Performance, Ethics, and Poetics of Violence

This chapter demarcates the scope and parameters of the book, first by defining the term “violence,” and then by outlining the three pillars that support the chapters that follow: performance, ethics, and poetics. This discussion is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a foundation painted with broad strokes to allow for the subsequent chapters to go into more detail with respect to the particulars of the plays being studied. The section on performance lays out the book’s theoretical approach and provides some historical conditions of performance, as most of the tragedies studied in the book were performed around their date of publication. The chapter then delineates the connections between ethics and tragedy before revisiting the poetics of sixteenth-century French tragedy and the use of onstage violence as a dramaturgical device.