Baroque drama treats sovereignty’s exercise as willful and dangerous, not fated

Evidence

Its movement typically revolves around the person of the monarch, at once tyrant and martyr, a figure whose extravagant passions demonstrate the willfulness of sovereignty. Its theme is not tragic fate (from which nothing can be learned) but the mourning and sorrow that are invested in the dangerous exercise of social reason and social power. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 315