SOURCE: "Shakespearean Violence: A Preliminary Survey," in Themes in Drama: Violence in Drama, 1991, pp. 101-21.

In the following essay, Barish examines the theme of violence as it appears in Shakespeare's plays, and suggests that throughout his career Shakespeare gradually lost interest in gratuitous violence and increasingly connected violence with disorder and tyranny.

We live, as we are often told, in a violent age, and it would seem that one of the things about the Elizabethans and Jacobeans that make us feel close to them is their own fascination with violence. As long ago as 1940 (in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642) Fredson Bowers cited numerous instances of violent behavior in society at large—of private duels fought in disregard of the laws forbidding them, of grudge assassinations performed by hired ruffians, of the use of lingering poison and other stealthy forms of murder for disposing of one's enemies—to demonstrate...