ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the reasons behind the international success of Scipione Maffei’s tragedy Merope, first staged in 1713, then translated all over Europe, and reproduced many times by several eighteenth-century dramatists who wrote their own Merope, drawing the subject from Maffei’s play. It asserts that a big cause of its triumph was the staging of a popular protest against the tyrant introduced in the end of the tragedy. However, the representation of the people’s political claims does not convey republican ideas, as someone recently suggested. This survey demonstrates that the people’s revolt in Maffei’s tragedy, and in other plays insisting on this plot, is characterized by the will to return to the status quo ante, and that Merope expresses instead a strong absolutist thought.
