By it he undoes not Lucretia but kingship itself. Tarquin's is an offence against the body politic. The intruder is the comrade and kinsman of her absent husband, and 'issue of a king'. Lucretia is not a foreign woman to be borne off as part of the spoils of war, but a Roman citizen violated in her own bed. The crux of her story is her suicide, which emulates the other noble Romans who chose death before dishonour, virtually all of whom were men. In hundreds of depictions, though she is shown as bare-breasted, she is on the point not of sex but of death, menaced not by a rapist but by a rapier wielded by her own hand.

Lucretia is not usually an erotic subject. Shakespeare's favourite artist, Giulio Romano, is responsible for one of the sexiest depictions of this subject, in which the eagle tries to kiss the weeping boy's soft lips with his hard beak. The most ravishing of all rape victims must be the boy Ganymede who was swept off his feet by Jupiter in the guise of an eagle.

The perpetrator of rape is always male but the victim is not always female. In the same way, Europa, who was mythically raped by Zeus disguised as a bull, is always shown on top of a magnificent white animal, rather than the other way about. Instead we see tumbling mother-of-pearl bodies being heaved on to the Centaurs' backs. In Rubens's Rape of the Sabine Women, we do not see the Centaurs forcefully penetrating the women. Though feminist critics may argue that the humiliation of women is a spectacle that masculinist culture never tires of, it is seldom actual rape that is depicted. Rape cannot make sense but narratives must.

To render it in any other way, as if it had some kind of internal logic, would be to deny its essential character. To assist at such a spectacle would be at least as degrading as - and no more informative than - watching a dogfight. But it could hardly be done in a way that would make such criminal behaviour explicable. That does not mean some playwright or other has not written a spectacle of prolonged sexual assault, in which characters are repeatedly raped and sodomised. Of itself it can have no motivation and no psychology. It is a catastrophe, and as such can only function as the end of one story and the beginning of another. Rape has no duration and no narrative content.

Violated heroine english version