ABSTRACT

This chapter examines Lucrece's creaturely world, including its "things", showing how the poem's creaturely abundance and its lively non-living actants are related. The poem is about human bodies and souls; however, those human concerns seem intimately related to the birds, beasts, and object actants and actors that Lucrece lives among. The creaturely reading in this chapter may suggest that a categorical subject-object distinction is a feature of a world later than Shakespeare's world and the one he created in The Rape of Lucrece. The Rape of Lucrece will enable to explore the differentiation of the creaturely world and also to investigate the relations of that world with the material world humans created. As much as Lucrece classifies the creaturely world into birds, beasts, and humans, it also, and perhaps primarily, classifies it into predators and prey; that predator/prey division crosses bird and beast classifications in the poem.