ABSTRACT
As Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and Roberta Mock (2011) have pointed out, “bodies are the material through which theatre researchers most often discuss performance … Whether performing or spectating, bodies are often the means for understanding how performance operates and makes meaning” (210). This chapter will consider the performances of Lucrezia Borgia and of some of the women of her entourage – in particular Angela Borgia, Lucrezia’s cousin and lady-in-waiting – during the years before and after the death of the Ferrarese poet Ercole Strozzi. Many documents, for example, insist on Lucrezia’s isolation during the period following Ercole Strozzi’s death: she refused to receive people in her rooms and showed no desire to hold court. Scholars and biographers tend to explain Lucrezia’s behavior as the result of a severe depression. However, it is possible to re-read Lucrezia’s isolation as a series of performances apt to project the private domestic space to which she was “restricted” into the public sphere. Lucrezia’s refusal to leave her rooms could represent a rebellion against dominant codes that served to regulate the ways and times a duchess was to appear in public. In fact, as this chapter shows, when she finally did leave her room and appear publicly it was in the most peculiar ways. In addition, this chapter will investigate how Lucrezia’s awareness of the ways in which self-representation could be coded was paralleled by bodily practices that tended to challenge contemporary moral standards.
