Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock Rory Loughnane Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. x+289 pp. £75 ($99.99). ISBN 978–1–108–83018–8. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe is another major study by Andrew Hiscock, one of our leading commentators on early modern cultural and intellectual history. This ambitious book, divided into six chapters and with an expansive Introduction and Conclusion, offers a series of case studies about the 'cultural debate concerning the status and functions of violence' (p. 2). While grounded in Shakespeare's late Elizabethan English histories in its core chapters, it is an emphatically European book, a political statement of its own right in these testing times. It looks beyond the Atlantic archipelago to mainland Europe, and in particular to the wars of religion that raged in sixteenth-century France, demonstrating that for the Elizabethan elite 'it became impossible to conceive of England's political survival without having a watchful eye beyond the borders of the kingdom' (p. 4). In his lucid and learned Introduction, Hiscock moves seamlessly from Augustine and Seneca to early modern political commentators to post-World War critics and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom have considered the origins and outcomes of violent acts. Hiscock draws together his sources carefully, revealing how the phenomenon of violence, and its deployment as a tool for social (dis)order and nation-building, has long been and remains [End Page 242] foregrounded in cultural debate. The book helps to reveal how Shakespeare's early histories, and the early modern dramatic scene more generally, contributed to such debate about the militarization of society and helped inform cultural opinion about the status and functions of rebellion and nation-led violence. The chapters, in brief, are bookended by case studies about individuals: Chapter 1 uses the career of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his unfinished History of the World book project, to analyse broader English attitudes towards the use and justification of violence; Chapter 5 turns to Robert Devereux, his disastrous Irish campaign, and the failed rebellion of 1601 that led to his execution; Chapter 6 usefully considers European responses to the careers of Ralegh and Essex in the two centuries that followed. The core chapters, 2, 3, and 4, analyse, respectively, the three Henry VI plays, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V. Hiscock identifies a continuity of sorts between the plays, wherein Shakespeare 'repeatedly returns attention to the disturbingly creative ways in which cultures of violence disclose the sobering realities of corruption and human failure' (p. 150). The study of Henry V in Chapter 4 leads naturally, of course, into the study of Essex's failures in Chapter 5, as the Chorus opening the play's fifth act in the Folio text alludes to Essex's efforts to quell rebellion in Ireland. Hiscock concludes the book by extending his analysis to the nineteenth century, where he demonstrates an enduring fascination in dramatic and operatic writing with narratives of violence and the late Elizabethan court. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe marks a significant contribution to our collective understanding of how violence figured in early modern cultural debate, and how Shakespeare's creative engagement with English history in the late Elizabethan period helped to introduce and sustain such debate, albeit without any hope for resolution, in the popular forum of the theatre. Shakespeare's early history plays persistently reveal the fault-lines of violence, variously condemning and valorizing its use; indeed, as Hiscock observes, part of the entertainment of such plays was the fiction of real violence it represented. It is this tension surrounding the cultural 'appetite for violence', a phrase Hiscock repeats usefully, that helps bridge the early modern and modern worlds this study traverses. Rory Loughnane University of Kent Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association