Note: In July of 2001 after finishing my MA in English at Bob Jones University, my parents sponsored my attendance at Cambridge University’s International Shakespeare Summer Program, a non-credit continuing education program for anyone above 18. There I had the privilege and delight of learning from a brilliant scholar-teacher, Charles Moseley. Dr. Moseley fit every ideal I had for the perfect literary scholar–breadth of learning, erudition, stylish good looks (complete with coat and tie and a white goatee), and a British accent. It was like learning from someone from the same circle as Tolkien and Lewis, and it was mesmerizing. He said kind words during our interactions about my suitability for doctoral study and validated the quality of the literary education I had received at BJU that left a lasting mark of encouragement. I wrote this paper for his three-week class on Shakespeare’s poetry. A major portion of the argument is a direct response to something he had said in class about the structure of Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece. The paper was written with him as the primary audience. Looking back, it is typical of an approach I used often in my literary analyses–direct analysis of the structure and purpose of the text, a method similar to that used in explicating the meaning of the Bible. (DL, Sept. 19, 2021)
To discuss the importance of form and structure[1] in The Rape of Lucrece we have to know what we mean by “importance.”For our purposes here, importance signifies how large a role form and structure play in getting the poem to do what Shakespeare wanted it to do; it is a measure of how integral they are to the poem’s success as Shakespeare would have defined success. I begin, therefore, with a brief statement of what Shakespeare wanted Lucrece to do.
It is clear from the poem’s dedicatory epistle and from the historical context surrounding the poem’s composition that Shakespeare wrote Lucrece to impress an educated, courtly audience already very familiar with his subject matter—to impress them with his skill as a poet. In addition, it is reasonable to assume based on the Renaissance uses for poetry and modes of reading poetry that Shakespeare was also trying to say something significant. If accomplishing these two goals is taken as the measure of the poem’s success, it is to be expected that form and structure will be important insofar as they are avenues for impressive technical display and/or communicative tools.
The analysis is much easier when it comes to determining to what extent form and structure make Lucrece impressive. Lucrece is a technical tour de force, and it is so primarily because of Shakespeare’s use of certain forms. Success in Elizabethan poetry was virtually defined by how well one could handle certain well-established verbal forms. A myriad of verse forms, rhetorical forms, and topoi had been passed down to the Elizabethan poet from antiquity, and if he could excel at all of them, he could almost guarantee himself a place in the contemporary hall of poetic fame. Shakespeare tackles many of those forms in Lucrece, and he handles them brilliantly.
Shakespeare’s choice of Rime Royal was obviously meant to impress his audience with the weight of his undertaking. Presumably following Aristotle, Elizabethan critics believed verse forms fell into a hierarchy—some noble, some bathetic. Rime Royal was assigned the highest place in that hierarchy, “recommended . . . for tragic matters, complaints, and testaments” (Hallett Smith, Riverside introduction). The selection of Rime Royal bills Lucrece as a “serious” poem in the tradition of Chaucer’s Troilus—a poem with pretensions of greatness.
Shakespeare builds upon his choice of the Rime Royal with a heavy dose of rhetorical forms that were extremely well known to Shakespeare’s classically educated audience.[2] There are at least three major speech cycles in the poem, and although Shakespeare chose a very dramatic subject and made it more dramatic by beginning en medias res, the poem as a whole emphasizes rhetoric over action. (Almost half of the 265 stanzas are given to speeches.) The modern reader is likely to find all this rhetoric a distraction that lessens the poem’s dramatic punch, but Shakespeare’s audience would have found it resonant, and more to the point, they would have been impressed by its quality. They would have spent a good deal of their own time composing the exact same kind of rhetoric, and they would have known that the rhetoric in Lucrece exemplified the art at its finest. Lucrece’s complaint after Tarquin’s departure, for example, is not the longest single section in the poem and centrally located by accident. Not only was the complaint a well-recognized rhetorical form dating back to antiquity (and recently used to great success by Samuel Daniel’s), Elizabethan students were often assigned the writing of their own version of Lucrece’s complaint for their rhetorical edification. By devoting the forty most important stanzas of his “graver labor” to the same speech that many in his audience had had to write for school, Shakespeare displayed authorial confidence bordering on audacity—very impressive audacity.
One other form in Lucrece deserves attention as it is used twice to very notable effect: the ekphrasis. Both the description of the sleeping Lucrece and the fabulous description of the painting of Troy fall under the purview of the ekphrasis, and both are exploited as opportunities for poetic virtuosity. The description of Troy especially would have been impressive to Shakespeare’s audience as it is strongly reminiscent of Maro’s similar ekphrasistic depiction of Troy in the Temple of Juno.
The foregoing analysis is cursory and unoriginal, but the point is clear: the various verbal forms Shakespeare exploits in Lucrece are absolutely fundamental to the poem’s artistic success.
We break newer ground with the question of Lucrece’s structure as a part of its artistic success. This question is more complex and ultimately less satisfying; it is also easy to answer—macroscopic structure was very likely not an important part of Shakespeare’s attempt to impress his courtly Elizabethan audience. There simply is no easily discernable skeletal frame. It has been suggested[3] that the poem’s 265 stanzas can most profitably be understood macroscopically if they are divided into five sets of fifty-three stanzas, each fifth corresponding to an act in a Senecan tragedy. This reading is attractive as it lends a very satisfying order to an otherwise chaotic mix of drama and rhetoric. But it is an imperfect solution to the tangled problem of the poem’s structural coherence.
The Senecan scheme works extremely well for the first two-fifths of the poem. The first fifty-three stanzas concern themselves with Tarquin’s reception at Collatium and his subsequent nocturnal ratiocinations. Tension builds nicely as the heated Tarquin first clamps down on his lust, offering a cogent (beautifully crafted) argument against the madness of raping his kinsman’s wife, and then rejects his rational self in favor of an unbridled will goaded by burning passion. There is notable progression form the first position to the second. Tarquin affirms reason (st. 28-34), then vacillates (st. 35), then rejects reason and affirms passionate will (st. 37-40), and finally goes so far as to consciously reject divine guidance (st. 49-51). The act closes with a foully resolved Tarquin stealing into Lucrece’s chamber and, at the end of stanza fifty-three, throwing back the curtains around her bed.
The second fifth (stanzas 54-106) immediately continues the action as Tarquin, who is now spiritually and rationally self-blinded, is further inflamed by the physical sight of the sleeping Lucrece. Eye imagery pervades the passage, and a powerful four stanza crescendo of martial imagery (st. 60-63) culminates with the lust-bound Tarquin’s first assault of Lucrece’s person. Tension continues to build as he declares his evil intent, rejoices in the weakness expressed in her pleas, and finally rapes her. Following the climactic moment there is a slight softening as the narrative voice elucidates just how well Tarquin prophesied the pangs he would suffer after his crime. The second fifth ends with precision, “surfeit-taking Tarquin” flying from Collatium, his desire, like Amnon’s, turned to abhorrence. The very next stanza (107) begins Lucrece’s complaint.
Each of the first two fifths ends on a natural break in the poem’s dramatic and rhetorical development; indeed, the second fifth ends precisely on the most significant break in the entire poem. But the remainder of the poem fails to live up to the promise of the first two fifths. The divisions are suggestive of an organic structure, but they lack the convincing precision of the first two, which leads me to conclude that the poem very nicely divides into five parts, but those parts are not in five groups of fifty-three stanzas each.
The third fifth is the weightiest portion of the poem, which is in keeping with a Senecan plan, but the break after stanza 159 that marks the end of the third fifty-three does not fit the poem’s organic structure. Lucrece finishes her complaint in stanza 154. In stanza 155 the sun rises, marking the transition away from the “hateful, vaporous, and foggy Night” that Lucrece has just finished lambasting. A break at the end of stanza 155 would be as natural and satisfying as the previous two: the complaint finished, the sun risen, and Lucrece on the threshold of a new day. But by the time the third fifth actually ends, the action has moved on, and the poem is in the process of developing Lucrece’s state of mind as she faces that new day (specifically it focuses on how much misery loves company). While the third set of fifty-three closely brackets the poem’s dominant complaint section, the imprecise alignment with the poem’s actual shifts resists interpretation as intentional structural design. If Shakespeare was really thinking in terms of five fifty-threes, he could easily have caused the end of the complaint and the beginning of the new day to fall exactly on the end of the 159th stanza.
And matters get only worse. The final internal break at the end of a group of fifty-three (at the end of stanza 212) falls awkwardly in the middle of a speech, a speech that is itself in the middle of the Trojan ekphrasis. Lucrece has marked Hecuba’s grief as a worthy parallel of her own, and she reflects on it for four stanzas, the third of which is stanza 212. A break at the end of that stanza is no real break. The nearest thing that could be construed as a shift in the poem’s movement would be Lucrece’s discovery of Sinon in stanza 215, but even that is not a satisfying break, as it separates the Sinon section from the rest of the ekphrasis, rather than making it its fitting culmination. A much more natural division follows stanza 226 where there is the briefest pause as Lucrece reflects upon the ultimate futility of seeking comfort in shared grief, an idea that she has pursued since the rising of the sun in stanza 155 (traced through her reflections on birds, her commiseration with the maid, and her meditation on the painting). Following this slight pause Collatine arrives on the scene in stanza 227, marking the beginning of the poem’s final resolution.
Lucrece can indeed be very profitably read in five sections (1-53 Tarquin’s ratiocinations; 54-106 the rape; 107-155 Lucrece’s complaint; 156-226 expressions of grief; 227-265 resolution), but it is doubtful that Shakespeare intentionally coordinated those five sections with five groups of fifty-three stanzas. The best that can be said is that the poem’s five-part structure is covert, and identifying it is not a necessary part of being very impressed by what Shakespeare has done.
Moving on to the second of Shakespeare’s goals, there is much that could be said about the role form plays in presenting the poem’s message. Obviously forms are again essential, as most of what is said is communicated through carefully chosen, highly artificial verbal forms. Most of the messages are fairly obvious Renaissance themes, and a detailed discussion of the communicative functions of the verbal forms in Lucrece will not fit here. Suffice it to say that they are self-evidently fundamental to the poem’s communicative success.
As far as structure and message goes, because there is no clearly dominant macrostructure, it is not necessary to glean most of what the poem has to say through the lens of a macroscopic skeleton. There is, however, an interesting footnote to the more accessible lessons that can be drawn from one particular, peculiar piece of the poem’s structure.
One of the most puzzling parts of Lucrece’s design is the extremely compressed movement towards retribution. It is difficult to understand why Shakespeare would conclude his tour de force, his serious tragic poem, with an anticlimactic throwaway stanza that undercuts the gravitas he has worked so hard to maintain. But a possible answer that would explain the odd conclusion and also shed some light on Shakespeare’s message may be found in the portrayal of Brutus.
From antiquity Brutus has been the “picture of Roman virtue” (Mosely), and the poem a paean to republicanism. But here Shakespeare unquestionably makes Brutus a minor Machiavel. In two short stanzas Brutus is neatly sketched as a deceiver guided by “policy,” (Policy the Shakespearean codeword for Machiavels, (cf. Aaron the Moor)). We have, then, in the seven final stanzas of the poem two notable oddities—the anticlimactic final stanza and Brutus’ abnormal portrayal—two oddities that are specifically linked to one another in the poem’s argument wherein Brutus is credited with effecting the exile of the Tarquins “with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the King, wherewith the people were . . . moved.” Taken with the final stanzas, the argument seems to suggest that Brutus is perhaps a bit of a demagogue who is not above using others for his own political ends. Indeed, it is quite clear that Brutus takes little interest in Lucrece’s suicide other than exploiting its political significance. He has the deadly knife in his hands before the body is comfortably collapsed. This pattern of oddity in the final stanzas is, I think, purposeful and significant. To see the significance, we must begin by examining the political implications of Tarquin’s crime.
We know that the poem clearly addresses issues of power and responsibility. Tarquin is the son of a king and will be king himself someday. Lucrece makes a very big deal out of this fact when she adjures him not to commit the rape. “This deed,” she says, “will make thee only lov’d for fear, / But happy monarchs still are fear’d for love” (610-11). Tarquin bears on his shoulders the responsibilities of a monarch, and the familial duties which he mentions repeatedly in his ratiocinations are tied to monarchal responsibilities. When he says the rape would “be an eye-sore in [his] golden coat” he is referring to family honor, but a family honor that is inevitably linked to the crown. And when he rejects those considerations and responsibilities and rapes Lucrece anyway, Tarquin commits a sin not just against Lucrece, but against himself—and against the crown. Tarquin makes the crown vulnerable, which is why Brutus is able to effect a bloodless revolution. Shakespeare does not explicitly condemn Tarquin’s sin as a crime against the monarchy, but the subtext is clear, and he does obliquely reinforce the idea when he has Lucrece observe, “Had doting Priam check’d his son’s desire, / Troy had been bright with fame, and not with fire” (1490-1). The exact same could be said of the elder Tarquin and the Roman monarchy.
But while Tarquin’s crime is indeed an abuse of power and crime against the crown, and while it is indeed traditionally portrayed as a public evil that justly results in very public retribution, Shakespeare portrays Tarquin’s sin as primarily private. And he, through Lucrece, specifically calls for private retribution. Lucrece explains that one of the reasons suicide is called for is to offer a guide for how her husband should pursue vengeance. “How Tarquin must be us’d, read it in me: / Myself thy friend will kill myself thy foe, / And for my sake serve thou false Tarquin so” (1195-7). She reiterates this view in the powerful stanzas leading up to her death. “Let the traitor die,” she cries (1686), and then enjoins them all to swear an oath to revenge her wrong. And they swear, crying out for the name of her ravisher. But she does not give the name. Instead, in a carefully orchestrated maneuver designed to reinforce Tarquin’s worthy end, she declares that her stain demands her death. And in a moment of Verdian drama, she plunges a dagger into her breast, crying that it is Tarquin, “He, he . . . / That guides this hand to give this wound to me” (1721-2). In so doing, she simultaneously identifies Tarquin and powerfully casts him as a murderer, a murderer who must die even as she has died.
But Tarquin does not die. One of the unforeseen consequences of his crime against the crown is that he is exiled with his whole family and the monarchy is pulled down. It would seem that Brutus, despite his words about the “wretched wife . . . that should have slain her foe” and his bloody handed oath to “revenge the death,” capitalizes on Tarquin’s smirch on the monarchy by inciting a popular revolt. It is possible that in Shakespeare’s strongly hierarchical, Elizabethan economy, Brutus leads his fellows astray and Lucrece dies in vain. Certainly Tarquin does not get his just deserts, and in avoiding death is further dishonored.
The bathetic ending, then, is a reflection of Shakespearean anti-republicanism and a subtle condemnation of a foolish father and husband that will squabble over who is more grieved and then fail to actually do anything about it. It is also almost certainly a warning to the young Southhampton that he should be aware that prodigality on his part will leave him vulnerable to the preying hands of unscrupulous men who wish to find a pretext to deny him influence. To bad he didn’t learn the lesson.
In sum, verbal forms are very important to both the artistic and communicative success of The Rape of Lucrece. This poem is all about writing extremely well in widely recognized conventions. Because of the rich use of these forms, Shakespeare is able to do without overt structural harmony on both an artistic and communicative level. The result is at times frustrating for the critic who wants a tidy row of dotted i’s and crossed t’s, but multiple reprints and high praise from Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson bear witness that Shakespeare’s audience wasn’t too bothered.
[1] Form and structure are possibly redundant and should be defined. Form in this paper is a catch-all term that refers to any of the verbal forms of poetry, whether they be verse forms, rhetorical forms, or what have you. Structure refers to the poem’s macrostructure, the skeletal frame around which it is built.
[2] I speak of large-scale rhetorical genres, not rhetorical devices.
[3] By one Dr. Charles Mosely, my chief source of information for everything in this paper.