Women’s Bodies Are Ledgers (Upon Which Men Write)

“Tarquin and Lucretia” , Jan Sanders van Hemessen

I’m going to rape you, Tarquin tells Lucrece. Straight up.

But he’s not without virtue, so he offers her a choice: comply or resist. The latter will be messy. Best to just let it happen.

Anyway, it’s her own fault for being so goddamn fine.

‘The fault is thine’, he sighs. ‘For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine […] Thy beauty hath ensnar’d thee to this night’. He tried to fight the urge, honestly, he really did. Shakespeare spends near 500 lines of verse on Tarquin’s internal back and forth, as he breaches her chambers and does the ethical sums. He enlisted ‘reason’ and ‘reproof’. But then he saw her asleep in bed, and ‘thy bright beauty’ got the fire going again.

The Rape of Lucrece is a sixteenth-century retelling of a Roman legend — Shakespeare flexing his muscles before he properly started on the plays — but its dynamics of power, responsibility and shame are evergreen.

Lucrece tries to bargain with him:

My husband is thy friend — for his sake spare me,

Thyself art mighty — for thine own sake leave me,

Myself a weakling — do not then ensnare me;