Shakespeare’s Violence and the Early Modern Spectator

Shakespeare's plays feature events of extreme violence.Investigating the ways in which the original early modern audiences might have reacted to their scenes of violence, this volume reveals too the complex web of factors that shape our present-day responses to violence and suffering.Drawing on a mixed methodology, Rebecca Yearling combines close textual analysis with insights from the history of emotions, early modern theatre and cultural history, performance studies and contemporary psychological research to model a new way of approaching early modern audience response. The book focuses on four key moments of violence: the rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, the beheading of Cloten in Cymbeline, the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear and the murder of Desdemona in Othello.Individual chapters situate these acts within their wider contexts, exploring how the performance conditions of Shakespeare’s time and broader Renaissance discourses surrounding violence, morality a