The Rape of Lucrece

Abstract

Venus and Adonis was a great success, and Shakespeare came to dedicate another narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to the young Earl of Southampton. In this dedication, Shakespeare had promised to write a more grave work, a promise he fulfilled in this poem about the rape of a virtuous woman and the founding of the Roman republic with the banishment of the king-rapist—Tarquin. Shakespeare takes up a story that Ovid had told in Fasti and Livy had included in his History of Rome. The chastity of Lucretia is a foundational myth of the Roman republic that Livy and Ovid both represent. The rape of Lucretia has been as much a tale for the late twentieth century as it was for the ancients like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus and for Shakespeare and his contemporaries.1 For Ovid, the rape of Lucretia was part of a context in which Fasti represented the tensions and anxieties of late Augustan Rome by examining Roman monuments, religion, legend, history, and character. His representation, as Carole Newlands has observed, differed from that of Livy, who had made her rape a prelude to the public theme of liberty by stressing that, like Philomela, she had suffered a personal and private tragedy.2 In other words, Livy’s tale of a woman’s sacrifice for her country becomes Ovid’s exploration of who gets to speak and who remains silent.3 Ovid is using time, reflecting on the calendar, to consider history and mythology, the politics of ideological foundations. The tension between private shame and public revenge lie at the heart of this story.