Shakespeare: The Narrative Poems

While most people know Shakespeare as a playwright, he saw himself as a poet in the quite traditional sense.  Today, we'll look at his two major narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

clip from "Mrs. Robinson" by Paul Simon; perf. by Simon and Garfunkel. 1968.  Taken from We Got Good at It: A Wrecking Crew Anthology 1962-1971.  The Internet Archive.

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Hello, everyone, and thanks for dialing up the Classic English Literature Podcast on your portable computer machines.  This is the poddie that gives rhyme its reason – no, check that.  Rhyme already has its reason, we just explain how it works.  Today, we’re going to skip the theatre, I think, and instead lazily wile away the waning of the day in the secluded glade of a shady wood, by a gently bubbling spring, indulging our more Ovidian proclivities.  What I mean is that we’re not talking about plays by Shakespeare today, but of his lesser known narrative poems – lesser known to the average Jack and Jill in the street.  Today: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.  

But before we kick off, I need to say a great big thank you to listener Roland, who has again provided some generous support for the show.  Your donation does indeed help with the bills for the podcast, but more importantly, it lets me know that you enjoy what I’m doing, and that is most encouraging.  So thank you, Roland, thank you very much!

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By giving an episode about his narrative poems towards the end of our Shakespeare series-within-a-series, I am probably perpetuating the misperception of Shakespeare as only incidentally a poet, that his real job was the drama.  True, pound for pound, the Bard does produce more plays, but he considered these more his business than his passion.  He considered himself a poet proper, and while his narrative poems have slipped into obscurity except for real Bardophiles, they were what he was most proud of.

The narrative poems were published early: Venus and Adonis in 1593, widely regarded as Shakespeare’s first publication and, during his lifetime, far and away his most successful.  The quarto version printed by Richard Field, probably from Shakespeare’s own fair copy – a term which here means the final working draft of text – went through 10 editions by Shakespeare’s death in 1616.  The poet dedicated it to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and in the dedicatory epistle Shakespeare calls Venus and Adonis "the first heir of my invention,” seemingly discounting his early theatrical works in comparison to this, his bid for literary respectability.  Once such credibility has been secured, of course, Shakespeare largely leaves behind the traditional grind of poetic apprenticeship and focuses his formidable energies on the stage.

But as to that conventional apprenticeship ladder – that a serious poet must first produce pastoral verse and climb one’s way up to the prestigious epic – our sweet swan of Avon sort of skips a rung.  Venus and Adonis is indeed pastoral, but of a kind called the epyllion, or minor epic.  That is, a narrative poem lacking the length and breadth of an epic, but yet still adhering to some of the formal qualities of the more esteemed genre.  Shakespeare whips a few Homeric similes on us from time to time, like this one, just to show us that he knows what he’s about.  For instance:

An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d,

  Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage:        

  So of concealed sorrow may be said;

  Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage;

    But when the heart’s attorney once is mute

    The client breaks, as desperate in his suit.   

The epyllion usually focuses on comparatively minor mythological figures and its verse tends to foreground artifice and wit, calling attention to the poet’s verbal dexterity.  In Venus, Shakespeare uses a sixain stanza – six lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababcc – foregoing the more common use of exclusively heroic couplets.  The sixain had been used before by other poets, but such was the impact of Shakespeare’s first narrative poem that it became known as the Venus and Adonis stanza.

Before we get too far into the weeds, let’s refresh our memories about the poem’s story.  Venus, the goddess of love, has fallen head over heels for Adonis, a very handsome young mortal. Adonis, however, would rather go hunting than dally in love, and this causes, shall we say, a bit of tension. Venus, the hottest of all hotties, attempts to seduce the young man, praising his beauty and promising pleasure and eternal bliss.  

Despite Venus's efforts, Adonis steadfastly insists on hunting, his true passion, and that he disdains love. This rejection deeply wounds Venus, who has a vision of his death while pursuing the wild boar.  Umm . . . he pursues the boar, not her.  At least not literally.  Adonis sets off on a boar hunt anyway. Completely unsurprisingly, he encounters the savage porker which fatally gores him in the ensuing struggle. Venus arrives too late to save him – Adonis, not the pig.  Devastated, Venus mourns Adonis's death passionately in a series of poignant speeches. She blames herself for his demise, regretting her failure to protect him and cursing the cruel fate that tore them apart.  In the final stanzas of the poem, Venus transforms Adonis's blood into a flower, the anemone, as a tribute to his beauty and a symbol of eternal remembrance.

The story, basically, was one familiar to Elizabethan readers.  Several Greek and Roman writers told the tale, from the Orphic Hymn to Adonis to Nonnus’ Dionysaica.  The 13th century French writer Jean de Meun, he of the Roman de la Rose fame, had a version as did his later countryman Pierre de Ronsard.  Edmund Spenser, too, has his turn.  But the grand-daddy of sources is undoubtedly the Roman poet Ovid’s masterwork, The Metamorphoses, a poem chronicling the history of the world in a mythological framework and a standard text in Renaissance schools.  Shakespeare certainly would have learned a good deal of his Latin from it at the King’s New School in Stratford as a boy.

Book 10 in Ovid tells the story of Venus and Adonis, but in this version, Adonis is quite a willing lover, not the rather stubborn prude of Shakespeare's telling.   The latter probably borrows the emotional relationship of his characters from a story in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, in which Salmacis falls in lust upon witnessing the bathing Hermaphroditus and forces herself on him.  Which is basically what Venus does to Adonis in Shakespeare’s poem.

Wait – are we saying that Venus sexually assaults, even attempts to rape Adonis?  Well . . . may-be?  I’ve seen critics describe the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’ event as an attempted rape and I’m sure many would agree that Venus is doing the same – Adonis clearly does not give consent.  There is something disturbing to modern readers about Venus’ aggression and, depending on how old we envision Adonis, maybe even something creepy.  The first stanza of the poem ends with the couplet:

  Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,

    And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.

I don’t think, though, that the word sick here means, as we might say, perverse.  It just means lovesick or infatuated.  And Shakespeare also calls her the “bold-faced suitor,” so we have a gender reversal from the typical seduction poem.  Later, too, Venus reckons it would be easier if the gender positions were more traditional:

Would thou wert as I am, and I a man,

  My heart all whole as thine, thy heart my wound;

    For one sweet look thy help I would assure thee,

    Though nothing but my body’s bane would cure thee.

Don’t miss the irony, either, about Adonis as Venus’ prey: “Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn.” Boars, deer, foxes, and hares don’t give consent, either.  That we’ve not historically seen the poem as particularly problematic may have something to do with the fact that, in addition to altering Adonis’ attitude from the Ovidian original, Shakespeare renders much of the poem as comedy.

Not that there aren’t moments of great tragedy and pathos, but we are generally asked not to take the main thrust of the poem too too seriously.  Shakespeare’s portrayal of Venus, remarkably, lacks any powerful quality of divinity.  While she may be aggressive, she never seems threatening.  Adonis seems merely annoyed by the pestering Venus:  

 let me go;

  My day’s delight is past, my horse is gone,

  And ‘tis your fault I am bereft him so:

  I pray you hence

She seems less a goddess, the personification of love (or sex, if we’re being less precious) than an entitled and libidinous woman, blithely assuming her charms to be irresistible and clumsily befuddled at their entire lack of impact on her young hunter: 

He saith she is immodest, blames her miss;

    What follows more she murders with a kiss.

  She comes across more as a cougar, like that woman of a certain age in the classic 1960s film . . . now what was her name . . . ?

(Mrs. Robinson)

No, actually, she’s not like that at all.  A la the comedic idiom, Adonis seems too much the straight man, too recalcitrant and resistant.  In this fanciful construction, one is supposed to wonder how any red-blooded young man could hold out against the temptations of the goddess of love.  He scoffs:

 ‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it,

  Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it;

  ‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it;

  My love to love is love but to disgrace it.

He must be exceptionally good-looking, because I’m beginning to wonder why Venus is bothering with this prat.  She says:

Thou canst not see one winkle in my brow;  

  Mine eyes are grey and bright, and quick in turning;

  My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow;

  My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning;

    My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt.

    Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt.

It is fair, though, I think to critique some of the more retrogressive assumptions about women that are the bedrock of the poem’s humor: insatiability, superficiality, and so on.  But one can also argue that comedy, to some extent, relies upon reductive and recognizable types and the poem does rest upon a series of conspicuous oppositions: seduction and refusal, obviously, but also love and lust (Adonis has quite a dissertation on how Venus has confused the two, though one wonders whence comes his authority), compulsion and free will, beauty and ugliness, and attendant to that, order and chaos.   

These last two pairs are linked in the poem, almost as different emanations of the same concepts.  Beauty is order and ugliness is chaos.  During the dialogue, Venus makes a teleological argument for their sexual union.  According to Aristotle, everything is made to fulfill its intended purpose, from the simplest tool to the human spirit.  That purpose he calls a “telos.”  An eye is a good eye if it realizes its telos – that is, if it can see.  All this is part of the cosmic order of things.  Venus argues that Adonis was made for sexual pleasure and love:

Torches are made to light, jewels to wear,

  Dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use,        

  Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear;

  Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse:

    Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty;

    Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.   

  ‘Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed,

  Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?

  By law of nature thou art bound to breed,

  That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;     

    And so in spite of death thou dost survive,

    In that thy likeness still is left alive.’

Venus’ argument will show up again in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets addressed to the so-called Fair Youth, that he is too beautiful not to procreate.  At the vision of Adonis’ death, Venus laments: “ For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, / And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.”  Renaissance aesthetics, especially as articulated by artist and theorist Leon Battista Alberti, saw beauty as the result of the harmonious blending of proportion, symmetry, nature, clarity, simplicity, and functionality.  So if Adonis’ death is the death of beauty, which is therefore the death of order, logically only chaos could result.

Shakespeare fortifies the poem’s balance with particular imagistic deployments.  Colors, for one, feature prominently.  One cannot help but be struck by the number of occasions on which he invokes the comparisons between white and red.  His uses here are not particularly groundbreaking. White (and its adjuncts snow and lily and alabaster) invariably connote purity and innocence.  Red, conversely, intimates love, passion, and perhaps anger.  The only other colors that make remarkable appearances are green, with its usual associations of lushness and fertility, as well as envy, and purple – especially Adonis’ blood and the anemone flower – a sign of royalty or nobility as well as extravagance.  

The poet also frequently deploys avian imagery, birds, in the poem.  In general, a bird may be read as a symbol of the soul or of transcendence, but depending upon the species, may also carry associations of predation, as with the falcon, or tranquility, as with doves.

When we get to the awful conclusion, Adonis having been disemboweled by the boar, which has throughout stood as a symbol for brutality, ugliness, and chaos, (Venus calls it the “foul, grim, and urchin-snouted boar, Whose downward eye still looketh for a grave”), the poem takes on an etiological dimension so common in mythology.  Venus, in a self-referential irony, curses love:

Since thou art dead, lo! here I prophesy,

  Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:     

  It shall be waited on with jealousy,

  Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;

    Ne’er settled equally, but high or low;

    That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.

Her discourse on the future misery of love continues for four more stanzas, invoking more of those binary oppositions: blooming and blasted flowers, strength and weakness, wisdom and folly, youth and age, trust and mistrust, courage and fear, and so on and so on.  Love will appear pleasant and tempting and desirable, but will always betray the lover.  She, like the poem, invokes these opposing pairs only to dismiss them as essentially irresolvable, and therein lies the real frustration and unfulfillment of the poem.

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In that dedication to the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare promises that he will honor his patron with “some graver labor,” evidently something weightier than the frothy caperings of love goddesses and pretty hunters.  It’s not unreasonable to see 1594’s “The Rape of Lucrece,” also dedicated to Southampton and also in the minor epic form, as that weightier work.  

Nor is it unreasonable to see this second epyllion as the inverse to Venus and Adonis, sort of funhouse mirror reflection – though maybe funhouse is inappropriate here.  While seduction and refusal is the main dynamic in both poems – perhaps problematically playful in the first – it is explicitly violent and dehumanizing in the second.  In “The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare (or perhaps a later editor, though I doubt it) supplies a short summary of the poem to follow called the Argument.  

During a siege, a group of Roman military nobles compare the virtues of their wives.  Collatinus claims his wife Lucretia as the most pure and chaste, and that while “kings might be espoused to more fame / But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.”  The king’s son, Sextus Tarquinius, enraptured by passion for this Lucrece, rides to her palace and “that same night, he treacherously stealeth into her chamber, violently ravished her, and early in the morning speedeth away.”  Lucrece laments her fallen state and sends for her husband and his retainers.  She names her abuser and then takes her own life.  The nobles parade Lucrece’s corpse through the streets, incensing the people, who declare “the Tarquins all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls.”  

Shakespeare writes this tale of a rape that topples a kingdom in a stanza form called rhyme royal, consisting of seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCC.  Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Troilus and Chrysede, popularized the form, though it wasn’t called rhyme royal till King James I used it in his own verse, so there’s a little trivia to impress your friends at the next church picnic.  Livy’s The History of Rome and Ovid’s Fasti provide the source material, chronicling events from 509 BCE, which ignited a revolt led by Lucius Junius Brutus, resulting in the banishment of the Tarquin royal family and the founding of the Roman Republic.  Perhaps.  Ovid and Livy wrote centuries after the events and historical records, many of which were alloyed with legend, were destroyed by Gauls in 390 BCE, so grains of salt, grains of salt.

But the perhaps questionable history of the sources does nothing to diminish the effect of the poem.  The poem is really divided into two major sections, with some bookends.  The first section focuses on Tarquin’s struggle with his conscience and then with his guilt ex post facto.  The second addresses Lucrece’s sense of sexual shame.  Bookending these are the bragging of the officers about their wives and finally the oath to avenge Lucrece’s death.

Let’s look at Tarquin’s strangely ambivalent obsession.  When he creeps into the sleeping Lucrece’s chamber, Shakespeare treats us to what is called in poetry a blazon, which is a concatenation of the physical attributes of, usually, a woman.  Here, Tarquin notes “her lily hand” and “rosy cheeks,” her “eyes like marigolds” and her “hair, like golden threads.”  All very flattering, no doubt, in appropriate circumstances, but disturbingly objectifying in the context of a rapist’s gaze, with his “lewd unhallowed eyes.”

Then, Tarquin cups her breasts, which he sees as 

ivory globes circled with blue,

A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd. . . .

These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred,

Who like a foul usurper went about

From this fair throne to heave the owner out.

Right, the conquest and imperial metaphor is rather on the nose, but it adds a nice bit of ironic foreshadowing to the overthrow of the Tarquinian dynasty at the poem’s end.  And Shakespeare isn’t gonna leave a good idea alone – the military metaphors just keep coming:  Lucrece’s breast, which his hand “scales” is “the heart of all her land.”  When his “Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!” awakens Lucrece who trembles in fear, “This moves in him more rage and lesser pity, To make the breach and enter this sweet city.”

The phrase “lesser pity” seems odd occurring here in a sexual assault cum siege analogy.  Was he ever pitying her?  Well . . . no.  But he does pity himself.  He declares:

I come to scale

 Thy never-conquered fort; the fault is thine,

 For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine.

Oh!  It’s her fault you’ve come to rape her – she was asking for it with those marigoldy eyes.  Tarquin then moves into a rather galling and appalling analogy.  In foreseeing the shame and ignominy his assault will bring upon himself, he laments: “I see what crosses my attempt will bring; I know what thorns the growing rose defends.”  Oh, Jesus Christ . . . you’re not.  But one must say the tension between his honor (or humanity, if you’d like) and his possessive obsession is a quite dramatic part of the poem.  In fact, this poem feels like a drama, like we are hearing dramatic monologues in an otherwise silent tragedy.  Tarquin says,

I have debated, even in my soul,

What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I shall breed,

But nothing can affection’s course control

Or stop the headlong fury of his speed.

I know repentant tears ensue the deed,

 Reproach, disdain, and deadly enmity,

 Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy.

Now that’s good TV, as they say.  Of course, one should note that this “noble” struggle is very much about him – he doesn’t really consider Lucrece as having any real entry in the cost-benefit analysis.  The question has nothing really to do with her violation, but with his honor.

In fact, the dynamic between honor and possession is really the thing that sets off this whole debacle.  Remember that at the beginning of the poem, Collatinus, Sextus Tarquinius, and other Roman nobles sit comparing the virtues of their wives, rather like men comparing horses or muscle cars.  Collatine’s “bragging” seems to set Tarquin off.  Shakespeare writes:

Haply that name of “chaste” unhapp’ly set

This bateless edge on his keen appetite

When Collatine unwisely did not let

To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white

Which triumphed in that sky of his delight,

 Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven’s beauties,

 With pure aspects did him peculiar duties.

Can I just say that I love the first line of that stanza?  Lovely balance: Haply, meaning “it so happened that” or “by chance” then kind of negated by the “unhappily,” with the elided vowel to fit the meter, making it “unhaply.”  Now, for all the word nerds out there in the cybervoid, our word “happy” – meaning well-being or contentment – first appears in English in the 14th century and means something like “favored by fortune” because of its root “hap,” meaning chance or fortune, from the Old English gehaep, which means convenient.  Anyway, none of this is really the point I’m trying to make by citing this stanza.

The point I’m trying to make is that Collatine’s bad luck in mentioning his wife’s impeccable chastity whets Tarquin’s appetite for challenging that chastity.  Also good to note that Lucrece never gets named in this stanza, but only metaphorized as a colorful sky that delights him and does him “peculiar duties.”  Let’s leave that to our imaginations.  

But this whole section is really quite male-centered, isn’t it?  All about male competition and rivalry, dominion and power.  And sadly, the other major section of the poem, Lucrece’s long set piece, underscores her own implicit – if not completely unexamined – acceptance of a male-centered, or phallocentric as some critics might say, ideology.

An interesting line here comes right after Tarquin’s assault: “He scowls and hates himself for his offense; She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear.”  Louis B. Wright and Virginia LaMar, editors of the Folger edition of the poems, note that “the poet is more interested in Tarquin’s soul than Lucrece’s body.”  That may be so, and certainly a pretty straightforward feminist argument can be made that, despite Lucrece getting so much air time, the focus of her grief rests upon a patriarchal construction of female chastity and purity.  Shakespeare, as a man, cannot fully enter the experience of a woman, especially a victim of sexual violence.  But I’m not sure we need to be that essentialist about things – Shakespeare has more than shown his ability to inhabit the vast variety of human experience and psychology.

Nonetheless, I’d like to note Lucrece’s initial reaction to her rape: she tears her own flesh with her nails.  Almost immediately, we can infer a kind of Lucretian dualism – like her body is her enemy since it is the site of her shame.  The whole time the poem’s spotlight is on her, she separates her mind, or her soul, from her flesh.  She figuratively disembodies herself in her monologue, then literally does so with her suicide.

And she feels that she is somehow complicit in her undoing.  She speaks of her life now as “The story of sweet chastity’s decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow” and her “loathsome trespass.”  As if she agrees with Tarquin that the rape is her fault.  Well, partially anyway.  She does blame him for violating her, but blames herself for violating Collatine: “Tarquin wrongèd me, I Collatine.”

How wronged?  Her husband’s honor.  At one point, she stops to regard a painting of the Siege of Troy, and sees in that tale her own plight in an ambivalent analogy to the rape of Helen by Paris:

Show me the strumpet that began this stir,

That with my nails her beauty I may tear.

Thy heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur

This load of wrath that burning Troy doth bear;

Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here,

 And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye,

 The sire, the son, the dame, and daughter die.

“Why should the private pleasure of some one

Become the public plague of many moe?

But why should she see in herself a strumpet or a traitor?  No one else in the poem, save Tarquin, holds her in any way culpable for her victimization – nor should they, obviously.  But she delivers a particularly chilling line just before she dies: “No, no,” quoth she, “no dame hereafter living / By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving.”  Basically, no woman will be able to claim her resistance or unwillingness as even mitigating, far less obviating, her guilt.

We may call such an attitude today “internalized sexism.”  She sees herself through the eyes of the patriarchal order in which she exists, rather like W.E.B. DuBois’ famous conception of “double-consciousness.”  

So Lucrece condemns not only Tarquin but herself for her degraded condition.  But additionally, she offers a quite interesting discourse on forces beyond human control and their complicity in her impending destruction.  Lucrece waxes rather philosophical about the nature of Time and what she calls Opportunity – we might call it chance or perhaps fate – and about how human will cannot be entirely free given that it operates within the arena constructed by such transcendental forces.  Here is a an example of such theorizing:

O, hear me, then, injurious, shifting Time!

 Be guilty of my death, since of my crime.

“Why hath thy servant Opportunity

Betrayed the hours thou gav’st me to repose,

Canceled my fortunes, and enchainèd me

To endless date of never-ending woes?

Time’s office is to fine the hate of foes,

 To eat up errors by opinion bred.

She proceeds to catalogue the moral responsibilities of Time and how it has allowed Opportunity to abdicate them.  She then pleads for Time and Opportunity to make amends, to thwart Tarquin’s flight, to harrow his soul, and restore her honor, and, by implication, that of her husband.  But then her grief and shame overwhelm her once again, and she says

In vain I rail at Opportunity,

At Time, at Tarquin, and uncheerful Night.

In vain I cavil with mine infamy.

In vain I spurn at my confirmed despite.

This helpless smoke of words doth me no right.

 The remedy indeed to do me good

 Is to let forth my foul defilèd blood.

The anaphoric repetition of “in vain” – especially as connected with speech acts, the absolute ineffectiveness of words to set things right or to change the course of events as dictated by Time and Opportunity – eerily foreshadows the fact that she will sever her veins, spill her own blood, as the only firm act of personal rectitude.

Suicide is, of course, always a traumatic course, both for the victim and for their survivors.  But its treatment strikes us as ambivalent here.  For a Christian culture, such as Shakespeare’s, suicide was the ultimate act of defiance – defiance to God.  For a mere human, a creature of the Creator, to end one’s own life represents the highest act of treason against divine providence and, traditionally, was accounted a sin all but unpardonable, for one could not ask for absolution.  Thankfully, modern Christian teaching is far more understanding of mental and emotional disease and takes a quite compassionate view of a soul in such desperate straits.  So Shakespeare’s audience would have found Lucrece’s resolution quite traumatic, for both psychological and theological reasons.

But as the poem occurs in a pre-Christian pagan Roman culture, in which suicide was often regarded as an honorable course, the poem presents us with a rather ambiguous understanding of Lucrece’s death.  When she stabs herself, after accusing Tarquin, her husband Collatine stands stunned, amazed, unresponsive.  Her father, Lucretius, falls upon the sword, too, cursing Time for its perversity, letting the old outlive the young, the weak the strong.  Then Brutus steps forth and his first words are to Collatine: “Thou wrongèd lord of Rome. . .arise!”  Hmmm . . . yes, he is, but a word about Lucrece having been wrong-ed first would have been nice.  In his speech rousing his compatriots to just vengeance, he does, though, repeatedly insist upon Lucrece’s utter purity and guiltlessness.  He speaks of “this chaste blood so unjustly stained” and “chaste Lucrece’ soul.”  I think that provides an interesting twist on an ending that might otherwise seem straightforwardly phallocentric.  I mean, yes, female chastity is still a male possession and a point of contingency for male honor, but none of the men here endorse Lucrece’s own understanding of her violation – they see her suicide as desperate and unnecessary, an innocent sacrifice that they hope will redeem Rome.  Not entirely an enlightened understanding of female personhood, but not uncomplicatedly chauvinistic either.

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As an early poem, we can find in The Rape of Lucrece “first drafts” of themes that Shakespeare will return to in later works.  The mutilated Lavinia of Titus Andronicus, a revenge play roughly contemporaneous with Lucrece, explores rape as an impetus for revenge.  Petruchio alludes to chaste Lucrece when describing how Katherine will behave after he has tamed the shrew and Malvolio in Twelfth Night speaks of Lucrece’s knife.  A late play, Cymbeline, expands upon a “gentleman's bet” (imagine the air quotes around that phrase, yeah?) about a woman’s chastity, as one man wagers he can convince her to commit adultery.

But it is in The Tragedy of Macbeth, I think, that Shakespeare most deftly reinvents and repurposes Lucrece’s story.  In his second soliloquy, as he approaches Duncan’s chamber following a hallucinated dagger, Macbeth compares his movements to “Tarquin’s ravishing strides towards his design moves like a ghost.”  Macbeth likens his imminent murder of his king to Tarquin’s imminent rape of Lucrece.  I don’t think you have to be Freud to put together the dagger/penis penetrative analogy.  Remember all of Tarquin’s siege metaphors as he stalks his victim’s chamber?  Shakespeare moves those political-military metaphors to the more literal and that the act of violation, in both texts, leads to the downfall of a monarchy and the institution of a more just system of rule only heightens the parallel.  I also pointed out The Tragedy of Macbeth’s obsession with determinism, moral culpability, and the elasticity of Time – all of which have their antecedents in the earlier minor epic.

So Shakespeare’s two major narrative poems, as in some ways reflections of each other, also stake out much of the thematic territory he will survey for the remainder of his career.  They establish his poetical bona fides, thus freeing him to elevate his plays, and thereby drama itself, to a level of artistic and critical credibility it had not enjoyed before, but which it continues to do even today.  Indeed, as I hinted at the beginning of this episode, the plays which elaborate upon much in the narrative poems so overshadow that to the modern general public, Shakespeare is seen only as a playwright, not a poet in the traditional sense.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief look at Shakespeare’s narrative poems.  If you did, please leave a positive review on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to.  A five-star rating would be exceptionally groovy.  Click the support the show button if you’ve found a bit of change in the couch cushions and haven’t yet figured out where to put it.  Next time, we’ll look at our final Shakespeare play, The Tempest, and following that we’ll round off our time with the Bard with a look at his sonnets. 

Thanks for dropping in – mind how you go, now.  Oops!  Don’t let the cat out!  Bye!