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 and entertainment shaped audience reactions. By reconstructing these layered dynamics, Yearling illuminates the deeply social nature of violent spectacle. In addition, the book argues that responses to fictional violence can reveal insights into how people engage with real-world violence. In both cases, viewers confront moral dilemmas about who deserves empathy and who does not, in ways that reflect underlying social values and power structures.

Importantly, Yearling also looks forward, suggesting that studying early modern responses to violence can simultaneously shed light on our own. In an age saturated with violent media and real-world brutality, understanding how and why audiences respond to violence as they do is both historically significant and urgently contemporary. This book, therefore, is not only about Shakespeare’s audiences - it is also about us.

Rebecca Yearling is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. Her previous publications include Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama (2016).