The Sonnets and Other Poems by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

Lucrece stabs herself because she has been ravished. Both poems are centrally interested in the way in which linguistic art is instrumental in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction.
    The Rape of Lucrece
is not only Shakespeare’s most sustained imitation of a classical source, it is also a supreme example of the art of “copiousness” that was recommended by sixteenth-century humanist literary theorists: Shakespeare expanded the seventy-three lines of the Lucrece story in Ovid’s
Fasti
into nearly two thousand. As with
Venus and Adonis
, the most significant elaborations are those that invest the characters with linguistic arts. Three extended discourses are introduced: Tarquin’s inward disquisition as to whether he should carry through his desire, the disputation between the two characters in the bedroom, and Lucrece’s formal complaint after the rape. The genre of the “complaint” seeks to give a voice to the women who are the victims of history: it is the mode of Queen Margaret in her farewell to the Duke of Suffolk in 2
Henry VI
and the voice of the team of lamenting women in
Richard III
. “A Lover’s Complaint,” published with Shakespeare’s
Sonnets
in 1609, is a self-contained foray into the genre.
    Nothing provokes desire more than antithesis. The more artless Lucrece is, the more Tarquin wishes to exercise the arts of love upon her. In the Ovidian source, the very fact that Lucrece has not dressed her hair seductively, that it falls carelessly (“neglectae”) on her neck, makes Tarquin all the more hot to seduce her. In Shakespeare, “Her hair like golden threads played with her breath — / O modest wantons, wanton modesty!” The oxymoron comes to the core of the poem’s depiction of Tarquin’s antithetical desire.
The Rape of Lucrece
is full of puns such as “for his prey to pray he doth begin”: such play of linguistic contraries is not just ornament, for it figures the psychology of contrariness. Tarquin’s desire increases in proportion to Lucrece’s unattainability. The psychology is similar to that in the sonnet tradition, where it is the frosty disdain of the object of desire that energizes the lover into verse.
    Tarquin is inflamed by the very image of Lucrece’s exemplary chastity. The word itself is enough to fire him up: “Haply that name of ‘chaste’ unhapp’ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite.” His lust is also bound up with the dynamics of power: the idea of Lucrece’s loyalty to her husband provokes envy and the thought that “meaner men” should not be entitled to possess anything which he, the king’s son, lacks. Tarquin is an image of the same thing as Angelo in
Measure for Measure
: a man who is made very excited by the thought of purity and whose dominant social position gives him (he thinks) a freedom to satisfy his desires without paying a price.
    On the way to Lucrece’s bedroom, Tarquin’s torch is almost extinguished by the wind which tries to stay his steps, then reignited by his own hot breath. This kind of enlivening detail is typically Shakespearean: it is no coincidence that the poem’s stealthy pacing to the bedroom is reimagined in those great theatrical nightpieces, Macbeth as the embodiment of “withered murder” en route to Duncan’s chamber “With Tarquin’s ravishing strides” and Iachimo in
Cymbeline
emerging from the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom with the words “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” Though it was subsequently turned into a play by Thomas Heywood,
The Rape of Lucrece
is not a dramatic poem in the dynamic sense: it is interested in the action of language, not a language of action. Yet it does share with the Shakespearean drama a taste for interior monologue. Tarquin stops in his tracks before reaching the bedroom “And in his inward mind he doth debate”—for twelve whole stanzas. This retards the action but opens up the character of Tarquin, allowing