In AD 48, Valeria Messalina — wife of the Emperor Claudius, mother
of his children, and the most feared woman in Rome — staged a public
wedding with another man while her husband was away.
She was twenty-six years old. She was executed within days.
Ancient historians called her a nymphomaniac, a monster, a cautionary
tale. They wrote about her body and her appetites. They rarely wrote
about her mind.
Messalina Her Fall is a tragedy in five acts that asks a different
question: what if she was the most intelligent political operator in
Rome — and the tragedy is not that she was shameless, but that she
was wasted?
The play is written in the tradition of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall,
using blank verse and the theatrical conventions of the English
Renaissance. It follows Messalina from the height of her influence
through her decision to marry Gaius Silius publicly — the one act
that converted private power into public treason — to her death,
alone, in the gardens of Lucullus.
It is a play about jealousy as governance, lust as politics, and what
happens to a first-rate mind in a world too narrowly framed to
contain it.
nelsonmarcelino 