Self-Judgment as the Worst Judgment

Lucrece has now told her husband and his companions of her rape, but has not yet named the perpetrator.  They have vowed to seek vengeance.  But she first asks them about the "stain" on her body from the violation, arguing for her own innocence as if they had thought her guilty:

'O, speak,' quoth she,
'How may this forced stain be wiped from me? 

'What is the quality of mine offence,
Being constrain'd with dreadful circumstance?
May my pure mind with the foul act dispense,
My low-declined honour to advance?
May any terms acquit me from this chance?
The poison'd fountain clears itself again;
And why not I from this compelled stain?' 

With this, they all at once began to say,
Her body's stain her mind untainted clears

So they do not judge her harshly, but recognize her as victim.

Turning away "with a joyless smile," she rejects this rational and fair-minded approach in favor of her own self-judgment.

(The subsequent clash of mourning from her father Lucretius and her husband Collantine over her dead body - who loved her most? - reminds me of the graveside clash of Ophelia's sometime love and her brother.)

Brutus intervenes in this unseemly quarrel, and again reaffirms that Lucrece was innocent and her death unnecessary:

Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself, that should have slain her foe.

Curiously, the vengeance ultimately inflicted on Tarquin is banishment, rather than death.