Thomas Heywood's the Rape of Lucrece
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Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece
Janice VALLS-RUSSELL IRCL, UMR 5186 CNRS and Univ. Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Thomas Heywood likes beds. He likes beds because he is a dramatist with a flair for the dramatic potential of props, but also because he has a distinctive interest in women, giving them agency and a voice even as he seems to titillate his (male) readers and spectators with scenes of erotic voyeurism.1 As Peter Stallybrass notes, “[p]erhaps the most substantial stage property of many Renaissance companies was a bed”,2 and this certainly seems to have been true of the theatre of the Queen’s Men for which Heywood wrote several of his plays, the Red Bull, where “beds were among the most commonly used of large stage properties … in the period 1605–25”.3 The bed that is glimpsed in the alcove of the discovery space or wheeled forward onto the stage, rear-stage or centre-stage according to the needs of the scene constitutes a focal point of dramatic action and tension that is well served by Heywood’s mastery, with his keen eye for staging opportunities, his sense of timing and an urge constantly to push back the limits of representation: in The Silver Age, Heywood stages what must be one of the most spectacular bed scenes in early modern drama, when the bed on which Jupiter has seduced Semele “fires, and all flies up, Jupiter from thence takes an abortive infant”, baby Bacchus (K1r). 4 As a stage-within-the stage, a bed scene offers dramatic potentialities that encourage generic experimentation within a larger theatrical frame.
I should like to thank warmly the editors of this issue, Sujata Iyengar and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, for their careful reading and stimulating suggestions. I was also very fortunate to be able to share thoughts on Lucrece with the late Christy Desmet, when I presented an earlier version of this essay at the University of Georgia. Christy has been in my thoughts as I reworked my text, which I dedicate to her, in memoriam. 1 Sasha Roberts, “‘Let me the curtains draw’: the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy”, in Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 153–74, 153. On the bed as the locus of rites of passage, see pp. 155–7. 2 Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: Speculating on the boy actor”, in Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: The Erotic of Desire in the Renaissance Theatre, London, Routledge, 2005, pp. 50–64, 50. 3 Roberts, “‘Let me the curtains draw’…”, p. 157. Roberts is referring to George Fullmer Reynolds, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater, 1605–1625, New York, Kraus Reprint, 1966 [1940], p. 65. 4 Thomas Heywood, The Silver Age, London, Nicholas Okes for Benjamin Lightfoot, 1613.
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From the adulterate bed in The English Traveller and A Woman Killed with Kindness – with its final deathbed scene – to the bed curtains being drawn around Jupiter and Danae – by Danae herself – in The Golden Age, Heywood plays on his audiences’ nerves by building up anticipation, only to leave them finally imagining what might, or might not, actually happen in the bed. So doing he plays on the sense of discomfort and unease that staging a chamber can create in an audience. As Colin Burrow recalls in his edition of Shakespeare’s poems, The intimacy of violation is represented in terms of domestic geography: a private chamber was in this period a particularly intimate place of retreat, as Cressida knows: “My lord, come you again into my chamber, / You smile and mock me, as if I meant naughtily” (Troilus, IV.ii.39–40).5 It is this “intimacy of violation” that I shall be exploring in this article, focusing on the “adulterate bed” – a phrase used both by the rapist and his victim – in Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, which was first staged at the Red Bull in 1607 or 1608. 6 While the term “adulterate” implies voluntary, extramarital intercourse, which is what Sextus Tarquin would like – and Lucrece dreads – to see construed, both adultery and rape imply illicit sex, with a “polluting effect of both acts” on the woman and, more widely, her family, in particular her husband.7 Here, the bed is the locus of rape. It collapses the violation of the bride’s body, of the marriage and of the domestic space associated with the marital bond, which is exposed to the voyeurism of witnesses – the spectators – even as, in a moment of cruel dramatic irony that seeks to make her complicit with his act, Sextus tells Lucrece that she has nothing to fear since what happened shall remain a secret, echoing Tarquin’s “if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend” (526) in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece:
SEXTUS. Night, be as secret as thou art close, as close As thou art blacke and darke thou ominous Queene (G4r)
SEXTUS. … what hath past Is hid from the worlds eye, and onely private Twixt us, faire Lucrece. (H2r)8 What Tarquin cannot imagine for one moment is that the secret will be exposed by his victim. The rape takes place virtually in the marriage bed – with the ensuing implication that marital sex must henceforth be banished from that space. References to Lucrece – alongside Philomela and Virginia – in Titus Andronicus explicitly link her to Lavinia’s fate and invite a parallel between the tyrannical rules of Tarquin the Proud (“Superbus”) and Saturninus over Rome; more specifically, it is the twofold violation of body and bed that triggers other parallels with Lucrece in early modern drama, as in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian (1610–14), where Lucina, wife of Maximus, commits suicide after
5 Colin Burrow, ed., “The Rape of Lucrece”, Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, note to line 302, p. 261. 6 Frederick Kiefer, English Drama from Everyman to 1660: Performance and Print, Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015, p. 482. Dates provided for all plays are from Kiefer and, unless otherwise indicated, refer to their first staging. 7 The quotation is from Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, p. 23. Heywood critiques the perception of the adulterate woman in A Woman Killed with Kindness. 8 Unless otherwise indicated, references are to Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece. A True Roman Tragedy. With the severall songs in their apt places, London, John Raworth for Nathaniel Butter, 1638. This quarto includes songs that were not in the earlier editions.
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being raped by the emperor Valentinian, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609–10), where Iachimo imagines himself cast as a potential Sextus, raping Innogen in her bed. In my discussion of Heywood’s staging of the rape, I shall be glancing forward to Cymbeline, whilst primarily considering how he engages with Shakespeare’s poem as well as with the original Latin source-texts. I hope to show that he fashions the material he reworks into a dramatisation that carefully maps a domestic geography embedded in the wider framework of Rome. This geography is in turn appropriated by Lucrece, who negotiates a degree of agency within that space through which Heywood critiques the male abdication of agency on the wider Roman stage until her death galvanises the men into action. Staging the violation of Lucrece’s body and by extension the collapse of the security and integrity of the domestic space dramatises the caving-in of the Roman tyranny and the attendant collapse of values that made Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece possible – and it takes her rape, and her response to it, to shake the city’s patriarchs out of their political and moral sloth.
A European tradition grounded in the classics Many readers today tend to discover the early modern reception of Lucrece through Shakespeare’s poem, which belongs, like Heywood’s play, to a prolific European tradition that was already manifest in the writings of Boccaccio and Chaucer and a wide range of visual arts, from manuscript illuminations to paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and other leading artists.9 Botticelli included two panels depicting the fates of Lucrece and Virginia in a set of spalliere, or wooden panels, that were designed for a bedroom, in celebration of a wedding, perhaps as the headboard and foot of a bed, thereby linking two Roman stories that combine rape and its political impact.10 The publication of Shakespeare’s poem, which first appeared in 1594 and was reprinted in 1598, 1600, 1607 and 1616 (to cover just the period that interests us here), overlaps with that of Heywood’s play, which was first printed in 1608, then reprinted, with some changes, in 1609 and 1614, both texts being available when Cymbeline was staged.11 William Painter’s four-page account had first appeared in volume 1 of The Palace of Pleasure in 1566 and the main events of note in the history of the English reception of Lucrece between Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s versions were the publication, in 1600, of Thomas Middleton’s poem, The Ghost of Lucrece, in which Lucrece retells her story post mortem from a Calvinist perspective, 12 and Philemon Holland’s translation of Livy’s History of Rome. Livy, of course, was available in Latin in numerous
9 See Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia…. 10 Botticelli, “The Tragedy of Lucretia”, 1499–1500, tempera and oil on panel, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, accession number P16e20. 11 According to Roberts, the poem “was one of Shakespeare’s most frequently reprinted texts in the early seventeenth century”, “‘Let me the curtains draw’…”, p. 171, n31. However, Katherine Duncan-Jones has questioned its popularity: “Though it is a brilliant piece of writing, few have found it genuinely enjoyable. It is notable that, compared with Venus, large numbers of clean copies survive of the early printings. It was bought, but not read”, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, London, Methuen, 2010 [repr. with add. material of 2001], p. 90. In “Ravished and revised: the 1616 Lucrece”, Review of English Studies, 52:208 (2001), pp. 516–23, she suggests that the change in the title of the poem, from Lucrece to The Rape of Lucrece for the 1616 edition, was a marketing strategy partly inspired by Heywood’s play (pp. 519–20). On “the publisher’s desire to capitalize on the popularity of Heywood’s stage version” for the 1616 edition, see also Paulina Kewes, “Roman history and early Stuart drama: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece”, English Literary Renaissance, 32:2 (2002), pp. 239– 67, 247. 12 Sarah Carter offers a detailed analysis of the poem in Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature, London, Palgrave, 2011, pp. 66–78. Middleton seems to anticipate the story’s dramatic potentialities, with several references to the stage.
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editions from the earliest days of printing.13 Neither Shakespeare nor Heywood needed a translation to be acquainted with the story: they knew it directly from Livy’s History of Rome, (I, xvi-lx, lvii–lx for the Lucrece story) and Ovid’s Fasti (II, 685–856; VI, 585–610), which was not translated into English until 1640 but was available in Latin.14 In his play, Heywood reworks Livy and Ovid in a multi-directional process that incorporates references to Shakespeare as he adapts the story to the stage in a bold generic move that owes as much to his competence as a Latinist as to his awareness of his contemporaries’ works and his own craftsmanship as a dramatist.
From Shakespeare to Heywood Paring back the timeline to Tarquin’s encounter with Lucrece, the rape and its immediate aftermath, Shakespeare’s poem focuses on the bedchamber scene, on the rapist and his victim’s emotions and inner conflicts. Where Shakespeare pushes the political context to the margins (in the opening prose argument and the last fifty lines or so of the poem), closer in this to Ovid than to Livy, Heywood reincorporates the rape within the broader scape of Roman politics:15 the structure of the play largely follows Livy’s account of the deposition and assassination of King Servius by his son-in-law Tullus Tarquin and his wife Tullia, daughter of Servius. (Tullia is the only other leading female character in Livy’s narrative and in Heywood’s play, and her ambition and ruthlessness, akin to those of Lady Macbeth, act as an obvious foil for Lucrece’s domestic virtues.)16 The impact produced by the rape scene is all the greater in that Heywood has previously shown how tyranny and intrigue have reduced the patricians to idleness at court and on the military front. 17 Similarly, in
13 A “careful comparison of Holland and Heywood provides no positive evidence of this translation being employed. He translated Sallust’s history and he would not have needed the aid of a translation to read Livy”. Peter Culhane, “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, Translation and Literature, 14:1 (2005), pp. 21–44, 24. Numerous editions of Livy were available, starting with the 1469 editio princeps (Rome). They included the 1518 edition by the Aldine Press (Venice), which was reprinted throughout the sixteenth century, and Titi Liuii Patauanii Romanae historiae principis, libri omnes quotquot ad nostram aetatem peruenerunt, post varias doctorum virorum emendationes, London, Edmund Bollifant, 1598, a reprint of a continental edition. This is the edition I have used alongside Loeb. For the reader’s convenience, I provide the text and translations from the Loeb edition (there are no significant variations with the 1589 edition for the Lucrece story). 14 Editions of Fasti included the one published in London with marginal commentaries that include references to Livy, P. Ovidii Nasonis. Fastorum lib. VI; Tristium Lib.v.; De Ponto lib. iiii; In ibim; Ad Liviam., London, Thomas Vautrollier, 1583, a reprint of a continental edition, possibly the one published in Antwerp in 1578 by Christophe Plantin, USTC 406412. This is the edition I have used alongside Loeb. For the reader’s convenience, I provide the text and translations from the Loeb edition (there are no significant variations with the 1583 edition for the Lucrece story). On Shakespeare and Fasti, see Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 48–50. All references to Shakespeare are to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works, Oxford, Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005 [1986]. 15 Critics have covered much of that ground, both in Shakespeare and in Heywood. See for instance Kewes, “Roman history and early Stuart drama…”, pp. 239–67; and Warren Chernaik, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 35–55. On Machiavelli’s possible influence on Heywood’s handling of the political dimension, see Kewes and also Mercedes Maroto Camino, “‘My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife’: public heroism, private sacrifice, and early modern rapes of Lucrece”, in Jonathan Hart, ed., Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature (London, Routledge, 2015; 1996), pp. 95–107. 16 While some critics suggest that Heywood’s portrayal of Tullia was influenced by Lady Macbeth, others have suggested that Livy’s Tullia may have inspired Shakespeare’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth. For a brief discussion of both sides of the argument, see Culhane, “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, p. 25. The commentator of the 1583 London edition of Fasti describes Tullia as “ferox” (commentary to VI, 587, p. 140). 17 “The nobles’ neglect of the running of the state eventually leads to the catastrophe of the rape, and only then are they provoked to action”. Culhane, “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, p. 36.
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Cymbeline, Innogen’s near-rapes (by Iachimo then Cloten) occur in a context marked by political uncertainty and moral decline, owing to the king’s incapacitation and the queen’s ambition (similar in this to Tullia) that isolate the princess all the more since her husband has been banished, leaving her doubly vulnerable. Innogen owes her resilience to the fact that she has chosen Posthumus for her husband – nearer in this to Juliet than to Lucrece – and that she is not raped, as well as to the generic transposition of the story to a world where history blurs into myth and legend and the court ultimately resists fashioning by Roman ideology. Hence the inversion when she awakens and finds Cloten (like Sextus, a prince of the ruling clique) dead besides her: Shakespeare has turned the tables on the would-be rapists. In Heywood’s play, it takes Lucrece’s rape and suicide to shake the men out of their “mis-spent time” and “sloath” (I4r). Heywood further emphasises the overall sense of male disengagement by introducing a clown, servant to Lucrece. Through his drinking songs and bawdy jokes, the clown bridges the physical and mental distance between the male, public world of Collatine and his friends and the female domesticity of Lucrece and her maids. The clown has been criticised as a tasteless addition, all the more so since his songs and jokes frame, and comment on, the rape scene, seeming to trivialise it.18 However, as Culhane observes, “The many songs in the play are more than incongruous asides; they are part of the nobles’ diversions from their abject state, and signify the ills of Rome”.19 Jeremy Lopez notes that “The Clown connects the plots with a song that filters the exposure of the effects of tyranny – sexual aggression from above – through something like antibourgeois satire – sexual aggression from below”.20 Closer to my discussion, Jean Howard considers that the songs reveal the extent to which the male community is collectively implicated in the acceptance of sexual assault and may contribute to changing an audience’s consciousness “by revealing … the social context of rape”. The Clown acknowledges the difficulty of putting words to what has happened:
CLO. My Lords, the Princely Sextus has been at home, but what he hath done there I may partly mistrust, but cannot altogether resolve you: besides, my Lady swore me, that whatsoever I suspected I should say nothing. VAL. If thou wilt not say thy minde I prethee sing thy minde, and then thou maist save thine oath. CLO. Indeed I was not sworne to that, I may either laugh out my newes or sing em, and so I may save mine oath to my Lady. (I1r) Male discomfort resorts to bawdiness, laughing and singing, as if anticipating, in a cruelly antithetical generic mode, Lucrece’s tears and her struggle to put words on her ordeal
18 In “Notes on Thomas Heywood’s later reputation”, The Review of English Studies, 4:14 (1928), pp. 135–44, pp. 142–3 n†, Louis B. Wright quotes Charles Baldwin: “The Rape of Lucrece is a sort of dramatic monster, in the construction of which every rule of propriety is violated, and all grace and symmetry are set at defiance. The author, one would suppose, must have produced it when in a state of inebriety; in which a man of genius may frequently, amidst strange and foolish things, give birth to poetical and impassioned conceptions. The dignified characters of Roman story are, in this play, really infected with the madness which Brutus only assumes. But, with an exuberance of buffoonery and conceits, are mingled a considerable portion of poetry and some powerful scenes. Upon the whole, this single composition, with all its absurdities, contains so much that is really excellent, that it is well worth forming a part of this collection”. 19 Culhane, “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, p. 36. 20 Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 152.
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before the same male audience that has previously heard the Clown without heeding (or, perhaps, wishing really to hear) what he is attempting to convey.21
Setting the scene: domestic space and dramatic anticipation Where Heywood differs most from Shakespeare (and his other sources) is in the way he carefully leads up to the bedchamber scene before it actually takes place and in his shifting of perspectives. Breaking with the classical narrative in which the reader first discovers Lucrece through Collatine and his male friends’ eyes, he adds a domestic scene where she appears onstage with her servant, Mirable, and the clown, thus offering the audience an unmediated encounter. The meal that follows in the same space, with Lucrece playing hostess to Collatine and his friends – another scene added by Heywood – establishes that, as in Livy, the setting is an area of the house to which guests are admitted (“in medio aedium”, I, lvii, 9–10), transposed to the hall in the early modern household, not a private chamber, which is where Ovid sets the very first encounter, thereby introducing a voyeuristic element through the depiction of a delicate scene of female intimacy: “inde cito passu petitur Lucretia, cuius / ante torum calathi lanaque mollis erat. / lumen ad exiguum famulae data pensa trahebant” (741–3) (“Thence they galloped to Lucretia, before whose bed were baskets full of soft wool. By a dim light the handmaids were spinning their allotted stints of yarn”). 22 Heywood respects and adapts Livy’s concise reference to an early modern domestic space. The scene in which Collatine and his friends later pay her a surprise visit (following their bet about the behaviour of wives in the absence of their husbands) takes place in the same hall, and that is where Lucrece admits Sextus on his surprise visit later that night: Heywood thus innovates while respecting the classical sources, unlike Shakespeare, whose Tarquin’s lust, like Iachimo’s, is aroused not by the sight of Lucrece but by her husband’s praise. Audiences at the Red Bull thus saw the hall three times before the scene switched to her chamber for the rape; because that space is then violated, because the story of what she suffers is so intimate, and impacts her marriage, it is in that self-same chamber that she receives her husband, her father and their friends on the following morning to reveal what has happened before killing herself. Lucrece then disappears from the stage. Heywood chooses not to expose her body to the citizens’ male, collective gaze – a strategy that, in Livy’s account, helps bring about the downfall of a corrupt monarchy and the reinstatement of patrician rule. The setting shifts back to Lucrece’s home, after the exchange in the military camp where Collatine wagers a bet on Lucrece’s virtue, reducing both to an object of barter:
COL. Ile hazard all my fortunes on the vertues Of divine Lucrece, shall we try them thus? It is now dead of night, lets mount our steeds, Within this two houres we may reach to Rome,
21 Jean E. Howard, “Interrupting the Lucrece effect? The performance of rape on the early modern stage”, in Valerie Traub, ed., The Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 657–72, 671. For discussions of the way the songs in the play reflect both the silencing of the men under Tarquin’s tyranny and allow for a measure of expression, see Andrew Bretz, “Sung Silence: Complicity, Dramaturgy, and Song in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece”, Early Theatre, 19:2 (2016), pp. 101–18; and Nora L. Corrigan, “Song, Political Resistance, and Masculinity in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece”, in Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson, eds., Gender and Song in Early Modern England, London, Routledge 2014, pp. 139–52. 22 For a version of this infrequently depicted scene, see Willem de Poorter, “Lucrèce à l’ouvrage” [Lucretia weaving with her maids], 1633, Musée des Augustins, inv. 2004 1 379, Toulouse, France.
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And to our houses all come unprepar’d, And unexpected by our hie praisd wives, She of them all that we find best imploid, Devoted, and most huswife exercisd, Let her be held most virtuous, and her husband Winne by the wager a rich horse and armour. (F2v) It is late evening, as Lucrece’s opening line of the following scene indicates (“But one houre more and you shall all to rest”, F2v). Lucrece and her maids seem to be centre-stage as they busy themselves – “Here, take your work again, a while proceed, / And then to bed, for whilst you sow Ile read” (F2r). The scene may be situated rear-stage or in the discovery space, unless Collatine and his companions enter from the rear and move towards Lucrece and the maids centre-stage. Onstage spectators, they observe Lucrece at work with her maids before she comes forward to greet them. If Lucrece and her maids are centre-stage, one may speculate that the bedchamber, possibly visible at the back of the stage, has a bed that will later be wheeled forward for the rape scene. The quiet, Ovidian domesticity contrasts with the callousness of Collatine who, having won his wager, leaves Lucrece and returns to camp, in spite of her gentle insistence:
LUC. Will you taste such welcome, lords, as a poore unprovided house can yeild? … But my lords, I hope my Collatine will not so leave his Lucrece. … Will not my husband repose this night with me? (F4r-v) Left alone on the stage, she urges the audience to excuse him in a speech Heywood crafts for her, redeeming her from the silent acquiescence of sources and contemporary texts:
LUC. With no unkindnesse we should our lords upbraid, Husbands and Kings must alwayes be obaid. Nothing save the high busines of the state, And the charge given him at Ardeas siege, Could ha made Collatine so much digresse, From the affection that he beares his wife. But subjects must excuse when Kings claime power. (G1r)
“This ring to Lucrece shall my love convey, / And in this gift thou dost thy bed betray” Dignity is unmistakeably on the side of Lucrece, all the more so since this direct address to the audience occurs midway between the moment when Collatine, having won his wager, declares in a flourish that he “commit[s] [his] Lucrece wholly to the dispose of Sextus”23 – with Sextus declaring in an aside just before leaving the stage, “Lucrece, we cannot rest, / Till our hot lust embosom in thy breast” – and the moment when, at Sextus’ insistence, Collatine gives him a ring, in effect providing him with a laissez-passer to his home, wife and bed:
SEX. Collatine, shall I doe you any service to your Lucrece? COL. Onle commend me. SEX. What, no private token to purchase our kind welcom?
23 The heavily loaded verb “commit” embraces the notions both of trust and of placing something, someone or oneself at someone’s mercy: Heywood is reluctant to “commit” his plays to the press, Lucrece says that Collatine commits all his business to her, Lucrece commits her chastity and honour to Jove, and Sextus himself compares his deed to bodies committed unto a funeral pyre in battle.
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COL. Would Royall Sextus would but honour me to beare her a slight token. SEX. What? COL. This ring, SEX. As I am Royall I will see’t delivered. This Ring to Lucrece shall my love convay, And in this gift thou dost thy bed betray. Tomorrow we shall meet, this night, sweet fate, May I prove welcome though a guest ingrate. Exit. (G1r-v) The ring appears in none of Heywood’s sources. Symbols of marriage, as in Titian’s painting of the rape of Lucrece, where the wedding ring on her left hand, with which she attempts to ward off Tarquin’s attack, is situated “at the exact vertical centre of the painting”,24 rings onstage are rife with sexual connotations, as in The Changeling, and analogous to metaphoric bed tricks in The Merchant of Venice. The ring is a signifier of the impending rape, worked into the dramatic fabric through dialogues that resonate with Shakespearean imagery:
LUC. This Ring, my Lord, hath opt the gates to you, For though I know you for a Royall Prince My soveraignes Sonne, and freind to Collatine Without that key you had not entred heere. (Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece, G2r [xiii]). For he the night before in Tarquin’s tent Unlocked the treasure of his happy state, What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent In the possession of his beauteous mate … Or why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears, because it is his own? (Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, 15–17, 33–5) Heywood literalises and materialises what Jonathan Bate calls “Collatine’s indiscreet verbal ‘unlocking’ or ‘publishing’ of Lucrece’s beauty” and the consequences of a wager through which a husband – Collatine or Posthumus – endangers his wife’s chastity.25 To reverse Burrow’s phrase, Heywood explores onstage the dramatic consequences of violating the intimacy of the private sphere through public exposure. With the means of a prop (the ring) and words (Collatine’s boasting and Lucrece’s voicing of uneasiness), Heywood stages Ovid’s bitter, self-reproaching account in Amores III, xii, of how he lost his love by turning her into a bawd through careless publicising of her qualities: “Her gate by my hands is set open wide”, to quote from Christopher Marlowe’s translation.26 In an aside, Sextus uses the word “treasure”, casting himself as a looter or pirate: “’Tis force, not suit, must purchase this rich treasure” (G2v). Before withdrawing to her chamber, Lucrece reiterates her trust in Sextus, precisely because he is the bearer of that ring:
24 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 13. 25 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 69. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline in this perspective and the way in which female privacy, which is intended to protect female chastity, “can also render that chastity vulnerable, and thus threaten the home itself”, see Emma Whipday, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 129–42, 138. 26 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, “Elegy 11”, line 12, pp. 180–1.
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LUC. This Ring speaks for me, that next Collatine you are to me most welcome, yet, my Lord thus much presume, without this from his hand, Sextus this night could not have entred here: no, not the king himself: My dores the daytime to my friends are free, But in the night the obdure gates are lesse kinde. Without this ring they can no entrance finde. Lights for the Prince! (G3r) Later, just before she commits suicide, Lucrece bitterly upbraids her husband: That unprincely Prince, who guest-wise entred with my husbands Ring, This Ring, O Collatine! this Ring you sent Is cause of all my woe, your discontent. (I3r) The bedchamber scene inevitably recalls Shakespeare’s poem and anticipates Cymbeline, largely because the two authors drew on similar material, but also because Heywood’s dialogues recall those in the poem, which those audience members who were familiar with it could recognise, like a palimpsest effect. One may speculate that Heywood’s play contributed a further layer of reception when Cymbeline in turn was staged, on which Shakespeare may have played, in effect teasing his audience even as he heightened expectations: So, you think you’ve seen this before? Like Lucrece, Innogen trusts Iachimo because he is the bearer of credentials from her husband, and Shakespeare redoubles this, making Iachimo’s claim that he has had access to Innogen’s bed sound all the more plausible since he brings Posthumus her bracelet. Collatine’s ring and Posthumus’ letters reinforce the husbands’ responsibility in the rape or near-rape of their respective wives, which is unleashed by their proprietary boasting – a further link between Tarquin and the Italianate Iachimo being provided, perhaps, by Callimaco, in Machiavelli’s “comic version” of the Lucrece story, Mandragola: “Callimaco has returned to his native Florence in search of one Donna Lucrezia, whose beauty he has heard praised in Paris by one of her kinsmen, during an argument as to where the most beautiful women are to be found, in Italy or France”.27 Building on the dramatic expectations created around the ring, Heywood heightens the sense of foreboding by carefully crafting the nocturnal setting, like a stage director seeking to maximise his lighting effects all the more effectively since the play was initially performed in daylight:
LUC. Tis late, so many starres shine in this roome, By reason of this great and Princely guest, The world might call our modestie in question To revell thus, our husband at the Campe, Haste and to rest; save in the Princes chamber, Let not a light appeare; my hearts all sadnesse, Jove unto thy protection I commit My chastity and honour to thy keepe, My waking soule I give, whilst my thoughts sleep. Exit. (G3v) In this evocative moment, in which Heywood might also be thinking in terms of staging the play for the more intimate space of an indoor theatre or anticipating an evening performance at court,28 Lucrece offers a chronographia, a “time painting” expanded from
27 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 90. 28 The play was performed before the queen in 1612, after Heywood’s Silver Age: “The Sunday followinge att Grinwidg before the Queen and the Prince was playd the Silver Aiedg: and ye next night following Lucrecia”, “by
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Ovid’s “Nox erat et tota lumina nulla domo” (Fasti, 792, “it was night and there was no light in the whole house”), which Shakespeare had reworked in his poem (“Now stole upon the time the dead of night…”, 162–8) and Macbeth (II.i.49–56), before having Iachimo enact the scene onstage (II.ii.11–14).29 Heywood also sums it up prosaically when a serving-man, very much the curt stagehand, orders “Out with your Torches” (G4r). In writing those lines for Lucrece, Heywood directly correlates her sense of disquiet with the materiality of light and darkness. The ominous note he introduces here is not in the source texts, nor in contemporary versions. It is in keeping with what I have called his distinctive interest in women: once again, he gives Lucrece a voice before the deed. Simultaneously, Heywood adds a dramatic turn of the screw, in having her commit her protection to Jove who, audiences well knew, was an adulterer and rapist, more appropriately invoked by Sextus moments before the rape – Innogen echoes this moment in Cymbeline, “To your protection I commend me, gods” (II.ii.8), just before Iachimo steps out of the trunk. In spite of Lucrece’s renewed appeal to Jupiter in the following scene, the god (and history) are on the side of Sextus and frame the rape:
SEX. By Jove Ile force thee. LUC. By a God you sweare to do a devils deed – sweet Lord, forbear! By the same Jove I sweare that made this soul, Never to yield unto an act so fowle. Helpe, helpe. (H1r)
SEX. Lucrece, th’art mine: In spite of Jove and all the powers divine. He beares her out. (H1r)30 As in Shakespeare, and in keeping with a prevalent iconographic theme, as well as recalling Frankford secretly returning to his house at night – “softly, softly” (xiii.20) – in Heywood’s earlier play, A Woman Killed with Kindness,31 the rape scene opens with Sextus entering the room stealthily, “with his Sword drawne and a Taper light” (G4r, sd). Moving centre-stage towards the bed, he speaks a soliloquy that moves from an imagery of night to a military “Forward still” (G4v). This is immediately followed by a stage direction, “Lucrece discovered in her bed”, which Sextus expands, “turning the playwright’s language into performance” by drawing attention to the curtains around the bed that simultaneously reveal and frame Lucrece:32 “To make thy lust live, all thy virtues kill. / Here, here, behold! Beneath these curtains the Queens players and the Kings Men”, Peter Cunningham, ed., “[Book XIII.] The Booke of the Revells Ending the last day of October Ano Dom: 1612”, Extracts From the Accounts of the Revels at Court, in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I: From the Original Office Books of the Masters and Yeomen, London, Shakespeare Society, 1842, p. 211. 29 “These images occur in the stanza ‘Now stole upon the time the dead of night …’ (162–8) which is a formal chronographia expanded from Ovid’s ‘Nox erat et tota lumina nulla domo’ … and incorporating details from the textbook chronographia of the moment when Virgil’s Dido resolves on suicide (‘Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem / corpora per terras …’, Aeneid, IV.522 ff., ‘It was night, and over the earth weary creatures were tasting peaceful slumber’).” Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 70 n26. See also Burrow, ed., Complete Poems and Sonnets, p. 254, note to 162–8: “A set piece description of a time of day was known as a chronographia (‘time painting’)”. 30 Shakespeare’s Lucrece also appeals to Jupiter: “She conjures him by high almighty Jove, / By knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship's oath” (568–9). Heywood shares this moment of irony as an inside joke with his audiences and readers, in intratextual references to Jove’s sexual activities, principally in Troia Britanica, the Age plays and Jupiter’s Escapes. 31 Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Arden Early Modern Drama, London, Bloomsbury, 2017. 32 Nathalie Rivère de Carles, “Performing Materiality: Curtains on the early modern stage”, in Farah Karim- Cooper and Tiffany Stern, eds., Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, The Arden Shakespeare,
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lies / That bright enchantress that hath dazed my eyes”.33 This speech recalls, and enacts, Shakespeare’s “The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece’ bed” (301) and what amounts to a stage direction that simultaneously resonates with the harsh, metallic sound of Tarquin’s steps: “Into the chamber wickedly he stalks, / And gazeth on her yet-unstainèd bed. / The curtains being close, about he walks” (365–7). Sextus’ thoughts, spoken as he approaches the bed and contemplates Lucrece, suggest momentary hesitation and self-disgust, as in Shakespeare.34 The dialogic pattern already present in Shakespeare’s poem (which gives Lucrece the voice she lacks in Livy’s and Ovid’s third-person narratives) acquires theatrical immediacy in the dramatic confrontation of Lucrece and Sextus on stage, which opens with a terse exchange:
LUC. Whose that? oh me! beshrew you. SEX. Sweet, tis I. LUC. What I? SEX. Make roome. LUC. My husband Collatine? SEX. Thy husband’s at the Campe. LUC. Heare is no place for any man save him. SEX. Grant me that grace. LUC. What are you? SEX. Tarquin and thy friend, and must enjoy thee. (G4v) This stichomythic sequence emphasises the physical space, Lucrece’s growing anxiety and her sense of being pinned down and constrained in her movements by Sextus (“Make room”), simultaneously recalling the symbolic power of the marriage bed (“My husband”, “Thy husband”, “Here is no place for any man save him”). It ends on a reiteration of Sextus’ earlier aside (“Thy virtue, grace, and fame, I must enjoy”) that recalls Shakespeare (“‘Lucrece,’ quoth he, ‘This night I must enjoy thee’”, 512). References to the bed mark Sextus’ threats:
SEX. I’me all impatience, violence and rage. And save thy bed nought can this fire asswage: wilt love me? … SEX. These pillows first shall stop thy breath, If thou but shrickest, harke how Ile frame thy death. (H1r) Shakespeare’s poem too refers to pillows, both when depicting Lucrece asleep and when she tells Collatine what happened: “A stranger came, and on that pillow lay…” (1620). The reference to pillows in the play (which replace “cushions” in the 1608 edition) further conjures up an image of an Othello-like Sextus threatening to stifle Lucrece, hence, perhaps, her depiction of a Moor-like figure when she relives the scene – “his sharp pointed
London, Bloomsbury, 2014 [2013], pp. 51–69, 69. On the use of curtains in Cymbeline, which also discusses Lucrece, see pp. 61–4. Heywood uses curtain effects elsewhere (see The Iron Age, The Fair Maid of the West). 33 Sextus’ description of Lucrece as an enchantress is in keeping with his derogatory view of women, expressed earlier in Spenserian terms that assimilate women with sirens, serpents or harpies: “SEX. What’s Lucrece but a woman? and what are women / But tortures and disturbance unto men? / If they be foul th’are odious, and if fair, / Th’are like rich vessels full of poysonous drugs, / Or like black serpents arm’d with golden scales: / For my own part, they shall not trouble me” (F1v). 34 Culhane notes that “The parallels are particularly evident in Tarquin’s mental turmoil before committing the crime”: “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, p. 25. Burrow points out that “Nothing in Ovid or any other source corresponds to this section of the poem: its focus on the psychology of Tarquin’s action is completely Shakespearean”, Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 251, note to 127–441.
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Semiter / The Tyrant bent against my naked brest” (I3r) – that also recalls Aaron in Titus Andronicus, “He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point / That touches this, my first-born and heir” (IV.ii.90–1).35 As is well known, Moors were often associated with lust and cruelty in the European Renaissance and Lucrece’s words bring to mind Titian’s painting, The Rape of Lucretia, in which Sextus is a Moor-like figure, clad in Orientalising garments and wielding a scimitar, 36 and the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. 37 Similarly, Laurence Olivier’s Othello “enters to quell the disturbance in Cyprus … holding a large curved scimitar, the most blatant of phallic symbols”. 38 Sextus’ behaviour thus carries connotations of threatening “otherness” – Lucrece has just referred to him as a “stranger” (“by a stranger I am strumpeted”, I3r) – that place him beyond the pale of Roman civic virtues. And it ties in with Sextus’ threat to kill a slave and place him in her bed, the slave being black in some versions of the story, as in Servius’ commentary on Aeneid, VIII, 646, where “he calls the slave an Ethiope”.39 Sextus’ use of the verb “defile” and his reference to “thy adulterate bed”, which he reinforces with the phrase “mechall sinne”,40 contaminate Lucrece’s language. She seems to internalise her assailant’s discourse, to the extent of inviting an analogy with Lady Macbeth by alluding to a stain that cannot be washed away – the difference being, of course, that Lucrece is guilty of no murder; and “thy adulterate bed” becomes “my adulterate bed” when she speaks to her husband. Writing of Shakespeare’s reference to Lucrece’s blood after her suicide, some of which “looked black, and that false Tarquin stained” (1743), Joyce Green MacDonald notes that “Even though she has been raped, Lucrece has somehow been blackened by non-marital sexual contact”.41 And even before the rape has taken place, Heywood’s Lucrece anticipates that it will indelibly inhabit her, physically and morally: “my staine”. She is acutely aware, as Margo Hendricks reminds us, that “unlawful sexuality, despite its initial invisibility, inevitably resurfaces” – in what Hendricks terms “the semiotics of genealogy”: following the contamination of “Lucrece’s body, once ‘white’ now marked by Tarquin’s racializing ‘stain’”, the risk exists of an illegitimate birth would contaminate Collatine’s lineage.42
SEX. Oh, who but Sextus could commit such waste … Or at such fatall houres these revels keepe,
35 In The Merchant of Venice, Morocco swears by “this scimitar / That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince” (II.i.24–5). 36 The painting, displayed at the Bordeaux Musée des Beaux-Arts, was in the collection of Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel: Inv. Bx E 42. c.1570-71, http://www.musba-bordeaux.fr/. Another version of this painting, c. 1571, hangs at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK), permanent identifier: http://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ id/object/656. Tarquin seems to be holding the same weapon, though the curve of the blade is less apparent. Ian Donaldson (The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 13), suggests that this “tonal contrast possibly hints at the racial, as well as purely sexual, oppositions of the story: Lucrece is a Roman, Tarquin an Etruscan” and, therefore, a “stranger” indeed. 37 Artemisia Gentileschi, Tarquin and Lucretia (c. 1645–50), Neues Palais, Potsdam-Sans Souci. 38 Peter Holland, “Rethinking blackness: the case of Olivier’s Othello”, in Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne- Guerrin, eds., Shakespeare on Screen: Othello, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 43–58, 52. 39 See Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 169 n4. 40 Mechal, “adulterous” (OED records this use of “mechal” only in Heywood’s work). 41 Joyce Green Macdonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 42. 42 Margo Hendricks, “‘’Tis not the fashion to confess’: Shakespeare – Post-coloniality – Johannesburg, 1996”, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Postcolonial Shakespeares, London, Routledge, 1002, pp. 84–97, 89 and 91. For her discussion of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, see pp. 87–94.
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With thought once to defile thy innocent sleepe? (G4v)
LUC. … marre not that Cannot be made againe: this once defilde, Not all the Ocean waves can purifie Or wash my staine away. (H1v)
SEX. … One of thy basest Groomes, and lay you both, Graspt arme in arme, on thy adulterate bed, Then call in witness of that mechall sinne. (H1r)
LUC. Stain’d, polluted, and defil’d. Strange steps are found in my adulterate bed, And though my thoughts be white as innocence, Yet is my body soild with lust-burn’d sinne, And by a stranger I am strumpeted (I3r) Henceforth, bed and body – the bed on the stage and the body of the actor – merge in Lucrece’s account, which personifies the locus (“my adulterate bed”) as her alter ego (“my body soild”), even as it incorporates the words of previous Lucreces: Livy’s, “Vestigia viri alieni Collatine in lecto sunt tuo” (I, lviii) (“The print of a strange man, Collatinus, is in your bed”), which Philemon Holland translates as “The print, Collatinus, of another man is to be seen in thy own bed” (41);43 Shakespeare’s, “A stranger came, and on that pillow lay” (1620), and Painter’s, “Alas Collatine, the steppes of an other man, be now fixed in thy bed” (p. 23). Imprisoned by the rape, forced by a stranger, Lucrece confines her innocence within a single line, which is as closely besieged as she is in her bed and indeed the patrician world. At the same time, she refuses to remain silent. However ineffectually, she strives to make Sextus change his mind and later proclaims her innocence before her husband, whose boasting encouraged Sextus to violate “the marital seal” and imprint his own upon her body and the bed.44
The morning after On the morning after the rape, Lucrece appears “unready” (sd H2r), perhaps with her hair dishevelled, as in Ovid: “passis sedet illa capillis” (813), “She sat with hair dishevelled”. Heywood – or rather, Lucrece – goes on to design the scene to provide a setting in harmony with her emotions: in Shakespeare, Lucrece’s maid asks her why such “heaviness” (1283), and Collatine, Lucretius and their companions find her “clad in mourning black” (1585). Heywood’s scene opens with the stage direction, “A Table and a Chaire covered with blacke”, and her maid Mirable’s question draws attention to this setting: “Why is your chamber hung with mourning black, / Your habit sable, and your eyes thus swolne / With ominous tearse, alas, what troubles you?” (I2r). The men express unease on discovering the room: “Why is this funerall blacke, and ornaments / Of widow-hood? resolve me cousen Lucrece” (I2v). Adapting the scene to the conventions of both the stage, where black hangings signalled tragedy, as Melpomene indicates in the induction of Heywood’s A Warning for Fair Women, and early modern households, when “after death … bed, bedchamber and sometimes
43 Philemon Holland, The Romane Historie written by T. Livius of Padua … Translated out of Latine into English, London, Adam Islip, 1600, p. 41. 44 The quotation is from Margreta de Grazia, in her discussion of imprinting metaphors and how they “surface repeatedly around issues of virginity and chastity, rape and adultery”, “Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes”, in Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 3, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 63–94, 81.
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spouses’ beds were draped in black mourning cloth”,45 Heywood lends physical, dramatic immediacy to the sense of bereavement that Ovid lingers on: … passis sedet illa capillis, ut solet ad nati mater itura rogum, grandaevumque patrem fido cum coniuge castris evocat, et posita venit uterque mora. utque vident habitum, quae luctus causa, requirunt, cui paret exsequias, quove sit icta malo? (Fasti, II, 813–18) She sat with hair dishevelled, like a mother who must attend the funeral pyre of her son. Her aged sire and faithful spouse she summoned from the camp, and both came without delay. When they saw her plight, they asked why she mourned, whose obsequies she was preparing, or what ill had befallen her. Simultaneously, Heywood turns to Shakespeare (and, through Shakespeare, reconnects with Ovid) for the dialogue between Lucrece and her maid as well as the detail of the blush; in the poem, when she sends the servant off with a letter to her husband, “Lucrece thought he blushed to see her shame” (1344), with the blushing creating further blushing (1352–8). Onstage, Lucrece’s mention of the blush she thinks she sees on her maid’s cheeks emphasises for the audience the oscillation between her sense of shame and her ineffectual attempt to hide her inner disarray:46
LUC. I am not sad, thou didst deceive thyselfe; I did not weepe, ther’s nothing troubles me, But wherefore dost thou blush? MAID. Madam, not I. LUC. Indeed thou didst, and in that blush my gilt thou didst betray. How cam’st thou by the notice of my sinne? MAID. What sinne? (I2r) Heywood follows this with a lovely moment of female intimacy, which bridges the interval between Lucrece’s inability at this stage to elaborate on what has happened and the arrival of her husband and her father:
MAID. Sweet Lady cheare yourself, Ile fetch my Violl, And see if I can sing you fast asleepe. A little rest would weare away this passion. LUC. Do what thou wilt, I can command no more (I2v) Lucrece then retells the story of the rape, as in Shakespeare, overcoming the difficulties she had in Ovid in putting words on what had happened: “quaeque potest, narrat. restabant ultima: flevit, / et matronales erubuere genua” (827–8) (“And what she can she tells. The end
45 “Looke Comedie, I markt it not till now, / The stage is hung with blacke; and I perceive / The Auditors prepared for Tragedie.” A Warning for Fair Women, Induction, 81–3. The quotation above is from Roberts, “‘Let me the curtains draw’…”, p. 156, a reference to Nigel Llewellyn’s The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–c. 1800 (1991). In “‘The stage is hung with blacke’: on the use of black curtains for tragedies in the early modern period”, Theatre Notebook, 68:3 (2014), pp. 153–88 (pp. 180–1), Mariko Ichikawa points out that coloured hangings or curtains are used for the scene in which Tarquin “discovers” Lucrece in bed, with a change to black hangings to make a dramatic visual impact on the viewers, the audience and the characters entering for that scene. 46 On the topos of blushing, see Yves Peyré, “Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction”, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont, and Charlotte Coffin, eds., Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 25–40, 32–3 for a discussion of Shakespeare’s Lucrece.
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she left unsaid but wept and a blush o’erswept her matron cheeks”). Her narrative, absent in the sources, draws out the moment of revelation, with Heywood changing the sequence: whereas in Shakespeare Lucrece first tells her tale, then names Tarquin and finally calls on vengeance, following the order of Livy’s compact summary (Ovid omits the request for revenge), in Heywood she first insists that they swear to avenge her before telling them who her assailant is and what happened: “Ere I speake my woe, / Sweare youle revenge poor Lucrece on her foe” (I3r). Once again, she attempts, within the narrow sphere that is hers, to have a say in the direction of events, after having staged, within the same bedchamber in which the rape took place, her own narrative and death. Allowing Lucrece to tell her story, and giving her the space and time to do so onstage, restores a degree of agency that is denied to Lavinia, or rather, restricted to the moment when she reveals the identity of her rapists through her access to the classics and learning.47 It is this power of the personal narrative that some stagings of Shakespeare’s poem have chosen to emphasise, in a varying number of ways: in her 2012 production, Elizabeth Freestone opted for a musical version, in which a single performer (Camille O’Sullivan) is cast as Lucrece and narrator, with Feargal Murray at the piano, on a virtually bare stage: “a shadow looms out of the darkness; a patch of light suggests a bedroom door ajar with possibilities”.48 The bed, with translucent white hangings, was the focal point of Callie Kimball’s 2007 adaptation of the poem for the Washington, D.C., Shakespeare Festival, with Betsy Rosen as Lucrece, and other characters assisting her in narrating the rape and re-enacting it onstage.49 There are very few productions of Heywood’s play, hence the importance of Sonia Ritter’s production in 2005, in which Christine Lawrence’s Lucrece embodied and voiced the devastating impact of the rape.50 Ritter’s directorial choices were all the more relevant in that she played Lavinia in Deborah Warner’s production of Titus Andronicus for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, which was a landmark in the way it showed the brutal physical reality of sexual assault on the victim’s body. It is to be noted that all these productions are by women, who turn to the stage to retrieve Lucrece physically from the symbolism that simultaneously highlighted the political import of her story and diminished her own tragedy, as Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Second Sex, writing about the symbolic use of women in historical narratives: “the women have been pretexts rather than agents. The suicide of Lucretia has had value only as a symbol”.51 With his careful framing and staging of Lucrece’s domesticity, rape and ensuing suicide, Heywood was already pointing the way.
47 For a discussion of Lavinia’s “dis-/in-articulacy” and Lucrece’s lamenting voice, see Jennifer Edwards, “Metaphorically speaking: Titus Andronicus and the limits of utterance”, in Farah Karim-Cooper, ed., Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, London, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 159–78. 48 Lyn Gardner, “The Rape of Lucrece – Edinburgh Festival Review”, The Guardian, 23 August 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/23/rape-of-lucrece-edinburgh-review. 49 Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, “Callie Kimball’s The Rape of Lucrece (2007): A Woman’s Creative Response to Shakespeare’s Poem”, Borrowers and Lenders, 7:2 (2012–13), http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/380/show. 50 Richard Rowland discusses the production in Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, p. 6–14. See also Howard, “Interrupting the Lucrece effect?”, p. 670–1. 51 “[E]lles ont été prétextes beaucoup plus qu’agents. Le suicide de Lucrèce n’a eu qu’une valeur de symbole”: Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, 2 vols, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, vol. 1, Les faits et les mythes, p. 220; The Second Sex, transl. and ed. H. M. Parshley, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972, p. 162. Quoted in Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 10.
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Conclusion In exploring the domestic intimacy of Lucrece’s constricted world at the heart of a political drama, Heywood reinvigorates the capital of emotions that is already present in the classical sources and that Shakespeare expanded. He adapts their dramatic potential to the tastes of theatregoers. The structure of the play dramatises Livy’s narrative, the situations and dialogues draw on Ovid’s and Shakespeare’s mapping of emotions, and the use of props and stage space situates the play in the broader scene of the early modern stage, in much the same way that Lucrece’s story is encased in that of Rome. The effect is of a trap closing in on Lucrece. Walled in within the concentric rings of a male universe, her world, which her father Lucretius, early in the play, associates with shelter, in contrast with the world of the court— Ile home to Collatine And to my daughter Lucrece: home breeds safety, Dangers begot in Court, a life retir’d Must please me now perforce (C1r) —is contaminated and violated. Within her home, the theatrical space and the dramatic tempo drive her from the hall to her bedchamber. The safety that ought to be provided by the home and, within the home, by her own chamber and, within the chamber, the bed, becomes a trap where the virtuous matron who rules over her household is “strumpeted”. While seeming to play on male voyeurism, Heywood destabilises the male world through his depiction of a woman who is strongest when seemingly most vulnerable. In his staging of the rape and the way Lucrece handles her plight, refusing to accept the silence Sextus seeks to impose on her, Heywood expands on the way Ovid, in his portrayal, endowed his delicate, feminine Lucrece with a virile soul, “animi matrona virilis” (Fasti, II, 848).52 The bequest of Heywood’s Lucrece is a legacy of revenge, whose impact radiates outwards from the domestic to the public scene, reversing the dynamics of the first part of the play. Her suicide marks a shift in the action, with Brutus’ oath (I4r), the uprising against Tarquin and Horatius’ heroic resistance on the bridge, which Livy recounts in II, x of his History, but which Heywood brings forward, in a parallel with Lucrece’s resistance that similarly contributes to the uprising of Rome and the restoration of the city’s virtue and dignity.53 In this reinstatement of male and civic honour, which she invites already in Livy, when she calls on the men to avenge her “si vos viri estis” (if you are men, I, lviii), Lucrece is the catalyst. Reversing the role of Helen, whose rape, as Shakespeare’s Lucrece remembers, destroyed a city (“Why should the private pleasure of someone / Become the public plague of many moe?” 1478–9), Heywood’s Lucrece saves another city from self- destruction by overcoming, through self-inflicted death, Sextus’ threat to destroy her in her own bed. Simultaneously, the painful trajectory she embodies through her presence on stage in Heywood’s generic transposition invites the audience, in Stephanie H. Jed’s words, “to dismantle the narratological connection between rape and republican liberty”, and to critique a narrative that reads a collective male betrayal of a woman as a premise to liberation from tyranny.54
52 See also Peyré, “Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage ...”, p. 32. 53 “Heywood moulds together these iconic scenes from Livy’s early history, carefully arranging them in a harmonious structure that elaborates Livy’s themes and values of order, valour, and self-sacrifice”, Culhane, “Livy in early Jacobean drama”, p. 26. 54 Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 9.
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