Andrew Hiscock locates Shakespeare's history plays within debates over the status and function of violence in a nation's culture.

Andrew Hiscock is Dean and Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales, and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3. He is a Fellow of the English Association and has published widely on English and French early modern literature. He is series co-editor for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides and a trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association. His monographs include Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2011) and The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (2004).

1. 'touching violence or punishments': Walter Ralegh and the economy of aggression; 2. 'Undoing all, as all had never been': the play of violence in Henry VI; 3. In the realm of the 'unthankful King': violent subjects and subjectivities in the Henry IV plays; 4. 'Now thrive the armourers': Henry V and the promise of 'Hungry War'; 5. 'The childe of his great Mistris favour, but the sonne of Bellona': the conflict-ridden careers of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; 6. European afterlives 1600-1770.