"When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize" (On "The Rape of Lucrece")

Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece" is based on a pre-Christian Roman legend from Livy, later romanticized in poetry form by Ovid in 8 AD. Shakespeare sticks to the basics of the story: Roman general Collatine brags about his wife's fidelity and beauty, leading the other Roman generals to check in on their own wives, of which Lucretia/Lucrece is the only wife worthy of such praise. Unfortunately, this exposure of her worth causes the son of the king, Tarquin, to fall madly in lust with her, and plot her rape.

Tarquin steals into her bedchamber at night, and wakes her, threatening her with a choice: she can submit to his sexual advances willingly, or he will kill her and place her body in an embrace with that of a dead slave, allowing him to claim that he caught them in the carnal act and slew them, thence destroying both her own and her husband's honor forever.

She begs him not to throw away a lifetime of honor and glory for a few moments of pleasure, but Tarquin is unmoved. He blames Collatine for showing him Lucrece and not protecting her well enough, and blames Lucrece for being just so darn pretty. In Shakespeare's version, he then stuffs some sheets in her mouth and goes to work.

Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer describes the act thusly: "Rape has no duration and no narrative content. It is a catastrophe, and as such can only function as the end of one story and the beginning of another. Of itself it can have no motivation and no psychology. That does not mean some playwright or other has not written a spectacle of prolonged sexual assault, in which characters are repeatedly raped and sodomised. But it could hardly be done in a way that would make such criminal behaviour explicable. To assist at such a spectacle would be at least as degrading as - and no more informative than - watching a dogfight. Evil is chaos. To render it in any other way, as if it had some kind of internal logic, would be to deny its essential character. Rape cannot make sense but narratives must." (The Guardian, 2001.) 

By now, with years of "Game of Thrones" behind us, surely we are immured to the thought of a woman's rape as being necessary for plot advancement, rather than the plot itself. But my heart still aches when Lucrece's response to Tarquin's ravishment is not despair for the hurt placed upon her, but for how Tarquin's act has despoiled her, as a possession and holder of her husband's honor. A few dozen stanzas explore her grief, compared to that of Hecuba of Troy, not in her own pain and fear and trauma, but in how the rape will ruin Collatine's position. She plans her own suicide in an effort to spare him the knowledge.

Yes. She (and the silent audience reading along with her) believe in some way that death is the only option for dealing with a body and soul soiled by the ravishment of another. She's compared, stanza after stanza, to a castle that has been invaded, and is therefore polluted. She cannot be saved; she must therefore be destroyed.

She finally decides on another course of action, and in Shakespeare, as in Livy and Ovid, she tells her husband and father of Tarquin's rape immediately before killing herself with a dagger. In Shakespeare, as proof of her now-polluted nature, the blood that spills out from her breast is both red and black, the black evidence of how Tarquin was able to spoil her at an inner, body and soul level.

The end is triumphant - Lucrece's death leads to the Roman men banding together to drive out the evil kings of Tarquin and founding the first Republic (but not before first, fighting over who has more right to own the grief over Lucrece's death.) Hurray for Roman Republicanism! Down with tyranny!

Not finished with Lucrece's poor body yet, though, the Romans first parade her through the streets as a bizarre anti-monarchic propaganda. Only in death could she escape her despoilment and be honored again.

The problem is, art is not only descriptive, it is prescriptive. Shakespeare has been one of our most prolific, most taught artists for hundreds of years now. Yes, there is a positive message about driving out tyrannical kings here, but what other messages are underneath? Of course, in the English Renaissance, there were ideas about a woman's honor, and who it belonged to, and "purity" and how a man isn't to blame for his own lust, it's the woman's fault for being so beautiful that he can't help himself. Those ideas existed then, for sure. But when a piece like this is read, and taught, uncritically, and the rape becomes just part of the narrative, a plot piece to drive forward another message and not examined for itself...what other messages are we reinforcing in our own worlds?

When we talk about "rape culture," this is what we are talking about. Not a world in which people rape each other as a matter of culture, but a world in which our culture excuses rape, and finds excuses for it - he couldn't help himself, he's just a man, she should have been more protected, she should have hidden her beauty, she is defiled now that another man who isn't her husband has protected her. And being aware and critical of these things doesn't mean censoring them - I'm still here, still reading Shakespeare, still loving his work (and eventually, when we get to "Measure for Measure," we'll see him start to question these assumptions more and more.) But it DOES mean looking with a critical eye and noticing how these monoliths of our culture contribute to the ideals of today.

Art installation by Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May (1977)

Old Dominion University (ODU) in Virginia, 2015.