Poetizar el dolor de la mujer en la Modernidad temprana inglesa: política de la forma en La violación de Lucrecia, de William Shakespeare

Abstract

The Rape of Lucrece allows for a gendered political and literary reading. The narrative poem rewrites classical sources that deal with the passage in the state government from kings to consuls in the context of the English Renaissance as the expression of the secularising and anthropocentric Early Modernity. This transition is artistically correlated. The protagonist is first the object of a language that idealises her, responsible for the sexual violence that victimises her. Such language is replaced by one which acknowledges her material beauty due to the presence of desire. This desire, however, is not subject to reflection and does not relate her beautiful features to an individuality with its own will. From the painful experience of rape, Lucrece tries to forsake her condition as an object and attempts to become a subject. This process is possible at the artistic level of poetry, though it does not unfold onto the public sphere because the emerging political regime reduces her pain to a private instance and does not allot some social space for her to undergo her period of mourning, which triggers the tragic denouement.