True Crime on Stage in Shakespeare's England

Apple  | Audible |  Spotify  |  RSS  |  YouTube (captioned)
​

In the often-chaotic society of sixteenth-century England, many people enthusiastically consumed true crime narratives in songs, news, and theater plays. Then as now, true crime narratives often centered on community crime-solving as a way of dealing with sensational and upsetting violence. Whether in the form of domestic tragedies or elaborate revenge dramas, true crime played to packed houses in the theaters of Elizabethan London. Amid religious and political upheaval, the popularity of true crime attested not just to evolving habits of media consumption, but also to powerful desires for communal order and mutual responsibility. In this episode, Lucy and guest host Dr. Rachel Clark examine true love, strong hate, and swift revenge – and why audiences tend to love a good murder.

Hosts: Lucy and Rachel

Help keep Footnoting History going, click here to find out how!

Further Reading
Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches, ed. Helen Ostovich. [contains Tomkyns letter]

Rachel E. Clark, “John Webster and the Height of Jacobean Tragedy.” Seventeenth Century English Literature, ed. Kirilka Stavreva. Gale Researcher Guide.

Sheila Coursey, “Two Lamentable Tragedies and True Crime Publics in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy.” Comparative Drama 53, no. 3/4 (2019): 263–86. 

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

English Broadside Ballad Archive.

Marissa Greenberg, Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England.

Frank Kermode, The Age of Shakespeare.

Harold Schechter, “Our Long-Standing Obsession with True Crime.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 45 (2012): 6–8. 

Emma Smith, ed., Five Revenge Tragedies.

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640.

Elizabeth Williamson, "The Domestication of Religious Objects in the White Devil." Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900 47, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 473-4A.

Stephen Wittek, The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News.

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)​​

Meet Our Guest Co-Host, Rachel Clark

Rachel Clark earned her PhD in English from the Ohio State University in 2011. Since then, she has taught at Wartburg College in Iowa, where she is Associate Professor of English and director of the Honors Community. She fell in love with 16th- and 17th-century poetry when she read John Donne; an undergrad class on revenge tragedy cemented the deal. Her current research examines witchcraft and disability in the early modern Atlantic world. At Wartburg she teaches British literature from Beowulf to Wolf Hall, as well as honors seminars on utopias, celebrity gossip, and witches around the world. In her free time, she fulfills the demands of her dog Jellybean, who believes in being adored at all times, and daydreams about retiring someday to a small European village full of delicious pastries and low-key mysteries.