Virginia: un soggetto politico per la tragedia tra Sei e Settecento

Abstract

The paper takes into account several tragedies based on the Roman subject – drawn by Titus Livius – of Appio and Virginia, composed in English, French and Italian between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to show how the subject's progressive refinement allows the dramatists to cope with essential matters of the Early modern political philosophy, from the relationship between the sovereign and the law to the gap between public and private happiness. The analysis aims to prove that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the subject of Virginia becomes an unavoidable passage for dramatist interested in representing political tragedies.