In Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, the desire to know, access, and capture hidden truth manifests in three different acts of violence: Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece, Lucrece’s slashing of a painting, and Lucrece’s stabbing of herself.  Tarquin and Lucrece commit these acts in large part because they believe that by breaching surfaces—skin and canvas—they will access the truths hidden behind those surfaces.  Tarquin will know the Lucrece hidden behind the heraldry of her red and white skin; Lucrece will know the Sinon hidden behind the surface of the canvas; and by slashing through her own skin, Lucrece will access and expose her still chaste soul. 

            As my paper will demonstrate, the Rape of Lucrece places violence at the precarious intersection not, as Tarquin and Lucrece places violence, between obfuscation and truth, but rather between imagination and perception, between representational words and images.  And as real, violent acts, they express Tarquin and Lucrece’s shared desire to subject the referents of words and images to direct perception—to reduce that which can be imagined by the mind’s eye to that which is directly perceived.

            Thus, The Rape of Lucrece emerges as Shakespeare’s extended exploration into the ethics and effects of perspectival art in the early modern period. For as, Shakespeare demonstrates, art that achieves the illusion of depth also arouses in the beholder a desire to know what is beyond the surface, for example, of the canvas.  This desire, which manifests as a violent breaching of surface, unleashes a violence that is not, at least in the end of Shakespeare’s poem, contained.  Indeed, as I will argue, for Shakespeare it is perspectival representation, and all its concomitant conflations and cognitive slippages that inspire, at the end of the poem, war.