Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Anglistisches Institut IV

The Theme of Rape
in Elizabethan and Jacobean Literary Texts

Schriftliche Hausarbeit
im Rahmen der Ersten Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt für die
Sekundarstufe II ggf. mit Zusatzprüfung für die Sekundarstufe I

vorgelegt von: Stephanie Michaela Schnabel
vorgelegt am: 31.08.2006

Table of content

A. Introduction

I. Introduction into the topic ... 4

II. Aim of the present study and its position in current research ... 5

B. Definition of ‘rape’: narrowing of the term? ... 8

C. The notion of rape in antique, medieval and Renaissance times

I. Beliefs about rape in Antiquity: connection with honour ... 10

II. Medieval and Renaissance attitudes: rape as a theft of property ... 11

D. Literary forerunners: the “rape of Lucrece” in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

I. The “rape of Lucrece” in Antiquity
1. Political focus: Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita ... 13
2. The importance of the Roman calendar: Ovid’s Fasti ... 14
3. Roman myth for Greek readers: Dionysius Halicarnassos’ Antiquitates Romanae ... 15

II. The reception of the ancient myth of Lucrece in Christian and medieval literature
1. Lucrece as a self-murderer: St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos ... 17
2. An unconscious Lucrece: Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women ... 18

E. Different adaptations of the “rape of Lucrece” in the English Renaissance

I. William Shakespeare’s Lucrece
1. Structure of the text, context, reception history ... 21
2. Sources of Shakespeare’s adaptation ... 22
3. Textual analysis
a. Lucrece’s chastity: a virtue to be conquered ... 23
b. Tarquin’s lust: a double-edged sword ... 25
c. Description of the actual rape ... 27
d. Different ways of dealing with the rape
i. Lucrece’s different stages in her complaint
and her subsequent suicide ... 30
ii. Tarquin: a troubled rapist ... 38
iii. Reactions of her husband, father and friends ... 39
e. Tarquin’s banishment: the “Argument” and the last stanza of the poem ... 41

II. Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece
1. Structure of the text, context, reception history ... 43
2. Sources of Middleton’s adaptation ... 44
3. Textual analysis
a. Lucrece: from chaste wife to lustful whore ... 44
b. Tarquin: a lecherous ghost in Hell ... 46
c. Reminiscences of the actual rape ... 47
d. Different ways of dealing with the rape
i. Lucrece’s raging complaint and the re-enactment of her suicide ... 48
ii. Tarquin the ghost: raping Lucrece a second time? ... 51
e. The dedication, the Latin text, the prologue and the epilogue ... 52

III. Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece.
1. Structure of the text, context, reception history ... 56
2. Sources of Heywood’s adaptation ... 57
3. Textual analysis
a. Lucrece’s chastity: a virtue also imposed on the household ... 58
b. Tarquin: a lecherous prince in an infected state ... 58
c. The dialogue leading up to the actual rape ... 60
d. Different ways of dealing with the rape
i. Lucrece’s complaint and her heroic suicide ... 63
ii. Tarquin: Remorseful rapist? ... 64
iii. Reactions of her husband, father and friends ... 65
e. The rape as a reason for heroic deeds and the slaughter of the Tarquins ... 67

F. Conclusion: comparative analysis of the three Renaissance texts ... 70

G. Bibliography

I. Primary Texts ... 73

II. Secondary Texts ... 74
 

A. Introduction

I. Introduction into the topic

The topic of the present study is “The Theme of Rape in Elizabethan and Jacobean Literary Texts”, that is –to name it with a more general term- in two parts of the English Renaissance period. At first rape and Renaissance literature do not seem to be very closely connected but they can be linked quite easily as Barbara Baines explains: “For an inquiry into the history and thus the ideology of rape, the Renaissance is an ideal period because it both re-presents medieval and classical assumptions and lays the foundation for what we recognize as our own modern concerns.”¹

Rape is one of the most hideous crimes humanity can think of. The term and also the inherent concept behind it, implies a lot about the intrinsic balance of power between the victim and the rapist. Although normally most people imagine a woman as the sufferer and a man as the perpetrator, gender boundaries are blurred and it is dependent on social conventions how people involved in rape are treated by their surroundings. These more general thoughts can be applied to rape in reality, but also to rape as a theme in literature.² Authors of all ages have written either about violation itself or included it as a literary device in their texts to convey certain ideas.

The term ‘renaissance’ usually means a rebirth of and a renewed interest in Antiquity, that is in antique texts and ideas, legends or myths. During the Renaissance period most of the contemporary authors turned to ancient Greek and Roman sources for literary themes, topics and motives. In England, one of the most used authors was Ovid, in whose oeuvre, for example in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, the theme of rape is included.

The famous playwright and poet William Shakespeare took the rape of Philomele, a topic which he used for both Titus Andronicus and Lucrece, from the Metamorphosis and the myth of the rape of Lucrece from the Fasti for his poem of the same name. He was the first of three authors to develop a literary text out of this founding myth of the Roman republic between 1590 and 1610. In the time of Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and his fellow author Thomas Middleton wrote and published two poems individually, Lucrece in 1594 and The Ghost of Lucrece in 1600. The third text which depicted Lucrece’s fate was Thomas Heywood’s play The Rape of Lucrece from 1608, written and performed under the reign of King James I.

The general background of the story is as follows:

During a lull in the Roman siege of Ardea (509 BC), young Prince Tarquin and some noble friends rode home in secret to spy into the behaviour of their wives. Only Collatine’s wife, Lucrece, was found virtuously at home, spinning wool with her maids and longing for her husband’s safe return; the others were all abroad, dancing and revelling. So Lucrece was judged the moist chaste, and the night visitors rode back to Ardea. But ironically, […], blind love for Lucrece had suddenly infected Prince Tarquin. The more unachievable she seemed, the more hotly he desired her. So he returned secretly to Collatine’s residence, where Lucrece chastely welcomed him as both kinsman and guest. At night, he sneaked into Lucrece’s bedchamber, raped her, and fled. Lucrece summoned her husband and father from the siege, told them of the rape and stabbed herself to death. She thus became the catalyst for the resultant banishment of the Tarquins, and the establishment of the republic.³

However, the three Renaissance authors were not the first to depict this myth. In the present study they are presented as a sort of final stage of a literary tradition, which began in Antiquity itself and was developed further at the end of the Roman Empire and during the Middle Ages.

The rape of Lucrece was also a topic for three antique authors, who, like Shakespeare, Middleton and Heywood, were contemporaries. Livy in his Ab Urbe Condita concentrated on presenting the myth in its historical setting and chronological order. He also included the background story, which was later taken up by Heywood, but only alluded to by Shakespeare: Tarquin Superbus, the father of Lucrece’s ravisher, was goaded by his wife Tullia into killing Servius Tullius, his father-in-law and king of Rome, and into usurping the latter’s throne. Ovid, however, focused more on the rape itself and its consequences but he also embedded it into a larger context. He arranged his Fasti in accordance with the Roman calendar: the rape of Lucrece takes place on the 24th February. As Livy’s text, published earlier, was one of his literary sources, Ovid’s account has much in common with the report of his contemporary although he also changed it according to his own taste and specific purpose. The third antique author was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who moved from what is today Turkey to Rome at the age of approximately 28.⁴ He aspired to write a history of Rome, the Antiquitates Romanae, for Greek readers to justify the claim that “the heritage of the Greeks”⁵ was “bestowed on the basest of barbarians”.⁶ As most Greek readers were ignorant of the early history of Rome he strove to fill this gap. Dionysius’ report differs the most from both Livy and Ovid and it is interesting to analyze in which instances his influence on the three Renaissance authors might be detected.

De Civitate Dei contra Paganos by Saint Augustine is the next written record of the myth to be included here. He is the first author to bring a Christian layer to the pagan story. He quickly touches on the ‘historical facts’ but develops at length his argument that he sees a double-edged problem here. “If there is no impurity in her being ravished not consenting, there is no justice in her being punished not unchaste.”⁷ Here, the Christian ambiguity of Lucrece’s rape and suicide has its origin, an ambiguity which can be traced in all of the Renaissance texts and also in two medieval writings: the Confessio Amantis by John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. These two, however, added a new layer to the myth: when Tarquin threatens her, Lucrece is so overwhelmed with fear that she loses consciousness. There is a double layer here: because of her unconsciousness she is clearly innocent but that makes her suicide even more terrifying.
 

II. Aim of the present study and its position in current research

By having a look at these literary forerunners and analyzing to what extent they might have been used by the Renaissance authors, I like to put myself in the tradition of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare from 1957, but at the same time take his research one step further. In his chapter about The Rape of Lucrece he names Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ovid’s Fasti in the original Latin version and in the translation by John Gower, and finally William Painter’s translation of Livy in his Palace of Pleasure. But why did he not also include Livy in the Latin version? And why has he failed to look further into Gower’s own English works? I cannot explain these gaps but I would like to make up for them by including all the above mentioned texts here.⁸ Shakespeare, Middleton and Heywood each had knowledge of at least some of the texts, but they chose to make their own changes in their respective adaptations of the myth. These changes, though, were in part influential on how their texts were perceived and, in the case of Shakespeare and Middleton, accepted by their patrons or, in the case of Heywood, by the audience in the theatre. Shakespeare’s 1594 Lucrece was a great success and established him as a fine poet, alongside his earlier Venus and Adonis, whereas Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece was a complete failure, which is said to be one reason why he left his studies at Oxford before completing his degree and tried, this time successfully, to earn money as a playwright.⁹ Heywood’s play The Rape of Lucrece was very popular and well received in its day, although the figure of King Tarquin bears similarities to King James, that the 1616 version of Shakespeare’s poem saw a title-change, as if to secure part of Heywood’s fame for the poem through a similarity of names.¹⁰ The former running-title The Rape of Lucrece was made into the new title of the poem, which had until then only been called Lucrece. This is one of the indications that Shakespeare, Middleton and Heywood certainly knew each other’s works, which will also to be shown in the course of the present study.

[ ... ]

1 Barbara J. Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation”, in: English Literary History 65.1, 1998, p. 69.

2 Cp. Ellen Rooney’s remarks about seductive women in her article “Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence”, in: Modern Language Notes – Comparative Literature 98, 1983, No. 3, p. 1269-1278.

3 G. B. Shand, “Introduction to Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece”, in: Middleton, Thomas. “The Ghost of Lucrece”, ed. G. B. Shand, in: Thomas Middleton, Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor (OUP, forthcoming).

4 Cp. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities – Vol. I, trans. Earnest Cary. London and Cambridge (Massachusetts): William Heinemann Ltd. and Harvard University Press, reprinted edition 1961, p. vii-ix.

5 Ibid., p. xiii.

6 Ibid., p. xiii.

7 Saint Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans – Vol. I, trans. George E. McCracken. London and Cambridge (Massachusetts): William Heinemann Ltd. and Harvard University Press, reprinted edition 1966, p. 85.

8 Another, more recent, predecessor in that respect is Colin Burrow, who, in the introduction to his edition of the poem, names all the texts as possible sources for Shakespeare’s Lucrece but comments on only some of them. Cp. William Shakespeare, “Lucrece”, in: William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare – Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 45-66.

9 Cp. T. H. Howard-Hill, “Thomas Middleton”, in: Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 58: Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists. ed. Fredson Bowers. Detroit, Washington D. C., London: Gale Research Company, 1987, p. 200-201.

10 Cp. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Ravished and Revised: The 1616 Lucrece”, in: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 52, No. 208 (2001), p. 516-523.