Lucretia’s Lines of Flight

Multimodal Representations of the Rape of Lucretia

Abstract

Lucretia’s rape and her inner turmoil after the violation has been the subject of countless poems, dramas, paintings, and musical compositions over the past two millennia. In my paper, I focus on how the myth of Lucretia appears Benjamin Britten’s opera, The Rape of Lucretia (1946). In particular, I would like to address the 2013 Glyndebourne performance directed by Fiona Shaw (and adapted to the screen by Francois Roussillon [2015]). I will examine how Shaw departs from Britten, and how her staging enters into discussion with long-standing interpretive traditions to re-create Lucretia’s ethical and psychological stance.