Early modern tragic drama is inextricably bound up with violence. We can register this in the description of it, performed in earlier Elizabethan forays into the form by messenger characters lifted directly from classical Greek dramatic precedents, a technique which kept the most gruesome scenes defiantly offstage and out of sight, and in the later visceral materialities of Jacobean tragedy and its close counterpart, revenge drama, which took a certain delight in the effects of putting acts of extreme cruelty and suffering onstage for the audience to witness and endure.

Andreas Höfele has described the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare's c. 1605 play King Lear (it was first published in 1608) as ‘arguably the most horrendous scene of violence in English Renaissance drama’, but perhaps we need to ask why this scene is so unsettling and what the feelings and responses are it seeks to mobilise. This in turn may start to tell us something interesting about the act of spectating and the particular act of spectating tragedy in an early modern theatre.