time; dancing, laughing, gossiping, feasting. Lucrece, however, was at home, alone except for her maids, and was gravely engaged in the housewifely task of spuming.
Collatine had won his wager, but in a deeper sense, he had lost, for Prince Tarquin, having seen Lucrece's beauty and chastity, conceived a powerful desire to make love to her. Once all the aristocrats were back at the siege, he left again, this time alone, in order to gratify that desire.
... had Narcissus seen her ...
Tarquin is not at ease. He is not an utterly abandoned villain and he feels the guilt and disgrace of the reprehensible thing he is doing-yet he cannot help himself. After having arrived, he is treated as a welcome guest and Lucrece asks for news of her husband. Tarquin muses on her beauty and says to himself that, on hearing her husband was well
... she smiled with so sweet a cheer
That, had Narcissus seen her as she stood,
Self-love had never drown'd him in the flood.
- lines 264-66
Narcissus is the young man in Greek myths who loved only himself, and drowned trying to kiss his reflection in water (see page I-10).
... a cockatrice' dead-killing eye
When night comes, Prince Tarquin invades Lucrece's bedroom and tells her that if she will not yield, he will take her anyway and kill a slave, whom he will accuse as her lover. The situation paralyzes Lucrece with horror, which the poem indicates by stating:
Here with a cockatrice' dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself and makes a pause;
- lines 540-4l
Tarquin's words have the effect on her that a cockatrice's eye would have. The legendary cockatrice, the infinitely poisonous snake, kills with a mere glance (see page I-150).
A similar metaphor from the other direction is then used:
So his unhallowed haste her words delays,
And moody Pluto winks while Orpheus plays.
- lines 552-53
The reference is to Orpheus' descent into the underworld to win back his wife Eurydice (see page I-47). His music charmed even Pluto, and as the harsh king of the underworld was made captive by beauty, so chaste Lucrece was paralyzed by evil.
... still-pining Tantalus. ..
Tarquin rapes Lucrece, then hastens away, miserable and guilty, leaving her behind, miserable and innocent.
To Lucrece, all the world is now fit only for cursing. There is no comfort anywhere or in anything. What good is wealth, for instance? The aged miser, having accumulated his hoard, finds his health gone, and cannot buy youth back with his gold:
But like still-pining Tantalus he sits
And useless barns the harvest of his wits,
- lines 858-59
Tantalus is always the very personification of punishment through frustration (see page I-13).
... Fortune's wheel
Nor does time heal matters in her now utterly pessimistic view. It but makes matters worse; merely serving to
... turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel.
- line 952
Fortune (Tyche), an important goddess to the later Greeks (see page I-135), was often pictured with a turning wheel. That represented the manner in which men's fortunes rose and fell in indifferent alternation.
... lamenting Philomele. ..
One thing she determines. She will tell her husband the truth, so that he might not imagine his desecrated wife to be whole, and so that Tarquin might not be able to smile secretly at Collatine's ignorance. This conclusion brings her solace and she ends her wailing for a while:
By this, lamenting Philomele had ended
This well-tun'd warble of her nightly sorrow,
- lines 1079-80
Philomela was a young woman in the Greek myths who (in Ovid's version of the tale) had undergone an even crueler rape than that of Lucrece, and who was eventually turned into a nightingale which nightly sang the sad song of her misery. Philomela is therefore a poetic synonym for "nightingale" and is frequently used in this way by Shakespeare.
Indeed, Shakespeare used this particular myth in detail in Titus Andronicus (see page I-405), which was written shortly before The Rape of Lucrece.
The rapist in Philomela's case was a Thracian king named Tereus, and Lucrece sees the comparison, for she says to the nightingale she imagines before her:
For burthen-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still,
While thou on Tereus descants better skill;
- lines 1133-34
She then makes use of the legend of the nightingale leaning against a thorn to keep awake all night (see page I-64) to hint at suicide:
... wretched I
To imitate thee well, against my heart
Will fix a sharp knife...
- lines 1136-38
... Pyrrhus' proud foot...
She will not kill herself, however, until Collatine finds out the truth, and she writes a letter, begging him to hasten home. While she waits she has a chance to study and comment