Empowerment through Communication in Shakespeare’s Lucrece: Transitioning from Economic to Artistic Transactions

Abstract

It is the metaphoric doubling of past into present that gave Renaissance ekphrastic representations its techniques of self-understanding. In effect, in the ekphrastic doubling of the past in the present, we notice that historicity becomes an inalienable part of its contemporary credibility. The reduction of distance between life and art, as evident in contemporary obsession with selfies and photographs, thus begins to become the central project of early modern ekphrasis, enhanced in the Renaissance. In sum, art becomes equivalent to legal tender, and ekphrasis, a principle of exchange and substitution, through which objects and artefacts seem to be in danger of losing their particularities and gaining new generic human values. When Shakespeare wrote The Rape of Lucrece (1593–1594), it was ekphrasis that allowed Shakespeare to speak about the ills of his own times through a Greco-Roman subject. The metaphorical implications that his story has for the issues of good government and private and public security embedded in colonial mercantilism are implicit in his tropological practice. And in doing so, Shakespeare conducts an ekphrastic economy of exchange, which is in this sense the intransitive art of shielding life.