ABSTRACT
Shakespeare does something in Lucrece, as he begins the poem with the “Argument,” a relatively short prose synopsis of the story. In his account of Shakespeare’s linguistic play, David Willbern writes that Lucrece is “about the process of writing—or of imaginatively conceiving a traumatic act and inscribing that conception on the page.” The Argument turns out to be primarily about the political implications of the story and it begins and ends with Tarquin. The story of Lucrece is important to this text, but mainly because her rape is the catalyst for the political change that is the Argument’s main subject. In other words, the Argument can be considered as a form of ecphrasis, and ecphrasis will turn out to be an important part of the poem as a whole. Throughout Lucrece, but especially at the beginning, Shakespeare emphasizes not only description but also how those descriptions are interpreted.
