Politic sacrifice in Lucrecia y Tarquino

This paper analyses Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla's comedia, Lucrecia y Tarquino , in relation to the fraught body politics of an absolutist age. Diverging both from the eroticized Lucretias of Renaissance painting and from the antique Roman portrayal of Lucretia's martyrdom as a pathos‐ridden public spectacle that fueled Republican revolution, Rojas's Lucrecia is adapted to a conservative courtly milieu in which corporeal display is ridden with problematic connotations. By combining compelling performance and stringent decorum, Lucrecia embodies the ideals of an epoch marked at once by the recognition that the incitement of truculent emotion is a powerful political tool and by the belief in strict disciplining of the senses. While some have read Lucrecia's embodiment of female modesty as denoting a lack of agency, I show her to be a model of heroic action well suited to the conflicted post‐Machiavellian world where messianic idealism coexists with political pessimism.