Extreme violence scarred the early modern period. Contemporary commentators grappled to find language to categorise the massacres, genocides, assassinations, enslavements, sacks, rapes, riots, and regicides that informed the times. Some used ''outrages'', others ''cruelties''; but significantly, the early modern period gave rise to the term we use today to define these acts collectively: ''atrocity''. Atrocity and Early Modern Drama intervenes in the broad field of violence and early modern drama by placing acts of atrocity at its centre. In doing so, this essay collection offers the first book-length examination of atrocities and early modern drama. Progressing across three sections, the volume spotlights different forms of, and contexts for, atrocity in early theatre, their varied representations in contemporary Shakespeare performance, and strategies for teaching early modern atrocity drama in the context of more recent atrocities. Atrocity and Early Modern Drama considers atrocity in the work of multiple playwrights - including Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middelton, John Fletcher and George Peele - and across a wide variety of genres and forms - from comedy, tragedy and revenge, to cinematic adaptation, documentary film and contemporary theatre. Its final section provides innovative race- and gender-informed approaches to teaching the subject through text and performance. By making visible strikingly fraught but often overlooked atrocious encounters, the collection addresses the intersections of atrocities with issues of class, crime, gender, race, and the natural world. Together, the chapters interrogate how early modern drama reflects upon and shapes understandings of the historically contingent, politically loaded, and culturally contentious phenomena of atrocity.>

Vorwort
Offers the first sustained and wide-ranging account of late 16th- and early 17th-century conceptualizations of atrocity in English drama.

Autorentext
Sarah Johnson is Associate Professor in the department of English, Culture, and Communication at the Royal Military College of Canada. In addition to her monograph, Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England (2014), she has published several peer-reviewed articles on early modern drama. Sarah has served as an associate editor of Early Theatre since 2014. Georgina Lucas is lecturer in early modern literature at Edinburgh Napier University. Her work has appeared in Early Theatre, The Journal of the British Academy, and Shakespeare and has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the British Academy. Her first monographMassacres in Early Modern Dramais forthcoming with Manchester University Press.Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and, with Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre.Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at University of Sheffield Hallam. She has published numerous works on Shakespeare including her most recent work, Beginning Shakespeare (2005) and has written on film adaptations including Screening the Gothic. She is the Senior Editor of the online journal, Early Modern Literary Studies.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

1.Georgina Lucas (Independent scholar) and Sarah Johnson (Royal Military College of Canada), 'Introduction'

Part One: Typologies

2. Sarah Johnson (Royal Military College of Canada), 'War Crimes and Erasure in John Fletcher's The
   Tragedy of Bonduca'
3. Kirsten Mendoza (University of Dayton, Ohio, USA), 'The Poetics of Violated Property: Rape and Race on the Early
   Modern Stage'
4. Matt Carter (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA), 'Dismemberment, Cannibalism, and Revenge in
   Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's The Bloody Banquet'
5. Jennifer Feather (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA), 'The Merchant of Venice and Environmental
   Atrocity'

6. Catherine Clifford (Graceland University, USA), 'Accidents and Atrocities in the Elizabethan Tournament'

   Part Two: Performance

7. Edel Lamb (Queen's University, Belfast, UK), '"When the hurly-burly's done": Shakespeare after the Astor Place
   Riots'
8. Georgina Lucas (Independent Scholar), 'Rwanda and Juliet: Shakespeare and Post-Genocide Reconciliation'
9. Ramona Wray (Queen's University, Belfast, UK), 'Televising Atrocity and The Hollow Crown: Changing
   Technologies and "Renaissance" Aesthetics'

10. Brandi Adams (Arizona State University, USA), '"[S]poyling, slaughter, and sondry torments": Atrocities in
    Shakespeare's Henriad and David Michôd and Joel Edgerton's The King'

    Part Three: Pedagogy

11. Patricia Cahill (Emory University, USA), 'Starting with Witchcraft: Atrocity in the Classroom'
12. Matthieu Chapman (State University of New York at New Paltz, USA), 'The Atrocity of Denying Black Being in
    Shakespearean Performance'
13. Nora Williams (University of Essex, UK), 'Disrupting Atrocious Dramaturgies in Measure for Measure'
    Notes
    References
    Index