ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece demonstrates how rhetoric produces the mechanism of desire by which female resistance incites rape. Dolan discusses how moral treatises on cosmetics analogized the 'painting' of 'colors' on the face to the act of writing. While according to Dolan a woman 'can write only by rewriting herself', or artificially transforming her existing features, Shakespeare's poem suggests that the revision of previous forms is intrinsic to all artistic creation. Lucrece dramatizes how the poem was created, by focusing on the representational practices that both Shakespeare and his protagonist must engage in order to reproduce 'Lucrece the chaste'. Douglas A. Brooks argues that with the rise of print publication in Renaissance England, literary writers increasingly used metaphors of conception to describe the writer's close and proprietary relationship to his bibliographic offspring. However, Renaissance writers recognized that through identifying with fictions one could convincingly describe one's 'inner state of woe'.
