The Metaphorical Bloodshed of Shakespeare: Examining Love's Labour Lost and The Winter's Tale Anonymous College

We live in a violent world. One only needs to watch the nightly news to find this to be the truth. Theft. Murder. Rape. Fires. Car crashes. Natural disasters. All of these forces bring violence into our lives, and it should come as no surprise that it has always been this way. Even in the time of Shakespeare, violence was a common thing and was sometimes even accepted within the dominant culture. What many scholars have sought to discover is if Shakespeare supported this cultural normativity, or if he was subtly trying to subvert and undermine it. Many forms of violence occur within Shakespeare’s work, but some of the most biting and bloodiest of these is in his word choice and the language of his characters. Just like in real life, words have a powerful impact on the lives of people. Some of the things that we remember in life are words that have hurt us with their cruelty or ignorance. Shakespeare, being the master playwright that he was, wrote this human aspect into the lives of the characters of his plays.

In this essay I will be drawing upon two of his plays to illustrate this: Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Winter’s Tale. Throughout the medieval period, we can see evidence of two different types of people who were commonly...