SOURCE: "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen, 1985, pp. 95-115.

Below, Vickers examines the rhetoric of The Rape of Lucrece as depicting male political struggles enacted on the female body.

When, in Sonnet 106, Shakespeare's speaker alludes to "the blazon of sweet beauty's best" (5) he identifies "blazon" with "descriptions of the fairest wights" (2), with poetic portraits "in praise of ladies dead and lovely knights" (4).' He then goes on to qualify "blazon," to suggest that it is an outdated poetic mode standing in contrast to a present, paradoxically silent, one: "For

we which now behold these present days / Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise" (13-14). The term "blazon" derives both from the French blasonner and from the...