Reading Shakespearean Violence

Abstract

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Shakespeare Section.

This article takes as its starting point some of ways in which the events of 9/11 have been integrated into recent critical studies of Shakespeare. These linkages between Shakespeare and 9/11 are a reminder that acts of violence are readily available access points at which to engage with Shakespeare's textual and theatrical manifestations; it is also apparent that broad and contentious issues coalesce around examinations of Shakespeare and violence: authorship, human agency, ideology, the historicizing and politicization of events and texts. With this in mind, it seems a suitable moment for retrospection, to survey prominent voices of the twentieth century in an effort to gain perspective and context for critical interrogations of Shakespeare and violence. This article aims to read critics reading Shakespearean violence in order to identify and examine influential approaches to Shakespeare as well as prominent theoretical modes – Formalism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism – brought to bear on early modern drama generally.