The Rape of Lucrece and the History of Shame

The Rape of Lucrece and the History of ShameEven though William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece (1594) is not a play, but a narrative poem, it shares with the play the use of dramatic monologues, the presentation of the plot through scenes in which specific characters appear and either enter the dialogue or deliver monologues, and the intense interest in the emotions of characters, which displays both the author's focus on the universal and on what Peter N. Stearns calls "constructive emotions", i.e. the ones that change over time (Stearns: xii).Shame is undoubtedly one of those constructive emotions, and the discussion of this emotion in, for example, Hamlet, where Ophelia is shamed for her sexual behaviour, or Othello, where the eponymic character experiences shame at his wife's supposed infidelity, can be complemented with tracing shame in The Rape of Lucrece.As Ian Donaldson points out, "the story of the rape of Lucrecia is not one story, but many stories" (Donaldson: 3).Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece is undoubtedly the most famous version, but not the only one.When reading it we experience the debate among the classical, the medieval, 1 and the Renaissance ideas in the poem, and the debate between the concepts is related, although not exclusively, to the history 1 Guilemette Bolens has devoted a lot of scope to discussing ancient versions of the narrative along with Augustine's, John Gower's, and Chaucer's rendering of it (Bolens: 100-18)

Shame · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Social Psychology