SOURCE: Breitenberg, Mark. “Publishing Chastity: Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.” In Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, pp. 97-127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Breitenberg examines the ways in which honor, publication, and desire serve as the bases for Shakespeare's depiction and criticism of masculinity in The Rape of Lucrece, and emphasizes that this exploration is undertaken within the context of early modern rhetoric concerning the nature of masculinity.

In this chapter my discussion is organized around the circulation of three critical figures in the rhetoric of early modern masculinity: honor, publication and desire. In a specifically poetic context, I will look closely at the function of these figures as the bases for Shakespeare's representation and critique of masculinity in his early poem, “The Rape of Lucrece.” In a broadly cultural context, I will consider how the poem's preoccupations and problems rehearse several distinctively Elizabethan...