Violence to Women and Shakespeare

Some of Shakespeare's most violent plays were by far his most popular during his lifetime. Although modern audiences are often repulsed by its gore and brutality, "Titus Andronicus" was a huge success in Tudor England. And certainly it is no coincidence that Shakespeare often deviated from his sources to include more titillating details and include sensationalist melodrama into his psychological masterpieces. Hamlet's father is poisoned with a potion so potent that it immediately causes bubbling …

…women as an aspect of the structure of male dominance in Shakespeare's plays may be seen to obscure deeper patterns of conflict in which women as lovers, are perhaps more importantly as mothers, are perceived as radically untrustworthy. In this structure of relation, it is women who are regarded as powerful and men who strive to avoid an awareness of their vulnerability in relation to women, a vulnerability in which they regard themselves as feminine.