This article explores the conflation of rhetorical and physical acts of rape and massacre in a range of early modern drama, culminating in a case study of the two phenomena in Alarum for London (1599). Rooting its analysis in the Lucrece myth, the essay demonstrates how prominent traditions of reading rape – as an attack on the soul, and as an attack on a city – provide a rubric through which Alarum can be understood. When enacted concomitantly, rape and massacre have the propensity to destroy body and soul, individual, and the wider society to which they belong.

Shakespeare regularly stages extreme violence. In Titus Andronicus, Chiron and Demetrius are baked in a pie and eaten by their mother. Gloucester's eyes are plucked out in King Lear. In contradistinction to this graphic excess are moments when violence is relegated off-stage: Macbeth kills King Duncan in private; when Richard III suborns the assassination of his nephews-the notorious 'Princes in the Tower'-the boys are killed away from the audience. In such instances, the spectator must imagine the scope and formation of the violence described. Focussing on Richard III, this article asks why Shakespeare uses the word 'massacre' to express the murder of the two princes. Determining the varied, and competing, meanings of the term in the 16th and 17th centuries, the article uncovers a range of ways an early audience might have interpreted the killings-as mass murder, assassination, and butchery-and demonstrates their thematic connections to child-killing across the cycle of plays that Richard III concludes.

No abstract

No abstract