Cutting words and healing wounds: Friendship and violence in early modern drama

Abstract

Beatrice’s outburst in this epigraph pithily incorporates the thematic triad at the heart of this study-masculinity, friendship, and violence-and even glances at medical discourse, which binds them together.2 These lines, and the larger passage from which they come, invite questions about the proposed correlation between manhood and violence, and the repercussions this equation has on men’s foundational relationships: in a culture privileging male-male homosocial amity as fervently as in early modern England, how could one friend contemplate challenging another friend to a duel, as happens with relative frequency in plays of the time? And once they have reached that level of emotional intensity, what determines whether they can ever return to or even improve upon their previous state of friendship, or whether one will kill the other? How, in short, might we re-read early modern friendship in such a way that violence becomes, at least upon occasion, a necessary ingredient for preserving that friendship rather than a purely literary invention introduced in order to intensify the dramatic situation in such plays as John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy?3.