Lucrece's Tabula Anatomica: Identity, Possession and Self-Possession in Shakespeare's Roman Poem

This essay addresses the ways in which Shakespeare makes his Lucrece capable of changing her status from that of a Petrarchan, dead-like “virtuous monument”, offered to the inspection of Tarquin’s predatory gaze, to that of a pre-mortem ‘monument’ of herself as an image that actively troubles and displaces the male gaze of her kinsmen. The point of departure is Lucrece’s long-drawn ekphrasis of the Troy piece, which takes place after her rape: a vicarious exploration of the self through which, Del Sapio argues, she transforms her own face, by way of a fashioning ars moriendi, into a disquieting ‘anatomy of ruin’ – an écorché, a living and revengeful tabula anatomica. What this essay suggests is that Lucrece’s post-rape, self-possessing assertion of identity is underpinned by the new science of bodies or what has been called the new “culture of dissection”. In this light, the battle waged to possess her body, both figuratively and physically, is perceived as part of a much broader contest among contrasting and overlapping modes of understanding/imagining/possessing bodies in early modern culture. In developing her argument, the author draws on the idea of a ‘sisterhood’ among diverse arts and forms of knowledge (poetry, theatre, anatomy and the visual arts) and highlights the ways in which they cooperate in the context of early modern European culture in problematizing, if not redefining, the female body and self.