermath of her brutal physical and sexual assault.

Given Lavinia’s unbreakable verbal silence throughout the end of the first and the

entirety of the second half of the play, it is difficult to understand fully her perception of
53
Donaldson 24.

43
 Lavinia

the sexual rape that has been committed against her after the fact. It is therefore

enlightening to examine her reactions leading up to this rape at a time when she was able

to give voice to her thoughts.

There are aspects of Lavinia’s dialogue leading up to her rape that identify the

young woman’s character and create a context for her sexual assault. When Lavinia is

walking with her new husband, Bassanius, and comes across Tamora engaging

romantically with Aaron the Moore, Lavinia coarsely mocks and rebukes the Goth for her

act of infidelity. Lavinia boldly tells Tamora that it is widely known that she has “a

goodly gift in horning” and may “Jove shield your husband from his hounds today!/’Tis

pity they should take him for a stag” (2.3.67-71). She insults Tamora for being an

adulteress. As infidelity was said to give cuckolded husbands horns, Lavinia teases that

Tamora’s husband would probably be mistaken for a stag if he were to take part in a hunt.

Unbeknownst to herself, it is Lavinia who is actually the hunted, doomed doe. Lavinia

continues on this trajectory of insults, provoking the angry Goth queen. She labels

Tamora’s affair a “raven-colored love” (2.3.83) playing on Aaron’s race and insinuating

that their affection is less than pure, but is as dark and ominous as his skin. After Lavinia

realizes that she is at risk of being raped at the hands of Tamora and her sons, after they

have killed her husband, she amplifies the coarse nature of her insults. She tells Chiron

and Demetrius that “the milk that thou suck’dst from her did turn to marble” (2.3.144),

attacking the core of Tamora’s womanhood. The milk that a mother produces for her

young is traditionally considered one of the most sacred, feminine gifts that a woman can

give. Lavinia accuses this milk of being tainted in an attempt to pit sons against mother,

continuing her onslaught of insults.

44
 Lavinia

Critical interpretation of Lavinia’s taunting of Tamora and subsequent rape is

often disturbing in its justification of Lavinia’s punishment. Critic Arthur Symons writes,

“Lavinia is a single and unmixed blunder… I can never read the third scene of the second

act without amazement at the folly of the writer, who, requiring in the nature of things to

win our sympathy for his afflicted heroine, fills her mouth with the grossest and vilest

insults against Tamora, so gross, so vile, so unwomanly, that her punishment becomes

something of a retribution instead of being wholly brutal.”54 On a similar note, George

Steven’s writes that Lavinia’s “raillery to Tamora is of so coarse a nature, that if her

tongue had been all she was condemned to lose, perhaps the author (whoever he was)

would have escaped censure on the score of poetic justice.” These analyses serve as

critically endorsed acts of the blaming of the victim. Symons and Steven do not take

Lavinia’s desperation into account. She is on the brink of losing her identity as a

respected Roman female archetypal figure and disintegrating to the point of existing only

as a mutilated body that has no place in her society.

Up to this point, Lavinia has functioned as the obedient daughter, the societally-

approved feminine archetype: subservient, praising of her father, unwilling to question

Titus when he reneges on her betrothal. R. S. White claims that when she taunts Tamora

even before she knows about her impending attack, Lavinia is acting out of loyalty to her

emperor and husband, Bassanius. When she condemns Tamora’s act of adultery with

Aaron in act two, scene three,55 she is defending the sanctity of marriage. However, even

if these are her motives, Lavinia’s cruel words do serve a dramatic function in her

54
Arthur Brown, Studies in the Elizabethan Drama, (New York: E.P. Dutton &
Company, 1919) 75. March 10, 2010 <http://www.books.google.com>.
55
R.S. White, Innocent Victims: Poetic Injustice in Shakespearean Tragedy (London:
Athione Press, 1986) 31.

45
 Lavinia

characterization. Her retorts render her a more complex, three-dimensional character; she

is not merely perfect, but rather she is a full-bodied woman who has flaws and a temper;

she has depth. Hence, Lavinia cannot be viewed only as a subservient female.

Furthermore, Lavinia’s verbal assaults cannot be construed as the cause of her rape and

attack. Aaron and Tamora had already planned the attack against Lavinia as a means of

retribution for past offenses committed by her father and brother against Tamora.

Carolyn Asp notes the ineptitude of Lavinia’s insults.56 According to Asp,

Lavinia does not present a linear argument and fails to employ effective, pathos-inducing

prose. She jumps around, first appealing to Tamora’s womanhood and then accusing her

of not being a true woman. Then she tries to gauge who will be a more sympathetic ally,

flip flopping in her plea to Tamora’s sons. She speaks to Chiron and then to Demetrius,

insulting them and then praising them in a confusing manner. Eventually Tamora says, “I

know not what it means, away with her!” (2.3.157). Lavinia’s mounting desperation and

impotence is reflected in the breakdown of the coherence of her speech and of her

rhetorical style.

Indeed, Lavinia does not use the beautiful language that Lucrece employed before

her attack. Lucrece gently, lyrically pleads to Tarquin’s sense of honor as a man and as a

friend to her husband. When Tarquin stuffs her sheets into her mouth, one may wonder if

he is silencing Lucrece because he cannot bear to listen to words he already recognizes as

true. She becomes his voiced (but smothered) conscience. In contrast, while Chiron and

Demetrius are quieting Lavinia so that she cannot turn them in, they are also tearing out

the very same tongue that has been spitting curses at their mother. While Tarquin was

56
Carolyn Asp, ““Upon Her Wit Doth Earthly Honor Wait” Female Agency in Titus
Andronicus,” Ed. Philip C. Kolin Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1995)
339.

46
 Lavinia

attempting to silence his sense of shame, Chiron does not silence Lavinia for these same

reasons. Chiron and Demetrius are annoyed and want to end Lavinia’s ramblings. Mary

Laughlin Fawcett believes that Lavinia’s attempt at verbal communication is so failed

that she serves a greater artistic purpose when she is forcibly silenced.57 While Fawcett

gives a harsh critique, it is true that Lavinia’s dialogue through non- verbal channels of

communication does evoke more feelings of sympathy and pathos than her verbal

arguments ever did.

When Lavinia begins to understand that the Goth queen intends for her sons to

rape her, Lavinia is almost unable to comprehend such a violation being committed

against her body. Lucrece would rather face any punishment that does not include rape --

a word that her tongue is unable to form, her lips unable to utter. She asks for instant

death rather than rape, to which she refers as that “one thing more/ That womanhood

denies my tongue to tell” (2.3.173-4). Feminine decency has paralyzed her tongue. She

cannot refer to the crime by its proper name, but rather chooses to use roundabout

phraseology and euphemisms. The word rape is replaced by the phrase a “worse than

killing lust” (2.3.175) and a shame far worse than death; to kill her rather than rape her

would be considered an act of charity (2.3.178). Lavinia believes that to be raped, even

to utter the word “rape,” is to be stripped of her femininity.

Before the sexual act of rape in act two scene three, Lavinia pleads, “Tumble me

into some loathsome pit,/ Where never man’s eye may behold my body” (2.3.176-7). She

is preoccupied by the thought of her violated body being viewed by men. The sight

would be offensive both to her and to her male counterparts. Lavinia wants to escape

57
Mary Laughlin Fawcett, “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus
Andronicus.” ELH 2 (Summer, 1983) 266. <http://www.jstor.org>.

47
 Lavinia

exposure and display, and she desperately wants to avoid becoming a figure that is

interpreted and reinterpreted, marked by the crime that has been committed against her

body. Poignantly, this becomes her fate.

When rape is seen solely as a crime against the male owner and not against the

female body, it can be argued that Chiron and Demitrius’ rape of Lavinia is justified. As

was stated in Chapter One, Tarquin could have seen his rape of Lucrece as a justified act

had Collatine wronged him in some way (Lucrece, 232-6). While Collatine did nothing

to Tarquin to “legitimize” the rape of his wife, Lavinia’s father has killed Tamora’s son,

Chiron and Demetrius’ brother. Thus Titus has committed an act in reprisal for which the

two Goths believe they can legitimately seek vengeance. Although their vicious and

brutal act suggests excessive recompense, theirs is certainly a murkier crime than

Tarquin’s crime against Lucrece given their respective societies’ social and ethical

norms.

When physically invasive crimes against the female body are interpreted through

the lens of a patriarchal society, it is easy to lose a sharp focus on where the

consequences to the female victim fall in the schema. One begins to question if, in such a

society, a female character has room to react to her victimization. Not only is it difficult

for the male characters in Titus Andronicus to understand Lavinia’s emotional response,

but it is hard for audience members as well.

Gauging Lavinia’s reaction to the crime that has been committed against her body

is complicated by the fact that she cannot truly tell her story. Her uncle and father project

their theories onto her silent frame, an act that further obscures Lavinia’s true inner

experience. Observing the way Lavinia comes to terms with what has happened to her

48
 Lavinia

and communicates to those around her becomes one of the most poignant elements of the

play. The University of Oxford’s 1985 production represented Lavinia as an active and

instigating force during the murders,58 while Matt Rucker’s production rendered her

entirely silent and almost catatonic from the moment of her rape onwards, so numb,

traumatized and sensitive to external stimuli that she must cover her ears with her stumps

to block out her the sound of her father’s laughter.59 Beneath differing directorial

interpretations, however, textual evidence and stage directions from the Shakespearean

epic do illuminate Lavinia’s subtle character development throughout the play.

At first, Lavinia represents the state of the traumatized victim. She is just coming

to terms with her rape, and thus behaves in a passive manner. As the scenes continue and

as she interacts with her male family members, all of whom become obsessed with

identifying her violators and seeking revenge, she begins to come to terms with what has

happened. Lavinia turns to the use of gesture and movement, using a concocted sign

language to communicate exactly what has happened to her.

When Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus, stumbles upon his bleeding and broken niece in

the forest, he asks, “Who is this? my niece, that flies away so fast!” (2.4.11). This first

sentence of what evolves into a 47-line monologue of horror, confusion, and discovery

can be interpreted in various ways. This line could allude to the first time that Lavinia

speaks through movement. He could be asking if Lavinia is the person who just ran off.

It is possible that Lavinia has seen her uncle’s approach and has decided to run away

from him. Before the rape, she made it clear that she would rather decay in a pit than be

58
Alexander Leggatt, “Titus Andronicus On Stage.” Ed. Philip C. Kolin. Titus
Andronicus: Critical Essays. (New York: Garland, 1995) 432.
59
Alan C. Dessen, Titus Andronicus. (New York: Manchester University Press, 1989)
95.

49
 Lavinia

put on display following the assault. She cannot bear to be examined by male eyes. On

the other hand, Demetrius and Chiron do exit immediately prior to Marcus’ entrance.

Thus, Marcus could be asking for the identities of the men who sped away so quickly.

Upon realizing the damage to Lavinia’s body, however, Marcus has answered his

previous question and begs her to “Speak, gentle niece, what stern, ungentle hand/ Hath

lopped and hewed and made thy body bare” (2.4.17-8). This fixation of naming the men

responsible for this crime becomes a driving force for the remainder of Titus Andronicus.

The unfolding events of the play – the slaughter of Demetrius and Chiron, the feeding of

their bodies to their mother –occur only as a march towards full retribution.

Lavinia is urged to speak the names of her violators, and yet she can say nothing.

Marcus postulates about why Lavinia remains silent until he realizes the full extent of her

injuries. He laments, “Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,/ Like to a bubbling fountain

stirred with wind,/ Doth rise and fall between thy rosèd lips” (2.4.22-4). In poetic and

very visual verse, Marcus examines Lavinia as he would a work of art. There is a strong

rendering of color and texture. Marcus’ words vividly paint a picture of the bloody

Lavinia even though she is standing right there for the audience to see. In this

monologue, language can be taken either as a description of Lavinia’s actual condition --

she can be seen as a fountain spouting blood -- or it might also convey more than what

the audience can already see as the onstage Lavinia does not have to be spouting blood.

The director is not required to have her appear in the way Marcus describes her. In a

1988 production, Lavinia merely had clay around her stumps.60 This minimalist

approach makes Marcus’ speech all the more elegant. Lavinia’s body becomes a source

of inspiration – a blank canvas on which others can paint. Karen Cunningham writes that
60
Dessen 454.

50
 Lavinia

Lavinia is “like the subject of a Renaissance anamorphic painting, which can be seen

from one point of view as a vital, dynamic figure, and from another point of view as a

decaying corpse… a cipher and repository of meaning continually reinterpreted through

the observation and voices of others.”61 She is art, she inspires art, but she must become

the artist. If Lavinia does not take charge and become an active body, then she is at the

mercy of her male painters who do not necessarily understand either what has occurred or

the rape’s impact on the female psyche.

Yet not long after discovering Lavinia, Marcus indicates that he fully understands

the nature of the crimes committed against her body. In his speech, Marcus states, “But

sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee,/ And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy

tongue… A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met,/ And he hath cut those pretty finger

off/ That could have better sewed than Philomel” (2.4.26-42). The story of Philomela is

immediately used as a literary analogy, just as it was in The Rape of Lucrece. This

literary allusion, likening Lavinia’s mutilation to that of Philomela in the Ovidian tale,

appears to indicate that Marcus grasps the fact that Lavinia has been raped by a villain

crueler than Tereus. But if Marcus does hold this knowledge, he is readily able to

overlook or perhaps forget it almost instantaneously. He does not indicate that Lavinia

has been raped to Titus, and Lavinia’s writing of her crime in VI.i is received by Marcus

as a shocking surprise. How can this amnesia be explained? We have seen that sexual

rape is a difficult and predominantly unspeakable act given the social context of the play.

The term of sexual rape is outside the male vocabulary, and even Lavinia was unable to

speak it aloud. The male consciousness is unable to comprehend rape’s implications,

61
Karen Cunningham, ““Scars Can Witness”: Trials by ordeal and Lavinia’s Body in
Titus Andronicus,” ed. Katherine Anne Ackley, Women and Violence in Literature an Essay
Collection (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990) 144.

51
 Lavinia

especially on the female person and body. Thus, when Marcus invokes the literary model

of Ovid, perhaps it is just that – an allusion rather than an assertion of knowledge. Just as

Lavinia inspires allusions to physical art from the males who surround her, so does she

inspire literary artistic expressions, in this case Ovid. Throughout the play, Titus and

Marcus use literary and historical models as means of understanding their related

situations (Titus refers to Viginius at the end of act five when he contemplated killing his

raped daughter). Furthermore, Marcus’ theory of rape is never specifically and overtly

confirmed by Lavinia herself. There is no stage direction for her to run up to him, grab

him with her stumps or nod furtively to indicate that yes, she has been deflowered. Thus

Marcus is able to pass over his accurate conjecture with ease. If “rape” is not explicitly

named, if the word is not spoken, then it cannot be real. Lavinia is not ready to address

what has happened by weaving her story, not with threads, but rather with fluid

movements and other forms of physical expression that she employs later in the play.

Marcus, and later Titus and Lucius, not only postulate what could have happened

to Lavinia, but they try to create her voice. Once Marcus understands that Lavinia is

physically incapable of providing words to describe her experience, he asks, “Shall I

speak for thee? Shall I say tis so?” (2.4.31). He is asking explicit permission to give her

a voice but also perhaps inadvertently to supplant her words. The Andronici express an

unremitting desire to understand what has happened to Lavinia. If they can put words to

the crime, then perhaps they can understand it and rectify the situation -- to the extent that

it can be rectified.

Marcus and Titus’ need to seek revenge is not altruistic and reflects an element of

selfishness. During Marcus’ speech in 2.4, he says, “O that I knew thy heart, and knew

52
 Lavinia

the beast,/ That I might rail at him to ease my mind!” (2.4.34-5). Lavinia is only brought

into this statement as a potential conduit of information leading to emotional satisfaction.

Marcus does not want to know what is in her heart in order to try to understand her grief,

but rather to extricate information in order to exact the price for what has been done to

her. Marcus is not suggesting that he wants to alleviate Lavinia’s pain, but rather that he

wants to “ease” his own. Attacking the enemy would be his means of coping. There is

ambiguity around whether Lavinia’s male relatives are motivated by what is best for

Lavinia, or rather (consciously or not) what best serves their own needs and desires.

This does not mean, however, that these men do not seek to understand Lavinia.

They do, and desperately. When Titus sees his daughter, he is overwhelmed. He laments

that he does not know how he can possibly gain understanding of her situation. Titus

describes Lavinia as a “map of woe” (3.2.12). Her body is a chart of abuse and grief. Yet

this is a map that is illegible, for it lacks a clearly comprehensible key. Thus Titus and
Marcus are unable to translate Lavinia’s topography without extensive interpretation. Her
body has become a work of physical art, and thus she must use movement as a means of

communication. Frantic for knowledge, Titus asks, “Shall we cut away our hands like

thine?/ Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows/ Pass the remainder of our

hateful days?/ What shall we do?” (3.1.130-3). Perhaps the only way that he can imagine

being able to understand Lavinia is if he were to be subjected to her physical disabilities.

Perhaps then he could gain insight into the language of the mute and mutilated. Instead,

Titus comes to the conclusion that it is best to “let us that have our tongues/ Plot some

device of further misery/ To make us wondered at in time to come” (3.1.133-5). Once

again, the importance of spoken language is expressed explicitly. The line asserts that the

only way to come to terms with Lavinia’s abuse is to inflict further misery and

53
 Lavinia

destruction, perhaps in an act of revenge. But this act of vengeance can occur only if a

tongue is present. Titus recognizes that he must work hard to grasp the meaning of

Lavinia’s communicative actions. He tells his daughter, “Speechless complainer, I will

learn thy thought;/ In thy dumb action… Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to

heaven,/ Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,/ But I of these will wrest an

alphabet,/ And by still practice learn to know thy meaning” (3.2.39-45). Titus is

determined to assign every one of Lavinia’s movements an accurate and clear-cut

meaning.

And yet, even though Lavinia does perform each of these actions, even though

she sighs and kneels and nods and signs and raise her arms in anguish towards the

heavens, Titus and other surrounding males are for the most part unable to interpret her

untraditional, non-verbal mode of communication. When Lavinia cries after Titus speaks

of her two brothers, whom he has subsequently sent to their deaths, Marcus and Titus are

unable to understand why she is crying. “Perchance she weeps because they killed her

husband,/ Perchance because she knows them innocent,” Marcus postulates (3.1.114-4).

The two men are unable to decipher the impetus behind her actions. While there is no

definite explanation for why Lavinia cries, the audience can be certain that it is not

because Lavinia finds her brothers at fault for the murder of Bassanius. Titus also asks

Lavinia to kiss him, to kneel by his side (3.1.209), to sigh (3.1.225), and yet he has no

translation for these “signs” either. Misinterpretations occur again and again throughout

the unfolding of the plot, for example when Lavinia chases the boy with a copy of the

Metamorphosis around or when she raises her hands in the air in “sequence” (4.1).

54
 Lavinia

It is important to note the changing nature of Lavinia’s movements and to see how

her ability to perform with physical motion rather that oral communication evolves over

the course of the play as she comes to terms with the crimes that have been committed

against her body. In acts two and three, Lavinia’s movements are more reactive than they

are active. She will cry in response to emotional stimuli and she will follow directions,

but she is unable to use her body as a vehicle for creative communication. This is a

reflection of her interiority at this point in the production. Lavinia has just been raped

and put on display in front of the male members of her family, a succession of events that

she identified as her worst fear in 2.3. She is unable, emotionally, to come to terms with

her vicious sexual assault let alone communicate it to her family. This handicap explains

why she gives no sign to Marcus that he was correct when he spoke of her being

deflowering. Lavinia has a tendency to move with passivity in these acts. When her

father asks her to kneel and cry, she allows herself to be guided. When Titus asks his

daughter to take his hand between her teeth (3.1.282) so that he can lead her offstage, she

puts his palm in her mouth and lets him lead her. As Mary Laughlin Fawcette writes,

“the hand completes the tongue.”62 Lavinia is shaped by her social circumstances, and

she exists in an authoritarian and patriarchal society. Titus has claimed that he speaks for

his daughter, and this act connotes her acceptance of his assumption of that role, even if

his interpretations are often mistranslations of her inner monologue.

And yet some time in between acts three and four, something within Lavinia

changes. She becomes fully engaged with her body and excitedly tries to show Titus and

Marcus the nature of her victimization. Act four opens with the stage direction: “Enter

Lucius’ son and Lavinia running after him, and the boy flies from her with his books
62
Fawcett 265.

55
 Lavinia

under his arm.” This is an explosively active opening to the scene. The numbed Lavinia

is now fervently chasing the frightened boy around their home. He must escape her and

when he tries, he begs for help, crying, “sweet aunt, I know not what you mean” (4.1.4)

and going on to explain, “I have read that Hecuba of Troy/ Ran mad for sorrow. That

made me to fear” (4.1.21-2). Once again, Lavinia’s actions, although now very active

rather than passive, are met with confusion and misinterpretation. Lucius’ nephew likens

her to the literary and historical figure of Hecuba who, after losing her family and being

enslaved by the Achaeans, blinded her captor, Polymestor, and then killed his children.

The boy in the scene fears that her fervor might be a murderous rage. In the Inferno,

Dante wrote that after Hecuba saw that bodies of her dead children she “began barking

like a dog.”63 As Lavinia’s actions are often indicated by other characters’ speech rather

than plotted stage directions, the Boy’s allusion could imply that Lavinia is grunting in an

animalistic manner – the only verbal utterances that her impaired state permits. Lavinia

engages her whole body and perhaps even her voice to communicate a message. While

the Boy is correct in noting Lavinia’s agitated passion, he does not realize that what she

wants is the copy of the Metamorphosis that he holds in his hands.

Seeing the book is Lavinia’s emotional trigger; she is now not only ready but

obsessed with communicating that she was raped by Chiron and Demetrius. Pointing out

Philomela’s story could be a way for her to communicate this to her father and uncle.

She raises her arms in the air, indicating that she had two assailants (4.1.37) and then

grabs the book, fumbling with its pages (4.1.41). This is a sequence of extreme bodily

engagement, yet it still is not enough. Marcus begs her to “give signs,” to explain further,

63
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Ed. Mark Musa: The Indiana Critical edition (Indiana: IUP,
1995) 216.

56
 Lavinia

and he then shows her how to write out her message with a stick in her mouth on a blank

piece of dirt. And so she does. Lavinia crouches on the ground, “takes the staff in her

mouth and guides it with her stump and writes” (4.1.76). She writes the word Stuprum,

which in Latin translates to “dishonor, shame, (illicit) sexual intercourse.”64 Lavinia then

writes the names of her rapists: Chiron and Demitrius. This series of movements

represents the zenith of Lavinia’s character development. She is no longer guided by her

father’s hand; it is now she who guides. Even though Marcus showed her how to write

with the stick, he is unable to provide her with the words. The words are, indeed, her

own. Lavinia has taken the staff into her mouth and created her own tongue. The woman

who could not even utter the word “rape” now writes it clearly on the ground. Lavinia’s

writing of “rape” in the dirt, however, does introduce interesting questions about gender.

In 2.3, Lavinia’s feminine decency paralyzes her tongue, preventing it from saying the

word “rape.” She insinuated that even uttering the word would taint her womanhood.

This raises issues as to the impact upon her essential womanhood once she is raped and

bears to write it down. In taking the staff into her mouth, Lavinia figuratively gains male

genitalia, the stick serving as a phallic symbol. Traditionally, males are the bodies of

action, but here Lavinia has taken action. Lavinia has gained empowerment but has lost

the essence of her womanhood. Once her story has been told, however, once she finds a

way to take charge and physically scrawl Demetrius and Chiron’s names on the ground

and action has been taken, she is erased. Lavinia has exhausted her function in society

and in the play. Even discounting her physical maladies, Lavinia is a ruined woman. Her

husband is dead and she has been shamed and dishonored. She can never return to her

role as chaste daughter. Never again can she be a wife. Her role has been irrevocably
64
Berger 719.

57
 Lavinia

disrupted. Furthermore, she has given the men of her family all that they needed: the

names of her rapists, the names of those who will now be the objects of Titus’ cruel

revenge. Her job is done. After Marcus asks Lavinia to kneel with them after she has

written down her assailants’ names, she is not addressed throughout the rest of the scene.

Her male relatives do not comfort her or ask her more questions. It is as if Lavinia is no

longer there. The men will avenge her crime, but after that they have little other use for

her. She has sealed her destruction. According to Dessen, in a Deborah Warner stage

production, Lavinia “conveyed vividly a sense of euphoria at this breakthrough, an initial

reaction that was soon followed (once events had passed her by) by a let-down that was

acted out in a slow, shambling exit upstage during Marcus’ closing speech.”65 The men

onstage essentially ignore Lavinia as a victim.

The rest of the play depicts Lavinia completing her saga of erasure, for after

Chiron and Demetrius are dead, there is nothing left for her. Although the level of her

involvement is left to the discretion of the director, Lavinia does play a role in the death

of her rapists. When Titus slits their throats, it is Lavinia who holds the basin between

her amputated arms to collect their “guilty blood” as it drips from their throats (5.2.182).

She is physically active, but a tool for Titus’ revenge plot.

Revenge is the only option open to the Andronici given their social context. In

fact, as Maurice Hunt remarks in an article examining different forms of "compelling art"

in Titus Andronicus, through Marcus' invocation of the legend of Troy, likening Titus

and Lucius to Hector and Junius Brutus in iv.i, he provides literary models, artistic

examples, of how his own family can seek bloody vengeance. Furthermore, Titus states

that "for worse than Philomel you used my daughter,/ And worse than Progne I' will be
65
Dessen 66.

58
 Lavinia

reveng'd" (5.2.194-5). Titus kills Lavinia just as Virginius killed his daughter. Literary

works act as paragons. In this case, “literary images can suggest meaningful patterns of

behavior.66 The Andronici must seek revenge. Lavinia must die to close her tale and her

suffering in a satisfying way.

Lavinia’s death is her final act as a performance artist. She even enters in

costume, dressed in a veil. Although it is Titus who slits her throat, and although he may

do so for selfish reasons (“Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee/ And with thy shame

thy father’s sorrow die!”), this act of murder is also an act of mercy given the social

context and a recognition of the devastating losses to her person and status that have

rendered Lavinia’s life unlivable (5.3.46-7). In Warner’s production, Lavinia steps to

Titus with her back towards the audience. When he performs the act of killing her,

Lavinia is seated on his lap.67 In 1978, at Stratford, William Hurt played the final scene

entirely as a manifestation of charity, ridding Lavinia of her shame.68

Although she can reach her full potential as a fully realized character after the

attack, the role of a Shakespearean rape victim is still severely limited. Her function is to

assist in righting the wrong of the crime in an act of revenge and then disappearing to

erase the trauma’s existence from the stage.

66
Maurice Hunt, “Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900. (Spring, 1988) 204. <http://www.jstor.org>.
67
Dessen 60.
68
Ashley 425.

59
 Conclusion

Conclusion

In Shakespeare’s body of work, the subject matter of rape is not unique to The

Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus. In fact, allusions to sexual assault are made

throughout Shakespeare’s writings, spanning the entirety of his career. In most of his

other pieces, however, rape is only alluded to or threatened, but is never fully actualized.

Shakespeare presents rape in a variety of contexts. It can be an act of revenge, an

attempt to force someone’s hand in marriage (marrying one’s rapist was often seen as the

only ways to erase the shame of the crime);69 or a loss of the rapist’s sexual control. In

the case of Caliban in The Tempest, it is revealed that the monster tried to rape Miranda

but was stopped by her father. Remorseless, Caliban says, “O ho, O ho! wouldn’t had

been done… I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans” (1.2.349-53). Miranda is

present when Caliban makes this declaration, and yet she says nothing about his intended

crime. Considering that Miranda is the one who taught Caliban how to speak, it is

interesting that she gave him language but he has rendered her speechless.

Rape is often threatened in Shakespeare. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

written before Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, Proteus lusts after Silvia, who is in love

with his friend, Valentine. When Proteus follows Silvia into the woods and tries to woo

her, his advances are denied. Outraged, Proteus responds that if Silvia cannot be changed

“to a milder form,/ I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arms’ end./ And love you ‘gainst the

nature of love – force you” (Two Gentlemen, 5.4.58-61). As he seizes Silvia, the

69
Williams 95.

60
 Conclusion

frightened, intended victim cries, “O, heaven!” (5.4.62). This is Silvia’s last vocal

assertion for the remainder of the play. She is rendered speechless by Proteus’ intended

attack. Furthermore, when Valentine leaves a space in which he has been hiding to

rebuke Proteus, the potential rapist shows remorse and Valentine, satisfied, offers Silvia

to her would-be rapist to show that there is no ill will. An apology is not issued to Silvia

but to her fiancé; she is not consulted. The now silenced Silvia is an object to be passed

between men.

Allusions to rape in the woods occur throughout Shakespeare. Outside of the

home and an uncivilized, lawless environment, the woods are a hidden place to carry out

acts of impurity; the woods are, after all, where Chiron and Demetrius raped and

mutilated Lavinia. In act three, scene five of Cymbeline, Cloten plots revenge against his

spurned lover, Imogen, and her fiancé. He plans to follow them into the woods to kill his

adversary and then rape Imogen. Fortunately for Imogen, this plot never comes to

fruition. However, the woods are depicted not only as providing cover to hide crime, but

as offering an unregulated place that can even inspire these lustful acts. Demetrius

threatens Helena with rape if she follows him into the forest any longer, “You do

impeach your modesty too much/ To leave the city and commit yourself/ Into the hands

of one that loves you not,/ To trust the opportunity of night/ And the ill counsel of a

desert place/ With the rich worth of your virginity” (2.1.214-219).

Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed rather than read, thus, directorial

interpretations of rape also must be taken into account. A John Hancock production of A

Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theatre de Lys in 1968 was sexually erotic and vulgar.

Hippolyta, the captured Amazonian, is dragged onstage, caged and guarded. She is a

61
 Conclusion

captive donning leopard skins, ferocious, and vindictive.70 She is there by force, perhaps

a victim of rape. This makes Theseus’ lines, “I wooed thee with my sword/ And won thy

love, doing thee injuries” all the more ominous (1.1.16-7). While “sword” is a

euphemism for “penis,” creating a double entendre, if Hippolyta is seen as an unwilling

captive, then Theseus is admitting to having taken his wife by force and having his way

with her as an act of violence. The humor of the line is thus lost. However, since

Hippolyta is now married to Theseus, her presumed rapist, the crime may be, in the

Elizabethan framework, erased. It is only a modern concept that a husband can rape his

wife.71 Another example of what today would be conceptualized as marital rape occurs

in The Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio is depicted as an abusive husband, denying Kate

food and beating her into submission. In a 2008 production of the play by the Royal

Shakespeare Company, Petruchio is displayed having sex with Kate’s limp and lifeless

body. Thus, without stepping outside the bounds of the text, directors have interpreted

the Shakespearean canon as including further instances of actualized rape. These

directors take Shakespeare’s lead by reacting to his textual implications of rape and

representing it on the stage.

The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus are unique in that they, alone, fully

present rape as a pivotal, actualized event in its entirety, including its emotional

consequences for the female victim. Rape lies at the crux of these two early tragedies; it

is not merely a construct of a director or an event alluded to in passing. Furthermore, The

Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus are unique in the way that they develop the

70
Alan Lewis, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Fair Fantasy or Erotic Nightmare”
Educational Theatre Journal, (Oct 1969) 251. <http://www.jstor.org>.
71
K. Bugress-Jackson. “Wife Rape.” Public Affairs Quarterly (Jan 1998) 1-22.

62
 Conclusion

character of the rape victim. Even if she is silenced by the assault, quite literally in the

case of Lavinia, the violated woman has an emotional reaction and arc after the crime has

been committed against her body. And even though Lucrece and Lavinia both choose to

end their lives, they are both fully developed and endowed with complexity.

The emotional depth of Lucrece and Lavinia’s reactions to their trauma

foreshadows the characters of Shakespeare’s other heroines, particularly the innocent

victims. In Hamlet, Ophelia suffers the loss of her former lover. Her intended trajectory

towards marriage and the role of wife and princess is stopped short. Jan Kott writes,

“Lavinia lacks the awareness of suffering that plunged Ophelia into her madness.”72

Ophelia is never depicted in the text as having been raped, although numerous stage

productions have chosen to have Hamlet almost raping her. Following a Peter Brooks

production of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon, Jan Kott, a reviewer from the Birmingham

Post, describes Hamlet suddenly and violently reaching up Ophelia’s skirt in a rash attack

after which she “looks lucky to escape with her life.”73 But Ophelia does react to what

she sees as her victimization as if she were a victim of rape. Showalter writes that, “In

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the stage direction that a woman enters with disheveled

hair indicates that she might either be mad or the victim of a rape; the disordered hair, her

offence against decorum, suggests sensuality in each case.”74 Ophelia is directed to enter

with her hair tangled before her death.

72
Jan Kott, “Titus” ed. Philip C. Kolin Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (New York:
Garland, 1995) 394.
73
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet, (NJ: Associated University Press, 1992) 535.
74
Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities
of Feminist Criticism,” Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. (New York: Routledge, 1993)
3.

63
 Conclusion

Just as Lavinia and Lucrece learn to express themselves through artistic and

symbolic means of communication in an attempt to alleviate the pain of their

victimization, so does Ophelia. Brian Lyons even believes that, “Of all the characters in

Hamlet, Ophelia is most persistently presented in terms of symbolic meaning”75 She is

dressed in white, decorated by garlands, her hair down, and singing until she ends her life

by drowning. She is giving away flowers, deflowering herself. “There’s rosemary, that’s

for remembrance… And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts… There’s fennel for you and

columbines” and “rue” and “daisy” and “violets” (4.5.174-83). Finally, she sings a

nonsensical song leading to her death. Words have escaped her and she can only

communicate her feelings of madness and confusion through song.

Although these women exist within the strictures and legal schemata of their

societies, which could be seen as diminishing them to the status of property, Shakespeare

takes a large initiative in the evolution of artists freeing those women from that status to

show them as three-dimensional, significant human beings. His interest is in the

individual rather than the crime committed against her. Shakespeare explores the pain of

doomed female characters by giving them their own voices. Even if they are physically

incapable of expressing their voices through speech, their inner-suffering and interior

pain comes through in moments of creative artistry.

75
Showalter 2.

64
 Works Cited

Works Cited

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Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans: Mark Musa. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Livy. The History of Rome from its Foundations. Trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt. New
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Saint Augustine. City of God. Trans: Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Ed. J.M. Nosworthy. London: Arden, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet, 1998.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Russell McDonald. New

York: Pelican, 2000.

Shakespeare, William. "The Rape of Lucrece." The Complete Sonnets & Poems. Ed. Colin
Burrow. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 239-338.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Arden, 1958.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Ed. Russell McDonald. New York: Pelican,
2000.

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