The Rape of Lucrece

Ekphrasis is the practice of writing poetry about a piece of (usually visual) art. One of the earliest and most pertinent examples of this literary device is Homer’s long passage about Achilles’s shield in the Iliad. Shakespeare’s ekphrastic section about the painting of the Trojan war in “The Rape of Lucrece” includes Achilles: “For so much imaginary work was there; / Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, / That for Achilles’ image stood his spear / Gripped in an armed hand; himself behind / Was left unseen” (Lines 1422-1426). Lucrece’s painting only depicts a small part of Achilles: A weapon represents him and the viewer is left to fill in the details. This reflects how the reader of Shakespeare’s poem is given small pieces of the story of the Trojan War and left to fill in the remaining pieces. The craft of painting, the “imaginary work,” is often compared to the craft of poetry; ekphrasis brings these arts together.

Shakespeare uses a wide variety of literary devices that fall under the category of repetition, such as apostrophe, anaphora, and alliteration. Apostrophe is the act of addressing absent and/or abstract entities. For instance, Lucrece repeats “O” when she apostrophizes night, opportunity, and time: “O comfort-killing night, image of hell” (Line 764), “O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night” (Line 771), “O night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke” (Line 799). These curses against an entity that cannot reply are one way Lucrece processes the trauma of her assault.

Anaphora employs a similar repetition of the first word, but in subsequent clauses. When trying to talk Tarquin out of violence, Lucrece uses this rhetorical device: “She conjures him by high almighty Jove, / By knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship’s oath, / By her untimely tears, her husband’s love, / By holy human law and common troth, / By heaven and earth and all the power of both” (Lines 568-572). “By” is repeated at the beginning of several lines in a row. This is also a catalogue (or list)—a common trope in the medieval romances that Shakespeare emulates in his poem about Lucrece—but the addition of the grammatically unnecessary repetition (of “by”) for many items in the list is a way to add extra emphasis and structure the list.

Shakespeare also employs repetition at the level of letters; repeating the first letter of several words in a row is called alliteration. For instance, the description of the painting of Troy includes the line: “Or blot with hell-born sin such saint-like forms” (Line 1519). The repetition of the “s” sibilant reminds the reader of the hiss of a snake, connecting the content about hell and sin with a snakelike satanic sound.