SOURCE: Washington, Edward T. “Vanishing Villains: The Role of Tarquin in Shakespeare's Lucrece.” Upstart Crow 14 (1994): 126-38.

In the following essay, Washington contends that Tarquin, understood to be the poem's villain, serves to emphasize a complex pattern of meaning at work in The Rape of Lucrece. Through both Lucrece and Tarquin, Washington maintains, we are encouraged to see Lucrece as a personification of an outdated mode of literary expression, that of Petrarchan perfection, and to view Tarquin as the means by which Lucrece's literary hegemony is necessarily purged.

The general theme of rebellion by an individual against the supreme authority in the established normative order and against the rules by which this order operates [is] the basic meaning of evil in the traditions of the … classical and Christian civilizations.¹

Early twentieth-century criticism was reluctant to accept Shakespeare's Lucrece as a complex and problematic literary text. Douglas Bush called it...