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Thomas Heywood's the Rape of Lucrece © 2019 ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE / SCENE FOCUS (IRCL-UMR5186 du CNRS) ISSN 2268-977X. Tous droits réservés. Reproduction soumise à autorisation. Téléchargement et impression autorisés à usage personnel. www.ircl.cnrs.fr 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. Bedchamber Scenes ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE/SCENE FOCUS 8 (2019) 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. <102> J. VALLS-RUSSELL, Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece 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.
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