Lucrece's Time

When David Houston Wood observes in Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England that Shakespeare's works are "crammed full with . . . emotionally inflected, subjective representations of time," he participates in a long tradition that has explored Shakespeare's references to time but also signals a break with that tradition.¹ No reader can be surprised by the claim that Shakespeare was fascinated by time. References to time and time reckoning are found throughout the Shakespeare canon.² Time has been called "the essential organizing principle" of Shakespeare's plays, and Shakespeare has been called both "time-beguiled" and "obsessed by time."³ But as Wood points out, studies of temporality in Shakespeare have primarily regarded time as an objective phenomenon that exists independently of human temporal perception.⁴ Objective time might be thought of as the corollary to a Cartesian conception of space: a uniform, external matrix that envelops all objects and entities. Like Newton's gravity, objective time is always self-consistent, flowing forward at a constant rate and sometimes "personified" as an independent entity: Time.⁵ In recent years, however, studies of Shakespearean time have taken a different turn, and scholars are more apt to stress its deeply subjective and contradictory nature. To provide just two examples, Philippa Berry traces the conflicted depictions of time in Romeo and Juliet, arguing that Juliet is the focus of the play's multitemporality, and Matthew Wagner identifies several nonobjective and nonuniform characteristics of Shakespearean temporality such as its paradoxical "thickness."⁶ For these critics and others, Shakespeare is less interested in time as it "really is" than in how temporality is connected to and influenced by human experience.

My goal is to bring The Rape of Lucrece into this conversation about subjective time and to claim that this early poem is one of Shakespeare's most sustained reflections on the ways in which individuals in different circumstances experience time.⁷ I claim that Shakespeare's story is as much about time as it is about rape. I do not mean that time vies with rape for the story's focus. Rather, the experience of rape and the experience of time are mutually constitutive— Shakespeare reminding the reader of the etymological link between "rape" and "rapidity," both derived from the Latin verb rapere. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that "time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection between entities."⁸ Latour argues that time is not an independent abstraction but an expression of how beings and objects exist in relation to one another. Although Latour is thinking about whole cultures rather than individuals, his view of time as fundamentally relational can help us understand the way in which, at different stages in The Rape of Lucrece, different "connection[s] between entities" produce different kinds of time. For example, at the beginning of the poem, Tarquin and Lucrece exist in one kind of temporality, but the "connection" of rape produces a different time sense for each. And Lucrece's post-rape experience of time is not quite the same as the temporality that impels Brutus when he withdraws the knife from Lucrece's chest. To move through the poem is to move through a series of temporal modes or orientations, each one influencing and yet distinct from the others. Writing about the ways in which the Middle Ages was characterized by a variety of discrete, localized relations to time, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out that time as represented in medieval works "remains a phenomenon of the body." It is both "a possibility and constraint of specific bodies in historically explicable relations of power."⁹ This embodied temporality is startlingly present in The Rape of Lucrece, for the poem's various temporal modes are generated not when characters sit and think but when they touch and intrude upon one another in physical ways.

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The beginning of Lucrece displays a temporal version of ventricular fibrillation. Just as the human heart in this condition lacks its ordinary rhythmic pulse and instead flutters in a spasmodic and ineffectual way, the opening of Lucrece...