Paradoxes of possession in Shakespeare's Lucrece

Paradoxes of possession in Shakespeare's Lucrece Paradoxical attitudes to gender are built into the fabric of The Rape of Lucrece,^ for Shakespeare has combined the two very different contemporary genres of Ovidian narrative and the woman's complaint. From Ovid comes not only the story of Lucrece, but a questioning, daring attitude to sexuality and gender issues, and a sympathetic stance towards w o m e n and their viewpoint.2 This would seem to contradict the values of the woman's complaint, which, by the 1590s, was focussing narrowly on the need for absolute chastity in women, either glorifying w o m e n for defending their honour, even to the point of welcoming martyrdom, as in Drayton's Matilda, or berating w o m e n for then weakness in giving in to male desire, as in Daniel's Rosamond or Lodge's Elstred. Although these poems are supposedly related in the voice of the wronged woman, they are in fact extremely patriarchal, merely acting as an endorsement of established male values, with little attempt to explore a female viewpoint.3 1 This essay owes much to Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemic: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Princeton, NJ, 1966, in which she describes paradox as exploiting 'the fact of relative, or competing, value systems': p. 10. Thus 'paradox' in this essay means the holding in tension of contrary beliefs and values, either stated or implied, which underlie the poem and which may not necessarily be expressed in any neat verbal form. 2 Shakespeare's story of Lucrece comes from Ovid's Fasti (bk 2: ed. and trans. James George Frazer, Cambridge, M A , 1931), but this Ovidian stance of sympathy for women is most evident in the Metamorphoses, in stories such as those of Scylla (bk 8) and Myrrha (bk 10), and above all in the Heroides, in which the letters by women grieving for their departed lovers strike a convincing note. The Heroides is, of course, the prototype for the woman's complaint genre, but the 1590s woman's complaint, which derived more immediately from The Mirror for Magistrates with its overt moralizing, is, as I explain later, so changed in spirit from Ovid's complaints that I accord it a new genre in its own right. 3 In Daniel's Rosamond, for instance, little sympathy or understanding is extended to Rosamond, the victim of seduction. The reader is called upon to feel sorry, rather, for the king, the author of her woes, in his loss, as he bewails the death of his mistress (617-700), whereas Rosamond apparently deserves the poison she is forced to administer to herself (596-602). Moreover, the limited theme of the horrors of female unchastity is further emphasized in the second edition of the poem two years later (1594) when twenty stanzas are added, all on P A R E R G O N ns 13.1, July 1995 ~. J. Laws However, these two apparently incompatible genres in many ways enrich each other, for Shakespeare brings them into fruitful co-existence and exploits the potential of both. By embedding Lucrece's complaint within the Ovidian story of her rape, Lucrece, for thefirsttimein the history of the legend, is allowed to put forward her o w n viewpoint, and the narrow concerns of the complaint genre are widened to include an exploration of the nature of chastity, not just a continual glorification of that virtue. The usual two-dimensional figure of the complaint heroine, important only for her chastity or lack of it, is replaced by the fully engaging character of Lucrece, a worthy successor to the w o m e n of Ovidian complaint. But, in spite of this apparently seamless merger of the two genres, a conflict of values remains central to the poem, for within the patriarchal framework expected of a complaint poem there is a subversive, 'feminist'4 voice reminiscent of Ovid. Patriarchal authority is reflected in the absolute mie of m e n over their w o m e n and in society's demand for a wife's complete sexual purity, even to the point of death if there is any transgression of this...