Blackwell Reference Online

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The story of Lucrece, celebrated by Livy, Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, is a founding myth of patriarchy. It entails the heroine's death, in this case accomplished by her own hand. While suicide marks Lucrece's exit from the story, though, it does not constitute narrative closure. That is accomplished with the expulsion of the Tarquins (the ruling dynasty, to which the heroine's assailant belongs) from Rome, the abolition of the monarchy, and the inauguration of the republic. Thus Lucrece's story marks a key turning point in Roman history, in which the personal is surely the political. Rape authorizes revenge; revenge comprises revolution; and revolution establishes the republic. In Shakespeare's time, like Pompey, Cato, or Julius Caesar, Lucrece was a Roman hero familiar even to common folk; an exemplar embodying the single virtue of chastity, whose name called up her story. Shakespeare's version of that story begins with a prose Argument telling how Tarquin's father got his throne by murder, a violent, illicit “possession” that mirrors the rape his son commits ( Belsey 2001 : 6). The Argument then recounts the precipitating incident of the rape, briefly alluded to in the poem: during a military siege outside Rome, in Tarquin's tent Collatine “extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife.” The soldiers post to Rome to verify his claims, and find all the women save Lucrece ... log in or subscribe to read full text