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

Ekphrasis as an Inevitable Mode of Human Communication

The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a very significant revival of interest in ekphrasis. Starting from Murray Krieger’s seminal essay ‘Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoön Revisited’ (1967) discourse on ekphrasis have been appearing at regular intervals. Though the term ekphrasis has meant slightly different things at different times in its history, our modern interest in the term recognizes it as involving the representation in one work of art of a work of art in another medium (Mitchell, 1992). And in this context, Shakespeare has played a prominent role in ekphrastic endeavours, particularly in his attempt to communicate to his audience his issues with humanistic discourses that responded to his age of colonial mercantilism.

When Shakespeare wrote The Rape of Lucrece (1593–1594), ekphrasis as an artistic mode using comparison of the past with the present made it possible for the past to become a metaphor for the present. Shakespeare chooses a Greco-Roman subject for this poem, but seems to speak about the ills of his own times. Through ekphrasis, as we shall see, his text seems tacitly to encourage metaphorical comparisons between one age and another, one experience and another, and of course, one art with another. If today, we are seemingly connecting with the past through our preoccupation with photographs, Shakespeare does so then with the tool of representation called ekphrasis.

The Text: Shakespeare’s Lucrece

Shakespeare sets out the argument of the poem in a short prefatory note at the very beginning of the poem (Hyland, 2003). This piece (the Argument), in fact, brings out the political implications of the story quite well. Lucius Tarquinius, who was, Shakespeare tells us, surnamed Superbus on account of his excessive pride, gets his father-in-law Servius Tullius assassinated and takes over the kingdom ‘contrary to the Roman laws and customs, not requiring or staying for the people’s suffrages’. Accompanied by his sons and other Roman noblemen, he goes to besiege Ardea. During the siege, the principal men of the army meet one evening at the tent of the king’s son Sextus Tarquinius and get to discussing the virtues of their wives in their post-prandial conversation. They are curious to find out whether their praise of their wives was justified and repair to Rome ‘to make trial of that which everyone had before avoucht’. All except Collatinus find their wives ‘dancing and revelling, or in several disports’. Though it was late at night, Lucrece the wife of Collatinus, was spinning among her maids. Sextus Tarquinius was inflamed with Lucrece’s beauty, and after returning back to camp with the others, secretly goes back to Collatinus’ house. He is very hospitably received by Lucrece. But that very night he steals into her chamber, violently rapes her and goes away early in the morning. The distraught Lucrece sends for her husband in the camp. When her husband along with her father came home along with dignitaries like Brutus, they find Lucrece attired in ‘mourning habit’. After making them take an oath of revenge, she tells them about the rape and kills herself. The assembled men resolve to ‘root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins’ and take the dead body to Rome. Brutus makes a speech before the people and acquaints them of the vile deed and delivers ‘a bitter invective against the tyranny of the king’. The people of Rome thereupon turned against the Tarquins and exiled them, ‘and the state government changed from kings to consuls’.

The Context: Roman Suprematism in the Renaissance

Shakespeare’s story is drawn from a moment in Roman history, and the events connected with the story were important enough to be represented on Aeneas’ shield in Virgil’s ekphrastic description of it in his Aeneid. Politically speaking, this story has at its very heart the political struggle between the Etruscans and the Romans for supremacy in Italy (The World of Royalty, n.d.). This subtext is part of Virgil’s triumphalist version of Roman history. It is typical of Shakespeare’s Renaissance bias in favour of Roman republicanism—which Rome’s conquered peoples always experienced however as Roman imperialism—that he should choose to make this story the centre of this poem. In doing so, the issues that he raises are all issues internal to the Roman discourse about good government. Thus, we get to consider the public consequences of private acts rather than the Roman strategy of containing and vanquishing Etruscan power. The rape of Lucrece becomes a convenient justification for Roman suprematism. It was natural for an educated man during the Renaissance to identify himself with the Romans since his education consisted mainly of large and early doses of the Latin language and Roman history. What Shakespeare learnt at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon would have mainly been Latin grammar rather than English history or the structure of the English language. His intellectual skills would have been fostered through copious exercises in rhetoric and the skills of oratory. ¹ The turning point in the Lucrece story is therefore the awakening of oratory and the dormant rhetorical skills of Brutus in the face of overwhelming abuse of political power. Without a figure like Brutus, the rape of Lucrece would have become an insignificant and private incident. It is the rhetorical power of Brutus and his ekphrastic redescription of Lucrece’s own expert testimony with respect to her own experience of sexual violence that raises it to the level of a public outrage requiring public denunciation. Roman republicanism—which served the cause of Roman imperialism by reducing conflict between the Romans themselves—had to be legitimized and demonstrated as being the epitome of civilized governance. The mirror of ekphrasis, thus, reflects the shadows of empire.

The Tool: Rhetoric as Means of Negotiation

It is the conflict between public truth and private desire that requires the negotiatory practice of rhetoric. Tarquin is unable to accept the need for having socially justified boundaries for what constitutes the private sphere, which is what governs the management and fulfilment of desire. Shakespeare configures the conflict between the two spheres in Tarquin’s soliloquy before the rape within the classical trope of antisagofe or the rhetorical act of arguing for one side of a proposition first, and then the other, with equal vigour. Thus, the rhetorical figure first contemplates the dread of shame and the fear of public dishonour that would be the consequences of molesting his friend’s wedded, loyal and beautiful wife. It would be a blemish on his social skin, an eyesore as he puts it, on his golden coat. One of the consequences of the black deed would be that he would no longer be able to communicate with his friend through the social instrument of language, particularly when accused: ‘Will not my tongue be mute?’ (Luc. line 227). During a pause in Tarquin’s speech, Shakespeare indicates the rhetorical structure of the villain’s desperate soliloquy:

Thus, graceless, holds he disputation

´Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will,

And with good thoughts makes dispensation,

Urging the worser sense for vantage still;

Which in a moment doth confound and kill

All pure effects, and doth so far proceed,

That what is vile shows like a virtuous deed. (Luc. lines 246–252)

The flow of libidinal energy overrides the counsel of rhetorical disputatio.

Tarquin’s presentation of the other side of the argument, paradoxically enough, counsels the abandonment of rhetoric so that illegal desire might be fulfilled, free from the restraints imposed by the call of conscience. Action is privileged over contemplation, youth over age and desire over prudence. Rhetoric, wisdom and old age form a pole whose binary opposite is desire, impulsiveness and youth. When the passions are aroused rhetoric is a liability: ‘All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth’ (Luc. line 268). Fears and scruples and the exercise of antisagofe itself must go: ‘Then, childish fear avaunt! debating die!’ (Luc. line 274). If the first part of the proposition had dismissed the momentary pleasure to be desired from ravishing Lucrece as an unwise, commercial investment, the second part urges high-handed commercial exploitations. The dominant images are all drawn from the high seas of the Renaissance, populated as it were by pirates and merchant speculators. The voyage may begin as an official expedition, but the vessel would often change when booty was in sight. The success of such enterprises, of which there were plenty in the Renaissance (Drake, for example) depended upon the crews’ loyalty to the captain. Tarquin declares: ‘Affection is my captain, and he leadeth; / And when his gaudy banner is display’d, / The coward fights, and will not be dismay’d’ (Luc. lines 271–273). When there is profit to be made, legality must be put in abeyance. The desiring body itself is imagined as a ship at sea. For Tarquin, the eye is the captain and the heart the crew: ‘My heart shall never countermand mine eye.’ (Luc. line 276). The objective of this Elizabethan voyage is very clear: ‘Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize; / Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?’ (Luc. lines 279–280). Once his course is set all difficulties and abstractions become part of the risks involved in speculative overseas trading. Thus, Tarquin mutters when forcing his way to the living quarters of Lucrece: ‘Pain pays the income of each precious thing; / Huge rocks, high winds, strong pirates, shelves and sands, / The merchant fears, ere rich at home he lands’ (Luc. lines 334–336). The more the risk, the greater the profits.

The Subtext: Rhetoric of Voyages, Trading, Wool and Mercantilism

The rape of Lucrece is clearly bound up with the developing discourse of colonial capitalism which lies at the very heart of Renaissance mercantilism. Thus, when Tarquin’s moral transgressions have to be depicted, they are implicitly as well as explicitly compared to those committed by Elizabethan seafarers in their attempts to plunder and exploit distant, conquered and hence alluring lands, their cities, and their peoples. In the absence of the ruler, and beyond the jurisdiction of his empire, the seafarer who is now a privateer becomes the king, the vessel with its crew his empire and his plunders his dominion. In effect, when he returns to his land rich with his illegitimate goods, his profits stand himself as well as his nation in good stead. Drake, for example, had obtained a privateering commission from the Queen herself in 1572 to plunder the Spanish coasts, which he managed with amazing alacrity causing the Queen and hence England immense joy and satisfaction (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2002). Once Tarquin is away from Collatine, he too becomes a privateer for whom immediate profit outweighs all moral considerations: ‘I have debated, even in my soul, / What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I shall breed; / But nothing can affection’s [by extension, his captain’s] course control, / Or stop the headlong fury of his speed’ (Luc. lines 498–501). His rape of Lucrece itself is compared to a siege on a desirable city:

His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,

His eye commends [sic] the leading to his hand;

His hand, as proud of such a dignity,

Smoking with pride, marcht on to make his stand

On her bare breast, the heart of all her land;

Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,

[…] To make the breach, and enter this sweet city. (Luc. lines 435–469)

Military metaphors appear in abundance and recreate the rape of Lucrece as a successful act of military aggression: thus there are drums and trumpets; commanding and dreading; there is a lot of smoke; there are marches; there are ranks of soldiers; fortifications are scaled and breaches made; and finally ingress is achieved into the sweet city.

Lucrece becomes a metaphor for the illegitimate booties in search of which many Renaissance voyages were made. It is interesting to recollect and reiterate at this point in our analysis that Collatine alone of his company had found his wife engaged in the lucrative and economic activity of spinning—presumably wool. By 1480, France saw a meteoric rise in the economics of silk and wool weaving. From clothing to artistic produces like the famous tapestries of Arras in Flanders, weaving and spinning became an integral Renaissance industry in itself. For example, the mainstay of trade in Flanders was the transformation of English wool into exportable cloth and garments. So when the painters of Flanders are painting woollen clothing in realistic detail, they are also putting on display the finest products of their lands. This is what explains the excessively liberal amounts of cloth used in the garments that Renaissance painters made their Madonnas wear. Paintings and tapestries therefore became window displays of proud owners and merchants. And verisimilitude, in the way the paintings make visible the textures, fabrics and hairs, thus becomes an index of both artistic as well as commercial power. Art, therefore, becomes equivalent to legal tender. In a similar manner, it is not enough that you have a beautiful wife; one had to declare and demonstrate to the world that she is beautiful. So husbands were greatly interested to display their wives as their prime possessions, through elaborate portraits and medallions, and Collatine does exactly that in the beginning of the poem: ‘For he the night before, in Tarquin’s tent, / Unlockt the treasure of his happy state; / What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent / In the possession of his beauteous mate […]’ (Luc. lines 15–18). Thus, Lucrece’s loyalty, her sexual charms and her moral goodness, just like a portrait, attracted customer demand. So, here is evident a tension between the mercantile dimensions of a wife and a woman. The legal status of being wife is after all dependant upon her husband’s exclusive rights upon her person. Rape can be seen as an ideological violence in which Lucrece is seen as losing her value of exclusiveness. ² Thus, there is risk for the patriarchal ideology—an ideology that makes Lucrece’s gender her destiny and her sexuality her life. Ironically, the one argument of Tarquin that sealed Lucrece’s fate was that if she resisted him, he would kill a servant and placing him in her arms, claim to have killed him for having been embraced by Lucrece; the dishonour that she would have gained thereafter would affect her husband’s own honour as well as the honour of her children. Lucrece does not kill herself rather than be raped in order to prevent this obloquy from happening. She decides to wait for the arrival of her husband so that she can recount her true tragedy to him, thus saving her honour and by extension his for him. And she lives in this interim (between her rape and the coming back of her husband at her request) merely to give witness to her own tragedy and bear testimony to her faithfulness towards her husband. Thus, what she represents is as much the cause of her tragedy as her aggressor and her legal possessor!

The Agenda: Interchange of Space, Time and Values through Artistic Trading

Lucrece, as an alternative, is given a strange time in place of immediate death. In real time she now has to wait for her husband and father to arrive so that she can make her testimony and end her newly ‘worthless’ life. In narrative terms, what Shakespeare does is that he introduces an ekphrastic interlude that is supposed to fill up the real time, but actually deepens the problems of representation that this text has at its heart. What we have here is a situation in which real life and art become metaphors for each other. Lucrece herself is waiting to envoice her sad story without any distorting intermediaries (like Tarquin). Her experience alone gives authenticity to her testimonial narrative. The experience of pain and loss alone has the power and the right to represent one’s own or another’s pain and loss. Thus the criterion of authority is correspondence to experience. Art itself must be born out of the emphatic understanding that is the gift of experience. 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. Tereus cut her tongue so that she would be unable to represent the wrong that he had done, and let others know of it. But through embroidery she was able to tell her sister what had happened. The story of Philomela thus becomes a trope for Lucrece’s own condition. By postponing her death, she would be able to envoice her tragedy: ‘Yet die I will not till my Collatine / Have heard the cause of my untimely death; / That he may vow, in that sad hour of mine, / Revenge on him that made me stop my breath’ (Luc. lines 1177–1180). She therefore dispatches a messenger requesting an urgent meeting with her husband. While waiting for Collatine’s arrival, Lucrece contemplates a painting of the fall of Troy. She is moved by the grieving figures of old Priam and Hecuba and finds fault with the artist for not being able to allow them to speak their grief. To compensate for this lack, she offers to speak on behalf of Hecuba: ‘I’ll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue’ (Luc. 1465). It is this moment of ekphrasis that allows her to join her own sorrow with the timeless, universal and transhistorical sorrow of womankind: ‘On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes, / And shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes’ (Luc. lines 1457–1458). Without the octroi of ekphrasis, therefore, bargains between incontrovertible capitals—between muteness and envoicement, between the experience of one woman in one age and that of another in a different age, or even between the visual art and the verbal art—become impossible. ³

Lucrece’s contemplation of the painting, which is broken only by the arrival of the messenger, her husband and her father, is full of interesting images and ideas that directly foreground the theme of ekphrasis. The most fundamental and enabling distinction for ekphrasis is that between the sensory impact of one representation and that of another in a different media. The painting itself is described as being skilful, but Shakespeare never allows us to forget the fact that it was finally only a painting and no substitute for life itself. However lifelike, the painted object is always lifeless. However copious, painted tears are always dry. Shakespeare makes much of the paradoxes of seeing and witnessing. The Trojans look through the loopholes at the Greeks, but we are the ones who interpret those eyes as sad, fearful or lustless:

And from the towers of Troy there would appear

The very eyes of men through loop-holes thrust,

Gazing upon the Greeks with little lust:

Such sweet observance in this work was had,

That one might see those far-off eyes look sad. (Luc. lines 82–86)

The punning use of the word ‘observance’ reminds us that this activity of looking was set into motion in the first place by the painter’s own observances—the word here means both artistic practices as well as artistic observation of details and features. But what we see is not always what we get. The eye reflects the heart, but the heart might not itself be truthful. Thus, though, as the text puts it, the faces of Ajax and Ulysses ‘cipher’d’ their hearts, Ajax’s eyes were full of rage and rigour, whereas those of Ulysses showed ‘deep regard and smiling government’ (Luc. lines 1396–1400). This distinction and this paradox seem to come straight out of Ovid. Ulysses’ well-governed heart will hide its real intentions, whereas the simple heart of Ajax advertises its intentions through his eyes.

As in Ovid (1986), Ajax is no different from a guileless ordinary soldier, many of whom are shown crowding around Nestor, ‘swallowing’ his words and refraining postponing from doing what is in their hearts only because Nestor is speaking: ‘And in their rage such signs of rage they bear, / As, but for loss of Nestor’s golden words, / It seem’d they would debate with angry swords’ (Luc. lines 1419–1421). Interestingly enough, their simplicity seems to call for realistic artistic practices. Shakespeare gives a beautiful instance of Renaissance perspectivism when he describes this part of the picture:

Some high, some low,—the painter was so nice;

The scalps of many, almost hid behind,

To jump up higher seem’d, to mock the mind.

Here one man’s hand lean’d on another’s head,

His nose being shadow’d by his neighbour’s ear;

Here one, being throng’d, bears back, all bold and red;

Another, smother’d […]. (Luc. lines 1412–1418)

We cannot hear Nestor’s speech as the soldiers did: we have to make do with his powerful gestures to find out what he said. The study and use of gestures to complement speech was of course an integral part of one’s training in rhetoric.

Shakespeare’s ekphrasis, bound to the ideological requirement of realistic verisimilitude, realizes the inevitability of metonymy. Thus, Shakespeare describes Achilles as represented in the picture only by a spear gripped by an armed hand. The figure of Achilles itself ‘[w]as left unseen, save to the eye of mind: / A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, / Stood for the whole to be imagined’ (Luc. lines 1426–1428). The abilities of realism are ironically also its disabilities. Ekphrasis itself enters into the picture as an attempt to transgress such limitations. The synecdochic Achilles will soon become reduced to his armour as death will soon reach him synecdochically through his heel. What Lucrece looks for in this painting is a part that contains the whole. She was able to find faces filled with sorrow and pain to one degree or another. But what she wanted to find was a face (a part) that would mirror all of the sorrow or pain that she experienced (the whole):

To this well-painted piece is Lucrece come,

To find a face where all distress is stell’d.

Many she sees where cares have carved some,

But none where all distress and dolour dwell’d,

Till she despairingly Hecuba beheld,

Staring on Priam’s wounds with her old eyes,

Which bleeding under Pyrrhus’ proud foot lies. (Luc. lines 1443–1449)

The figure of Hecuba is painted quite well, but is bereft of words:

On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes,

And shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes,

Who nothing wants to answer her but cries,

And bitter words to ban her cruel foes:

The painter was no god to lend her those […]. (Luc. lines 1457–1461).

Lucrece perceives her own ekphrastic duty as that of envoicing this painted Hecuba. The narrative then focuses on the mute painted tongue of Hecuba, and Lucrece’s response is filled with metonymies and synecdoches: ‘“Poor instrument”, quoth she, “without a sound, / I’ll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue; / And drop sweet balm in Priam’s painted wound, / And rail on Pyrrhus that hath done him wrong […]”’ (Luc. lines 1464–1467). The logic of ekphrasis is clearly complete here.

The Conclusion: Artistic Transactions Shield Life When Governance Does Not

In the Renaissance, therefore, the acceleration of production and the mercantile spirit created economic, social and political forces that endangered and severely restricted the power of individuals to participate in the task of transforming society. Prosperity and the fact that artistic genius was in short supply together ensured an exalted position for the artist during the Renaissance. Thus, the artist was able to escape the fate of the ordinary man, at least comparatively. When Renaissance ekphrasis discovered its source texts in the works of classical antiquity, it was in effect searching for metaphors with which to express the hopes and anxieties of the Renaissance itself. The ancient Greeks, with their subtlety of argument and their quasi-democratic politics seemed in every way desirable. Thus, ekphrasis can be described as a pervasive condition of being during the Renaissance. There is a preoccupation with fall balanced by the desire for justice and prosperity. It is this divided enterprise that describes the condition of modernity and of post-modernity. The mute painting said it for Lucrece. Today, mute visuals and photographs and cinema and virtual platforms have taken over, but nevertheless to say it all. In either case, then or now, if justice has to be achieved, the narrator must learn to live with her experience and tell her own story. The enterprising and self-reliant individual alone knows how to shield life from harm. The ekphrastic economy of exchange is in this sense the intransitive art of shielding life.