Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance explores rape and domestic violence against women around the turn of the seventeenth century in England, its pernicious erasure in the period's cultural representations, the framing and negotiation of that erasure in some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history-Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Heywood's A Woman killed with Kindness, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling-and the politics of rehearsing it all on our late twentieth-and twenty-first-century stages. Solga positions the book as both a history and an ethics: early modern theatre texts are still produced regularly and to acclaim around the world, prompting her to ask how we might perform these texts with a difference, staging the history of violence's elision, rather than just that elision itself.