Rape and Republicanism in Shakespeare’s Lucrece

The right of citizens to consent to laws is one of the primary tenets of Elizabethan republican discourse. However, “consent” is not merely a political concept but a multivalent term that has important meanings in relation to gender and sexuality. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare rewrites Livy’s narrative about the birth of the republic in a way that explores the relationship among these different forms of consent, demonstrating that speech acts concerned with agreement, promising, and vowing—all of which involve the assent of the will—are themselves implicated in the gendered and sexualized production of political agency.