Violence, Affect, Communal Identity: Massacres in Late Medieval & Early Modern English Drama

Author

• Robin S. Hizme, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Mario DiGangi

Committee Members

Mario DiGangi

Glenn Burger

Tanya Pollard

Subject Categories

Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Literature in English, British Isles | Medieval Studies | Renaissance Studies | Theatre History

Keywords

spectacles of collective violation, affective economies, affect contagion, strategic apathy, emotives, bare life

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between staged group violence, communal affect, and collective identity formation in late medieval and early modern English drama. While traditional scholarship has long focused on the singular body in extremis to explore anatomy or devotional piety, this study shifts the analytical lens to spectacles of collective violation – specifically massacres, sacks, and mass executions. Drawing on contemporary affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s “affective economies,” William Reddy’s “emotives,” and Anna Gibbs’s “affect contagion,” I argue that the representation of mass murder on the English stage operates as a powerful affective technology: these performances systematically orchestrate audience response along a continuum of belonging and exclusion, calibrating intense compassio for the favored in-group while cultivating “strategic apathy” toward religious, regional, or racialized Others. Performances of collective slaughter do not merely reflect pre-existing communal anxieties; rather, they serve as active, embodied laboratories that train audiences in selective empathy, systematically producing a shared national or religious communitas by defining who is – and who is not – worthy of human grief.

Spanning the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the project traces how these affective mechanics of exclusion adapt to shifting religious and geopolitical landscapes. Chapter Two examines how representations of group victimization in late medieval drama, including the York and Digby Slaughter of the Innocents pageants and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, stimulate visceral responses cued to social emotions to systematically police communal boundaries. These plays strategically deploy carnivalesque gender conflict, localized topographies, and “sticky” regional prejudices – such as virulent anti-Scottish sentiments and the spectral memory of York’s 1190 Jewish massacre – to block devotional empathy. By redirecting affective alignment away from historical Jewish and Scottish Others, these performances functioned as civic-religious apparatuses designed to train spectators in a highly exclusionary “strategic apathy” that defined the limits of the Christian communitas.

Chapter Three moves to the late Elizabethan commercial stage (Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris, Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War, and the anonymous A Larum for London), illustrating how dramatists leveraged the conventions of Foxeian martyrology and “pagan homology” across historical dramas to collapse foreign alterities into disposable “bare life;” concurrently, amid anxieties over succession and the influx of foreign refugees, representations of recent European trauma deployed “affective irony” and biopolitical critiques of corporeal excess to construct a defensive Protestant national identity. Chapter Four expands into late Jacobean drama alongside non-dramatic colonial archives, exploring how accounts of historical and transoceanic violence reorient English identity along a global axis. Analyzing Henry Shirley’s The Martyr’d Soldier and the anonymous The Tragedy of Nero alongside multimedia accounts of the 1622 Powhatan uprising and the 1623 Amboyna massacre, this chapter demonstrates how representations of group slaughter – ranging from Vandal persecutions and Nero’s burning of Rome to native attacks and Dutch mercantile torture – codify who qualifies as a human subject worthy of grief. By examining the tension between the Stuart administrative containment and somatic rupture across plays, official reports, and broadside ballads, I show how staged and printed massacres constructed an Anglo-Protestant imperial communitas built on selective empathy and the dehumanization of foreign Others.

The project concludes by bridging these pre-modern theatrical practices with our contemporary digital landscape. I argue that today's algorithmic feeds and recommender systems function as the direct, automated descendants of the early modern playhouse’s affective technologies. By tracing a transhistorical lineage from the physical “affect contagion” of the Globe crowd to the scrolling architecture of the smartphone screen, I demonstrate how modern platforms continually curate spectacles of collective violence and global trauma to programmatically weaponize “strategic apathy” and coordinate collective, visceral attunements that bypass cognitive processing. Ultimately, this study provides a critical, humanities-based framework necessary to analyze, resist, and consciously dismantle the persuasive, iterative technologies that continue to police the surfaces and boundaries of human belonging.

Recommended Citation

Hizme, Robin S., "Violence, Affect, Communal Identity: Massacres in Late Medieval & Early Modern English Drama" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6919