Introduction: Reclaiming Violent Masculinities

Abstract

In writing about the various forms of masculine identity that pervade Shakespearean drama, Bruce Smith describes contingency as the defining, universal feature of masculinity. This collection argues that if masculinity is defined by its contingency, achieving masculinity frequently, if not always, relies on acts of violence in one form or another. In other words, masculinity is achieved and negotiated through acts of aggression. Though Smith defines masculinity across cultures in terms of contingency, his work describes specifically early modern ideas of it by citing Caius Martius’s appearance as Coriolanus as the moment in Shakespearean theater that best demonstrates the dynamic whereby manhood is achieved. This moment of violent conquest in which Caius Martius “emerges, covered in blood, from the gates of the city of Corioles” is not coincidental but rather signals the centrality of acts of violence to the attainment of manhood.2 We focus, then, on masculine violence not simply because violence is frequently a defining feature of masculinity but because attention to the relationship between violence and masculinity both troubles the underinterrogated norm of male aggression and demonstrates how structures of male aggression influence and are influenced by the significant cultural shifts of the early modern period.