1. John Heming and Henry Condell, eds., dedicatory epistle to William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, The Shakespeare First Folio (1623). [BACK]

2. The Argument, "The Rape of Lucrece"; Shakespeare citations will be to The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., (Boston, 1974); references to the original edition (1594) will be to the facsimile edition published by the Scolar Press (London, 1968). Citations of poems will give line numbers within parentheses in the text. [BACK]

3. T. W. Baldwin discusses the influence on The Argument of Ovid's Fasti and Livy's Historia in On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., 1950), 108-12. James M. Tolbert argues The Argument to the poem is not by Shakespeare, "The Argument of Shakespeare's 'Lucrece': Its Sources and Authorship," Studies in English 29 (1950): 77-90. [BACK]

4. There are six attested Shakespeare signatures; "By me William Shakespeare " is on page 3 of Shakespeare's will. For discussions, not always persuasive, and reproductions of Shakespeare's handwriting, see Charles Hamilton, In Search of Shakespeare (New York, 1985), esp. 38-47. [BACK]

5. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, 1986). break [BACK]

6. Facsimile edition, "Hap'ly that name of chast, unhap'ly set." [BACK]

7. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; facsimile ed., Kent, Ohio, 1970), 216. [BACK]

8. "Bi-fold" is from Troilus and Cressida ; this is Troilus' response to Cressida's duplicity: "O madness of discourse,/That cause sets up with and against itself!/Bi-fold authority, where reason can revolt/Without perdition, and loss assume all reason/Without revolt. This is and is not Cressid!" (5.2.142-46). The passage is relevant to the Troy ekphrasis the poem develops later on, especially Troilus' dumbfounded response to "how these two did co-act": on the one hand, "Shall I not lie in publishing a truth," on the other, the hope "that doth invert th'attest of eyes and ears" (5.2.118-22). [BACK]

9. Sigmund Freud, "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality" (1922), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1970), 162. Freud sees this as the logic of projective jealousy, and footnotes Desdemona's "Willow song" as evidence: "'I called my love false love, but what said he then?/If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men,'" 161; see note 33, below. [BACK]

10. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, 1965); Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1977). [BACK]

11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, 1969). Patricia K. Joplin discusses the rape of Philomela in Girardian and Lévi-Straussian terms in "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours," Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25-53. Nancy Vickers discusses the rhetoric of praise in "The Rape of Lucrece" in much the same terms, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985): 95-115. [BACK]

12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), esp. 161-79. Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris, 1970). Traditional commentary on the story of the rape of Lucrece is usefully reviewed in Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982). Moralizing discussions of the ethical questions raised by the rape and suicide of Lucrece rapidly become formulaic "themes for disputation." Accordingly, aspects of her story provide convenient topical commonplaces through which to display and to teach rhetorical skills; hence, the purely rhetorical tradition of arguing on both sides of the question, in utramque partem, Pro Lucrecia and Contra Lucreciam , e.g., Coluccio Salutati, George Rivers, et al.; see Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia , 38. As I argue in connection with Tarquin's "cross," the story of the rape of Lucrece systematically activates essentially, and therefore interminably, contestable questions so as to elicit from readers a suspended investment in the story that, as something suspended, determines the inevitability of rape.

This is why triangulating characterizations of the relation of desire to violence in literature, such as those to which I refer above, regularly promote, whatever their explicit intentions, an erotics that conduces to rape. The tradition behind this literary strategy is an old one, which is why I say above that the desire for violence and the violence of desire are traditional expressions of each other. A paradigm for this, one that is quite important to Shakespeare, comes at the end of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale , which seems to resolve and to defuse the opposition between a violent Mars (represented by Arcite, who is nevertheless a lover) and a desiring Venus (represented by Palamon, who is nevertheless a warrior) in the figure of Emeleye, the representative of Diana who, as goddess both of the hunt and of childbearing chastity, is image of continue

the domesticated integration of violence and desire. The terms of this happy reconciliation go back to Homer, from whom derives the medieval tradition according to which the legitimate marriage of Mars and Venus spawns as its issue the child-god Harmonia (spelled "Hermione" in the Middle Ages, a point relevant to The Winter's Tale ). In The Knight's Tale (and elsewhere) the harmonious resolution of the chiastic conjunction of a venereal Mars and a martial Venus is accomplished through the exigently accidental violence that puts an end to the public fight for love conducted by Palamon and Arcite. But this harmonious and triangulated resolution of the two lovers' quarrel is staged for a fourth point of vantage, that of amazon Hippolyta and warrior Theseus, who thus come to occupy, by virtue of their witness to triangularity, the place in which violence and desire come together in chiastic disjunction, the vantage point, therefore, of rape. "Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword," says Theseus at the opening of A Midsummer Night's Dream , "And won thy love doing thee injuries" (1.1.16-17):

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Hippolyta and Theseus

Since Chaucer is the most eminent rapist in our literary tradition (thanks to the Cecily Champagne episode in which he was accused of raptus ), there are anecdotal, biographic grounds with reference to which we can understand why it is so regularly the violent case in Chaucer that Amor Vincit Omnia --usually with the help of Cupid's arrows. Chaucer consistently induces from the chiastic concatenation of violence and desire a specific form and substance of literary desire, e.g., the way, at the opening of The Canterbury Tales , a male Aphrodite (April) "pierces" a female Mars (March) or the way his/her liquidity spills forth to surround the parched channels through which it is supposed to flow: "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,/The Droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/And bathed every veyne is swich licour . . ./Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages." I discuss the way the criss-crossed invaginations informing these lines derive from a general literary logic of erotic yearning in "The Structure of Allegorical Desire," in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80 , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore, 1981). I discuss the tradition behind the Mars-Venus topos in my forthcoming book on Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Will (University of California Press). We can note here, however, that The Knight's Tale occupies a central place in Shakespeare's dramatic imagination; e.g., he concludes his career by retelling the story in The Two Noble Kinsmen . I mention this because, though this essay on "The Rape of Lucrece" is primarily concerned to establish the poetics of Shakespearean rape, the argument it develops is intended to serve as a basis for a discussion of how the theatrics of rape functions in Shakespeare's plays. Again, though Shakespeare's use, in narrative and drama, of the chiastic concatenation of violence and desire is nothing but traditional, there is something novel and historically significant about the way he uses the commonplace to produce powerful literary subjectivity effects, rather than the abstract, allegorical agents through which the commonplace is motivated in pre-Shakespearean literature. [BACK]

13. Cited in Riverside Shakespeare , 1837. break [BACK]

14. Compare with Twelfth Night 's purple "violet," the magic flower of erotic mix-up in A Midsummer Night's Dream , which is turned purple by Cupid's erring arrow: "Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell./It fell upon a little western flower,/Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound" (2.1.165-67); also "The forward violet" of sonnet 99. Purple is the color, and violets "breathe" the odor, of Shakespearean rape. [BACK]

15. A full discussion of the relation of Twelfth Night to "The Rape of Lucrece" would require an account of the way the false letter of Twelfth Night , written by a woman's hand, leads Malvolio to sport "cross-garter'd" stockings. With regard to what I argue above, it is important that the "signature" of the letter emerges from the literal connection of "cut" and "cunt": "By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's" (2.4.86-88). This is the same signature system as is developed in "The Rape of Lucrece," as Malvolio himself remarks: "And the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal" (2.4.93-94). [BACK]

16. The following four paragraphs are adapted, with some revisions, from Shakespeare's Perjured Eye , 39-41, where I used this stanza to example Shakespeare's use of rhetorical chiasmus; I want here to consider how chiasmus functions thematically in "The Rape of Lucrece." [BACK]

17. Cf. the inside-outside glove in Twelfth Night : "A sentence is but a chev'ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn'd outward!" (3.1.11-12). Referring to gynecological tradition, Stephen Greenblatt gives a naturalizing account of this love-glove in "Fiction and Friction," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought , ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, David Wellbury (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 30-63. [BACK]

18. The proverb survives through Freud: "Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love," "A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men" (1910), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , 67. [BACK]

19. Riverside Shakespeare prints a dash, but the facsimile edition a comma. [BACK]

20. The next stanza continues, "For with the nightly linen that she wears/He pens her piteous clamors in her head" (680-81); compare these "folded" "lips" and "pen" with King Lear : "If I had thee in Lipsbury pinfold, I would make thee care for me" (2.2.9-10). [BACK]

21. The title on the frontispiece is Lucrece , but the running title at the head of all the pages of the facsimile edition is The Rape of Lucrece . [BACK]

22. Cf. Lucrece's "'Let my good name, that senseless reputation,/For Collatine's dear love be kept unspotted:/If that be made a theme for disputation,/The branches of another root are rotted'" (820-24). [BACK]

23. The relevant Freudian parallel is the Wolfman's "W-espe," which, on the one hand, at the level of the signifier, spells out the Wolfman's initials, "S. P.," on the other, as "wasp," at the level of the signified, calls up the image of the butterfly that determines the Wolfman's erotic object-choice ( coitus a tergo ) through its associations with castration and the primal scene, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), in Three Case Histories , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1970), 286-87. As I argue above, it is only within a specific literary tradition that the visualization of letters necessarily entails this kind of subjectifying erotic designation. [BACK]

24. Example 1 does not play on "Will," but leads immediately to a thematization of epideictic "name": "He stories to her ears her husband's fame,/Won in the fields of fruitful Italy;/And decks with praises Collatine's high name" (106-8). Two stanzas continue

after example 2: "And in his will his willful eye he tired. / With more than admiration he admired" (417-18). A play on "will" occurs within example 3, but this is further amplified in the following stanza, where it is developed in terms of the logic of the "crossed," pricking "let": "'I see what crosses my attempt will bring, / I know what thorns the growing rose defends, / I think the honey guarded with a sting: / All this beforehand counsel comprehends. / But Will is deaf and hears no heedful friends'" (491-95). A play on "will" occurs within example 4, with "'Myself thy friend will kill myself. . . . This brief abridgement of my will I make.'" In example 5 redoubled "will" appears in the doubled "wil-dness." Example 6 imports the doubleness of "will" into the ambiguities of "marble will"; see footnote 26. [BACK]

25. " Willm Shakspere " appears on page 2 of Shakespeare's will; also, " Willm Shakp " appears in a document relating to a legal suit. " W ^m Shakspe * " occurs on the mortgage deed of Blackfriars house. [BACK]

26. This corresponds to thematic ambiguities raised by the syntax of example 6, which allow the "as" of the couplet to coordinate both male and female "will": with male will "forming"--either molding by encircling or engraving by carving--the waxy minds of women, as it chooses; and with female will, thus doubly "styled," the simulacrum--"as" as the likeness or masquerade--of the marble minds of men. In either case, Lucrece is not the "author" of her "will." [BACK]

27. Cf. Tarquin's argument: "Then for thy husband and thy children's sake, / Tender my suit; bequeath not to their lot / The shame that from them no device can take, / The blemish that will never be forgot, / Worse than a slavish wipe, or birth-hour's blot; / For marks described in men's nativity / Are nature's faults, not their own infamy" (533-39). [BACK]

28. Cf. Thersites' judgment in Troilus and Cressida : "All the argument is a whore and a cuckold" (2.3.72-73). [BACK]

29. The synecdochical procedure that allows a part to stand "for the whole to be imagined" presupposes a figurality that works by visually imaging the trope's signified (e.g., to take the standard example, fifty sails for fifty ships); this is quite different from a figurality based on the linguistic substitution of one signifier for another signifier, which is how Jacques Lacan understands the general operation of metaphor. Lacan explains this, and points up the nominalist folly informing a synecdochical understanding of poetic trope, in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud," in Ecrits , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 146-78. [BACK]

30. This blind spot in vision is thematically present in the poem from the very beginning; hence the book-reading context for the first MW example: "But she that never cop'd with stranger eyes, / Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, / Nor read the subtle shining secrecies / Writ in the glassy margents of such books. / She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks, / Nor could she moralize his wanton sight, / More than his eyes were open to the light" (99-105). [BACK]

31. Note that, at the level of the signifier, the "tide" which "outruns the eye" is articulated as "saw" and "draw," the past tenses of "to see" and "to draw." [BACK]

32. Though this marks its climax, the poem does not end right here, but continues on for a short while, first, developing a rivalry in grief between Lucrece's father and Collatine--"Then son and father weep with equal strife, / Who should weep most, for daughter or for wife" (1791-92)--then, gesturing, very briefly, toward the promised revenge. The father-in-law versus husband competition is central to Shakespeare's understanding of a structural contradiction energizing patriarchal marriage. When, in marriage, the daughter substitutes her husband for her father, her passage from the one male to the other amounts to a forswearing of the father, e.g., Brabantio in continue

Othello : "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see; / She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee" (1.3.292-93). For this reason, for Shakespeare, the woman has always already committed adultery by virtue of her having entered into marriage. The way the poem's conclusion scants the political consequences of the story--the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome and the institution of the republic, events to which the Argument gives more weight--suggests that Shakespeare was more concerned with the personalizing consequences of the rape, i.e., the way the "let" returns to Collatine, than with the rape's historical significance. For this reason, the poem leaves some of its readers wanting more, but more of the same , e.g., J. Quarles's extension of the story in Tarquin Banished; or, the Reward of Lust , which concerns itself with what happens to Tarquin after the rape; this was published as an appendix to a 1665 edition of Shakespeare's poem; see Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia , 179. [BACK]

33. Shakespeare plays, famously, on his own name in the so-called "Will" sonnets, where, since "will" refers to both male and female genitals, his lyric first-person is designated by disjunctive copulation, e.g., sonnet 136: "Make but my name thy love, and love that still, / And then thou lovest me for my name is Will "; see Shakespeare's Perjured Eye , chap. 5. There are many " Will " ¬   examples in the plays, e.g., the vocative "will" of William vocative "will" of William Page in the Merry Wives of Windsor: Evans : "What is the focative case, William?"; William : "O-- vocativo , O" (4.1.50-51), or the "Will" of Desdemona's "Willow song": "'The fresh streams ran by her and m urmur'd her m oans, / Sing w illow, w illow, w illow'" (4.3.44-45); "'Sing w illow, w illow; w illow; If I court m oe w omen, you'll couch w ith m oe m en'" (4.3.56-57). I discuss the theme of naming in Othello and its relation to Shakespeare's name in "The Sound of O in Othello : The Real of the Tragedy of Desire" (forthcoming, October , Spring 1988).

More generally, it can be shown that Shakespeare regularly finds the same old story in the remarked designation of a name. Consider, as a small example, but one relevant to "The Rape of Lucrece," what Titus says in Titus Andronicus when he sees his daughter, the raped Lavinia, making inarticulate gestures because her arms have been cut off and her tongue has been torn out: "Mark, Marcus, mark! I understand her signs" (3.1.143-44). Later, Lavinia will successfully reveal her rapists' names when, after first pointing to a passage about Philomela in "Ovid's Metamorphosis," "She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes" (4.1.76, stage direction). [BACK]

34. Claudio Guillén, "Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter," in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation , ed. Barbara Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 70-101. Guillén argues that the diffusion of printing technology, the Humanist revival of classical epistolary modes (neo-Latin and vernacular prose and verse epistles), the incorporation of fictional letters in literary works, the publication of letter manuals, plus an increase in private correspondence, leads to the formation of a specifically literary stylization of voice: a written voice that strives to seem conversational, spontaneous, individuated, intimate. Guillén sees this as an important factor behind the rise of the novel. In a larger historical context, we can say, as Brian Stock implicitly suggests in The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1983), that an oral culture only becomes such after the fact of diffused literacy: a writing culture looks back to an authentic orality that exists only as a function of retrospective nostalgia. This is how the writing "post" of "The Rape of Lucrece" works to establish "The golden splendor of the sun" as "An expir'd date, cancell'd ere well begun"; in the terms proposed by continue

the Dedication, this is why "this Pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous Moity." [BACK]

35. I refer here, of course, to some of the consequences arising, directly and indirectly, from the by now well-known debate between Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which centers around this claim at the end of Lacan's seminar on Poe's "The Purloined Letter": "The sender, we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form [ une forme inversée ]. Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in sufferance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination"; Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 72 (a full version of the seminar appears in Lacan's original Ecrits [Paris, 1966]); in French, the message is inverted, not reversed (41). For Lacan, this is a shorthand way of summarizing his understanding of how it happens a subject comes to be a desiring subject when he accedes to speech, passing (though Lacan means to describe a structural, not a chronological, staging process) from an "Imaginary" register of visual identification and idealization to a different register that Lacan calls "Symbolic," which he associates with a necessary slippage of meaning inherent in subjective speech, and by reference to which he accounts for the subject's insertion into the cultural order. Derrida objects to this Lacanian claim on the grounds that it universalizes a "logocentric" determinism; he summarizes his objection by pointing out that a letter does not always arrive at its destination since it sometimes goes astray. On these grounds, Derrida proposes to oppose, deconstructively, "writing," " écriture ," to Lacan's sexist, spoken "logos"; a short version of Derrida's argument appears in "The Purveyor of Truth," trans. Willis Domingo et al., Yale French Studies 52 (1975), but the argument is considerably amplified in La Carte postale (Paris, 1980).

What I have tried to suggest through the above reading of "The Rape of Lucrece"--with its account of a subjectifying progress from true vision to false language, via the intermediating circle of Collatine's "let"--is that this debate gains its charge because it repeats a familiar literary story; this is why "The Rape of Lucrece" seems so precisely to predicate the topoi and argumentative terms of the debate. As we know from Romeo and Juliet , where a "purloined" (i.e., post-poned) letter is what causes the lovers' tragedy, literary letters always arrive at their destination precisely because they always go astray. Derrida's powerful critique of Lacan, therefore, is readily assimilable to Lacan's general claim (as is apparent in Lacan's late introduction of a third term, the "Real," to function as disjunctive supplement to the Imaginary-Symbolic dialectic). This is why it is so dangerous to rewrite literary stories in an extraliterary register, for, when one does so, one ends up acting out a Shakespearean tragedy. The point is especially important when erotic intentionality is at issue. One contemporary example will have to stand for many. In a translation of a portion of Luce Irigaray's "When Our Lips Speak Together," we read "I love you: body shared, undivided. Neither you nor I severed. There is no need for blood spilt between us. No need for a wound to remind us that blood exists. It flows within us, from us. It is familiar, close. You are quite red, and still so white. . . . The whiteness of this red appropriates nothing. It gives back as much as it receives, in luminous mutuality"; trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs 6, no. 1 (1980): 70. Commenting on this portion of the text, the translator adds an approving footnote: "Irigaray's use of 'red' and 'white' differs consciously from the traditional Western opposition of these terms as symbols of passion and purity. In general, she tries to locate a locus in writing where such 'opposites' may coexist, in a new way" (70). As we have seen, however, the Western continue

tradition does not "oppose" red and white; quite the inverse: "when our lips speak together" in Irigaray's text, therefore, they may call out in a thematic way for "luminous mutuality," but their literary effect is to replicate the inside-outside in-betweenness of "her lips sweet fold," a replication that opens up "a locus in writing" that invites the intrusive interjection of the footnote. This is a model of "reader-response," and the example suggests why it is very dangerous to underestimate the seductive subtlety of Western literariness. break [BACK]