Infected Fancies and Penetrative Poetics in The Rape of Lucrece

This chapter explores the ways in which sensation infects and penetrates the embodied imaginations at play in Shakespeare’s narrative poem of rape and trauma, The Rape of Lucrece. Far from a disembodied, ornamental set piece overwhelmed by rhetorical excess, Shakespeare’s poem deeply engages with physically rendered imaginations, from Tarquin’s infected “fancy” to Lucrece’s disjointed conceits, as he draws from the imagination’s dangerous link to a world of unruly sensations. Even more, Shakespeare broadens his scope to consider art, from bird songs to his poem itself, as an intimate and dangerous enterprise forged out of the fraught relationship between sensation and the imagination. This chapter contextualizes Shakespeare’s poem within the period’s wider penetrative poetics and the trade of Lucretia objects from citterns to sealing rings in order to show how Shakespeare critiques the patriarchal aesthetics that had become a conventional part of this classical story of sexual violence. Pushing against the masculine fantasies of objectification and rational wills, Shakespeare ultimately offers an alternative form of readership—one fragmentary and richly connected to the unwieldy world of sensation—in his rejection of the period’s penetrative poetics.