Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock

Abstract

The week I began reading Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe, Russia invaded Ukraine. Those events made clear the timely, or, rather, depressingly timeless, nature of Andrew Hiscock’s analysis of how debates about war have shaped Europe’s international order. Hiscock possesses an insightful eye for the nuances of narratives about transnational violence and their complex relationships with literary texts—particularly Shakespeare’s history plays. His perspective is impressively broad, exploring how ideas about warfare have been repeated, re-formed, and interpreted in sources from England and the Continent from the seventeenth century to the present. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe proposes that the debates about “armed conflict as an instrument of state policy” were “articulated regularly in the playhouses and in early modern court culture”; in both, Hiscock argues, “the waging of hostilities was frequently linked with the overseeing of political continuity or change management, assertions of lordship and/or pressing crises responding to individual or collective insecurities” (3). While this is not a controversial claim, Hiscock builds upon it, showing how violence was deployed to reinforce claims of legitimate authority or conceal grounds of illegitimate authority, and arguing that the “enduring appetite for violence has come to fashion political discourse itself” (66).