By
David Hurley
A Presentation for the Shakespeare & Modern Author’s Society
県立広島大学
September 2025
Introduction
During the plague years of 1592-1593, with the London theatres closed, Shakespeare turned his attention to poetry. It is during this period that his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece were composed. Both poems draw heavily on Ovid, his Metamorphoses for the former and his Fasti for the latter, while Lucrece also draws on Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita.
At first glance it seems that Shakespeare follows tradition in The Rape of Lucrece. The Argument that serves as a preface to the poem informs us that Lucrece, having been raped by Sextus Tarquinius, summons her kinsfolk and,
first taking an oath of them for her revenge, revealed the actor, and whole manner of his dealing, and withal suddenly stabbed herself. Which done, with one consent they all vowed to root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins.
However, what occurs in the resolution of the poem after Lucrece kills herself has no parallel in either Ovid or Livy, or indeed, in The Argument itself, and so in this presentation I shall discuss two unique aspects of the suicide of Lucrece in Shakespeare’s poem:
- the blood that gushes from Lucrece’s wound,
- the response of Brutus to the occasion her suicide.
Variations in the Narrative: Livy, Ovid, Shakespeare
| Latin Order | Livy | Ovid | Argument | Shakespeare’s Order | Shakespeare’s “Lucrece” |
| 1 | Lucretia: violated body / innocent soul | 1 | Though my gross blood be stained with this abuse, / Immaculate and spotless is my mind | ||
| 2 | Lucretia demands revenge | Lucretia demands revenge | 2 | Lucrece “requests” revenge | |
| 3 | Names Sextus Tarquin as the rapist | mentions “a Tarquin” | “reveals the actor” | 4 | The men assert: Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears |
| 4 | Lucretia declared innocent by the men | Lucretia “forgiven” by her father and husband | 5 | no dame, hereafter living / By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving | |
| 5 | “aquits” herself of sin, but dies so that “no unchaste woman” shall use her as an example | denies herself forgiveness | 3 | She throws forth Tarquin’s name (246) | |
| 6 | stabs herself and dies | stabs herself and dies with decency | stabs herself | 6 | stabs herself and dies |
| 7 | Father and husband wail at her death | Father & Husband fall on her body | 7 | Father and Husband fall on her body in grief | |
| 8 | Brutus draws out the knife | Brutus “snatches” the knife | 8 | Brutus withdraws the knife | |
| 9 | 9 | black and red blood flows from Lucrece’s wound | |||
| 10 | 10 | Brutus criticises their childish humour and Lucrece’s suicide: Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so, / To slay herself, that should have slain her foe | |||
| 11 | Brutus swears on the bloody knife to expel the whole Tarquin dynasty | Brutus swears on the bloody knife to expel the whole Tarquin dynasty | 11 | Brutus swears on the bloody knife to “revenge the death of this true wife” and expel “these abominations” (i.e. the Tarquins) from Rome. | |
| 12 | The men swear on the bloody knife | The men vow to expel the Tarquins | 12 | The men repeat Brutus’ vow | |
| 13 | Lucretia’s eyes and hair move | 13 |
The Blood of Lucrece
When Brutus draws the knife from Lucrece’s wound, the blood that flows therefrom is described first as “purple,” then “crimson,” then as both “red” and “black”:
And from the purple fountain Brutus drew (8)
The murderous knife, and, as it left the place,
Her blood, in poor revenge, held it in chase;
(248)
And bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who, like a late-sack’d island, vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
Some of her blood still pure and red remain’d,
And some look’d black, and that false Tarquin stain’d. (9)
(249)
As black-looking blood congeals, it is surrounded by a watery “rigol” or “crown” as if of tears of mourning:
About the mourning and congealed face
Of that black blood a wat’ry rigol goes,
Which seems to weep upon the tainted place;
And ever since, as pitying Lucrece’ woes,
Corrupted blood some watery token shows,
And blood untainted still doth red abide,
Blushing at that which is so putrified.
(250)
First, the blood of Lucrece is described as flowing like a “purple fountain.” The word “fountain” suggests an abundant flow of pure and refreshing liquid, as in the “lively fountain of waters” (Revelation 7: 17) of the Geneva Bible, and while purple often connotes royalty or nobility, it can also suggest corruption and together with “crimson,” the stain of sin, as any Geneva Bible reading Protestant of Shakespeare’s day would know from the famous lines in the prophecy of Isaiah:
though your sins were as crimson, they shall be made white as snow:
though they were red like scarlet, they shall be as wool.
(Isaiah 1: 18, Geneva Bible [modern spelling])
Moreover the linkage of “crimson” and “scarlet” with the colour “purple,” and some other textual hints, might have led an Elizabethan Protestant reader or hearer of the Geneva Bible to associate the body of Lucrece, the “Roman dame” who lies in a “fearful flood,” with what they knew about the “Romish” “Whore of Babylon,”:
… the great whore that sitteth upon many waters,
With whom have committed fornication the kings of the earth
…
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet
(Geneva Bible: Revelation 17: 1, 2, 4)
As the blood flows around the corpse of Lucrece, it appears to take on a double aspect:
Some of her blood still pure and red remain’d,
There is no equivocation about the red blood of Lucrece, it “remains” uncorrupted and pure, but what of her black blood?
And some look’d black, and that false Tarquin stain’d. (9)
Here we find that the blood that Tarquin stained with his “load of lust” merely “look’d” black, which raises doubts as to its actual nature; is the blood really black? If it only appears to be black but is not actually so, then is it actually stained? If it only appears black, is the “stain” also an illusion, or merely a temporary accident?
What I suspect is happening here is that the suggested linkage of the pure and innocent (red blooded) “chaste” Lucrece is shadowed by the suggestion of corruption through a technique of covert association of imagery that alludes to, but never directly acknowledges, “the great whore” of The Revelation of Saint John the Apostle.
If this be so, it opens the poem up to an allegorical reading in which Lucrece, the pristine church, is deceived, assaulted, raped, and corrupted, and takes on the guise of the Whore of Babylon, which Protestant polemicists associate with the “corrupt” doctrines and “idolotrous” practices Roman Catholic church.
If indeed, part of Lucrece’s blood is as it looks, black, and is stained by Tarquin’s “load of lust” (through a process of humoral dyscrasia), can the raped body of Lucrece (or indeed the Roman Catholic church) ever be purified or is it as permanently corrupted as that of the Babylonish harlot, particularly as Lucrece’s corrupt blood is also blood “shed by her hand” in a damnable act of suicide?
[The Lord God] hath condemned the great whore which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants shed by her hand.
(Revelation 19: 2)
According to this reading, the blood that Lucrece sheds by her hand is both her own in the literal sense, and that of Christ’s servants, who are members of the “one body” of Christ’s church militant, that is, in persecuting Protestants, the church is shedding by her own hand the blood of the church itself.
Lucrece’s Fountain of Blood
The “purple fountain” of Lucrece’s blood is the fourth and final mention of a “fountain” or “fount” in the poem, and there is a progression, beginning with Lucrece pleading with Tarquin before the rape:
Quoth she, ‘Reward not hospitality
With such black payment as thou hast pretended;
Mud not the fountain that gave drink to thee;
Mar not the thing that cannot be amended;
(83)
In her lament, Lucrece employs anaphora reminiscent of Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy to ask why the innocent should suffer:
‘Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?
Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud?
Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts?
Or kings be breakers of their own behests?
(122)
Now the fountain has been muddied with poison by the toad Tarquin; but cannot fountains be cleared of pollutants, or Lucrece’s body be cleared of the “compelled stain”? That is the rhetorical question that Lucrece puts to her kinsfolk:
May any terms acquit me from this chance?
The poison’d fountain clears itself again;
And why not I from this compelled stain?’
(244)
Her male kinsfolk and friends instantly affirm that she can indeed be cleared of the stain of Tarquin; indeed, they assure her that her untainted mind can clear her body of its stain (that is, the menfolk do not expect her to restore lost honour through suicide):
With this, they all at once began to say,
Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears, (4)(245)
Their view of the relationship between the body and the mind is similar to that of Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD), who writes:
But is there a fear that even another’s lust may pollute the violated?
It will not pollute, if it be another’s: if it pollute, it is not another’s, but is shared also by the polluted.
But since purity is a virtue of the soul, and has for its companion virtue, the fortitude which will rather endure all ills than consent to evil; and since no one, however magnanimous and pure, has always the disposal of his own body, but can control only the consent and refusal of his will, what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity?
(Augustine, The City of God, Book 1, Chapter 18)
Where Augustine interprets the virtue of fortitude as a capacity to “endure all ills” and live, the pagan Lucretia / Lucrece interprets it as the strength of will to die so as not to be imputed an excuse for “unchaste” women, so as to preserve her Roman honour and that of her family, and perhaps also to serve as a propitiatory sacrifice to appease the gods.
Augustine imputes her suicide, however, to a “love of glory” and to pride:
…this matron, with the Roman love of glory in her veins, was seized with a proud dread that, if she continued to live, it would be supposed she willingly did not resent the wrong that had been done her. (Augustine, The City of God, 1. 19)
By Shakespeare’s day, it is the very act of suicide itself that links Lucretia / Lucrece in sinful pride with “whoredom” in the stricter sort of Protestant’s mind, as for example the judgement of John Tyndale (c. 1494-1536):
She sought her own glory in her chastity and not God’s. When she had lost her chastity, then counted she herself most abominable in the sight of all men, and for very pain and thought which she had, not that she had displeased god but that she had lost her honour, slew herself. Look how great her glory and rejoicing therein, and much despised she them that were otherwise, and pitied them not, which pride God more abhorreth than the whoredom of any whore. (Obedience of a Christian Man [modern spelling], p. 17)
An Exemplary Suicide OR a Wretched Mistake?: Becoming “Lucrece” OR Enacting “Brutus”?
According to Richard Lanham in The Motives of Eloquence (p. 108), Lucrece’s indulgence in rhetorical display has caused her to become rather than to enact her role. In contrast, Brutus steps forward and unmasks himself as a role player and therefore as one who can step outside of the algorithmic logic of any given role and respond to the potential that may be found in any “occasion” by taking on another role with deft heuristic flexibility.
So Brutus,
Began to clothe his wit in state and pride,
Burying in Lucrece’ wound his folly’s show.
…But now he throws that shallow habit by,
Wherein deep policy did him disguise,
And armed his long-hid wits advisedly,
To check the tears in Collatinus’ eyes.(259-260)
This is the third “wounding” of Lucrece.
The first was Tarquin’s rape, the second was the fatal blow that Lucrece inflicts upon herself to shed her blood and restore her honour.
The third, metaphorical “wound” is that inflicted by Brutus who first withdraws the knife from, and “buries his folly’s show” in, the wound of Lucrece. He, like Tarquin, approaches Lucrece under a “show” and then unmasks himself to use the occasion of Lucrece’s suicide to work his secret will and escalate the called for “revenge” into a full-blown conspiracy to expel the tyrannous Tarquins and found a new Roman Republic.
| Tarquin (tyrannous/aristocratic/ corrupted Petrarchan) | Lucrece(naive/aristocratic/Petrarchan) | Brutus (complex/republican/Machiavellian) |
|---|---|---|
| enacts role 1 (messenger and guest) | becomes role 1 (honourable wife & hostess) | |
| becomes role 2 (rapist) | becomes role 2 (dishonoured victim) | [back story] enacts role 1 (fool) |
| becomes role 3 (exemplary suicide) | enacts role 2 (blood-revenger and political-conspirator) |
To achieve his hidden agenda, Brutus does three things. Firstly, Brutus stops the useless “grief contest” of the menfolk (that extends through eight stanzas [perhaps as a parody of Petrarchan “lamentation”]). Through a series of rhetorical questions he recalls Collatine to the immediate task of revenge rather than self-harm:
Why, Collatine, is woe the cure for woe?
Do wounds help wounds, or grief help grievous deeds?
Is it revenge to give thyself a blow
For his foul act by whom thy fair wife bleeds? (260-261)
Secondly, Brutus deprecates Lucrece’s suicide (and the Petrarchan tradition of praising it) by turning an act of “honour” into a “wretched” act of folly. In doing so, he transforms the roles of Lucrece and himself, “burying” his “folly” in her wound and redefining her resolute (aristocratic) suicide as a “childish humour” wrought by a weak mind.
Such childish humour from weak minds proceeds:
Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself, that should have slain her foe. (261)
Thirdly, Brutus transforms the bloody knife, Lucrece’s corrupted blood, and her bloody corpse into totems of revolt so that Lucrece’s kinsfolk and then the people of Rome would “consent” (265) to what Brutus himself had already resolved, namely the overthrow of the Tarquins. In doing so, he substitutes a Machiavellian rhetorical strategem for Lucrece’s ineffective deployment of Ciceronian rhetoric (for example, in her appeal to “moral decorum” in stanza’s 82-92 to dissuade Tarquin from his purpose [Soellner, p. 12]], that is, to have him “consent” not to rape her).
The Suicide of Lucrece: The “Childish Humour” of a “Wretched” Wife
Until Shakespeare, no other poet or commentator (that I have discovered) who wrote on the topic of Lucretia has described her suicide as “wretched.” Yet when we consider that her internal conflict is the inability to reconcile her “pure” soul with her “stained” body, her conflict between her intention to be virtuous and her enforced loss of honour, we are confronted by a conflict between will and deed; we are on the territory of Saint Paul in his epistle to (who else but?) the Romans, the most well known text of which includes the most famous incidence of the word “wretched” in the Geneva Bible and most other translations to boot:
I do not the good thing, which I would, but the evil, which I would not, that do I.
I find then that when I would do good, I am thus yoked, that evil is present with me.
O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!
(Saint Paul, Romans 7. 19, 21, 24)
Whereas Paul “does” the evil he would not do, Lucrece had the evil she would not do “done” to her; in pauline terms, she conceived of herself as having been “yoked to evil” (Tarquin) and sought deliverence from “the body of this death” through suicide. Lucrece’s mistake – for Paul/Augustine and, for different reasons, for Brutus/Machiavelli – is to follow “the wisdom of the flesh” into death:
For the wisdom of the flesh is death: but the wisdom of the Spirit is life and peace,
(Romans 8: 6)
Lucrece’s dilemma was taken up by Augustine, who was himself deeply influenced by the epistles of Paul. He writes in the 16th Chapter of the City of God that,
while the will remains firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin. (City of God, 1. 16)
Even so, some of the violated Christian virgins he is writing about did commit suicide, and “who,” he asks, “with any human feeling could refuse to forgive them?”
Nevertheless,
he who kills himself is a homicide, and so much the guiltier of his own death, as he was more innocent of that offence for which he doomed himself to die. (City of God, 1. 17)
This thought raises a conundrum about the motives and actions of Lucretia in the mind of Augustine which offers another version of the body/mind dichotomy that renders Lucrece “wretched”: If only one [Tarquin] committed sin, why was it that he was merely exiled, and she killed? Or, what if she was,
betrayed by the pleasure of the act, and gave some consent to Sextus [Tarquin], though so violently abusing her, and then was so affected with remorse, that she thought death alone could expiate her sin? Even though this were the case, she ought still to have held her hand from suicide if she could with her false gods have accomplished a fruitful repentance.
(City of God, 1. 19)
He then reaches his notable conclusion that,
| … ita haec causa ex utroque latere coartatur, ut, si extenuatur homicidium, adulterium confirmetur; si purgatur adulterium, homicidium cumuletur; nec omnino inuenitur exitus, ubi dicitur: “Si adulterata, cur laudata; si pudica, cur occisa?” | … this case of Lucretia is in such a dilemma, that, if you extenuate the homicide, you confirm the adultery: if you acquit her of adultery, you make the charge of homicide heavier; and there is no way out of the dilemma, when one asks, If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her? (City of God, 1. 19) |
Whereas Lucrece’s solution to her body/soul dilemma is suicide, Augustine’s is either “patient endurance” (if innocent) or “fruitful repentance” (if guilty). All three responses share in common a contempt of the flesh and a desire to retreat from the world of affairs into a state of secluded passivity, whether in life or in death.
For Machiavelli too, there is a bifurcation of motive and action, of what one “would do” and what one “should do,” but this leads him to a radically different and “spirited” rather than “spiritual” conclusion to that of Paul or Augustine. He writes,
how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. (Prince, XV)
The focus of this passage is turned outward, away our own self-absorption to an observation of “what is done” by others in a wicked world, and how to take appropriate and spirited action to preserve (rather than to slaughter) oneself.
The Machiavellian perspective offers a critique of both Christian passivity and Roman suicide that Shakespeare takes up in his characterization of Brutus in the concluding stanzas of the Rape of Lucrece.
With Machiavelli, firstly, there is the direct critique of “our religion” – Christianity:
Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action… and if our religion demands that in you there be strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things. This pattern of life, therefore, appears to have made the world weak, and to have handed it over as a prey to the wicked, who run it successfully and securely since they are well aware that the generality of men, with paradise for their goal, consider how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries.
(Discourses 2. 2)
Secondly, there is Machiavelli’s rejection of the active role of Lucretia in the founding of the Roman Republic. For Machiavelli, the chief actor in the expulsion of the Tarquins is Brutus, not Lucretia. While he does allow that,
the excess done against Lucretia took the state away from the Tarquins’, (Discourses 3. 26)
he denies that her exemplary suicide was the cause of the revolt. Firstly, it was the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud, and secondly, the prudence of Brutus “in his simulation of stupidity” (Discourses III: 2) until an occasion to “make war [on Tarquin the Proud] openly” presented itself:
Thus [Tarquin the Proud] was expelled not because his son Sextus had raped Lucretia but because he had broken the rules of the kingdom and governed it tyrannically…
(Discourses III: 5)
Machiavelli notes that Lucretia’s suicide was an “accident,” by which he means that it was a contingent and not an essential condition in the overthrow of the Tarquins:
If the accident of Lucretia had not come, as soon as another had arisen it would have brought the same effect.
(Discourses III: 5)
Lucretia, then, is not herself an agent in the overthrow of the Tarquins. This, suggests Yves Winter, is because Machiavelli rejected
… a central ethical premise and rhetorical trope of [Petrarchan] republicanism: the idea that sexual virtue is a synecdoche for political virtue.
(Machiavelli and the Rape of Lucretia, History of Political Thought, p. 431)
The virtue of Lucrece in her suicide is both exemplary and static whereas that of Brutus in his conspiracy is effectual and flexible. The application of her virtue is algorithmic, his is heuristic. Hers is Petrarchan, his is Machiavellian.
Shakespeare’s Brutus is a Brutus reimagined in the image of a Machiavellian man of virtù rather than a man of Petrarchan virtue, and who, like Machiavelli’s hero, Cesare Borgia, knows how to disguise his motives, how to make opportune use of such instruments of persuasion as knives, blood, and corpses (Prince, VII), and how to impress his will upon the Roman gods as well as Roman men, as suggested in stanza 262 of Lucrece:
| Courageous Roman, | Collatine |
| do not steep thy heartIn such relenting dew of lamentations, | Petrarch was famous for his fondness for “lamentation,” including his lamentations on the plague, and his Canzoniere, (following Cavalcanti and Dante). |
| But kneel with me, and help to bear thy partTo rouse our Roman gods with invocations, | By invoking the Roman gods, Brutus aligns his purpose with a higher authority, calling on the gods for assistance to revenge, rather than patience to endure.. |
| That they will suffer these abominations,— | suffer = permitabominations metonymy: the Tarquins (and their abominations).“[pray] that the gods will permit us to … |
| Since Rome herself in them doth stand disgraced,— | the abominations of the Tarquins are a disgrace to Rome (and her gods) |
| By our strong arms from forth her fair streets chased. | These, I suggest, are the “buone arme” of Machiavelli (Prince XII etc)… chase the Tarquins out of Rome.” |
It turns out that a muddied fountain (and perhaps even Christ’s church itself) can indeed be cleared of abominations, provided one has the necessary strong arms, a man of virtù, and divine approval to clear it.
Bibliography of Works Quoted
Augustine, A. The City of God, in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, trans. Dods, M. Edinburgh, 1871.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1505/pg1505-images.html
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/civ1.shtml
Lanham, R. The Motives of Eloquence, Yale, 1976.
Machiavelli, N. Discourses on Livy. trans. Mansfield, H. C. & Tarcov, N. University of Chicago, 1996.
Machiavelli, N. The Prince. trans. Ricci, L. (1903), revised by Vincent, E. (1935), OUP, Penguin, imprint: Mentor 1952.
Shakespeare, W. Lucrece. W. G. Clark, W. Aldis Wright, eds.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1505/pg1505-images.html
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Wilson, J. D. ed. CUP, (Octopus) 1980.
Tyndale, J. The Obedience of a Christian Man, The Works of the English Reformers Vol. I. Russell, T. ed. London, 1831.
https://www.truthofgod.org/images/books/Obedience_of_the_Christian_Man.pdf
Whittingham, W. et al. The Geneva Bible. Geneva, 1560.
http://www.genevabible1560.com/
https://archive.org/details/1560-geneva-bible
Winter, Y. Machiavelli and the Rape of Lucretia. History of Polticial Thought, Vol. XL. No. 3. Autumn 2019
https://www.academia.edu/70175320/Machiavelli_and_the_rape_of_Lucretia