Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe

Andrew Hiscock is Dean and Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales, and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3. He is a Fellow of the English Association and has published widely on English and French early modern literature. He is series co-editor for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides and a trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association. His monographs include Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2011) and The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (2004).

• 1. 'touching violence or punishments': Walter Ralegh and the economy of aggression; 2. 'Undoing all, as all had never been': the play of violence in Henry VI; 3. In the realm of the 'unthankful King': violent subjects and subjectivities in the Henry IV plays; 4. 'Now thrive the armourers': Henry V and the promise of 'Hungry War'; 5. 'The childe of his great Mistris favour, but the sonne of Bellona': the conflict-ridden careers of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; 6. European afterlives 1600–1770.

'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 adds considerably to how we think about violence and war in the period, in Shakespeare's plays, and in our own time.' Matteo Pangallo, Shakespeare Quarterly