Publications

Shakespeare's Europe is full of crisis and contradiction, the scattered fragments of a once unified world. Elizabethan theatre grew out of the disintegration of this unity, and nowhere is the rift more deeply felt than in the revenge tragedies – although "metaphysical horror" would be a more accurate description. Their universe is a meeting place for slaughter and farce, faith and anatomy, politics and sex. Virginia Woolf called these authors "analytical psychologists," while others see them as the predecessors of Tarantino.

The volume examines both the crisis and the theatrical response to it. It explores the nature of theatre (from dramaturgy to spatial organization, from character arcs to poetry) and, beyond theater, the horror that – today as much as then – stems from the cultural anxieties of the moment. Montaigne, Caravaggio, Lynch, Haneke, Beckett, and chaos theory appear as analogies, along with the TV series Succession and Shakespeare.

Webster, Middleton and their peers explored the great traumas of their era in the most evocative place possible: the stage. For a long time, we did not forgive them for not being called Shakespeare, and the turmoil and violence that simmered in their works also gave rise to suspicion. Yet they are dazzlingly modern authors, born for our contemporary stage: their dramaturgical scalpel dissects the psyche and the body broken down into its constituent parts with the same stubbornness as social and political institutions, their investigation leading us simultaneously to the stars and the mud. We can learn from their courage: it is high time that examining their theatre we held up a mirror to our own.