Performative iconicity

From the beginning of Shakespeare’s dramatic long poem The Rape of Lucrece, Tarquin and Lucrece are presented as antagonists: lust-breathed Tarquin (3) vs. chaste Lucrece (7). This opposition also connects them with one another, and the key to their relationship lies in a statement that is uttered late in the poem, when Lucrece is looking at the Troy painting and says: “These contraries such unity do hold” (1558). The characterisation of both Tarquin and Lucrece on the level of content is mirrored on the level of language. For example, when Tarquin in the second line of the epyllion is described to be “borne by the trustless wings of false desire”, the apparent parallelism (adjective followed by a noun) in fact contains an antagonistic structure. Throughout the poem, the inner debate that characterises him before the rape of Lucrece is presented in terms of self-division on the level of content; linguistically, this is rendered by means of chiasmus. In the following, I will show that the relations of synonymy and parallelism as well as of chiasmus and oxymoron can be found throughout the poem, and that they are part of the larger setup of the text in that they imitate the content iconically, i.e. form and meaning correspond to each other. They also become performative as the language enacts the content. Parallelism and chiasmus are part of the semiotic setup and of the dramatic structure of the poem, and they go beyond mere poetic form and content (in the sense of action) as they are also part of the complex technique of character representation.