Chaste Thinking, Cultural Reiterations: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and The Letter

Abstract

This essay addresses the fidelity model of film adaptation and the “chaste thinking” of Shakespeare cinematic adaptation criticism. It addresses the current boundaries of Shakespeare adaptation study through an intertextual reading of texts whose castigating exemplarity links sexual violation, female chastity, and political formations: Shakespeare’s narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1593–1594), and the William Wyler film The Letter (1940), based on W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Letter” (1923) and stage play (1925). These particular literary and cinematic adaptations form a transhistorical conversation, whose shared thematics of chastity and politics is echoed in adaptation criticism as well. Suggesting a dialogical relationship between a famous Shakespeare text, itself both a faithful and unfaithful adaptation of its sources, and a cinematic reiteration of the Lucretia myth that works through inversion and wildly unfaithful gestures, throws additional critical light on the adaptation process.