Exonerating Rape: Pornography as Exculpation in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece

Abstract

This essay aims to justify a deeply contentious and probably unpopular claim that Shakespeare's narrative poem attempts to exculpate Tarquin's offence. Though modern criticism might recoil from a work that sympathizes (albeit to the slightest extent) with a rapist, we must be forthright enough to assert the possibility, at least, that in the early modern period, it was feasible to write a poem of sexual assault which attempts to exonerate the male aggressor. The essay considers Sonnet 129, Hamlet and Philip Larkin's “Deceptions” (which converses intertextually with the Nunnery Scene) in an effort to formulate a theory of pornography as that which allows the titillation of a masculine reader while clearing him of any moral culpability. The essay takes issue with Ian Frederick Moulton's assertion that the term “pornography” is inappropriate and anachronistic when applied to early modern texts. Finally, in demonstrating the poem's pornographic character, the essay also accounts for the anxious incapacity of feminist criticism to deal with it adequately.