The Politics of Rape by Jennifer L. Airey

Author:Jennifer L. Airey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus and the Dangers of Revolt

Although Rochester’s Valentinian justifies the overthrow of a violent monarch, it was Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus that proved the more immediately controversial; the play was suppressed after only three nights for “very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections vpon ye Government.”[37] Critics have speculated that the censors may not have actually read the play, that the language of royalism and republicanism alone may have made them sufficiently nervous to inspire a preemptive suppression. Antony Hammond writes, “It is clear from the wording that the Chamberlain was acting upon a complaint, not first-hand knowledge, and that he had not troubled to verify the objections to the play.”[38] That said, the play’s depiction of the royalists is far from complimentary and certainly could have raised concerns. At the center of Lucius Junius Brutus lies a royalist black mass in which human sacrifice and blood drinking are performed onstage: as a “busie Commonwealths’ Man,” symbol of parliamentary government, is displayed crucified upstage, priests distribute goblets “fill’d with Blood & Wine” that the royalists may drink the blood of human sacrifice and grow strong.[39] Brutus will later condemn the conspirators, his own sons among them, calling them “Sons of Murder, that get drunk with blood” (4.1.241). In the context of the Exclusion Crisis, this scene is central to any pro-Whig reading of the play, as royalism is here linked with Catholic vampirism and perversity. As in the English Civil War tracts, acts of rape escalate into instances of blood drinking, dark parodies of the Catholic Eucharist that align the royalists with the most pernicious and terrifying aspects of libertine and Catholic excess.

The scene of blood drinking notwithstanding, however, Lucius Junius Brutus defies a straightforwardly antiroyalist, anti-Catholic reading. For all that Brutus condemns the royalists for their perversity, he has himself participated in a vampiristic act; at Brutus’s insistence, Lucrece’s avengers seal their pact by kissing her knife, tasting the blood of Lucrece’s self-sacrifice to cement their oath. Brutus says,

Behold, you dazled Romans, from the wound

Of this dead Beauty, thus I draw the Dagger,

All stain’d and reeking with her Sacred blood,

Thus to my lips I put the Hallow’d blade,

To yours Lucretius, Collatinus yours, . . .

kiss the Ponnyard round. (1.1.434–39)

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