Performing early modern trauma from Shakespeare to Milton

"An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the way personal and collective loss is registered in prose, poetry, and drama in early modern England. It focuses on the connection of representation of violence in literary works to historical traumas such as royal death, secularization, and regicide. The author contends that dramatic and poetic forms function as historical archives both in their commemoration of the past and in their reenactment of loss that is part of any effort to represent traumatic history."--Jacket.