love and violence in shakespear's plays (answer in 250 to 300 words)
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Explanation:
Violence takes many forms in the works of Shakespeare, including warfare, murder, suicide, rape, and mutilation, and it appears to serve a variety of purposes. As an issue of critical debate, Shakespeare's use of violence has been both attacked and defended by modern analysts. While some scholars study the ways in which Shakespeare's use of violence reflects the attitudes of his time, others focus on the implications of the reaction to violence in Shakespeare's works by modern audiences and critics.
In his review of Shakespeare's use of violence, Jonas Barish (1991) identifies several categories into which violent episodes may be divided, including sword play and warfare, sacrificial killings, self-inflicted injuries, sexual violence, and comic violence. Barish argues that unlike his predecessors, Shakespeare did not seem to be "addicted" to violence. Rather, he observes in Shakespeare a gradual decline of violence for its own sake and an increasing tendency to equate violence with disorder and tyrannical behavior. Only in Titus Andronicus, which features both cannibalism and an excess of sexual violence in the rape and grotesque mutilation of Lavinia, does Shakespeare seem to "wallow" in violence, according to Barish.
Other critics focus more concertedly on the violence perpetrated against women in Shakespeare's plays. In her examination of Othello, Sara Munson Deats (1991) maintains that the play both legitimizes violence and negatively stereotypes women. This legitimation and stereotyping, argues Deats, "underlie the phenomenon of wife battering." Deats goes on to note that the psychological portraits of abuser and abused as depicted by Shakespeare have changed little in the twentieth century. Similarly, Emily Detmer (1997)'analyzes the pattern of domination in The Taming of the Shrew. Detmer stresses that despite Petruchio's physically nonviolent "taming" of Kate, his domination of her is an inherently violent act.