William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece is, at its core, a tale of possession and dispossession. Drawing on the work of Ovid’s Fasti and Livy’s Annals of Rome, Shakespeare chronicles the story of Lucrece (wife of the aristocrat Collantine) who takes her own life after she was raped by Tarquin (son of King Tarquin the Proud) (Maus 576). The theft of property, both physical and metaphysical, is a motif that persists throughout the poem; creating a story of crisis and unrest until order is finally restored in the final stanzas when Collantine avenges Lucrece by exiling Tarquin from Rome. To understand the significance of such a motif, I will be analyzing notable examples of loss in the poem as well as the Early Modern discourse and legal understanding of sexual assault and how it pertained to illegal seizure and property theft.

At a physical level, Lucrece, and even more specifically her virtue, is physically stolen through the process of rape because Lucrece is characterized as property throughout the poem. As Shakespearian scholar Catherine Belsey explains, “The problem [of the poem] is neither the carelessness of husbands nor, indeed, the inconstancy of wives but the expropriability of all property” (Belsey 317). When readers first learn of Lucrece, Collantine is boasting to his companions about his wife. The language used to describe the relationship between Collantine and Lucrece is that of the possessor and the possessed. The poem reads, “For he, the night before in Tarquin’s tent, / Unlocked the treasure of his happy state: / What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent / In the possession of his beauteous mate” (15-18). By comparing Collantine talking about Lucrece to a person unlocking a treasure chest Shakespeare is establishing two connected and equally important points: Lucrece is an object and Collantine is the rightful owner of that object. Similar rhetoric persists throughout the poem. Lucrece refers to her body on two separate occasions as her husband’s “interest” (1067, 1619) and describes her virtue as a stolen “treasure” (1056) or “jewel” (1191) while describing Collatine as the “hopeless merchant of this loss” (1660). Lucrece and Collantine are not the only people aware of such a relationship; even Tarquin views Lucrece as a commodity as opposed to a human being with agency and rights. When Tarquin decides to rape Lucrece he reflects to himself, “I’ll beg her love but she is not her own (241)”. Here, we see Tarquin understand that Lucrece does not belong to herself. Subsequently, Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece is analogous with property theft because Tarquin is blatantly disrespecting Collantine’s sole ownership of her body. Through this logic, it is fitting that scholar Coppélia Kahn writes that Tarquin views his rape of Lucrece as an “affair between men” as opposed to an act of violence against a woman (Kahn 54).

The rhetoric of dispossession continues throughout the text long after the act is committed. Whereas Lucrece’s body is physically stolen from Collantine, Lucrece’s honor is metaphysically stolen from herself. Reeling from the trauma of sexual assault, Lucrece casts the blame inward instead of on Tarquin. While contemplating killing herself Lucrece states,

Poor hand, why quiver’st thou at this decree? Honor thyself to rid me of this shame.
For if I die, my honor lives in thee;
But if I live, thou liv’st in my defame.

Since thou couldst not defend thy loyal dame,
And wast afeard to scratch her wicked foe,
Kill both thyself and her for yielding so (1030-1036).

Here, we see Lucrece lamenting her lost honor and claiming that her honor can only be restored if she takes her own life to absolve the shame her rape will bring to her family. It is important to note that Lurece’s alleged dishonor comes from her “yielding” to Tarquin. As a woman, Lucrece knows that she belongs to her husband. She views her inability to fight Tarquin off as proof that she betrayed Collantine and lost her honor in the process.

Lucrece equates her loss of honor with her loss of control over her own body and she tragically views suicide as the only solution to preserve both. Lucrce is worried that Tarquin’s rape will result in a “bastard graff” and she laments that her own body has the capability to inflict even more shame on her family (1062). Lucrece sees herself as “stained” (1059) and claims that she now has “defiled blood” (1029). By referring to her internal life-source as “defiled”, Lucrece is establishing that she has lost her sense of control over her own body. Lucrece’s blood continues to symbolically represent her loss of honor and sense of bodily control during her suicide scene. When Lucrece stabs her chest (which the unidentified narrator refers to as a “polluted prison”) Shakespeare writes that blood poured from the wound in two separate streams: “Some of her blood still pure and red remained, / And some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained” (1742-1743). Here, Lucrece’s blood is synecdochal for Lucrece’s lost virtue. Kahn claims that such a spectacle could have been considered plausible for an Early Modern reader to whom “magic and medicine were hardly distinct” because the Elizabethan medical discourse on the body believed that “diseased” and contaminated blood was black while “wholesome” blood was red (Kahn 64). On the dual nature of Lucrece’s blood Kahn writes, “While [Lucrece] regards herself merely as a polluted object, [Shakespeare] sees her as a moral agent whose mind remains pure, whose courage and integrity in taking her own life testify to that purity” (65). Such a reading would conclude that Lucrece is only able to re-possess her lost honor through her own death.

So why is the motif of possession and dispossession so prominent in an Early Modern poem about sexual assault? The answer is rooted in etymology and historical context. Etymologically speaking, rape is tied to the theft of property. The Oxford English Dictionary gives many definitions for the word rape. One, of course, is a forced sexual encounter achieved through the threat of violence, but this is not the only definition. The Oxford English Dictionary also defines rape as, “The act of carrying off a person by force; especially the abduction of a woman” (“Rape”) and “The act of taking something by force; especially the seizure of property by violent means; robbery, plundering” (“Rape”). While these two definitions are now considered archaic, they were both in use when The Rape of Lucrece was published in 1594.

To Elizabethan readers, the link between rape and property theft present in the above definitions was well established. In her chapter “Rape in England Between 1550 and 1700”, Nazife Bashar argues that in the Medieval period, rape laws were established to protect male property “in the form of their movable goods”: daughters, wives, inheritances, and future heirs (Bashar 41). The 1275 Statute of Westminster equates rape and abduction: “The king prohibiteth that none do ravish, nor take away by Force” (30). The law administered the same punishment for both crimes. The statutes of 1285, 1382, and 1487 (all passed to assist individual families) reinforced the principal that rape laws were established to protect male property because a woman’s father could charge a suitor with rape if they felt the union would work against the family’s interests (31). On the implications of such laws Bashar writes, “Whether the woman had actually been raped, was irrelevant. Medieval rape laws were meant for the wealthy, for the protection of their property, rather than to protect a woman’s rights and sexual self-determination” (32). She goes on to conclude that these same Medieval laws applied until the year 1700 (41). While a contemporary reader may be perplexed by the theme of possession and dispossession in The Rape of Lucrece, an Early Modern reader would have understood the legally binding link between rape and property theft.

The tragedy of The Rape of Lucrece is grounded in loss. More specifically, it is a loss that occurs through illegal seizure as is established by the motif of theft and loss that pervades the poem. Tarquin physically steals Lucrece from Collantine and metaphysically steals honor and a sense of bodily autonomy from Lucrece. In both instances, what was once possessed was stolen through an act of brutal violence. The implications and response to sexual assault is constantly changing with the times and a microcosm of such an adaption is present in the publication history of The Rape of Lucrece. When William Shakespeare originally published the poem in 1594 he simply titled it Lucrece. The poem was reprinted as The Rape of Lucrece in 1616 and has been known by that title ever since. As I have established above, rape was intimately connected to property theft as late as the early eighteenth century. However, Nazife Bashar writes that the belief that rape was a crime committed against a person in addition to property theft began to emerge as the sixteenth century came to an end. She cites the statute of 1597 as the first law to punish abduction separately from rape which had the unintended effect of establishing rape and abduction as two separate crimes (Bashar 41). Perhaps the title of the poem was altered from Lucrece to The Rape of Lucrece to draw attention to the act of violence against Lucrece herself amidst the growing belief that rape was a crime against women, not just the men who possessed them.

Bashar, Nazife. “Rape in England Between 1550 and 1700.” The Sexual Dynamics of History, Pluto Press, London, 1983, pp. 28–42.

Belsey, Catherine. “Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 52 no. 3, 2001, p. 315-335. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/shq.2001.0037.

Kahn, Coppélia. “The Rape in Shakespeare’s ‘Lucrece.’” Shakespeare Studies (Columbia), vol. 9, Burt Franklin and Co., etc, 1976, pp. 45–68.

Maus, Katherine Eisamn. The Rape of Lucrece (Introduction). The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., vol. 1, WW Norton & Co, 2016.

“rape, n.3.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/158145. Accessed 11 December 2021.

Shakespeare, William. The Rape of Lucrece. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., vol. 1, WW Norton & Co, 2016.