In a vale of tears

Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome. Her suffering inspires a revolution led by Brutus, and this is the beginning of the first Roman republic. It’s a rich myth of sex and politics, and Lucrece’s (or Lucretia’s) story was told by Ovid and painted by Rembrandt. Shakespeare returns to the episode in several plays, notably Cymbeline. But in the poem, written in early 1594, he apparently struggles to find the emotion and drama. Perhaps he was simply young; this was early in his career, and he is still learning. Perhaps it was too pragmatic; the poem is an attempt to secure aristocratic patronage from the Earl of Southampton. At almost 2,000 lines, it’s just too long. ‘As a human drama, it fails to arouse our sympathy,’ writes Clare Asquith in her new book about the poem, and describes it as ‘exhausting’ and ‘far from erotic’.

Now, here’s the twist. As Asquith argues in her latest book, Shakespeare and the Resistance, Rape of Lucrece isn’t really a poem: it’s a political pamphlet, and the rape isn’t really a rape. With considerable ingenuity, she presents Shakespeare’s poem as a coded account of the Act of Supremacy of 1534 and the destruction of old Catholic England by the wicked Protestants, lined up under Elizabeth I’s machiavellian adviser Lord Burghley. The poem’s violence and grief are allegories for the destruction of monastic libraries; the selling off of land and artworks; the burning and breaking of stained glass and church decorations; and perhaps most of all, the tearing up of the old charitable almshouses, and their property being given to the rich. The victim Lucrece is presented as a ‘Shakespearean evocation of the numinous spirit of England, marked by inner conflicts held in precarious equipoise’.