An Allusion to <i>Titus Andronicus</i> in Middleton’s <i>The Ghost of Lucrece</i>

Thomas Middleton’s early poem The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), long ignored by critics as part of his juvenilia, has received increased attention since the 2007 publication of the Oxford Collected Works. The poem is typically considered in relation to Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), a text to which Ghost responds.1 What has not been noticed to date, however, is that The Rape of Lucrece appears not to have been the only Shakespearean text that the young Middleton had in mind when he tried his hand at a version of the Lucrece story: the prologue to Ghost contains what is likely an allusion to Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), and that play’s bloody cannibal revenge may be echoed in the grotesque blood-as-breastmilk that Middleton’s Lucrece vengefully orders Tarquin to drink. While The Ghost of Lucrece is based on the genre of ‘complaint’—’a tragic monologue by a departed spirit’—Middleton creates a specifically theatrical setting for Lucrece’s ghost to lament her rape: ‘Thrice hath the trumpet of my pen’s round stage/Sounded a surge to her bloody age’ (35–6, original italics).2 In a poem that brings together a copiously bleeding Roman rape victim, the myth of Philomela, and vengeance through coerced blood-drinking, asking readers to imagine watching a play prepares them for the Titus allusion to come. Two stanzas later, the actors are summoned, and the speaker of the prologue punningly instructs them on the ‘part’ that awaits them: With ‘Play the cooks’—in the same line as and directed to ‘our stage’s actors’—the poem arguably alludes to the moment when Titus Andronicus avenges Lavinia’s rape by butchering the bound and gagged Chiron and Demetrius: after the rapists have bled out into a ‘basin’ held by Lavinia herself, Titus says, ‘So, now bring them in, for I’ll play the cook,/And see them ready against their mother comes’ (V.ii.183, 204–05).3 In baking them into pies to be fed to an unwitting Tamora, he takes a deliberately Ovidian revenge: In The Ghost of Lucrece, the metaphorical ‘actors’ who will ‘play the cooks’ are associated with the rapist, not the avenger, and the heart they will butcher into dainty morsels is that of the victim; however, the poem later provides Lucrece herself with a form of revenge, found nowhere in the original story, that takes us back to Titus Andronicus, the myth of Philomela with its cannibal vengeance, and Lavinia’s basin of blood. Both Middleton’s Lucrece, and Shakespeare’s Lavinia identify themselves with the raped and mutilated Philomel: prior to Titus’s declared intent to surpass Ovidian precedent, Lavinia uses a copy of The Metamorphoses to disclose what was done to her (IV.i.41–54); in Middleton’s poem, the Ghost evokes the same parallel in her final statement: ‘Now Tereus meets with ravished Philomel,/Lucrece with Tarquin in the hall of hell’ (596–7).4 Between the bookends of the prologue’s ‘play the cook’ and the monologue’s concluding allusion to Philomela, Middleton’s Lucrece avenges herself on Tarquin by recreating Lavinia’s basin of blood with her own blood, which she serves up for Tarquin’s consumption in a series of increasingly disturbing images. First, she transforms herself into a ‘bowl’ filled with blood from her wound, which she invites Tarquin to consume: After further invitations to ‘Quaff thine own fill’ (129) and ‘Pledge thy desire, carousing off my shame’ (131), the poem takes an even darker turn, with what Celia Daileader aptly describes as Lucrece’s ‘deeply aggressive’ force-feeding of an infantilized Tarquin, in ‘a quasi-cannibalistic “festival” of abjection’:5 In my recent study of disgust and shame in early modern rape narratives, I argue that while Shakespeare’s Lucrece feels that Tarquin has physically polluted her in a way that can only be cleansed by her death, Lavinia’s self-identification with Philomela also indicates her chosen revenge: by transforming her rapists to human meat, she inflicts the same condition of ‘disgustingness’ on their bodies that their mutilations had previously conferred on hers.6 Middleton’s Lucrece, like Lavinia, avenges the pollution-disgust conventionally directed towards the defiled rape victim by using disgust as a weapon against the man who violated her: a bleeding Lucrece is traditional, but a Lucrece who obliges Tarquin to drink great bowls of her blood and to suck yet more blood, ‘until [his] veins run over’, from an enormous, blood-filled teat ‘which scarce [his] mouth can cover’ is taking her own state of befoulment and forcing it, quite literally, down her rapist’s throat. In an echo of Lavinia’s revenge in Titus Andronicus, Middleton’s Tarquin begins as a cannibalistic gourmand who ‘Carve[s] out the daintiest morsel’ of human flesh for his own delectation, only to be justly served by having his victim turn around and ‘carve… . with her knife [his] festival’, vengefully feeding him sickening, unmanageable quantities of human blood.

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