Although commentators of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece have generally used the theme of ‘rape’ evident in the poem’s title in order to broach questions of gender, it is not difficult to make the connection between the rape of a woman, in its contemporary physical sense, and the broader military figure of the ‘siege’ -- a military operation carried out by an armed force whose purpose is to gain entry and control of a position or fortification. Indeed, when the poem is read with the notion of a siege in mind, physical rape becomes just one of the many sieges which the poem recounts, from the Romans besieging Ardea to Tarquin’s internal struggle between reason and desire, to the siege of Troy depicted in the painting which Lucrece contemplates and finally the poet-narrator’s siege of the listener/reader with his eye-witness account and comments on the events and the thoughts of the protagonists, to provide just four examples.
    Not all of these sieges refer to a military operation but all can be justified by the discourse of the poem which makes it more explicit through the notions of ‘assailment’, ‘encirclement’, ‘containment’, ‘breach’ or ‘release’. Even the idea of the poet-narrator besieging his audience, which seems at first pure metaphor, gains credence in Titian’s painting Tarquin and Lucretia, in which the tableau of Tarquin threatening Lucrece with a dagger also shows a mysterious figure holding back the curtain and watching what is going on.
    The paper, therefore, will focus principally on the ‘siege’ as the key figure of the poem, and on the consequences for both representation and interpretation; in particular, the way in which sieges initially appreciated from an ‘outside the walls’ standpoint achieve their effect by being turned ‘outside in’. In this context, the unusual role of the narrator-poet is commented on. The key theoretical input comes from Derrida’s The Truth in Painting which explores in different ways the difficulties of intepretation of meaning based on traditional analysis.