JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Folger Shakespeare Library and George Washington University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Shakespeare Quarterly. I N SHAKESPEARE S THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, AS ALL READERS of the poem know, the progress of the narrative is frequently interrupted by interior monologues and rhetorical set pieces that dilate Livy's and Ovid's essentially political story of Lucrece's rape and suicide into a lengthy, almost psychological investigation of the motivation for and implications of both Lucrece's and Tarquin's actions.' Among these rhetorical interludes, Lucrece's address to Night, Opportunity, and Time (11. 764-1022) and her ekphrastic self-identification with the fall of Troy (11. 1366-568) have in particular been the subject of no little scholarly debate, perhaps in some measure because they seem both to figure and to result from supposedly Shakespearean innovations that distinguish The Rape of Lucrece from its sources and from other early modern versions of the same material.2 Yet the surrounding matter and circumstances of one of these "Shakespearean" sectionsnamely, the lengthy apostrophes to Night, Opportunity, and Time, where the figure of the bird-woman, Philomela, twice appears-demand that we look again at the question of Lucrece's source texts. They do so not because they reveal something "new" or "modern" about Lucrece's "psychology" but because they reveal a great deal about Shakespeare's representation of rape and of women's political agency. Obscured in both the Shakespearean representation of Lucrece's story and in its critical reception is an image of woman's reaction to rape that differs radically from Lucrece's. This image, which is uncovered when one examines contemporary editions of Ovid's Fasti (one of Lucrece's source texts), is well represented by the Philomela legend mentioned by Lucrece, and it offers an alternative to the ideological PHILOMELA, FEMALE VIOLENCE, AND SHAKESPEARE'S LUCRECE 305 script played out by the Lucretia story, a script that blames the victim, allows her to internalize guilt, and defines her as an agent of political change solely in terms of a male's ability to avenge her.Philomela belongs to and represents the countertradition of vengeful and violent women associated with Bacchic legend. This tradition is replete with images of different, more direct forms of political agency for women, images that in fact challenge the fundamental organization and distribution of power in the Western, patriarchal state. I will argue that this tradition, which materializes onstage in copies of Ovid's Metamorphoses in both Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, is also pointedly invoked-but then just as pointedly excised-in and by ...