Negotiating Politics and Popular Taste: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece.

In this essay, I analyse Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, a play that has often been marginalised in studies of Jacobean drama due to its perceived catering to popular taste rather than the political and thematic complexity found in some of Heywood’s other Jacobean plays. While The Rape of Lucrece has frequently been dismissed as an incoherent, crowd-pleasing play tailored to the uneducated audience at the Red Bull Theatre, I argue that such criticism underestimates the complexity and significance of the play in negotiating politics and popular taste in early seventeenth-century England. I begin by exploring how Heywood deftly adapts his historical source, Livy’s The History of Rome, to create a play that was both accessible and engaging for his popular audience at the Red Bull. Heywood, for example, makes significant changes to Livy’s historicalaccount of key events, such as the assassination of King Servius and the oracle given to Tarquin’s two sons and Brutus, rendering the play more dramatically entertaining. Moreover, Heywood turns the character of Sextus into a formidable antagonist, creating a spectacular, climactic confrontation with Brutus̶a fight which is not in Livy’s text. Heywood’s changes to Livy’s historical account reflect his understanding of the taste of his Red Bull audience for dramatic spectacle. I then demonstrate that The Rape of Lucrece is not merely a crowd-pleasing popular play, but it also carefully engages with the political tensions of the early Jacobean period. Heywood’s representations of Tarquin and Tullia, for example, evoke contemporary scepticism towards the rule of King James I, particularly his assertion of the divine right of kings and his concilliatory stance in foreign affairs. By anachronistically referring to the Roman senate as “parliament” and by likening Tarquin’s rule to that of a god, Heywood subtly enables the audience to associate the tyrannical king with James, allowing for an interpretation of the play as a critique of James’s policy. Yet the politics of Heywood’s play is not one-dimensional as such. While Heywood might have enabled his audience members at the Red Bull̶who were known for their anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish disposition̶to appreciate the play from anti-James standpoints, he was equally mindful of the ways in which his play could be appreciated by the supporters of James and his policy, taking great pains to render his potentially unsettling subject matter inoffensive, at least on the surface, to James and his regime. For example, Heywood carefully manages the potential dangers of depicting rebellion and regicide by portraying Tarquin as a usurper, thereby justifying his overthrow. Furthermore, the rebellion against Tarquin is presented as divinely sanctioned, as Brutus fulfills a prophecy which legitimises his actions. Ultimately, while the tyrannical king is deposed, the play stops short of criticising monarchism, as evidenced by the final scene where Collatine is crowned sole ruler̶a significant departure from Livy. I argue that, while engaging with potentially subversive themes, the play’s ambiguous attitudes towards regicide and monarchy made it politically safe to perform during James’s reign while remaining palatable to those who opposed his policy. Although the popularity of the play eventually waned and it is seldom mentioned in modern scholarship, I argue that The Rape of Lucrece is a pivotalplay that deserves renewed critical attention as it illuminates the artistic, commercial and political strategies of the Jacobean playwright who negotiated between theatre and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]