Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe

Andrew Hiscock locates Shakespeare's history plays within debates over the status and function of violence in a nation's culture.

Andrew Hiscock (Author)

9781108830188, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 February 2022

290 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe is another major study by Andrew Hiscock, one of our leading commentators on early modern cultural and intellectual history … [It] marks a significant contribution to our collective understanding of how violence figured in early modern cultural debate, and how Shakespeare's creative engagement with English history … helped to introduce and sustain such debate …' Rory Loughnane, Modern Language Review

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe broadens our understanding of the final years of the last Tudor monarch, revealing the truly international context in which they must be understood. Uncovering the extent to which Shakespeare's dramatic art intersected with European politics, Andrew Hiscock brings together close readings of the history plays, compelling insights into late Elizabethan political culture and renewed attention to neglected continental accounts of Elizabeth I. With fresh perspective, the book charts the profound influence that Shakespeare and ambitious courtiers had upon succeeding generations of European writers, dramatists and audiences following the turn of the sixteenth century. Informed by early modern and contemporary cultural debate, this book demonstrates how the study of early modern violence can illuminate ongoing crises of interpretation concerning brutality, victimization and complicity today.

1. 'touching violence or punishments': Walter Ralegh and the economy of aggression
2. 'Undoing all, as all had never been': the play of violence in Henry VI
3. In the realm of the 'unthankful King': violent subjects and subjectivities in the Henry IV plays
4. 'Now thrive the armourers': Henry V and the promise of 'Hungry War'
5. 'The childe of his great Mistris favour, but the sonne of Bellona': the conflict-ridden careers of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
6. European afterlives 1600–1770.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Shakespeare plays [DDS]