SOURCE: “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 304-26.

In the following essay, Newman remarks that on first examination, The Rape of Lucrece appears to be a poem about the patriarchal victimization of women. However, Newman proposes that a closer look reveals the poem's subtext of Philomela's violent revenge against her rapist—a story which presents an independent response from women to the male society that dominates them.

In Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, as all readers of the poem know, the progress of the narrative is frequently interrupted by interior monologues and rhetorical set pieces that dilate Livy's and Ovid's essentially political story of Lucrece's rape and suicide into a lengthy, almost psychological investigation of the motivation for and implications of both Lucrece's and Tarquin's actions.¹ Among these rhetorical...