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

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Addressing a theme which has long raised the attention of early modern scholars, Andrew Hiscock offers in his Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe (2022) a thorough and finely researched study on the pervasive and multifaceted nature of violence in early modern culture, with special focus on its representation in Shakespeare's history plays. Through a rigorous exploration of historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Hiscock roots his argument in a wide selection of early modern and contemporary texts, ranging from early modern military treatises to modern scholarship on violence, smoothly handling the writings of Alberico Gentili and Sir John Harington as well as those of Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman … Hiscock's study offers fresh insights into how early modern audiences grappled with the same questions we face today: the legitimacy of violence, the instability of authority, and the human cost of power.' Beatrice Righetti, Cahiers Elisabéthains

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]