How do tragedies define the perpetrator and victim? To what extent are violent actions indexed to the gender of the criminal? To what extent does gender identity inform the representation of tragic crimes? The question is particularly acute, and thus the investigation interesting, in sixteenth-century tragedy because the distinction and definition of identities is at the heart of the gender quarrel while ancient figures are common material in tragedies and treatises. This theoretical context invites us to postulate that if fictional crimes reflect the hesitations and debates of their times, they also contribute to the clarification of gender identities and prerogatives.My hypothesis is that dramatic violence, through the play of plot and the relationships between characters in particular, exacerbates the distinctions but also the convergences and points of friction between identities and thereby contributes to their definition.To conduct the study, we propose to focus on a few plays that show violence by men on young girls, such as Iphigenia (Erasmus, 1506; Sébillet, 1549), Iphis (Buchanan, Jephtes, 1554) or Philomela (Procne from Correr, ca. 1426, ed. 1558, and from Parabosco, 1548). How is the violence motivated - sacrificial infanticide or rape - and how are the perpetrator and the victim represented respectively? We will also be interested in this perspective in the consent of the young girl. We will ask, in particular, if violence can be aggregated to gender, that is to say, if it can be generically compatible or if, on the contrary, it contributes to de-gendering or even to dehumanizing. With its bloody revenge and its final metamorphosis, the adventure of Philomela and Procne constitutes a privileged material to compare masculine and feminine crimes.In order to refine and test the first results of the investigation, it seems interesting to compare this first corpus with tragedies featuring more mature female characters, guilty of the same crime, such as Medea infanticide (La Péruse, 1555 and Galladei, 1558), or of an equally reprehensible sexual act, such as Philanire consenting to adultery (Roillet, Philanire, 1556 and 1563).It is, in short, the notion of sexed/gendered crime that this corpus of 16th century tragedies leads to propose and reflect upon.