Performing the Self and Staging the Other: Scripting the Legend of Lucretia in Early Modern England

In England, throughout the early modern period and beyond, the Rape of Lucretia served as a central intertext for literary and non-literary works engaging with the subject of transgression. Not only did legal tracts and social pamphlets prescribe a woman to behave analogously to Lucretia after rape in order to contest the innocence of her soul through her bodily performance. Allegorically, the legend′s iteration within new cultural contexts in contemporary English historiography and drama provided a powerful subtext with which national histories and identities were scripted according to a familiar plot structure in order to represent 'the Turk′ and thereby to interpret and control what was perceived to be a threat to English identity and sovereignty at a time of intensifying Anglo-Ottoman encounters. This paper not only demonstrates the re-staging of the Rape of Lucretia in different texts and contexts; it examines the way in which the national identities and cultural encounters are represented and performed through the legend in order to stage the self and the Other within the radical discourse of alterity in contemporary proto-orientalist contexts.