Shakespeare’s representations of rape

The essay surveys representations of rape in selected Shakespeare’s works. The subject fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career. It appeared for the first time in his early narrative poem “The rape of Lucrece” and in one of his first tragedies “Titus Andronicus”. Though his later works, unlike these two, do not represent sexual assaults upon women graphically, rape is present in almost all his Roman and history plays (e.g. “Coriolanus”, “Henry V”, “Henry VI”), comedies (e.g. “A midsummer night’s dream”, “Measure for measure”) and romances (e.g. “Cymbeline”, “Pericles”, “The tempest”). Since in Shakespeare’s England the social structure prioritized male power, women were treated as men’s property. Any accomplished or attempted sexual violation of women polarized male legal and emotional bonding, and it also disrupted and/or empowered homosocial solidarity. A preliminary study of the presence and dramatic use of rape shows a distinctive evolution in Shakespeare’s attitude to this omnipresent subject. One reason for this change might be a shift in the legal classification of rape in Elizabethan England: from a crime against (male) property to a crime against an individual.