Publication: Time’s up, Tarquin: the rape of Lucrece in the age of #Metoo
Authors
Cerdá Martínez, Juan Francisco
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Facultad de Letras
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Publisher
University of Porto Press
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21747/978-989-746-388-4/fac
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info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart
Description
Abstract
The emergence of cultural materialism in the 1980s provoked a substantial reevaluation of Shakespeare’s work, as critics felt the ethical need to renegotiate the values and discourses of early modern culture as they circulated in late Western societies. Certain plays, such as The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus and Measure for Measure, have received especial scrutiny from the perspective of gender. Instead, inhabiting a rather peripheral space within the Shakespeare canon, his poetry has received little attention as much as its resonances are of similar relevance to the concerns of late gender debates. This chapter extends this presentist reevaluation of early modern literature by examining the poem The Rape of Lucrece in the light of current discussions of feminism and gender violence. Shakespeare’s treatment of rape – an otherwise central concern of early modern culture – and of Lucrece – a character that also fascinated Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower amongst others – is here analysed in relation to (post)modern conceptions of feminine empowerment. Ultimately, the question is whether Lucrece’s bravery can be taken on by the brave new worlds, peoples, and women of the twentieth-first century. The Rape of Lucrece is currently not amongst Shakespeare’s most popular works.1 It can be argued that 1855 lines of iambic pentameter distributed among 265 septets of steady “rhyme royal” (ababbcc) is not the most fashionable format in the Netflix-obsessed late-modern cultural climate of 2019. But this wasn’t always the case. Together with numerous editions and praising references by fellow poets, in 1598 Gabriel Harvey annotated in the margin of his copy of Chaucer that “[t]he younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, have it in hem to Facing Europe in Crisis please the wiser sort” (apud Hehmeyer, 2013: 140). This illustrates the intellectual depth and popularity with which the poem was perceived at the time. A high regard which contrasts with the marginal position the poem holds nowadays within the Shakespeare canon. Even specifically, within the specialized circles of Shakespearean scholarship, the poem has not fared too well and, as Katharine Eisaman Maus has suggested, such limited attention can be at least partly attributed to how modern critics have “persistently object[ed] to its elaborate rhetoric” (Eisaman Maus, 1986: 66). This is, I believe, an accurate characterization of much of what has been written about the poem. A line of inquiry that is to a large extent exhausted or, at least, outdated since debates about the rhetorical quality of Shakespeare’s works have become rare in a research community that now tends not to evaluate, but to historicize Shakespeare’s writing.
However, a different approach has kept the poem alive, that is (what I should broadly term) feminist criticism. It is not a surprise that feminism would have something to say about a poem that re-versifies the semi-historical, semimythical account of the rape of Lucrece, the virtuous, chaste and beautiful wife of the nobleman Collatine, at the hands of Tarquin, son of the last Roman king: a poem that provides an extensive and intensive representation of the psychological processes involved in a sexual assault; a poem that ends with Lucrece’s suicide, the banishment of Tarquin and the rest of the royal family, and the establishment of the Roman republic. Sustained attention to the motivations, processes and consequences of rape make the poem worth revisiting in 2019, a time in which sexual violence – from the Harvey Weinstein scandal to the Spanish “Wolfpack” / “La Manada”, just to name two high-profile cases – has taken up a specially relevant space within the preoccupations of late-modern feminism.
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Citation
Cerdá, Juan F. (2024). "Time’s Up, Tarquin: The Rape of Lucrece in the Age of #Metoo", en Facing Europe in Crisis: Shakespeare’s World and Present Challenges, editado por Richard Chapman, Florence March, Paola Spinozzi y Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Oporto: University of Porto Press), pp. 91-100.
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