Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home

by Emma Whipday

Domestic tragedy was an innovative genre, suggesting that the lives and sufferings of ordinary people were worthy of the dramatic scope of tragedy. In this compelling study, Whipday revises the narrative of Shakespeare's plays to show how this genre, together with neglected pamphlets, ballads, and other forms of 'cheap print' about domestic violence, informed some of Shakespeare's greatest works. Providing a significant reappraisal of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, the book argues that domesticity is central to these they stage how societal and familial pressures shape individual agency; how the integrity of the house is associated with the body of the housewife; and how household transgressions render the home permeable. Whipday demonstrates that Shakespeare not only appropriated constructions of the domestic from domestic tragedies, but that he transformed the genre, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published February 28, 2019

Reviews

[Russio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and well argued connection of Shakespeare's tragedies (plus Taming of the Shrew) with the Elizabethan and Jacobean genre of the domestic tragedy, along with broadside ballads, showing that Shakespeare engaged with them and altered their tropes to create ideas that unsettle traditional notions of home, family, state power and female agency and sexuality.

[Katheryn Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies is an extremely well-written book that sheds light on domestic tragedies and Shakespearean plays alike. It does an excellent job of setting out the historical, cultural, and critical context of the plays and themes it explores, and covers a broad range of ground for a wide range of readers. I enjoyed this one a lot.