In the history of English-language drama, there are two periods that stick out as theatrical epochs of blood, gore, and violence: the Early Modern stage of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Cyril Tourneur, and John Webster; and the plays of the last two decades, including the so-called “In-Yer-Face” playwrights of the 1990s, Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, and Anthony Neilson, among others. These two eras have become readily identifiable by their stage violence, gaining no small amount of fame/infamy for the shocking acts depicted in a remarkably large number of the plays. Even though In-Yer-Face Theatre has often been called Neo-Jacobeanism, little study has been done on the connections between the drama of the two periods.

Using a variety of theoretical techniques to study the violence therein, I compare and contrast the plays and playwrights in question, forming connections and attempting to uncover thematic and theatrical trends that span centuries, while highlighting the innovations and idiosyncrasies that each successive generation of playwrights brought to its writing. The dissertation not only describes the history of violence on the English stage from the Early modern period to today, but it also investigates why this violence matters. Investigating paradigms such as Aristotelian catharsis, Artaudian cruelty, and Giardian sacred violence, I examine the function of violence in these plays, both dramaturgically and in relation to an audience of spectators. I argue that not only are the gruesome acts found in these plays not a mere function of sensationalistic titillation, but the violence can in fact have positive social, political, and religious connotations.