Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

A similar metaphor from the other direction is then used:

—lines 552-53

The reference is to Orpheus' descent into the underworld to win back his wife Eurydice (see page I-47). His music charmed even Pluto, and as the harsh king of the underworld was made captive by beauty, so chaste Lucrece was paralyzed by evil.

Tarquin rapes Lucrece, then hastens away, miserable and guilty, leaving her behind, miserable and innocent.

To Lucrece, all the world is now fit only for cursing. There is no comfort anywhere or in anything. What good is wealth, for instance? The aged miser, having accumulated his hoard, finds his health gone, and cannot buy youth back with his gold:

—lines 858-59

Tantalus is always the very personification of punishment through frustration (see page I-13).

Nor does time heal matters in her now utterly pessimistic view. It but makes matters worse; merely serving to

—line 952

Fortune (Tyche), an important goddess to the later Greeks (see page I-135), was often pictured with a turning wheel. That represented the manner in which men's fortunes rose and fell in indifferent alternation.

One thing she determines. She will tell her husband the truth, so that he might not imagine his desecrated wife to be whole, and so that Tarquin might not be able to smile secretly at Collatine's ignorance. This conclusion brings her solace and she ends her wailing for a while:

—lines 1079-80

Philomela was a young woman in the Greek myths who (in Ovid's version of the tale) had undergone an even crueler rape than that of Lucrece, and who was eventually turned into a nightingale which nightly sang the sad song of her misery. Philomela is therefore a poetic synonym for "nightingale" and is frequently used in this way by Shakespeare.

Indeed, Shakespeare used this particular myth in detail in Titus Andronicus (see page I-405), which was written shortly before The Rape of Lucrece.

The rapist in Philomela's case was a Thracian king named Tereus, and Lucrece sees the comparison, for she says to the nightingale she imagines before her:

—lines 1133-34

She then makes use of the legend of the nightingale leaning against a thorn to keep awake all night (see page I-64) to hint at suicide:

—lines 1136-38

She will not kill herself, however, until Collatine finds out the truth, and she writes a letter, begging him to hasten home. While she waits she has a chance to study and comment on an elaborate painting of the Greek siege of Troy, which had taken place seven centuries before her time.

(Actually in 509 b.c. Rome was completely under Etruscan cultural influence and was far removed from the world of Greek art and literature. It is extremely unlikely that the real Lucrece would be so knowledgeable of Greek mythology or have an opportunity to study paintings of the Trojan War. However, Shakespeare's high-flown style in this poem made such abundant classical allusion necessary.)

The painting is described. It is

—lines 1367-69

The Trojan War had had its cause, according to legend, in the rape (i.e., abduction) of Helen by Paris (see page I-76), and there is, therefore, an analogy to Lucrece's situation.

The individual Greek heroes are mentioned:

—lines 1398-1402

Ajax was, next to Achilles, the strongest of the Greeks; Ulysses (Odysseus) the craftiest; Nestor the wisest. All play important parts in Troilus and Cressida (see pages I-86, I-91, and I-92) and their listing here symbolizes Troy being assailed by strength, cunning, and wisdom.

Beyond that, Troy is confronted also by irresistible fate, as epitomized by the transcendent hero Achilles:

—lines 1424-26

The spear was symbol enough; the obscured hero was more an impersonal and relentless force than a man. He too plays his part, in an all-too-human fashion, in Troilus and Cressida (see page I-114).

What's more, the picture shows the Trojan War in its various stages. At another place, Lucrece sees Troy fallen and finds in it a face with sorrows to match her own:

—lines 1447-49

This incident is past the ending of Homer's Iliad and of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It represents the tendencies of the later mythmakers to pile horror on horror and to multiply the tragedy of Troy's final destruction.

The Trojan King, Priam (see page I-79), had witnessed his city besieged for ten years and, one by one, nearly every one of his fifty sons killed. Now at last the Greeks were gone, but they had left behind a large wooden horse (see page I-188). Priam and the Trojans are persuaded to drag the horse into the city and the Greek warriors hidden within emerge at night, open the gates for the remainder of the army, and begin their slaughter.

Priam and his aged wife, Hecuba (see page I-85), flee to an altar of Zeus where they might be safe. Polites, one of Priam's very few surviving sons, comes running madly toward the altar too. Behind him is Pyrrhus (or Neoptolemus) (see page I-115), the son of Achilles.

Pyrrhus has been brought to the field of Troy after his father has been killed by an arrow in the heel from the bow of Paris. He quickly proves himself as brave and as cruel as his father.

Now it is his cruelty that is predominant. He kills Polites even at the altar and in the presence of his parents. Priam, driven mad at the sight, feebly casts a spear at Pyrrhus, who promptly kills him as well.

Lucrece sadly views the depicted miseries of falling Troy:

—lines 1485-86

Hector was the greatest of the Trojan warriors (see page I-188), but in the medieval versions of the story of Troy, it is his younger brother, Troilus, who rises to prominence, and it is Troilus who is the titular hero of Troilus and Cressida.

Lucrece finally concentrates, however, on a Greek captive, taken by the Trojans after the Greeks had built their wooden horse. This captive, Sinon, who pretended to be a refugee from the Greeks, told a false story that the wooden horse was an offering to Athena and would forever protect Troy from conquest if brought within the city. He is therefore described as: