The Libertine Subversion of the Masque: The Case of John Wilmot's 'Lucina's Rape'

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, the (in)famous ‘court wit’ of king Charles II during the Restoration era, adapted John Fletcher’s Jacobean revenge tragedy The Tragedy of Valentinian, with the title Lucina’s Rape. Fletcher’s story – the cruel Roman emperor Valentinian rapes Lucina, the wife of his courtier Maximus, but she is revenged – stays the same in Wilmot’s version, but the focus changes significantly. The act of rape, taking place offstage, is ‘hidden’ by the noise of a court masque, both visually and musically. So the iconic magnificence of the masque, as a genre supposed to glorify kingship, is used to highlight royal hypocrisy in its most violent way.
This essay focuses on the representation of sexual violence as the antipode of the masque. The official theatricality of the masque implied that the magnificence of the spectacle supposedly expressed (and enhanced) the legitimacy of the King, governing by ‘divine right’. Confronting this magnificence with royal misdemeanor in a conspicuous way, the credibility of the court—Charles II’s—is problematized. The position of Wilmot raises questions about the political role libertinism – as an attitude and as a (philosophical) state of mind – has played at a moment English ‘governmentality’ shifts toward a constitutional regime and, consequently, renders magnificence, as a public (political) virtue, irrelevant.

ISBN:978-90-04-43264-2

Publication year:2020

Keywords:Magnificence, Masque, Libertinism, Restoration Era, English Court, Sexual Violence, 17th Century

Accessibility:Open