The Rape of Lucrece
In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a "graver labour".
The dedication is followed by "The Argument", a prose paragraph that summarizes the historical context of the poem, which begins in medias res.
One evening, in the town of Ardea, where a battle is being fought, two leading Roman soldiers, Tarquin and Collatine, are talking.
He also threatens to cause her dishonor by murdering a slave and placing the two bodies in each other's arms, and then he would claim that he killed her because he discovered them in this embrace.
At the beginning of the poem the Roman army is waging war on a tribe known as the Volscians, who had claimed territory south of Rome.
This incited a full-scale revolt against the Tarquins led by Lucius Junius Brutus, the banishment of the royal family, and the founding of the Roman Republic.
As Malvolio interprets the "fustian riddle", Olivia's inability or unwillingness to speak of her love for him is killing her, like the literal knife of Lucretia's suicide.
Shakespeare retains the essence of the classic story, incorporating Livy's account that Tarquin's lust for Lucrece sprang from her husband's own praise of her.
Iachimo hid in a trunk which was delivered to Imogen's chamber under the pretence of safekeeping some jewels, a gift for her father, King Cymbeline.
[4] In a post-structuralist analysis of the poem, Joel Fineman argues that The Rape of Lucrece, like Shakespeare's sonnets, deconstructs the traditional poetics of praise.
[7] Furthermore, the poem itself draws attention to its own complicity in Collatine's fatal rhetoric of praise: "the poem itself performs or activates this same praising word of which it speaks"[8] by citing, in the first line of the second stanza, its own use of "chaste" in the last line of the first stanza: "Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste" (7).
In these same opening stanzas, The Rape of Lucrece also acknowledges how its own poetic rhetoric is part of this larger literary tradition which yokes praise and violence.
Jane Newman's feminist analysis of the poem focuses on its relationship to the myth of Philomel and Procne from Book VI of the Metamorphoses by Ovid.
Shakespeare's poem faintly alludes to Ovid's myth, but does not present Procne and Philomel's method of revenge as an authentic option for Lucrece.
Although Lucrece maintains the ability to speak after the rape (in contrast to the mutilated Philomel who loses all speech), Newman argues that the poem actually limits Lucrece's ability to act precisely by celebrating her self-sacrifice: "The apparent contrast of a silent Philomela, robbed of the potential for such an impact on the political moment to which she belongs, effectively casts Lucretia's suicide as the only form of political intervention available to women.
"[11] Ironically, Lucrece's rhetorical eloquence blocks the possibility that she herself could seek out a more active, violent retribution on Tarquin, her rapist, and the monarchical regime that he represents.
Instead, her revenge must be carried out by male agents acting in her name, particularly Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic, who imitates Lucrece's self-sacrificing rhetoric as he leads the rebellion against Tarquin's father, the king of Rome.
