"My little what shall I call thee": reinventing the rape tragedy in William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust.

IN William Rowley's tragedy All's Lost by Lust (c.1618-20), Jacinta, a Spanish noblewoman in the court of King Roderick, acquires an unacceptable social position through no fault of her own. Left alone in the castle while her father leads an army against the Moors, Jacinta is raped by Roderick and held captive, lamenting the "heavy hainous wrong" (3.1.8) (1) that she has suffered. She is guarded by Roderick's henchman, Lothario, who is ebulliently aware of Jacinta's new social status. Lothario gloats that she is now a "crackt virgin" (9), taunting her with the knowledge that a woman who loses her chastity before marriage has lost any right to the three legitimate social roles available to early modern women: "Come, come, my little what shall I call thee. For it is now doubtfull what thou art; being neither maide, wife, nor (saving your reverence) widow" (14-16). Lothario adapts a well-known riddle, "neither maid, wife, nor widow," the solution to which is "whore" (Tilley, M26). He employs mock-delicacy, avoiding the abusive word while making clear how the rest of the world will now view Jacinta.

Lothario's comments epitomize the conventional attitude to the rape victim in the drama of the period. The rape victim occupies a contradictory social position: despite her lack of consent, she has experienced extramarital sex and is thus considered unchaste and unsuitable for marriage. She has become "neither maid, wife, nor widow," and there is thus no acceptable role for her in a patriarchal society (Catty, 3). Paradoxically, her lack of consent means that she is at once a chaste woman and a whore.

The representation of rape in the drama of the period can be seen as a struggle to efface this paradox. Recent feminist studies have shown that early modern literature typically obscures the victim's contradictory position by constructing narratives in which she internalizes the blame for the event. Jocelyn Catty and Karen Bamford have both shown that in plays about rape, there are only two possible outcomes (Catty, 20; Bamford, 10-11). Most of the plays are tragedies, in which the victim dies, usually by committing suicide or, less often, at the hand of a male relative. These tragedies are governed by the assumption by a male authority that "the girl should not survive her shame, / And by her presence still renew his sorrows" (Shakespeare, Titus, 5.3.40-41). (2) The only alternative outcome is the solution found in a few tragicomedies, in which the victim marries the rapist, thereby preserving a form of chastity by restricting the number of her sexual partners to one. (3) Underlying both of these narrative structures is an assumption that rape results in "a pollution of the female body, regardless of the victim's volition" (Catty, 15). In both tragedies and tragicomedies, the victim's suicide or marriage has the effect of "solving" the paradox of her social status so that she can no longer represent a threat to the patriarchal structure.

Rowley's play is different. Although it follows many of the conventions of the "rape tragedy," it offers a number of startling and unusual revisions to the genre. The most obvious is that Jacinta, far from committing suicide, remains noisily and energetically alive, only to be killed, against her will, in an incident that has nothing to do with the rape. The play breaks with the conventions of the "rape tragedy" in a number of other significant ways, which have the effect of reversing the demonization of the rape victim that occurs in the more conventional plays on the subject. Indeed, by transforming the typical conventions of the genre, Rowley's play moralizes on the dangers of ignoring the independent speech of women. Previous critics have noted Rowley's divergences from the genre, but have always regarded his changes as illogical or meaningless, apparently assuming that a popular playwright like Rowley would not have been capable of coherent thought, let alone of radically rethinking a genre. In contrast, I will argue that it was popular writers, particularly those, like Rowley, who were involved in the creation of clown roles, who were more likely to produce radical answers to the questions about female subjectivity that were raised by rape.

The anxiety about the status of rape victims in early modern patriarchal culture can be traced to its hostility toward women with independent subjectivity. The lawyer "T.E.," in The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632), famously wrote that all women "are understood either married or to bee married and their desires [are] subject to their husband" (B3v). In the ideology of the period, a woman was considered to be subject to her father's control until she was married, at which point control was passed to her husband. Conduct books exhorted wives and daughters to repress their subjective desires and to mirror those of their patriarchal superiors; the virtuous woman was thus seen as an object, rather than an individual with independent subjectivity (Belsey, 149-60). In early modern thought, a female character can thus be defined as transgressive if she enters a social position in which she is no longer subject to the authority of a male relative. Karen Bamford has argued that writers were reluctant to represent rape victims who survived their ordeal because their paradoxical situation (unsuitable for marriage because sexually experienced, and yet morally unimpeachable) gave them an independent subject position that could not be integrated into the patriarchal social order: they were neither maid, wife, nor widow, and thus possessed "excessive, threatening agency" (2). The rape victim, removed from her legitimate identity, enters a space defined only by transgression, as Lucina, raped by the emperor in Fletcher's Valentinian (1614), realizes:

      I am now no wife for Maximus,
    No company for women that are vertuous.
    No familie I now can claime, nor Country,
    Nor name, but Cesars Whore.
    (3.1.74-77) (4)

For this reason, Barbara Baines writes that rape removes a woman's agency, because it takes away her control of her chastity. However, the paradox that a rape victim could be thought of as morally stained by an act, yet chaste because she did not consent to it, means that the reverse could also be true. As Emily Detmer-Goebel has pointed out, if the victim insists on her lack of consent, her agency becomes all-important, because she must define herself as an unstained wife or daughter, rather than a whore (78). The reliance on female self-definition in rape cases seems to have caused considerable anxiety to early modern lawmakers.

Throughout the medieval period, rape had been considered by law to be the same as abduction, so that the crime was viewed as theft of (male) property, rather than a crime against the (female) person; the woman's self-definition was thus irrelevant (Bashar, 41-42, Wynne-Davies, 130-31, Chaytor, 395-96). However, abduction and rape were separated for the first time in English law by a statute of 1577. The significance of this separation is debatable, (5) but one effect, Detmer-Goebel suggests, is that the burden of proof was increasingly laid on the woman's voice, rather than on those of her male relatives: in particular, unmarried rape victims were expected to make the legal claim of rape themselves. Even though male relatives remained an important part of the legal proceedings in practice, it is clear that a shift in the perception of rape began in this period, and the legal process began to depend on "women's voices and their knowledge" (Detmer-Goebel, 78)--and, thus, on their self-definition as chaste victims of rape.

The notion that rape is defined by a woman's lack of consent (rather than by a man's decision to abduct her) did not make matters simple for lawyers; Baines shows that legal writers endlessly debated how to prove that a woman was telling the truth about her lack of consent (72-73, 91; see also Burks, 765-77). The legal debates about rape revolved around such questions as how to tell whether or not a woman consented to sex and what to do if she consented before, during, or after the attack (Baines, 82-84). This quibbling indicates a desire to place the blame on the victim, in order to avoid the paradoxical conclusion that a woman can be physically deflowered and yet mentally chaste. The debate is thus centered on the ancient question of "whether the mind and body are discrete categories or are mutually implicating" (Catty, 15; see also Maus, Inwardness, 204-6, and Bamford, 10): to acknowledge that the victim can be mentally chaste is to acknowledge that she can be the author of her own moral status (Catty, 4). Rape thus has ramifications beyond the act itself: it questions the notion that a self-defining woman is morally unacceptable.

The question of whether a woman can define herself as mentally chaste after a rape is common in fictional representations of the subject. The narrative structures that typically efface this question are evident in the archetypal rape narrative of early modern England: the legend of Lucretia. In William Painter's well-known English retelling of Livy's version, the relatives of Lucretia decide that "her bodye was polluted, and not her minde, and where consent was not, there the crime was absente." Lucretia agrees with them, but kills herself nonetheless, so that "no unchast or ill woman, shall hereafter impute no dishonest act to Lucretia" (24). Thus, although Lucretia's suicide is an act of self-definition (she announces "I cleare my selfe of the offence"), it demonstrates the insignificance of her subjective opinion: only her death can provide the proof of her lack of consent. (6) Even though Lucretia believes she is chaste, her body must still be destroyed, and her chastity remains a physical, not a mental state.

For early modern thinkers, the classical precedent of Lucretia was of course complicated by Christian ideas about the status of the rape victim. Augustine argued that chastity is a mental state and that Lucretia had no need to commit suicide (1.16-28), an opinion implicitly shared by Aquinas (2.2.Q152.art.1). (7) However, Augustine's conclusion was motivated by disapproval of suicide, rather than sympathy for rape victims, and his views were not therefore shared by all Christian writers, many of whom considered suicide justifiable in extreme circumstances such as rape (Donaldson, 33; Baines, 89). Thus, English adaptations of the tale of Lucretia merely efface her subjectivity in different ways: in Shakespeare's poem, for example, Lucrece initially insists that her mind was unwilling, but goes on to resolve that her mind and body are inseparable, and that the former is inevitably tainted by the latter (Rape, 1030-36, 1156-69, 1656-59, and 1709-10). (8)

By such means, the notion of the chaste rape victim is effaced in early modern representations of the subject. The drama of the period is no different: recent studies have seen the plays as vehicles for the reinforcement of patriarchal hegemony and have argued that the dramatists suppress the questions of agency that are raised by rape. In her detailed study, Karen Bamford demonstrates that all of the plays about rape are structured according to an ideological framework that insists on the inseparability of a woman's moral status from her physical state. She notes a number of recurring tropes that imply that chastity is physical, not mental, such as the notion that a truly chaste woman is physically inviolable and cannot be raped (29-30), or that suicide is the only acceptable course for a rape victim (10). The plays thus reiterate the notion that a virtuous woman cannot be an independent subject: she is defined by what men do to her, not by her own actions or opinions.

Bamford and Catty make strong arguments for the uniformity of early modern rape plays as expressions of a masculinist ideology that effaces the disturbing, problematic figure of the rape victim. However, there are two objections to the claim that this ideology is universal in the drama. The most obvious objection is that sympathy for the victim can be generated by dramatic performance. The law's abstract vision of rape as property theft is inevitably undermined when a theater audience sees a character suffer fear and horror before a rape, and misery and wretchedness afterward; during a performance, emotional sympathy might cause some audience members to behave like Lucrece's relatives in Shakespeare's poem who, after hearing her story, "all at once began to say, / Her body's stain her mind untainted clears" (1,709-10). Nevertheless, while it is easy to speculate that individual audience members might contest the plays' conclusions, Bamford is surely correct to say that the playtexts are the only reliable evidence for beliefs about rape in the theater. It is clear from the texts that writers of "rape tragedies" repeatedly tried to manipulate audiences into seeing the need for the victim's death. Speculation about whether they were successful is fruitless (22-23, 173n70).

Objections to this totalizing view of the rape tragedies must therefore be based on the discovery, via close reading, of plays that cannot be subsumed into the ideological structure that these critics describe. All's Lost by Lust is such a play. It contains a number of departures from the normative conventions of the rape tragedy, which suggest that the play is designed to contest the conventional conclusion that Jacinta's autonomy is dangerous and must be negated. In particular, the play didactically insists on the need for the victim's voice to be heard, not only after the rape, but before it too. All's Lost by Lust demonstrates that the potential for a radical sympathy with female subjectivity may have been possible within the early modern theater.

Critics have itemized the conventions of the "rape tragedy" in full, and All's Lost conforms with many of them. (9) As in all "rape tragedies," the victim is a beautiful noblewoman who is lusted after by an evil and tyrannical ruler. Like the other rapist characters, King Roderick is an uncomplicated emblem of lust, who is represented as entirely unforgivable. And, as in all the other plays, the rape polarizes the victim's family against the rapist king with a resulting political conflict that causes a change of government. Yet despite this appearance of conventionality, there are three major differences between All's Lost and the other rape tragedies. (10) First, Jacinta does not respond to the rape with suicidal shame, but with angry cursing. Second, there is no assumption on the part of either Jacinta or her father that she is required to die, and although she does die at the end of the play, her death is unconnected with the rape: it is part of the Moor's betrayal of her father, and is not willed by herself. Finally, in All's Lost, the rebellion triggered by the rape does not result in the emergence of a better regime, as in most rape tragedies. (11) Instead, the political situation changes for the worse, as the demonic Moor ascends the throne of Spain. Of the three major changes that Rowley made to the generic conventions, none is unique in itself, but taken together they make All's Lost very different in its meaning from the rest of the genre. Suzanne Gossett claims that Rowley's modifications "weaken the clear logic and morality of the older plays" (317), but I will show that Rowley is largely successful in challenging the genre's conventions in order to shift the blame for rape away from the victim and onto ideological admonitions to female silence.

Rowley's departures from convention can be traced to his source material. Unlike most of the "rape tragedies," All's Lost does not have its roots in the tale of Lucretia. It is based instead on a Spanish legend that offers a different paradigm to that established by the Lucretia myth. Legendary Spanish history relates that Roderic, or Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain, deflowered Florinda, daughter of the powerful Count Julian. Some accounts call Roderic a rapist, others call Florinda a seductress, but all relate that when Julian learned of the king's crime, he sought revenge, and joined with the Moorish leaders of Africa to depose Roderic and conquer Spain. Thus did the Moors rule Spain for several centuries. Roderic survived the battle and died a repentant man.

The legend of Roderic, Florinda, and Julian is almost certainly a myth constructed centuries after the event to explain the humiliatingly swift defeat of the Spanish by the Moors. (12) Unlike the tale of Lucretia, it condemns the victim's father for deposing the rapist king; in the Lucretia myth, the rape ultimately results in an improvement to the government, whereas Florinda's rape results in the destruction of the state. This may explain the more overt misogyny of some versions of the tale: early Spanish historians laid most of the blame on Florinda, labeling her "Cava" or "Caba," after the Arabic word for "whore." (13) This difference between the two myths explains why Rowley's play ends with the destruction, rather than the strengthening, of the state. Yet the source material also offers clues as to why Rowley chose not to make Jacinta commit suicide.

The English versions of the tale available to Rowley consistently fail to explain what happened to Jacinta after the rape. The reason for this is probably that in the Spanish legend, the fate of Florinda is less important than that of Lucretia. Stephanie Jed has described the implication in the Roman legend that Lucrece's sacrifice was a necessary evil: "Lucretia had to be raped so that Rome could be liberated from tyranny" (51). Thus, in the "rape tragedies," "the assaulted woman represents a community in thrall to a tyrant," and the plays "emphasize the necessity of the heroine's death and the rebellion that ensues" (Bamford, 79-80). (14) Readers of the Spanish legend would have had quite a different reaction: their wish would be that the rape of Florinda had never occurred, so that Spain could have remained unconquered. This means that the Spanish legend represents the rape of Florinda as unequivocally unnecessary, and also that Florinda's fate after the rape is irrelevant. The Romans needed to idealize Lucretia as a paragon of virtue if her status as a symbol of Rome's oppression was to be upheld, and so the tale of Lucretia was unthinkable without her suicide, which proved her chastity. But the Spanish did not need to either idealize Florinda or condemn her as a whore, because neither position would have had any effect on the most important point of the legend: that Count Julian was wrong to depose the king. Questions such as whether Florinda was a seductress or a rape victim, and whether or not she committed suicide, are thus not of fundamental importance. For this reason, indifference to Florinda's moral status is reflected in all of the English sources available to Rowley, (15) none of which discusses her fate after the rape. Neither the accounts of Thomas Lodge and Thomas Milles (both translations of Giglio), nor Thomas Newton, nor Edward Grimeston's translation of Louis de Mayerne Turquet, describes Florinda's death. Furthermore, the English versions attribute no blame to Florinad for the rape, or for the loss of Spain: Lodge, Milles, and Grimeston do not condemn her, and Newton merely professes ignorance about her moral status. (16)

Since none of his likely sources state that Florinda killed herself after the rape, Rowley, when adapting the tale for the stage, was free to contemplate how a rape victim should be represented if she stays alive after the rape. He seems to have taken this opportunity to break with convention, and the result is that Jacinta becomes a remarkable character, a strident and angry virago whom Rowley uses to question all the assumptions about rape victims in the other plays of the period. Rather than demonize her, Rowley seems to have seen her story as an argument against the repression of female subjectivity, and to have enforced this reading by changing the conventions of the genre.

Jacinta's most distinctive characteristic is her forceful language; she is vocally angry throughout the play. Before the rape, she rebuffs Roderick, tries to warn others of his advances, and insistently reiterates her lack of consent. The invective that she hurls at the pander, Lothario after she has been raped is paralleled by other victims in the drama, but Rowley breaks with tradition by representing Jacinta as a deliverer of angry curses even before the rape (Bamford, 108, 196n65), when she spurns Roderick with powerful speeches that emphatically deny her consent (2.1.108-12; 122-25). Although modern readers tend to assume that the audience's sympathy is intended to be with the angry Jacinta, (17) it has been argued that her failure to take the blame for the rape is designed to shift audience sympathy away from her. Certainly, female anger was often depicted as threatening in male-authored Renaissance literature, (18) and it could be argued that Rowley represents Jacinta as demonic by filling her speeches with images of witchcraft and poison. Bamford suggests that Rowley follows convention by demonizing the angry, outspoken woman (108, 196n68), and that her speeches "would have compromised her status as a sympathetic victim" for Jacobean audiences (108).

However, the scene is complex, and seems intended to generate a more radical response. As we have already seen, Jacinta's angry speeches are interwoven with Lothario's gloating, in which he triumphs over her loss of a legitimate social position:

  Thou art a looser, and I do consider it[:] thou hast lost a
  maydenhead, a shrewd cracke: a flaw that will hardly be soaderd
  againe; some there be that can passe away these counterfeits for
  currant, as brasse money may be taken for silver, yet it can never be
  the same, nor restorde to his first purity ... (3.1.27-33)

Lothario assumes that, if Jacinta is to gain acceptance in society, she must pretend that the rape never happened. Jacinta does not question this description of her situation. But while she acknowledges that she will inevitably be regarded as a site of disease and impurity, she refuses to accept the justice of the description. Instead of accepting the blame, like Lucrece, she wishes that she could expel the "poison," and infect Lothario with it: "O that I could spit out the spiders bladder, / Or the toads intrals into thee, to take part / And mixe with the diseases that thou bear'st ..." (15-17; my emphasis). What Jacinta articulates in her speeches is her violent desire not to be the thing that she has been made, and her insistence that the impurity with which she is now encoded should really be sited in Lothario. She insists that he is the more tainted of the two, calling him a "bundle of diseases" (20), and saying that although she would take pleasure in "rending up" his bosom, "I should but ope / A vault to poyson me" (38-39; original italics). The scene is, therefore, not a simple demonstration of Jacinta's unacceptable transgression; rather, it is structured to contrast her with her aggressors. By comparing Jacinta with the unmistakably loathsome Lothario, Rowley encourages the audience to choose between the two, and to sympathize with Jacinta's desire to remove her social stigma and place it onto Lothario where it belongs. (19)

The scene therefore questions whether Jacinta's mental virtue should be valued above the status of her body, and, as the play progresses, Rowley continues to raise this question rather than efface it. When Jacinta steals the keys to the dungeon from the sleeping Lothario, she says:

      From all but one,
    This key now frees me, O! that I beare about,
    Which none but mercies key can deliver out.
    (3.1.97-99)

The key frees her from everything except that which she bears about with her: her own body. She describes her physical condition as an enemy, but distinguishes between her body and the "I" that speaks, and retains a hope for mercy that will "deliver" her from the situation. This mercy eventually comes from an unexpected source: her father. Julianus says,

    Jacinta welcome, thou art my child still,
    No forced staine of lust can alienate
    Our consanguinitie.
    (4.1.133-35)

Julianus's acceptance of his daughter despite her stained chastity is extremely unusual; indeed, it is unlike that of any other man in a rape tragedy. (20) Furthermore, Julianus and the Moor regard Jacinta as suitable for marriage, (21) and Julianus even insists on her right of choice in the matter: "Ile not compell her heart ... / Forc't has she bin too much" (4.1.185-86). If Julianus's point of view is to be accepted, Jacinta's mind must be considered independent of her bodily and social status. Of course, it is not clear whether Rowley intends the audience to read Julianus's attitude as admirable, or whether it is intended as an example of the folly that the character displays elsewhere (for instance, his revenge on Roderick's castle is represented as wrongheaded, because he foolishly makes a pact with the unscrupulous Moor). (22) His defense of Jacinta is given no justification or explanation; similarly, Jacinta tells Julianus that she "should be the second Lucrece / Had she done her part" (4.1.98-101), highlighting the fact that Lucretia is a role that a woman in her situation is expected to play, but failing to explain why she has rejected it. However, Rowley's ideas become clearer in the final scene, in which the conventions of the rape tragedy are changed even more drastically.

Critics have noticed that All's Lost is almost unique among rape tragedies in that the victim's climactic death is unconnected with the rape, (23) but no explanations have been offered as to why Rowley might have chosen such an ending. Catty, acknowledging Rowley's introduction of "new elements" to the genre, feels that the radical implications are "subdued" by Jacinta's death (107). However, the precise manner of her death, which is unrelated to anything in the source material, seems designed to symbolically shift the blame for the rape onto Jacinta's social surroundings rather than onto herself, and thus to vindicate her angry speeches in the preceding scenes.

In order to understand the final scene, we must look at an earlier event that sets up the imagery that Rowley returns to at the end of the play. In act 1, Jacinta attempts to persuade her father that she is in danger from Roderick, but he is interested only in the forthcoming war, and dismisses her:

    Th'art a clog to me[;]
    Me thinkes thou shouldst be reading o're new fashions,
    Conferring with your Tire-woman for faire dressings[;]
    Your Jeweller has new devices for yee,
    Fine labels for your eares, bracelets for wrists,
    Such as will illustrate your white hand;
    These are all Pedlars ware to me, Jacinta;
    I am for Corslets, Helmets, Bils, Bowes, and Pikes,
    The thundring Guns, Trumpets tan tara,
    The ratling sheepeskin, and the whistling Fife:
    What Musicke's this to your eares? ha, farewell[!]
    (1.2.69-78)

I quote the speech in full because its tone seems designed to direct the audience's sympathy away from Julianus. The audience has already seen Roderick plotting to attack Jacinta, and is thus aware that Julianus's dismissive attitude will endanger her. Furthermore, the exaggerated diction ("Trumpets tan tara") seems designed to make Julianus's love of war look ridiculous, and emphasize further his folly in refusing to listen to his daughter. The undermining of Julianus's authority is completed in the following exchange, in which Jacinta reminds him of royal rapists from the past:

    Jacinta. There has bin ravishers, remember Tarquin.
    Julianus. There has bin chast Ladies, remember Lucres.
    (1.2.97-98)

Julianus seems unaware of, or uninterested in, the fact that Lucrece's chastity did not protect her from Tarquin--and in many versions of the tale actually encouraged his assault. One explanation for this sequence is that Rowley reminds the audience of the Lucrece story in order to ensure that they will be disappointed when Jacinta fails to follow her precursor by committing suicide (Bamford, 108). But the exchange is surely designed to highlight the inadequacy of the Lucrece paradigm for a woman threatened with rape. Julianus uses the image of Lucrece to admonish Jacinta into silence and submission, but the audience's knowledge of Roderick's desires, in addition to their knowledge of the outcome of the Lucrece story, highlights the fact that silence and submission will not prevent the threatened tragedy.

The import of this sequence becomes apparent during the play's climax, in which the usurping Moor orders a punishment for Jacinta and her father: "Pluck out his eyes, and her exclaiming tongue" (5.5.39). The 1633 text's "Argument" describes what happens next:

  The Barbarian [i.e., the Moor] to shorten Julianus his misery, gives
  him a weapon, the Moore hath another, with intent to runne ful-butt at
  one another[.] Much in-treaty being made to let Jacynta dye nobly, tis
  promist, and then they both being ready to runne, the Moore snatches
  Jacynta before him, and so the Father kils his own Daughter ... ("The
  Argument," 31-37)

The stage image in the moment before Julianus charges with his sword is loaded with symbolic meaning. Julianus cannot see what will happen, because he is blind; Jacinta cannot warn him, because she has no tongue. But the audience can see what is about to happen. The sequence therefore replicates in symbolic form their earlier conversation, in which the audience knew that Julianus was wrong to ignore Jacinta's fears. Even at that early stage, Julianus was metaphorically blind, and Jacinta was silenced. (24) Jacinta's death is therefore a second incident in which her voice is depicted as necessary to her survival, rather than immoral. In addition, the stabbing of Jacinta is symbolic, for throughout the play Rowley has associated swords with phallic imagery. (25) Jacinta's death by sword is therefore a metaphoric rape: by failing to protect her, Julianus has effectively raped his own daughter. By reminding the audience of Julianus's failure to protect Jacinta, Rowley implicitly shifts the blame for the rape onto him. He does so, it would seem, in order to deny the injunctions to silence and self-destruction that are encoded in the Lucrece image that Julianus advocated. The symbolic meaning of Jacinta's death argues strongly in favor of her right to express her mind and to contradict her father.

Jacinta's voice is also important elsewhere in the scene. When Julianus begs the Moor not to cut out Jacinta's tongue, Jacinta tells him to spare his breath:

    I shall have mentall prayers left for heaven,
    Fuller effectuall then this tongue can utter,
    And for the author of my wrongs and sinne,
    I shall have harty curses left within.
    (5.5.49-52)

Again, Jacinta's interior subjectivity is depicted as independent of her father's, and the audience must be expected to remember the independence of her speech when he tells his now tongueless daughter, "Farewell Jacinta ... / I know thy soule returnes a thanks to me" (170-71), and then recommends that she kill herself to avoid the humiliation of capture. (26) Can Julianus really know what Jacinta is thinking? The play has continually demonstrated that her opinions are independent of her father's, and that all his attempts to speak for her have resulted in disaster.

It appears, then, that Rowley wanted to write a play in which the blame for rape was shifted away from the victim and onto the patriarchal suppression of female speech and agency. In the final tableau, Rowley uses the traditional image of the tongueless rape victim in such a way as to remind the audience of her powerlessness before the event, as well as after it, and to criticize that powerlessness. Indeed, the dangers of not listening to Jacinta are emphasized throughout the play, as she warns other characters against foolhardy decisions: she warns Roderick about the fires of hell when he threatens her in 2.1; and when Julianus plans his mad revenge on Roderick, he ignores her pleas to calm down and be rational (4.1.135-38). Although it has been argued that she is demonized as a revenger (Bamford, 129), Jacinta in fact runs to her father for "safety," not revenge (3.1.94), and refers all pleas for vengeance to the will of heaven and hell. (27) All may be lost by lust in the play, but Jacinta is the only character who continually opposes lust in all its shapes. It might seem paradoxical that Jacinta counsels restraint while not restraining her own voice within the bounds of conventional modesty, but Rowley's point is surely that Jacinta's voice should not be restrained because she speaks the truth.

Instead of effacing the problematic status of the rape victim by blaming or silencing her, Rowley thus uses an articulate, self-defining woman as the moral center of his play. This means that the bleak ending of his tragedy takes on a different meaning than in the Spanish sources. Far from blaming Florinda/Jacinta for the destruction of the state and its usurpation by the tyrannical Moor, Rowley suggests that when Jacinta, the truth-telling heroine, is finally silenced, the play can end only with the replacement of one cruel ruler with another.

In conclusion, we must ask why William Rowley was the only writer to overtly question the assumptions of the rape tragedy. (28) Rowley's remarkably radical attitude in this play may have been encouraged by his career in performing clown roles, (29) for the clown is a character who specializes in holding up social conventions for ridicule. The clown articulates a "countervoice" from "outside the representative ideologies" (Weimann, 157-59), and his subversive humor comes from "his inability or refusal to understand differences" (Bristol, 140). Lorraine Helms notes that since clowns are invariably male, they rarely "concentrate their gestic subversiveness on the inequalities of age and gender" (556). Yet William Rowley was both playwright and clown, and we can speculate that when a clown writes a play, his need to construct female characters might result in a perspective different than that of conventional playwrights. Certainly, a speech in All's Lost by Lust by the clownish Jaques, who was "personated by the Poet," according to the Quarto, demonstrates that a clown's topsy-turvy viewpoint can provide a radical perspective on gender relations. Admiring his sister's good looks, and considering himself equally attractive, Jaques conjures a surreal fantasy in which he contemplates the arbitrariness of gender division:

  When we two tumbled both in a belly together, little did our mother
  thinke which should have beene the Madam; I might have beene cut the
  tother way iffaith, if it had pleased the sisters three[;] if the
  Midwife had but knowne my minde when I was borne, I had beene two
  stone lighter ... pretty trim Lady, I thinke we are eyde alike ...
  (3.2.67-75)

In this bizarre speech, Jaques assumes that his identity is formed before his birth, while his sex is determined afterward, and then only by the midwife's knife. He therefore articulates ideas, rarely found in literature of the period, about the independence of the mind from biological sex. The speech is the product of the skewed logic of a clown, and yet it articulates the possibility that male and female minds are not inherently different--an idea that is fundamental to Rowley's attitude toward the rape tragedy. Perhaps, therefore, a life spent playing roles that subverted the rigid moralities of the "serious" drama may have directed Rowley's more serious writing toward examinations of characters whose positions were more morally complex than was allowed by the strict ideologies underpinning conventional dramatic structures. If we are to seek exceptions to the hegemonic patriarchal ideology of the drama, perhaps we need to focus on popular writers, rather than on the more learned writers of the period. (30)

Notes

1. All's Lost by Lust is cited from the 1633 Quarto; for convenience, act, scene, and line references are keyed to Stork's edition. I have adapted the punctuation to aid clarity. Q frequently prints prose as verse, and I have therefore adjusted some of the lineation; capitalization has been adapted accordingly.

2. It is not explicitly clear that Lavinia in Titus acquiesces in her own murder, but her obedience to her father elsewhere in the play makes it likely that the scene is intended to be performed this way (Lamb, 219).

3. The only complications to this simple division are the related plays Women Beware Women (1621) by Thomas Middleton, and The Changeling (1622) by Middleton and Rowley, which can be grouped as an unusual subgenre. In both, sexual acts take place (the acts committed between the duke and Bianca, and between DeFlores and Beatrice) that have been read as either rapes or seductions. Neither Bianca nor Beatrice commits suicide after these events, although, as in All's Lost, both are ultimately murdered. Catty points out that these plays are different from most rape plays in that Middleton does not represent the victims as innocent: he shifts the audience's sympathy away from Bianca by making her fall in love with her rapist. Catty argues that this is done in order to make the audience question whether the rape was really nonconsensual (93). The same argument can be applied to Beatrice, who also comes to love her rapist. These two plays attempt to efface rape by emphasising the heroine's complicity with her rapist (see Burks, who uses this phrase in connection with The Changeling). Thus, although they depart from some of the conventions, these plays do not attempt to present an indisputably virtuous rape victim, as All's Lost does.

4. This passage is discussed in this context by Bamford (158).

5. For a discussion of this change in the law, see Baines, 82-48. Bamford summarizes the debate, erring on the side of those who see the post-1577 law as still primarily property-oriented (3).

6. Painter's version alters the original slightly. In Livy, Lucretia says "though I acquit myself of the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment; nor in time to come shall ever unchaste woman live through the example of Lucretia" (1.58.10-11). In Livy, then, Lucretia kills herself so that other women will not be able to claim rape falsely: if they wish to prove their innocence, they too must kill themselves. Livy's Lucretia thus has a different purpose in her suicide than Painter's, but both versions rely on the assumption that a rape victim cannot remain alive if she wishes to be seen as virtuous.

7. Aquinas agrees with Augustine that virginity is a state of mind, and that integrity of the flesh is irrelevant, although he does not refer directly to rape.

8. Donaldson discusses the indeterminacy of Shakespeare's poem on the mind/body question (44-49). See also Maus ("Taking," 69-75) and Baines (86).

9. For a concise summary of the conventions, see Bamford, 7-8, 156.

10. I am unconvinced by Gossett's argument for a fourth difference: the fact that Jacinta is a virgin, while in most other tragedies, the victim is a married woman. Gossett argues that Rowley here "removed a critical part of the usual justification for suicide following a rape ... Jacinta has no husband the purity of whose line she must maintain" (317-18). However, while Jacinta lacks a husband, she has a father, who considers himself dishonored by the rape: her virginity is as precious to him as her fidelity would be to a husband. Indeed, the version of the Roderick tale in The Life and Death of Mahomet explicitly describes Count Julian as "sensible of his daughters dishonor (which reflected upon him)" (sig. D5r). Although virgin rape victims are rare in the drama, they are very important in the debates about rape in the period: St. Augustine discusses them alongside Lucretia, and Baines points out that most rape trials were concerned with men accused of raping virgins (72). Furthermore, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, though briefly married, is a widow when she is raped, and her revenge is carried out by her father.

11. On this aspect of rape tragedies, see Bamford, 80-82.

12. For concise summaries of the legend and its relationship to historical events, see Thompson, 249-51, and Glick, 31-32.

13. E. Levi-Provencal, Histoire de L'Espagne Musulmane, 3 vols. (Paris: Maison-neuve, 1950), 1:14-15. Quoted and translated in Bamford, 106.

14. Relevant to this point is Leonard Tennenhouse's argument that rape can be used to signify a political act in which one faction exerts power over another (106-12). Jacinta's rape can certainly be read this way; Roderick, immediately after plotting to rape Jacinta, describes a "hot invasion" in which the Moors "Intend upon our confines" (1.1.19, 21), an image that uses the female body to signify the boundaries of a kingdom. And it is Roderick's invasion of Jacinta's body--which is often described in warlike terms (e.g., 1.1.106-7, 2.2.105-7)--that ultimately causes the invasion of the Moors. However, the national-political symbolism is not the only meaning of Jacinta's rape; the play's focus on her speech and on Julianus's lust for war are aspects that direct attention to questions about private morality as well as national cohesion--as Detmer-Goebel puts it, plays of this period demonstrate an interest in "rape as rape," not only as "a metaphor for chaos or disorder" (76).

15. No certain English source has been found for All's Lost, although any or all of the works I have cited could have been used by Rowley. All of the English retellings omit the story of the mysterious locked chamber that Roderick breaks into. This feature is present in some of the medieval Spanish romanceros or ballad-collections concerned with Roderick. The characteristics of these ballads are usefully summarized, with some parallel-text translations, by Bryant, 116-25; the ballad on 116-17 offers an example of the story of the locked chamber. Although Bamford suggests that Rowley could read Spanish (196n63), the evidence does not seem strong, and it is easier to assume that Rowley--who was not an educated man--simply heard the story of the chamber, or read it in a lost English source.

16. Lodge and Milles lay the blame on "Rodorigo," describing him as a man who "lost his kingdome and life thorough his own incontinence" (Lodge, sig. H2v; Milles, 684). According to them, Julian's daughter was "verie honest and vertuous," and Rodorigo was guilty of "enforcing hir, he satisfied his lewd and dissolute lust" (H2v); no blame is laid on Julian or his daughter. De Mayerne Turquet notes that the daughter of Julian was "called Caba or Cava," but does not translate the name, and lays the blame for the downfall of Spain firmly on "Roderic'"s vice and on Julian, who was wrong to "wickedly revenge this privat injurie by the ruine of the whole kingdome" (sig. O.vr). Newton calls the daughter "no lesse pernitious to Spayne, then faire Helena was to the Troyanes," but concludes with Roderic "moved with repentance, because he knew himself to be the cause & occasioner of all this mishap" (K.ivr). The only exception I have found is The Life and Death of Mahomet (1637), attributed on its title page to Sir Walter Raleigh, but in fact based on a Spanish history of 1606 by Miguel de Luna (Chew, 466n2). In this version, Florinda sees herself as "the cause of the slaughter of so many Christians, the extinguishing of Religion and the utter subversion of so flourishing a Kingdome," and commits suicide because "her selfe shee censured unworthie of life in being the cause of such irreperable mischiefs" (sig. F11v). However, this text was not published until after Rowley's death.

17. See, for example, Woodbridge, who discusses the play in the context of positive representations of "assertive women" who "speak their minds" (244).

18. Female anger was often viewed as threatening in the Renaissance; see Lamb, who shows that Renaissance adaptations of the Philomel tale tend to efface the character's anger (216-28); Dolan, who notes the common association of anger with witchcraft (196-98); and Kennedy, whose study of the representation of female anger emphasizes the link between anger, agency, and autonomy (162).

19. It might seem odd that Rowley makes Jacinta rail at Lothario rather than Roderick himself. Bamford suggests that Lothario was substituted for the king in order to avoid political censorship; making Lothario the object of invective rather than Roderick himself frees Rowley to make the language as strong as possible (197n70).

20. Even Titus, who remains affectionate toward his daughter, ultimately kills her to save the family from shame. Some characters in Valentinian argue that Lucina should not kill herself, but they are overruled.

21. Gossett points out that Jacinta too, though offended at the idea of marrying the Moor, never says that she is unavailable for marriage because of the soil of rape (318).

22. As in the Spanish legends, Julianus's revenge is depicted as an error of judgment: Bowers shows that although a public revenge could be considered justifiable, Julianus's is wrong because it is conducted for the purposes of settling a private injury (200-202). De Mayerne Turquet's retelling of the legend criticizes Julianus's desire to "wickedly revenge this privat injurie by the ruine of the whole kingdome" (sig. O.vr).

23. Aside from Jacinta, the only exceptions to this rule are the daughters in Fletcher's Bonduca who commit suicide for reasons unconnected with their rapes. However, in this play, the rapes of the daughters are not the central focus, and the daughters are demonized by Fletcher as wild, obsessive revengers (Bamford, 116-21). Their public suicides are represented as a necessity, unlike Jacinta's cruel and unnecessary murder by the demonic Moor.

24. Mooney notes the symbolic connection of Julianus's blindness with his misinterpretation of the Lucretia story (105), but does not articulate the other parallels between the two scenes, such as Jacinta's speechlessness.

25. E.g., 1.2.46-52; 2.2.19-20; 3.1.64-65.

26. The reason for this proposed suicide is not articulated explicitly, but it seems clear from the context. Gossett expresses puzzlement that Julianus uses Cleopatra and Portia as exemplars for Jacinta at this point, since neither were raped (318), but the reason is presumably that both killed themselves to avoid being captured by enemies. This demonstrates once again that the play does not assume that Jacinta should commit suicide because of the rape.

27. See 2.1.141-42; 3.1.56-57; 5.5.49-52. Although the prayer to hell may seem ominous, the belief in devils as agents of God's wrath is a common one in the Renaissance, and indeed is mentioned when Julianus tells the Moor that "this worke / Is none of thine, tis heavens mercifull justice, / For thou art but the executioner, / The master hangman" (5.5.134-37).

28. The only rape play that approaches the radicalism of All's Lost in questioning the typical conventions is Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent (c. 1620), which may use irony to highlight its ideological contradictions. In this play, the victim, Castiza, discovers that her rapist was in fact her husband in disguise, and that, in the legal framework of the period, the event was not rape at all. Castiza's reaction to the news is, "it is [too] greate a joy for Life" (5.2.275). Seventeenth-century audiences may have agreed with Castiza that the revelation that she is "neither by consent / or act of violence stained" (5.2.261-62) is an occasion for joy. Catty, however, suggests that Middleton's language "seems self-conscious ... about its problematic implications" (117). Lines such as "never was poore Ladye / so mockt into false terror" (3.2.117-18) seem deliberately jarring, and are perhaps intended to highlight the absurdity of the notion that rape by a husband does not constitute violence. However, Middleton's use of irony means that his play's subversive nature is implicit rather than obvious. Rowley's approach is less ambiguous, relying on the audience's sympathy with a virtuous woman forced unjustly into an unacceptable social position, and on the direct speech of Jacinta and Julianus, rather than on the audience's recognition of ironies. Rowley's didactic method is thus more overtly radical than Middleton's irony.

29. There is abundant evidence that Rowley specialized in performing clown roles (see Bentley, 556).

30. An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at a seminar on "Pulp Drama and Sensationalism" at the Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Victoria, BC, April 2003. I would like to thank Jessica Slights, organizer of the seminar, and the seminar participants, particularly Adam Max Cohen, M. J. Kidnie, Laurie E. Osborne, and William H. Sherman for their helpful comments.

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