This explains why Junius uses the dead body of Lucretia to his political ends. His dealing of rape belongs to the nineteenth century melodramatic imagination according to which the violation of a woman stands as a metaphor for the violation of a people, namely a threat to political order and popular sovereignty. There are major legal and mental ruptures that distinguish the Shakespearian era from Britten’s era. With Yehudi Menuhin they went to the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen, which had been liberated by the British army, to play for the survivors and it was there that they witnessed the devastating outcome of the Nazi occupation on the European Jews. Britten was in the United States and returned to England in 1942. At the very foundations of Europe lies the rape of Europa by the bull.īenjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia uses a historical event - a rape in sixth century BC Rome that served as a catalyst for the fall of a corrupt, dictatorial and belligerent regime and led to the establishment of the republic- represented famously in Shakespeare’s poem but which resonates strongly the immediate post-Second World War Europe. The historical and metaphorical uses of rape and its mythology are of no secondary importance either. Narratives are shaped by the social and legal frameworks that define the position of women and the meaning of rape depends on this position.

From the gang rapes in India to the rapes in Srebrenica and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, the meanings and uses of rape vary, as they vary in relation to whether they are performed in patriarchal societies or in liberal ones, in antiquity or in the modern era, in situations of war or in private. This should not imped us from approaching rape as a historical phenomenon and thus from analyzing it rather than attribute to it a pre-civilized status. The coincidence illustrates only too well that the frequency with which a rape happens all over the world signals that the phenomenon is at the heart of our era and our civilization both in situations of crisis and in everyday life. The production by Waltraud Lehner has arrived at a time when the ominous sexual attacks of women happened in Köln.

Collatinus rape of lucretia