"And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness": Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece

Abstract

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 ...

Suicide and Western Culture

“…It is unclear whether this was her intention. Feminist Jane Newman described “Lucretia's suicide as the only form of political intervention available to women” 6 …”

“…Feminist Jane Newman described ''Lucretia's suicide as the only form of political intervention available to women''. 6 Judas Judas, who died in April between 29 and 33 CE, was one of the twelve disciples. He took a bribe from priests, 30 pieces of silver, to identify Jesus (he kissed him in a public garden).…”

Empowerment through Communication in Shakespeare’s Lucrece: Transitioning from Economic to Artistic Transactions

“…If experience is dumb, the work of art can come in as its ekphrastic envoicement or embodiment. Lucrece hears birds singing and is reminded of Philomela (Newman, 1994). Philomela had been raped by her sister's husband Tereus, the king of Thrace.…”

Shakespeare, the Ekphrastic Translator

“…Critics have mainly concentrated on the idea that the rape is experienced as a tragedy capable of irrevocably changing the life of a family and the progress of a state, and that there are important genderized, social, and linguistic issues related to the body. Thus MacDonald (1994) analzyes The Rape of Lucrece's obsession with speech; Joel Fineman (1991) offers an in-depth analysis of how The Rape of Lucrece, like Shakespeare's sonnets, fundamentally deconstructs the traditional poetics of praise; Jane Newman (1994) argues that the poem actually limits Lucrece's ability to act precisely by valorizing her selfsacrifice as a political act; and Mary Jacobus (1982) sees it as a manifestation of the linguistic resistance of the feminine to incorporation within male master narratives. These authors consider the ekphrastic moment of the poem of no relevance for their approach, and, accordingly, ignore it.…”