[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 that the playwrights who brought violence onto the stage were not being merely melodramatic, not merely catering to the appetite of their audiences for bloody deeds remote from their experience, but realistic as well.¹ In both epochs we find not only the omnipresent fact of violence, but a kind of fixation on it, extending not only to violence itself but also to the representation of violence. Something about physical injuries inflicted on human bodies seems to exercise a kind of mesmerism, both over Shakespeare's generation and our own. A hasty survey, therefore, a provisional taxonomy, of Shakespearean violence may not be out of order on this occasion.

By violence I mean (following the dictionary) the inflicting of physical pain or injury by one person on another, often with the implication of excessive force, so that one might think of poisoning someone's drink as less violent than shooting or stabbing him, even if the end-result—death—were the same in both cases. Such violence, in Shakespeare as in other playwrights, may occur either before our eyes in stage action, or be reported as offstage action, or appear in the language alone. To me the most horrifying moment of violence in Shakespeare might well be Lady Macbeth's boast of what she would be capable of if bound by an oath: 'I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me; / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash'd the brains out, had I sworn as you / Have done to this' (I.vii.54-9).² Perhaps even more repellent, because we not only hear it in the language but see it performed, is the quenching of Gloucester's sight, in Lear. Lady Macbeth horrifies us because of the betrayal of innocence, helplessness, and trust involved, coupled with the appalling kind of agency whereby the smiling infant becomes the weapon of its own destruction, the wall or stony earth no more than an indifferent auxiliary. The cruelty against Gloucester makes us shrink because it puts us so intimately into the skin of the victim; Cornwall's language—Out, vild jelly!' (Lear, III.vii.83)—makes us feel our own eyes being enucleated on the point of his sword.

Compared to his predecessors, however, Shakespeare seems not much addicted to violence. He rarely goes in for bizarre or outlandish forms of it, as do a number of earlier and later playwrights. He has little to set alongside such things as the flaying of Sisamnes ('with a false skin'), the shooting of the young son of Praxaspes, followed by the cutting out of his heart and its presentation to the grieving father, in Preston's Cambyses; Hieronimo's biting out of his own tongue and spitting it on the ground in order not to reveal the secret he has sworn to keep—an act of madness, of course—in The Spanish Tragedy (here I think we should imagine the Elizabethan actor as spitting out a bit of raw calf s liver); the running against the bars of his cage so as to dash out his brains by Bajazeth the Turkish Emperor and then his wife in Marlowe's Tamburlaine; the writhing of the wicked Barabas in the cauldron of boiling oil in The Jew of Malta; the thrusting of the red-hot spit into the anus of the king in Edward II, if this sickening threat is indeed meant to be carried out before our eyes.

Shakespeare, as I say, on the whole avoids such perversities and bizarreries; even his most sadistic torturers rarely gloat over their own cruelty. His most frequent episodes of violence involve swordplay, often duels between mortal enemies: Richmond vs. Richard HI, Mercutio vs. Tybalt, Romeo vs. Tybalt, Hal vs. Hotspur, Hamlet vs. Laertes, Edgar vs. Oswald, Edgar vs. Edmund, Macduff vs. Macbeth, Guiderius vs. Cloten, Palamon vs. Article, etc. In most of these cases a rough equality, of age and rank and status, obtains between the adversaries, so that the encounter takes on some of the character of a trial by combat, a feudal contest conducted according to mutually understood rules. Romeo defeats Tybalt, Macduff defeats Macbeth, Hal Hotspur, and Edgar Edmund not so much because of superior swordmanship as because of their ethical superiority: they are the virtuous characters; they are in the right, and their malicious opponents in the wrong. In so doing they implicitly revalidate, one might say, the medieval legal concept of trial by combat, which in point of historical fact had long since lapsed.

The contest between the half-brothers in Lear is of course designed explicitly as a trial by combat, but so also is the earliest and in many ways the most striking of such confrontations, which takes place between commoners in a partly comic episode. In 2 Henry VI, Peter, the Armorer's apprentice, has accused his master of treason, and been ordered to meet him in combat before the king as a test of truth. Younger than his master, and inexperienced in fighting, Peter is sure he is about to be killed by his swaggering opponent, whose neighbors are already toasting his victory. Peter, terrified at the prospect, settles his earthly affairs: he bequeaths his apron to Robin, his hammer to Will, and his money to Tom, before asking God's blessing. The two combatants then assail each other, evidently with sandbags attached to sticks—clownish weapons—and 'Peter strikes him down', whereupon the Armorer at once confesses his treason and dies. The king concludes the scene: 'Go, take hence that traitor from our sight, / For by his death we do perceive his guilt, / And God in justice hath reveal'd to us / The truth and innocence of this poor fellow, / Which he had thought to have murther'd wrongfully' (II.iii.100-5). 'For by his death we do perceive his guilt': so Richard, so Tybalt, so Hotspur, so Edmund, so Macbeth: in each case defeat signifies a moral judgement, even if no higher power is expressly invoked. So too, evidently, with Posthumus Leonatus' defeat of Iachimo, whom, however, instead of killing he simply disarms, spurred by remorse for his own attempted aggression against Imogen. And so too, no doubt, with the defeat of the French armies by the English in plays like I Henry VI and Henry V, where the French, when they win, win only by foul means, while the English, with their victories, reconfirm and make manifest, almost magically, against impossible odds, their own moral superiority.

So too, very likely, with the death of Cornwall, following the scuffle with his servant during the blinding of Gloucester. The servant, we may recall, tries first to persuade his master to 'hold [his] hand'. Only when this attempt at restraint is met with vituperation does he challenge Cornwall physically. As they fight, Regan seizes a sword and 'runs at him behind' (III.vii.72-80). In other words, she overcomes him by treachery. Cornwall's subsequent death, then, would seem to represent a judgement on him, along with the vindication of his socially inferior, hence presumably weaker and less able adversary, who (though fatally struck) has defeated his aristocratic master by mortally wounding him. So Albany concludes, at least, when he learns of the incident: This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge' (IV.ii/78-80)—a sentiment in which, I suspect, we are invited to concur.

To this we might add the fact that in such trials by combat, when the more virtuous character does go under it is usually by underhanded means, as when Tybalt thrusts at Mercutio under Romeo's arm. But at least it is Mercutio, far from blameless himself, who falls, rather than Benvolio. In Hamlet vs. Laertes, both contestants lose, Hamlet through Laertes' perfidy, Laertes through Hamlet's energetic countermeasures and his own contrition. In all these cases one of the combatants has broken the rules. Apart from its apparent reinforcement of the moral distinction that seems to underlie such confrontations, the encounter between Cornwall and his servant and that between Tybalt and Romeo provide instances among many of the cyclical and self-perpetuating nature of violence, which even the good cannot always escape.

From time to time we also find arrested duels, such as that between Benvolio and Tybalt, interrupted by the arrival of the prince, or that between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, cut short by the histrionic and impulsive king, or that between Hector and Ajax, halted by reason of kinship and courtesy, or that between Caius Martius and Tullus Aufidius, broken off when Aufidius' men come to his rescue and retreat with him behind the city gates. In such cases the moral implications, if not already clear, remain suspended. In addition, however, to these relatively balanced duels, in which the opponents compete on a more or less equal basis, we sometimes find deliberately unbalanced encounters, killings—usually unprovoked and unexpected—of the weaker by the stronger, the defenceless by the armed, the old by the young, the innocent by the vicious, as in the sudden spitting of the nurse on Aaron's sword, in Titus Andronicus, or the killing of the boy Rutland by the warrior Young Clifford, the old king Henry VI by the future Richard III, the unsuspecting gull Roderigo by the perfidious Iago (in the dark), or Emilia his wife by the same Iago. From these cases we recoil as we do not from the more evenly matched contests. They represent malicious, unscrupulous, self-serving aggression.

This last category moves us toward a kind I would term 'sacrificial' killing, wherein a single defenceless individual is done to death by multiple assailants. The archetype here would be the scene in 3 Henry VI where York, stationed on his molehill, is subjected to the taunts of the paper crown and the napkin dipped in Rutland's blood, before being cut down by Margaret and Young Clifford. I call this incident 'sacrificial' because it alludes so deliberately to the Crucifixion. York on his molehill is ridiculed like Christ on Calvary. The placing of the paper crown on his head, in savage mockery of his pretensions to be king, actually originates in the historical record, but the chronicle tells us that it took place after York had been killed and his head held aloft on a pole. To crown him while he is alive, cornered, and at the mercy of his enemies tightens the identification with Christ while making for a more passionate and upsetting theatrical scene. The napkin dipped in Rutland's blood, like the paper crown, intensifies the torture. Unlike St Veronica's handkerchief, of which it is surely meant to remind us, it is not designed to palliate the victim's sufferings but to aggravate them, and its effect as a talisman later on is not to stimulate faith but to spur revenge.

Of York's three tormentors, however, one is compassionate. Northumberland twice admits that the plight of their captive foe has touched him to tears: 'Had he been slaughter-man to all my kin, / I should not for my life but weep with him, / To see how inly sorrow gripes his soul' (I.iv.169-71). Plainly enough this spontaneous rush of fellow feeling is intended to direct our own sympathies. Despite York's past crimes, we find ourselves, like Northumberland, 'with him', and the emotional appeal gains in force when he dies invoking heavenly mercy. We cannot, at this moment, think of him as the ambitious, bullying oathbreaker he has been, brutal and dishonorable toward those to whom he has sworn faith. We see only a fellow human creature goaded beyond endurance before being put savagely to death.

If we ask to whom or to what York is being sacrificed, the only answer can be, to the heartlessness of war, of civil war especially, just as York's own child Rutland has previously been sacrificed, and as one of his least culpable enemies, Prince Edward, will later be sacrificed in the same play, pitilessly stabbed by his captors, the brothers Edward, George, and Richard, for refusing to play his role as prisoner meekly enough to suit them.

These cases, however, all reflect the chances of war, where the innocent are understood to be destined to suffer along with the guilty. We have every reason to think that were the positions reversed, Margaret and Young Clifford would undergo the same fate at the hands of York and his followers that they have inflicted on him, and indeed the indignities heaped on Clifford's body when he is at last killed would seem to constitute deliberate retaliation. In the case of Julius Caesar, however, also cut down by multiple assailants, the element of concerted treachery makes its appearance. He is pierced to death without warning by those he most trusts and believes loyal. His last words, 'Et tu, Brute?—Then fall Caesar!' (III.I.77), mark the point at which our sympathies swing back to him as they have done to York. Whatever Caesar's prior arrogance and boastfulness, these are driven from our minds by the note of personal betrayal sounded in the use of the proper name and the second-person pronoun at the very moment of death.

Victim of a stealthy attack, overpowered by numbers, Caesar is explicitly likened by Mark Antony to a sacrificial animal brought low by cruel hunters, and so retrospectively ennobled: 'Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart, / Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand, / Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe. / O world! Thou wast the forest to this hart, / And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee' (III.i.204-8). Needless to say, the very killing regarded by Antony as a martyrdom of the great leader is thought by its perpetrators to be a deliverance from a prospective tyrant, a sacrificial act on behalf of republican freedom. 'Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius', Brutus has urged, and 'purgers' rather than murderers (II.i.166-80). As events prove, of course, the violence committed in order to forestall violence only provokes worse outbreaks of new violence, the first of which turns out to be another act of mass ferocity, the lynching of the poet Cinna, torn to pieces for his name alone, as it would seem, by the inflamed mob, in whom Antony's rhetoric appears to have aroused a bloodlust that will not subside till it has wreaked itself on what in the event proves to be a simple scapegoat.

The ugliest, perhaps, of all such multiple stabbings occurs towards the end of Troilus and Cressida: the murder of the unarmed Hector by Achilles and his Myrmidons, in defiance of all canons of fair play, not to mention those of epic heroism. Courteous, magnanimous Hector becomes a martyr to these, a sacrifice to the outdated chivalric code which his cynical adversary exploits in order to overpower him prior to dishonoring his body in death. (A recent production of the play, at the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival in July 1987, took literally Achilles' injunction to his followers to surround their victim and 'in feilest manner execute [their] arms' (v.vii.6). The Myrmidons turned the execution into a scene of torture, in which Hector, his face impaled on their swords, was made to cry out in anguish before death.) Here, as in Julius Caesar, the violent act engenders an overwrought mood of anarchic vengeance among Hector's survivors, with the maddened Troilus at their head.

It may be that this incident is itself outdone in ugliness by the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her child at the hands of Macbeth's hired ruffians. This comes as the bloody climax to Macbeth's other deeds of blood, which start as the honorable carving up of the merciless Macdonwald in defence of beleaguered Scotland. It is climactic not only in being morally the most abhorrent of his deeds but also in being the only one we are forced to witness for ourselves. Intensifying the horror is the fact that it is essentially so unmotivated, a kind of automatic reflex of Macbeth's increasing incapacity to feel anything at all, or to react in any situation, however inappropriate, except by ordering a bloodbath. On the other hand, reconciling us to it at least in part is the courage and dignity with which Lady Macduff and her young son confront their assassins. That their fate constitutes a sacrifice of sorts is recognized by Macduff himself: he sees that they have been struck for him, with the consequence that the episode marks both the low point and the turning point in the play, the moment at which the opposition to tyranny finally and irrevocably crystallizes, and so leads to its overthrow.

At the conclusion of this sequence we have the end of Coriolanus, who goes under hurling defiance at the cutthroats ringing him round and the populace clamoring for his blood, but who, rather than defend himself, welcomes their attack: 'Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me' (v.vi.111-12). Aufidius' rabble-rousing turns the unruly crowd into a lynching party: 'Tear him to pieces!' they cry, 'Do it presently!' (line 120). The lords' interposition proves futile, as Coriolanus taunts his captors and dares Aufidius for the last time to personal combat—'O that I had him, / With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe, / To use my lawful sword!' (127-9)—at which point the hired conspirators plunge their unlawful swords into his body. In violence of this sort, where the disparity in numbers serves to make the assault a mob attack—vengeful, irrational, and impervious to any consideration of justice—the victim dies bearing witness to the greatness of his own spirit against the meanness of his assailants.

None of these instances, however, with the partial exception of the murder of Lady Macduff and her family, is sacrificial in René Girard's sense.³ None of them renews, restores, or regenerates. None of them turns the murder, once committed, into a sacred act. Quite the reverse: except in the case of Coriolanus, the sequel to which is left up in the air, they merely provoke further and fiercer cycles of violence, a more implacable resolve on the part of the survivor-avengers, and a thickening of the moral sensibilities of all concerned.

Something like moral restoration does seem to occur in a subcategory of the same type, wherein a pair or more of hired murderers performs an assassination ordered from above. In the Quarto version of 2 Henry VI, for example, the following stage direction occurs: 'Then the Curtaines being drawne, Duke Humphrey is discouered in his bed, and two men lying on his brest and smothering him in his bed. And then enter the Duke of Suffolke to them'—to commend them for carrying out his wishes so efficiently, and to instruct them to 'see the cloathes laid smooth about him still, / That when the King comes, he may perceiue / No other, but that he dide of his owne accord.'⁴ For reasons censorship, evidently, this scene was dropped from the Folio, its outcome being simply announced to Suffolk by the hired bullies. Before they announce it, however, they engage in a significant bit of added dialogue: 'Run to my Lord of Suffolk,' says one, 'let him know / We have dispatch'd the Duke, as he commanded', to which his companion replies, 'O, that it were to do! What have we done? / Didst ever hear a man so penitent?' (III.ii. 1-4). Clearly a new element has here entered the picture, that of the divided and guilty mind of one of the murderers.

In Richard III we find a more fully worked-out scene of a similar sort in which the murderers of Clarence, even before confronting Clarence himself, first struggle with their own consciences and fears of damnation, then argue justice and morality with their victim, until at length, one of them beginning to relent, the other stabs the Duke from behind and drags the body off to the malmsey-butt. His associate, remaining on stage, breaks into remorseful lament: 'A bloody deed and desperately dispatch'd! / How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands / Of this most grievous murther!' When his accomplice threatens to denounce him to Richard for his slackness, the 'slacker' retorts, 'I would he knew that I had sav'd his brother! / Take thou the fee and tell him what I say, / For I repent me that the Duke is slain' (I.iv.271-8). An in some ways even more highly charged moment occurs later in the soliloquy of Sir James Tyrrel, after he has successfully engineered the murder of the boy princes in the Tower. Musing in horror on the 'tyrannous and bloody act', 'The most arch deed of piteous massacre / That ever yet this land was guilty of, he goes on to report the anguished, weeping reaction of the two crime-hardened thugs who have actually done the deed, now so speechless from 'conscience and remorse' as to be nearly incapable of telling their tale (IV.iii.1-21).

Sir Pierce Exton, in Richard II, performs a comparable service for the newly crowned Bolingbroke. Having killed Richard in his prison cell, he instantly recoils in dismay: 'As full of valure as of royal blood! / Both have I spill'd; O would the deed were good! / For now the devil that told me I did well / Says that this deed is chronicled in hell' (v.v.113-16). All these instances thus follow a similar pattern: the instigator carefully preserves a certain distance between himself and the crime, no matter how intensely he wishes it performed. He may or may not express regret afterwards for what has happened (Bolingbroke does so, but Suffolk and Richard III do not), but in each case at least one of the paid cutthroats emerges with bitter self-reproach, either dissociating himself from the deed altogether or expressing the most passionate wish that he might undo what he has done. The direct confrontation, that is, with the flesh-and-blood victim, especially one who is patently innocent (like the young princes) or penitent (like Gloucester) or troubled in soul (like Clarence) can harrow the conscience even of the hard-shelled murderer, and arrest if it does not extinguish the thirst for reward and the ability to think of the job as nothing but a dangerous assignment for which the pay is exceptionally good. Shakespeare would seem to be implying that if violence is natural—all too natural—to our benighted species, natural too and not to be suppressed are the sometimes deeply buried instincts that pull against it, capable of emerging even in the most unlikely of representatives and under the most unpromising of circumstances.

A variant on the same theme might be the moment in King John when one of the 'executioners' who has helped bind Arthur and heat the iron to burn out his eyes is dismissed from the scene by Hubert. As he leaves the stage he announces with relief that he is 'best pleas'd to be from such a deed' (IV.i.85), thus intensifying the struggle already taking place within Hubert himself. What we witness in Hubert a moment later is moral renewal, brought on not by violence, but rather, crystallized in the decision to refrain from violence.

From all this it is but a step to the schizoid Macbeth, so convulsed by conscience before, during, and after the murder of Duncan, so certain of his own damnation, so hair-trigger in his remorse—'Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst' (II.ii.71-2)—and then, later, following the murder of Banquo, along with the professional bravos who do his bidding, so heartless, so numb to remorse, so ready to devise new butcheries like the massacre of Macduff s family. It is as if the very hyperactivity of his conscience produced a corresponding hyperaggressiveness in Macbeth, an atrophy of conscience, exposing in almost schematic form the essential mechanism: violence fated to accomplish nothing but its own unfailing self-perpetuation.

In this case, interestingly, though Banquo's murderers are never heard to recant once they have discharged their commission, prior to receiving it they portray themselves as social rejects, so embittered as to have lost all sense of restraint. Says the first: 'I am one, my liege, / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world / Hath so incens'd that I am reckless what / I do to spite the world.' Says his comrade: 'And I another, / So weary with disasters, tugg'd with fortune, / That I would set my life on any chance, / To mend it, or be rid on't' (III.i.107-13). Life, then—society—has (as they see it) by persecuting them, dehumanized these men, rendered them indifferent to the rules by which others live, sensible only of their own grievances, and left them as their sole recourse the readiness to retaliate onto others the blows' and buffets they consider themselves to have suffered, if that will help them repair their own fallen fortunes. Violence in their case becomes an act of vengeance against a social order that (as they choose to think) has victimized them.

Among dramatic figures from Jacobean tragedy who come within the orbit of Shakespeare's influence, we might cite Webster's Flamineo and Bosola. Both are malcontents who regard themselves as forced by harsh economic necessity into an unsavory trade. Between them they embody both types of Shakespearean hireling. On the one hand Flamineo, the more thuggish of the two, like the assassins in Macbeth untroubled by conscience or any feeling for the sufferings of others, preens himself on his own criminal ingenuity and makes security of employment his sole aim in life. Bosola on the other hand, ambivalent, filled from the outset with self-loathing, resembles the more vacillating desperadoes of Shakespeare's earlier histories. Like them he feels trapped in a dirty job. Having forced himself to go through with it, he experiences a sharp revulsion, followed by a kind of revelation, which leads him to penitence and a newly awakened thirst for true justice.

To violence of such kinds we may add self-inflicted injuries. These would include mainly the suicides of characters in the Roman plays who discover that continuance in life has become impossible because (in their own view) dishonourable, and who therefore remove themselves from it, usually by the sword: Brutus and Cassius, Titinius, Enobarbus, Eros, Antony, Cleopatra. Ordinarily in such cases we are made to feel, I believe, that though reprehensible by Christian standards, which lurk always in the background, such acts of self-slaughter, springing as they do from an older code of courage and honor that survives in part into Christianity, have something noble and highminded about them. In the same category we would place the even smaller group of characters in non-Roman plays who follow a similar course, more or less culpably according to what they have done to bring themselves to such an extreme of desperation: Romeo and Juliet, Goneril, Timon of Athens.

To speak of the Roman plays is to recall the grisliest of Shakespeare's tragedies, Titus Andronicus, which outdoes even The Spanish Tragedy in the tempo and horrificness of its events, and introduces thus early in Shakespeare's dramatic career the motif of sexual violence, in the off-stage rape of Lavinia, later to culminate in the strangling of Desdemona. Though the rape itself occurs behind the scenes, its horrendous effects are brought before us almost at once—not only in the form of the mutilated Lavinia, in the bleeding mouth and the bleeding stumps that once were hands—but in the rhetoric of her uncle Marcus, as he struggles to cope with the horror of her condition and distance us from it. Marcus compares his defiled niece to a tree whom 'stern ungentle hands / Hath lopp'd and hew'd, and made [her] body bare / Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments / Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in'; her mouth, he says, 'a crimson river of warm blood, / Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind, / Doth rise and fall between [her] rosed lips, / Coming and going with [her] honey breath' (II.iv. 16-25). With such conceits, reminiscent of Petrarchan blazonry, Marcus aims to transform and make bearable, by a certain detachment, what in anything like its immediate actuality would be too hideous to contemplate.

Later, presenting her to Titus in her mangled state, he speaks of her speechlessness in sim ilar terms: 'O, that delightful engine of her thoughts, / That blabb'd them with such pleasing eloquence, / Is torn from forth that pretty hollow cage, / Where like a sweet melodious bird it sung / Sweet varied notes, enchanting every ear!' (III.i.82-6). Marcus seeks to lure our eyes away from what Lavinia now is and awaken our imaginations to what she once was, to summon up a vision of how graceful and beautiful were her hands, how melodious and birdlike her voice, and how like an aromatic fountain, even in the frightful present, seems her bleeding mouth. Shakespeare is once again drawing on the resources of figurative language to turn to favor and to prettiness that which if directly gazed at, even verbally, is—in its extremity—not to be endured.⁵

A grotesque episode of self-mutilation then follows in Titus' chopping off of his own hand, in exchange (as he thinks) for the release of his imprisoned sons—a sign, we are entitled to suspect, of his incipient madness. The wily Aaron, who has prompted the act, rapidly returns with the heads of the sons, and so 'wittily' fulfills his proposed bargain with Titus. The play thus presents us with images, verbal and visual, first of the human body cropped of its limbs, and then of those limbs and bodily parts themselves detached from their trunks, counterparts in the domain of the single individual to the dismemberment of Rome itself at the hands of its baleful rulers.

Heads, we may note in passing, of characters previously seen alive, appear with some frequency in Shakespeare. They are of course the products of violence, and almost always underscore the continuing inhumanity of the violence, which is at the same time inescapable, universal, and self-renewing: the head (for example) of the executed Suffolk, cradled in her lap by Queen Eleanor in 2 Henry VI; the heads of Lord Say and Cromer lofted on poles by Jack Cade's followers, prompting Cade's heartless quip: 'Let them kiss one another, for they lov'd well when they were alive. Now part them again, lest they consult about the giving up of some more towns in France' (IV.vii. 130-3); Cade's own head, shortly offered to the king by Iden, earning Iden his kinghthood; the head of the Duke of Somerset (in 3 Henry VI) shown proudly by Richard to testify to his achievements in battle; Yorick's skull in Hamlet; Macbeth's head, triumphantly flourished by the victorious Macduff; and Cloten's head, brandished by the more matter-of-fact Guiderius—all these, of course, being shown to Elizabethan playgoers quite accustomed to the displays of heads on Tower Hill and other public places following the execution of traitors.

To return to Titus: we see the inexorable cycle of violence renew itself and debase its victims spiritually when the abused Lavinia herself holds with her stumps the bowl into which pours the blood of her ravishers, as Titus cuts their throats before baking them in a pie to serve to their mother the Empress, in fulfillment of his revenge. Titus, indeed, offers the only instance in his career when Shakespeare seems to wallow in violence. The extent and terribleness of it would seem to symbolize the barbaric chaos that descends on Rome as a result of what is plainly a sacrificial act in the opening scene, the offstage ritual killing of Alarbus, the Gothic prince, by the sons of Titus, who 'for their brethren slain / Religiously [do] ask a sacrifice' (I.i.123-4), at which the victim's mother, the Gothic queen, Tamora, cries out, 'O cruel, irreligious piety!' (line 130). From this ill-considered immolation, stubbornly carried out by the fanatical Titus at his sons' behest, stems the fearful sequence of criminal revenges that dominate the rest of the action. Here, more crudely spelled out than in Julius Caesar, we see the inescapable aftermath of sacrifice: it produces an effect opposite to that intended, and worsens the situation it is designed to alleviate.

A less lethal form of violence occasionally appears, in which the weapons are stones rather than swords or knives. In I Henry VI, Gloucester's men and Winchester's brawl before the Tower and are only with difficulty restrained from continuing, even in the presence of the king and their respective masters. In this case the mutual detestation of the two peers is reflected in the aggressiveness of their language. Duke Humphrey, for example, threatens his antagonist, the Cardinal of Winchester: 'Priest, beware your beard, / I mean to tug it and to cuff you soundly. / Under my feet I stamp thy cardinal's hat; / In spite of Pope or dignities of church, / Here by the cheeks I'll drag thee up and down' (I.iii.47-51). To which, after further rioting among their men, and a proclamation from the Mayor forbidding weapons, the Cardinal retorts, 'Abominable Gloucester, guard thy head, / For I intend to have it ere long' (I.iii.87-8). The weapon, in short, at least for the moment, is language. As Girard suavely phrases it, in the drama hot words often substitute for cold steel.

At the second scuffle between the factions, the terrified Mayor reports to the king that 'The Bishop and the Duke of Gloucester's men, / Forbidden late to carry any weapon, / Have fill'd their pockets full of pebble stones; / And banding themselves in contrary parts, / Do pelt so fast at one another's pate / That many have their giddy brains knock'd out; / Our windows are broke down in every street. / And we, for fear, compell'd to shut our shops' (III.i.76-85). Violence of this sort, which threatens innocent bystanders and verges on anarchy, seems to arouse anxiety in Shakespeare and to draw condemnatory language, as in the opening scene of Coriolanus, where the citizens with their bats and clubs confront Menenius with his mollifying wit. It tends also to be conveyed more powerfully in words than in stage action, since stage action, needing to be disciplined and choreographed, makes raw confusion hard to render convincingly.

In Timon of Athens, finally, Timon's only method of counterattack against his false friends, other than verbal denunciation, is literally to throw things—the lukewarm water he spatters in their faces at his farewell banquet, the stones he digs up in the woods with which to pelt Apemantus and drive away the Painter and Poet. Under the circumstances, such primitive implements of aggression scarcely seem comic—they seem pitiable—but their uselessness, like that of his verbal missiles, underscores the futility of Timon's life in exile, which becomes productive only when he is capable once more of bestowing gold on his visitors, on Alcibiades especially, so as to make possible the siege of Athens.

From the carnage of Titus and the disillusion of Timon we may turn to a less harrowing topic: comic violence. Like its tragic counterpart, this may occur either in the language alone, or in the language by way of narrative report, or it may be enacted on the stage. It appears most often in scenes of farce—indeed it may be said to be one of the defining characteristics of stage farce—and it also often involves beatings, with fists or broomsticks or other homely objects. It is seldom meant to do serious hurt, and it often expresses nothing worse than annoyance. It causes only temporary distress to its victims; it rarely if ever draws blood; and it has no lasting ill effects.

Like its tragic counterpart, its Shakespearean manifestations have a long history of precedent in early Tudor interludes and moralities, and in Elizabethan popular drama. Usually it is found among the Vice and the lowlife characters, sometimes augmented by the Mankind figure whom these others temporarily succeed in leading astray. It is therefore (strictly speaking) the work of the Devil, attempting to undo the efforts of guardian characters with names like Mercy or Pity, whose mission it is to keep humanity on the path of righteousness. Most commonly it consists of beatings, drubbings, fisticuffs, and other non-lethal forms of aggression, from which its victims promptly recover, or whom—like the monster Tediousness in The Marriage of Wit and Science—we see as so purely allegorical that it never occurs to us to feel any concern for their fates as human beings. Shakespeare, of course, is not writing allegory, and he never loses sight of the humanity of his characters. Nevertheless, the knock-about element remains prominent and vivid in the three of his comedies customarily designated as farces.

Early in The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus complains to his supposed master, Antipholus of Syracuse, that the latter is late to dinner. Among other tokens of that lateness he mentions that 'The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell: / My mistress made it one upon my cheek' (I.ii.45-6). This simple reference sets the tone for most of the violence endured by both Dromios for most of the day. Dromio knows very well that his aching head will pay the penalty for his mistress's displeasure as well as his master's: 'I from my mistress come to you in post: / If I return, I shall be post indeed, / For she will score your fault upon my pate' (lines 62-5).

A moment later, having denied knowledge of the thousand marks supposedly given him, Dromio finds himself subjected to a second beating: 'What, wilt thou flout me thus unto my face, / Being forbid?' demands his exasperated master, 'There, take you that, sir knave'—striking him. Dromio answers, with some spirit: 'What mean you, sir? For God's sake hold your hands! / Nay, and you will not, sir, I'll take my heels' (lines 91-4)—whereupon he runs off to complain to Adriana, this time with more wit, of his mistreatment:

Adr. Say, is your tardy master now at hand?
E. Dro. Nay, he's at two hands with me, and
  that my two ears can witness.
  Adr. Say, didst thou speak with him?
  Know'st thou his mind?
  E. Dro. Ay, ay, he told his mind upon mine
  ear. Beshrew his hand, I scarce could
  understand it.
  Adr. Spake he so doubtfully, thou couldst not
  feel his meaning?
  E. Dro. Nay, he strook so plainly, I could too
  well feel his blows; and withal so doubtfully,
  that I could scarce understand them.

(II.i.44-54).

And 'in conclusion', concludes Dromio, 'he did beat me there' (line 74). Now it is Adriana's turn to threaten:

Adr. Go back again, thou slave, and fetch him
  home.
  E. Dro. Go back again, and be new beaten
  home?
  For God's sake send some other messenger.
  Adr. Back, slave, or I will break thy pate
  across.
  E. Dro. And he will bless that cross with
  other beating:
  Between you I shall have a holy head

(lines 75-80)

This sequence is quickly followed by a fresh misunderstanding between the same Antipholus and his proper Dromio, in very much the same vein, leading to another beating. Once again the beating produces an explosion of indignant punning:

S. Ant. If you will jest with me, know my
  aspect,
  And fashion your demeanor to my looks,
  Or I will beat this method in your sconce.
  S. Dro. Sconce call you it? So you would
  leave battering, I had rather have it a head.
  And you use these blows long, I must get a
  sconce for my head, and insconce it too, or
  else I shall seek my wit in my shoulders.

(II.ii.32-48)

One thing, it appears, that comic violence does is to unleash bouts of verbal protest from its victim, as tragic violence does not. The victims of tragic violence, like Gloucester, in Lear, or Lady Macduff s son, in Macbeth, Emilia, in Othello, or Coriolanus, may defy their aggressors, but they do so before, not after, they are assaulted. Once attacked, they are either dead, or else, like Lavinia or Gloucester, too brutalized to reply. In comedy, the victim strikes back in the only way permitted him, with a barrage of witty laments over his own misery. The result in the present instance is that once the interchange is over both parties return to an approximation of their former good humor.

As the tempo increases and the visiting Antipholus becomes convinced he is the sport of witches, it becomes the turn of the resident Antipholus, him of Ephesus, to lose patience with his Dromio—for fetching a rope instead of the money he was charged to find.

E. Ant. To what end did I bid thee hie thee
  home?
  E. Dro. To a rope's end, sir, and to that end
  am I return'd.
  E. Ant. And to that end, sir, I will welcome
  you. [Beats Dromio],

Officer. Good sir, be patient.
  E. Dro. Nay, 'tis for me to be patient: I am in
  adversity.
  Off. Good now, hold thy tongue.
  E. Dro. Nay, rather persuade him to hold his
  hands.
  E. Ant. Thou whoreson, senseless villain!
  E. Dro. I would I were senseless, sir, that I
  might not feel your blows.
  E. Ant. Thou art sensible in nothing but
  blows, and so is an ass.
  E. Dro. I am an ass indeed; you may prove it
  by my long ears. I have serv'd him from
  the hour of my nativity to this instant, and
  have nothing at his hands for my service
  but blows. When I am cold, he heats me
  with beating; when I am warm, he cools me
  with beating. I am wak'd with it when I
  sleep, rais'd with it when 1 sit, driven out
  of doors with it when I go from home,
  welcom'd home with it when I return; nay,
  I bear it on my shoulders, as a beggar wont
  her brat; and I think when he hath lam'd
  me, 1 shall beg with it from door to door.

(IV.iv.15-39)

Here the beleaguered Dromio, even more roughly treated than his brother, appealing to the Officer and to us as witnesses, gives vent to a heartfelt outcry against his lot as underling, with its ever-present accompaniment of blows and beatings. It begins to seem as though violence in the comic world is inherent in the relations between masters and servants. Though the blows and the beatings are meant to make us laugh, and though we understand from the outset that they will cause no lasting damage, it cannot be said that they are painless. They raise welts and lumps on their victims' bodies, and they injure their fragile self-esteem still more. The victims, for their part, are far from meekly submitting; both rise to a protest of some eloquence against the life they have led since childhood, with its perpetual threat of verbal and physical mistreatment. Still, the blows are not malicious; they are not meant to humiliate or destroy but to correct, to work off a momentary impatience, and we accept them, with whatever discomfort, as belonging to farce, in which certain characters, like Bergsonian jack-in-the-boxes, are destined to be repeatedly knocked down and to rebound each time with the same manic energy.

The Taming of the Shrew is filled with similar violence, but the violence is now more varied; it has more interesting meanings and purposes. We start with a scene reminiscent of those in The Comedy of Errors, in which the newly arrived Petruchio, accompanied by his servant Grumio, bids him knock at Hortensio's house, and is deliberately misunderstood by the impertinent underling, who bandies words until his exasperated master 'wrings him by the ears' (SD I.ii.17). The difference between this scene and the exchanges between the Dromios and the Antipholuses is that in this case the cheeky groom provokes Petruchio, and seems neither surprised nor discountenanced by the result.

Katherina the Shrew makes her stormy entrance onto the scene dragging the rope-bound Bianca out of the house, demanding to know her opinions of her various suitors, and striking her for unsatisfactory answers, then, a moment later, taking the luckless Hortensio as her target, smashing him over the head with his lute and breaking both head and instrument in the process. Violence is evidently Katherina's specialty, one of the distinguishing marks of her identity as a shrew. The first interview between her and Petruchio leads to her rashly striking him as well. Petruchio replies without hesitation and in words of one syllable, 'I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again' (II.i.220). From this point forward their 'chat', though charged with rage on her part and with rough good spirits on his, is conducted entirely on the verbal level. Physical roughness between them, we infer, has tacitly been declared off limits, the only possible exception being Petruchio's mock 'rescue' of his bride from her father and the wedding party, so that he may carry her off to his country estate.

We have heard, prior to this, of his antics in church, of his cuffing the priest for dropping the book, of his stamping and swearing 'as if the vicar meant to cozen him' (III.ii.168), and of his throwing the sops of the wedding wine into the sexton's face. Subsequent to this we hear from Grumio, who arrives ahead at the country house, of the turbulent journey the newlyweds have completed, a tale characteristically introduced by Grumio's boxing of Curtis's ear so as to command his attention. His narration acquaints us with more of Petruchio's antic humours en route ('he beat me because her horse stumbled' (IV.i.77, etc.) Arriving in person, Petruchio unloads a torrent of abuse onto his servants, cursing them as rascal knaves, loggerheaded and unpolished grooms, peasant and unmannered slaves, whoreson malt-horse drudges, as rogues, as villains, as beetle-headed, flap-ear'd knaves, as dogs, as heedless joltheads, reviling them and mauling them by turns, climaxing his tantrum by upsetting table, meat, and utensils, and swingeing any of the household foolish enough to remain within reach.

Petruchio thus enters the lists in a kind of competition of violence between himself and Katherina, except that where Katherina's violence was ill-natured, fierce, and meant to hurt, Petruchio very carefully avoids making her his target. He directs it against everyone in the neighborhood except her. His antics differ markedly also from the treatment of the Dromios by the Antipholuses, since it now reflects a theatrical purpose. Petruchio's anger is only mock anger. It constitutes a performance put on for Katherina's benefit, an uproar staged in order to hold the mirror to her senseless clamor, and so provide a model of unfeminine behaviour for her to contemplate, and (by inference) shun. It is intended also to wear down her resistance, to exhaust her into civility. And it is carried out in Petruchio's unfailingly extravagant style, with an ever-present element of unpredictability, of surprise. The same applies to his plan to sustain the hubbub at night, to keep her from sleep, and to rough-handle the tailor the next day, when his vocabulary of insult waxes almost Rabelaisian in its ferocity and inventiveness: 'Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, / Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! / Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! / Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread? / Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, / Or I shall so bemete thee with thy yard / As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st!' (IV.iii.107-13)—a tempest of words, that is, substituting this time for a rain of blows. This scene, however, marks the end of the violence. The tailor is stealthily promised his pay, and when next we see the wedded pair they are on the road back to Padua, where Katherina undergoes her conversion and all contention between them comes to an end.

Petruchio's violence, we may note, differs from that of the two Antipholuses not only in its being deliberately staged, but in its essential good humor, its imaginativeness, its comic high spirits, whereas that of the Antipholuses, though not malicious, sprang from furious vexation at what was perceived as the unseasonable jesting of their servants. Unlike Petruchio's, it was also relatively mechanical, monotonous, and unchanging. And it implied a somewhat unsatisfactory state of affairs between them and their Dromios. Though we hear no words of collusion between Petruchio and his domestics, and although the latter are doubtless fearful of their master's raging and storming, they nevertheless seem to take in the fact that he is playacting, and will ultimately do neither Kate nor themselves any harm. Certainly they never respond anything like the aggrieved Dromios lamenting their aches and pains. Quite the reverse: Grumio enters into Petruchio's make-believe as zealously as the lord's servants in the Induction enter into the plot to deceive Christopher Sly; he teases Kate much in Petruchio's own vein when she is hungry; and he pinch-hits energetically for Petruchio in the dispute with the hapless tailor. Even Kate's own initial violence, we come to suspect, springs from a kind of half-conscious playacting: having been designated all her life as the shrew, she will not bate a jot of her unprofitable role, at least not until persuaded that the role Petruchio has planned for her is a better one, that his kind of game is more amusing than her own tumultuous and fatiguing one. The happy upshot of their competition in violence, then, proves to be the total abandonment of all violence.

The most violent character in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Dr Caius, goes about roaring and stamping, with his rapier on the ready, but never has a chance to use it, thanks to the waggish Host of the Garter, who organizes the duel between him and Sir Hugh, sends them to wrong places, wears them out with waiting, and ends by playing the peacemaker. This leaves both of them unbloodied, but furious and thirsting for revenge. The only true violence practised on anyone in the whole mischief-ridden play has Falstaff as its butt, and Falstaff, needless to say, has it coming to him. Having survived the humiliation of his drenching in the Thames, he suffers a worse fate disguised as the old woman of Brainford, being thwacked unmercifully and at the same time strenuously berated by Ford: Out of my door, you witch, you rag, you baggage, you poulcat, you runnion! out, out! I'll conjure you, I'll fortune-tell you!' (IV.ii. 184-6). From so much, coupled with Petruchio's verbal onslaughts, we reconfirm our impression that farce often goes in for violent language even when it refrains from violent action. Falstaff, however, has been well and truly beaten. He ponders his fate in a melancholy soliloquy:

I would all the world might be cozen'd, for I have been cozen'd and beaten too. If it should come to the ear of the court, how I have been transform'd, and how my transformation hath been wash'd and cudgell'd, they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop, and liquor fishermen's boots with me. I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till I were as crestfall'n as a dried pear.

(IV.V.93-100)

Not much evidence here of physical distress, nor when he tells Mistress Quickly that he was 'beaten . . . into all the colours of the rainbow' (lines 115-16), but much of wounded amour-propre and fear of disgrace. Similarly in his account to his 'confidant', Master Brook—Ford in disguise—to whom he reveals that his sweetheart's jealous husband—Ford undisguised—'beat me grievously, in the shape of a woman, for in the shape of a man, Master Brook, I fear not Goliath with a weaver's beam, because I know also life is a shuttle. Since I pluck'd geese, play'd truant, and whipt top, 1 knew not what 'twas to be beaten till lately' (V.i.20-6).

This, unless we count the fairies' pinching in the final scene, marks the end of the violence, and of the talk of violence, in this play. The fairies' pinching, however, and the burning of Falstaff with their tapers' ends—Falstaff disguised as the ghost of Herne the Hunter, with animal horns—would seem to represent a mock sacrifice, in which a fertility spirit is done to death to allay the disruptions that have agitated the village. Prior to this moment Falstaff has been the butt of Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, and a few neighbors. He now becomes the sport of the entire populace, the irritant that must be removed if all scores are to be settled and peace is to be restored. Comic violence here, the baiting and mocking of the intruding spirit, re-establishes harmony between the Fords and advances the matrimonial designs of Fenton and Anne Page, insuring on behalf of the whole community that its wives are chaste, its husbands trusting, and its young people eager to found the next generation.

I think we may say, assuming our conventional chronology for these three farces is approximately correct, that what we see in them is a gradual progression away from violence, a growing realization on Shakespeare's part that violence in itself is not funny. And this inference would seem to be borne out by the fact that in comedies other than the farces, violence dwindles nearly to the zero point. When it threatens, however menacingly, as in Proteus' attempt to rape Sylvia, or Shylock's to exact a pound of flesh from Antonio, it fails to materialize. Swordplay is rare. Duels are more often halted or diverted than waged: Pompey vs. Armado, interrupted by the arrival of Marcade with his tidings of death; Demetrius vs. Lysander, misled into fogs and swamps and sleeps by Puck; old Leonato and old Antonio unable to provoke Claudio and Don Pedro into a quarrel to avenge the slander of Hero; Benedick vs. Claudio, their expected combat cut short by the revelation of Hero's innocence; Viola vs. Sir Andrew, swords in trembling hands, suspended by the appearance of Antonio, himself pursued by officers seeking to arrest him; Sebastian vs. Sir Toby, glaring fiercely at each other, ready to draw blood, stopped by the arrival of the outraged Olivia.

As for Orlando's match with the wrestler Charles, a formal contest staged before the court, that quickly takes on the character of a trial by combat: the selfeffacing hero overthrows the boastful champion, following the champion's own defeat of three country youths whom he has left gasping on the ground with broken ribs. Charles, wrestler to the usurping Duke Frederick and an ally of Orlando's envious older brother, represents the Goliath of this contest, being rapidly dispatched—but not killed—by the David, Orlando, whose victory marks his goodness of heart and the nobility of spirit that shine through his rustical upbringing. It reassures us that we are in a comic world where virtue will eventually win out over envy and persecution.

Active violence, then, effectuated violence, violence prompted by spite or fury, plays close to no part in the comedies. Only an occasional suggestion serves to keep us mindful of the passions that can provoke it. Truly murderous violence is nowhere in evidence, or if it is, it is shunted aside before it can do serious damage. The one disturbing comic instance appears in a history play: Falstaff s stabbing of Hotspur's body on the field at Shrewsbury. Even here, however, the fact that Hotspur is after all dead and cannot be hurt by a new wound, the colossal cheek of Falstaff himself, with whose self-preserving impudence we have learned to put up, for the sake of its inventiveness, and—perhaps most of all—Hal's magnanimous allowance of the gesture as a joke rather than a desecration, tend to take the sting out of it for us.

To continue for a moment with the Lancastrian histories: at the end of 2 Henry IV, we learn that one bit of offstage violence has had a disastrous outcome: the beadle takes Doll and the Hostess into custody, since 'the man is dead that [they] and Pistol beat amongst [them]' (V.vii.1-2). Coming as it does at this penultimate moment in the play, the incident constitutes a sharp reminder that the world of the tavern is among other things a dark one, just as the outbreaks of violence in Henry V—the ferocity of Henry's speech before Harfleur, his order to his soldiers to kill their prisoners, the French butchery of 'the poys and the luggage . . . expressly against the law of arms'—all throw a sordid light onto the heroic enterprise of the war and tarnish the glamor conferred on it by the Chorus, reminding us that even the most pageantlike and epically celebrated of battles has its seamy underside.

The readiness to resort to violence, in any case, even in the comic realm, remains something of a touch-stone, if not of malevolence exactly, then of a rankling perversity, of an inability to conduct affairs without inflicting humiliations on others, of a preference for aggression as a way of working off irritation or bafflement. We can (1 think) accept Cleopatra's furious onslaught on the luckless messenger, her striking him and haling him up and down and threatening him with horrendous torments, as an instance of comic overdoing, of the overflowing of the vessel, unlikely to have dire consequences. But the same cannot be said of Posthumus' striking of the disguised Imogen in the final moments of Cymbeline. That gesture really means two things: it means first of all, of course, that in spite of all that has happened in the course of the action he still does not really recognize her, really know her. It also means that he has not yet, after so long time and so much heartache, lost the habit of striking out blindly in anger. It is only when this replay, this echo of his first terrible mistake is perceived by him to be such that he can persuade us he has truly abandoned his unhealthy readiness to take to his sword or his fists. It is only when comic violence, then, is managed with good humor and a light heart, to expose swollen pride or sweeten a foul temper, as in the case of Petruchio or of the plots against Falstaff in The Merry Wives, that we are implicitly invited to endorse and approve it with a light heart ourselves.

I hardly need say at this point that I have dealt with this topic in an oldfashioned way. I might be taxed, by post-structuralists, with having, as they say, 'produced' the pattern I purport to discover, rather than having found something that was actually there. Furthermore, 1 have outlined what I take to be an implicit morality of violence in the Shakespearean canon, and—perhaps worst of all—the morality 1 claim to find is one I myself would endorse, and it is a bourgeois morality at that. But it does tally with much of what we already know about its author.

The commonest term used about Shakespeare the man in his own day was 'gentle'. I take 'gentle', here, not only in its Elizabethan senses of 'noble, generous, courteous, polite', but also in its continuing presentday sense of 'mild'—not rough, not harsh, not violent. To me it seems plain that the threads I have tried to follow lend support to the view of a 'gentle' Shakespeare. They suggest a Shakespeare losing interest in violence for its own sake, gradually eliminating it from his farces, associating it increasingly with unruliness, disorder, tyranny, and whatever interferes with life. In short they suggest a civilized and a civilizing Shakespeare.

But this is not to imply a squeamish or a sentimental or a milk-sop Shakespeare. It is not to suggest that he portrays all violent acts as reprehensible in themselves—certainly not when committed in legitimate self-defense, nor when brought under some meaningful rule and order. The trial by combat, the rituals of war, have their uses, even their value. We feel no revulsion—or should feel none, I believe—when Guiderius appears with Cloten's head, or (for that matter) when Imogen awakes to find the headless body beside her, only to mistake it, significantly, for that of Posthumus. We endorse, I suspect, the intent of Fluellen's phrase—'expressly against the law of arms'—to indicate the kind of violence Fluellen, along with Shakespeare, finds abhorrent. Shakespeare clearly believes in valor, in manly readiness, in military prowess. These qualities matter because the world we inhabit contains lawless, self-serving, aggressive human beings, ready to use others as means, ready to push them around whenever others seem to stand in the way of their own private purposes or private pleasures. And because they entail other qualities valuable in themselves, such as courage, resourcefulness, and resolution, which enable men, and women too, to assert their full humanity in the teeth of adverse fortune and dangerous enemies. The energetic captainship of Talbot against the treacherous French, the vigorous challenge of Edgar against the perfidious Edmund, conform precisely to the law of arms, and claim nothing short of the highest honor.

All this, no doubt, coming from our most revered culture hero, may sound too much for comfort like copybook morality. Yet I believe it to be the only lesson one can draw from the evidence I have tried to assemble.

Notes

¹ (Princeton University Press, 1940), chapter 1, passim.

² Except where otherwise noted, all citations from Shakespeare will be to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

³Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), passim.

⁴The First Part of the Contention, Sig. E2, in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Michael J. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 60.

⁵ Whether this technique of combined horror and distancing works on the stage is of course another matter. See Eugene M. Waith, 'The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus ', Patterns and Perspectives in English Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 41-54, esp. p. 51.