The Rape of Lucrece | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 32 pages of analysis & critique of The Rape of Lucrece.

The Rape of Lucrece | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 32 pages of analysis & critique of The Rape of Lucrece.
This section contains 9,300 words
(approx. 31 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Nancy Vickers

SOURCE: "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen, 1985, pp. 95-115.

Below, Vickers examines the rhetoric of The Rape of Lucrece as depicting male political struggles enacted on the female body.

When, in Sonnet 106, Shakespeare's speaker alludes to "the blazon of sweet beauty's best" (5) he identifies "blazon" with "descriptions of the fairest wights" (2), with poetic portraits "in praise of ladies dead and lovely knights" (4).' He then goes on to qualify "blazon," to suggest that it is an outdated poetic mode standing in contrast to a present, paradoxically silent, one: "For

Tarquin and Lucrece. Frontispiece to the Rowe edition of The Rape of Lucrece (1714). Tarquin and Lucrece. Frontispiece to the Rowe edition of The Rape of Lucrece (1714).
we which now behold these present days / Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise" (13-14). The term "blazon" derives both from the French blasonner and from the...

(read more)

This section contains 9,300 words
(approx. 31 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Nancy Vickers
Copyrights
Gale
Nancy Vickers from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.