Lucrece’s Re-Creation

Abstract

L UCRECE PRESENTS SOME SPECIAL PROBLEMS FOR MODERN READERS because it is about a chaste woman who, having been forcibly raped by the king's son, a friend and comrade of her husband, concludes that she is impure and that she must therefore kill herself. A considerable amount of critical energy has been expended in trying to determine whether Lucrece was defiled and whether she should have reacted differently. It is difficult for many readers to forgive Shakespeare and Lucrece for what they take to be the creation of a false dilemma from which the only release is self-destruction. It seems to me that Lucrece's corruption by Tarquin's act is a simple fact, accepted by Lucrece and her society and by Shakespeare and his society. If we accept that Lucrece has lost her purity, it follows that she is faced with a real moral dilemma. I believe that Lucrece resolves this dilemma successfully, in a way that simultaneously satisfies her own demands and those of her society. But however we finally judge Lucrece's resolution of her dilemma, we must be certain that we understand it as she understood it and as it is presented in the poem, and this is what many readers have failed to do.