ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's sympathy toward women helps to create an attitude toward rape that is more generous and less foolish than that of many of our contemporaries. He shows how defenseless women are before sexual violence and the large destructiveness it entails. Forced sexual submission enforces female death. In The Rape of Lucrece, Brutus thinks Lucrece's suicide a final act of excess in a Rome Tarquin and his family have ruled. In Titus Andronicus, Marcus asks for compassion for his niece and shows her how to publicize her plight. Moderate women who play prominent, articulate roles defending the victimized woman in Shakespeare's explorations of sexual jealousy, are missing from the examinations of rape. Their absence starkly points to women's inability to control and to influence in benign ways the public structures that judge rape and the psychosexual needs that generate it. Shakespeare warns his audience about breakdowns in the boundaries on male sexuality, showing rapists as vicious and out of control.
