Passionate Uprisings in Shakespeare’s 'Lucrece'

The phenomenon of passionate riot and its role in uprisings, fictional and historical, remains an analytical blind spot. Despite “the affective turn” in the humanities at the outset of the twenty-first century, scholarly studies have continued to focus on the social, political, economic and religious motives of participants in uprisings and on their methods of protest with little sense that these might include instances of passionate protest. To bring the phenomenon into focus, this article turns its attention to Shakespeare’s Lucrece, one of several Shakespearean texts that provide compelling evidence in the imaginative literature of the period of a perception that grief could motivate and be used to provoke political protest and instigate political transformation