"This bastard graff shall never come to growth": Conception and Consent in Shakespeare's Lucrece

Abstract

T ARQUIN WRONGED ME,” Lucrece states, “I Collatine” (819). 1 The first half of the statement comes as no surprise, but the second half is puzzling. In what way has Lucrece wronged Collatine by being raped? She has had extramarital sex, to be sure, but what blame can attach to her, given the constraints on her consent? It is the uncertain issue—in both senses of the word—of Lucrece’s consent that doubles the nature of the sexual offense, twinning it into two clauses: rape (“Tarquin wronged me”) and adultery (“I Collatine”). That doubling is not reducible to the internalized guilt of a rape victim. In early modern humanism, Lucretia was a defendant against charges of adultery in a perpetual rhetorical trial. She was a standard topic of humanist pro and contra debates that interpreted her motives for suicide through disputation of her chastity: “Shall we say she was an adulteresse, or was shee chast?” If we approach Shakespeare’s Lucrece with a certainty that the sexual offense at its heart is rape, we approach the poem anachronistically. The rape in Lucrece was always already a disputed