Shakespeare and Violence (review)

Why do we murder each other? Current genetic research suggests a link between the unusual compulsion to commit extreme, apparently irrational acts of violence, such as serial killings, and certain inherited predispositions—modified, of course, by experience. Moreover, it appears that the expression of our genes through the biochemical interactions that correspond to our behavior may be influenced not only by what we go through in our own lives but also by what our parents went through before conceiving us.¹ (So much for the science of our schoolteachers, who assured us that Lamarck was wrong.) At the biological level, the causes of violent impulses would seem to develop in complex, contingent ways and to affect individuals in widely varying degrees.

When we humanists read about such findings, we are intrigued. But we are often also impressed with the difficulty of drawing conclusions from them about human predicaments—conclusions, at least, that might seem certain and specific enough to illuminate poetic representations of those predicaments. Sensibly, R. A. Foakes in his new, wide-ranging book on violence in Shakespeare refrains from privileging any single or narrowly based account of the causes of human violence. Nonetheless, he does invoke our common "genetic inheritance" (213), as well as a long view of history and culture, in support of his study's larger premise: "that there is such a thing as human nature, giving us instincts and modes of behaviour that are still affected by . . . deep-rooted urges" (2).

In Foakes's view, our natural urges incline us to violence in ways that are subject to "the influence of both nature and nurture," so that "[t]he proneness to violence, to lash out, is both a part of what constitutes the nature of human beings, especially men, and is also culturally constructed" (3). One might balk at the generality of even such a carefully qualifoed claim, citing the variation between individuals' genetic programming, not to mention differences between cultures and periods, and between the various collective and individual behaviors that coexist in any complex society. However, it is by keeping his framework general that Foakes retains the flexibility he needs in order to survey attitudes to violence in over twenty plays. These include the earlier and later histories, Hamlet and the other central tragedies, the Roman plays, and the late romances.

All of these plays, Foakes argues, are informed by an "ultimately meaningless" reality of male violence (43) that remains inexplicable today unless as a byproduct of evolutionary programming for "aggression," though the effect of this programming is all too often compounded by the cultural "construction of masculinity" in terms of "honour" (213). The pervasiveness of violence in the plays thus has biological as well as historical and cultural significance, while its dramatic representations allow us to trace Shakespeare's changing appreciation of its meanings. Shakespeare began his career as a tragic and historical dramatist with a series of bloody "spectacular representations" (9). Here, according to Foakes, men's natural "proneness to violence" is at once taken for granted and exploited in order to satisfy sensation-seeking audiences. The later Elizabethan chronicle plays suggest a more (and increasingly) sophisticated sense of the opposed ends to which bloodshed could be put in the theater of politics, as in the construction of an exemplary Hal, remade first as a fearsome "model soldier" and then as a pacifying "model ruler" (96). Only in Henry V, however, does Shakespeare start to betray an acute preoccupation with violence as a truly "troublesome issue" (96), something too serious to be staged as a groundling's game or chivalric sport and too real to be exorcised imaginatively by a moral scapegoat such as Falstaff. From Henry V onward, Shakespeare's plays explicitly raise such problems as the validity of Christian justifications for war; the implication of violence in the political organization of Christian and pagan societies, and in the formation of masculine identities; the terrible possibility of violence practiced aesthetically "as an end in itself...