Rape and Resistance: Women and Consent in Seventeenth-Century English Legal and Political Thought

Abstract

During the Exclusion crisis, the figure of a tyrant rapist, a ruler undone by his own lust and cruelty, briefly appeared on the London stage. Early in December 1680, Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus was performed by the Duke's Company in the Dorset Garden Theater. Lee's play recounted the tale of the rape of Lucretia and the subsequent actions taken by Brutus in resistance to this act of tyranny. This theatrical production was by all accounts a success, yet the play was banned from the stage after only six days; the order of the Lord Chamberlain stated objections to its “very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government.” Lee's Brutus was, however, soon available in print, published by Richard and Jacob Tonson in June of 1681. Like other Exclusion publications, Brutus offered a powerful argument against tyranny and arbitrary government, and the play was evidently construed as an attack on the Stuart monarchy. Many modern commentators have specifically noted the anti-Catholic overtones of Lee's drama and have read it within the context of the Popish Plot scare. Yet the central theme of Lee's play is, of course, the association between tyranny and rape: it is the tyrant's violation of woman (not of religion) that justifies resistance. In Lee's drama, just as in Livy's history, the chaste and honorable Roman matron Lucretia is raped by “the lustful bloody Sextus,” a prince of the proud and tyrannical house of Tarquin. In both stories, Lucretia's rape and her subsequent suicide set off a train of revolutionary events: Brutus seizes the bloody knife from Lucretia's twice-violated body and, holding it to his lips, vows with his fellow Romans never to suffer Tarquin “nor any other king to reign in Rome.”