“No Dame Hereafter Living”: Shakespeare’s Ekphrastic Critique of the Troubling Legacy of Roman Female Virtue

In his poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis—the virtuosic description of a piece of art such as a painting, tapestry, or tableau—to critique the Roman ideal of female virtue. After her husband’s description of her beauty incites Tarquin to rape her, Lucrece processes her wrong and positions herself heroically by identifying herself with the figure of Hecuba in a painting of the fall of Troy. She then commits suicide, and her body becomes a vehicle of political renewal, prompting Roman men to revolt against the Tarquins and found the Roman Republic. Shakespeare’s wronged Roman women imitate Lucrece, ekphrastically orienting themselves to destruction in hopes of effecting political change. Tracing Lucrece-inspired moments of ekphrasis across multiple plays reveals how Shakespeare is in conversation with ancient literary techniques, critiques of Stoicism, and the moral concerns about Lucrece’s suicide raised in the Christian tradition. I argue that Shakespeare’s deliberate omission of ekphrasis from the story of the Stoic Portia highlights her suicide as unnecessary and reveals the self-destructive power of the Roman ideal of female virtue. While we may be tempted to think of ekphrasis as purely decorative, in these ekphrastic moments, poetics, philosophy, and political action are intertwined.