The Pope’s DaughterDario Fo, trans. Antony Shugaar (Europa editions, 208 PP, £10.99)Tablet bookshop price £9.90• tel 01420 592974
Just as modern biographers of Catherine the Great have to “get past the horses”, as one Russian historian put it to me delicately, so anyone wanting to restore Lucrezia Borgia’s image has to clean up multiple spatters: adulteress, incestuous lover, poisoner, inveterate schemer, political honey-trap. In one of the most effective rehabilitations of a bad girl since Madonna shelved her pointy bras and took up environmental causes, Dario Fo recasts Lucrezia as a powerful political administrator, both in Rome and Ferrara, a patron of the arts, an early form of social democrat, establishing a credit union for the less well of
14 January 2016, The Tablet
Unlikely heroine
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