Dennis Britton

This thesis interrogates the “storying” of white violence that occurs through Shakespearean tragedy. A term introduced by Gina Starbanket and Dallas Hunt to describe the ways in which “narratives, or spoken and written accounts, come alive and function as important political tools” (Storying Violence 23-24), the storying of white violence carries significant implications for how we conceive of both criminality and whiteness today. I offer early modern drama, and Shakespearean tragedy in particular, as a critical piece in the storying of white violence that continues to render whiteness invisible and illegible in our contemporary moment. This thesis focuses on Shakespeare’s storying of violence through The Tragedy of Hamlet. I contend that the play engages in a construction of whiteness that is crucially reliant on the intersection of visual and verbal representation, what I describe here as a visual epistemology mediated by language. Importantly, Hamlet registers not only the storying of white violence but also its disruption, moments of visual crisis and incoherence in the overarching narrative of white supremacy. Such moments of disruption, I argue, occur through the presence of miniatures, mirrors, and theatrical representation in the play. Analyzing these modes of representation alongside a historicized discussion of early modern visual culture, I show how Hamlet puts forward an understanding of criminal whiteness as deviant, the distorted reflection of whiteness that is, at the same time, assumed to be—and, indeed, set down as—the fundamental nature of Black bodies and being.

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