Plenary Interview: Dr. Rebecca Yearling

On a sunny afternoon in May, barely a month before BritGrad, I sat down with Dr Rebecca Yearling to talk about her upcoming plenary about Shakespeare and Violence. ‘Raised with Shakespeare’ by her parents, two English academics at The University of Glasgow, Rebecca similarly found a love for early modern drama and undertook her studies at The University of Oxford. More specifically, however, and much like this year’s conference theme, she expressed her keen interest in audiences and spectators. During her PhD, Rebecca interrogated early modern satire explaining the ‘problem of the audience’- ‘How do you get someone to react the way you want them to react?’ More recently, her work has turned to violence in Shakespeare as is explored in Shakespeare’s Violence and the early modern Spectator (2025). Rebecca expressed another problem with such texts- the ways in which audience members respond to extreme acts of violence- ‘we want to look, but we also don’t want to look’. This, and much more, awaits BritGrad attendees in her plenary talk… 

When asked how her work specifically engages with the conference theme, Rebecca delved into the moral precarity of audience responses to violence: 

‘I'm interested in things like with literary tastes, why we enjoy certain things, why we enjoy things that we kind of feel we ought not to enjoy. So sometimes that's moral things where we're looking at something that's private. But also, sometimes you end up seeing things that you feel you shouldn't have seen that might make you feel uneasy in various ways. So, I'm interested in observing, but also what observing does to the observer, how we feel, how we feel about being observers. I think Shakespeare's really interested in that, but I think he often asked us to reflect on the fact that we're not intervening, terrible things are happening, and we're doing nothing.’ 

For the early modern period, Rebecca also emphasised ‘the idea of violence as a form of theatre’. She explained how the two were (and to some extent still are) deeply intertwined, particularly with state intervention and the enactment of justice. This concept of moral spectatorship brought Rebecca to ‘the modern world’ in her 2025 book. She argued for parallels between ‘real violence’ and ‘theatrical violence’, pointing to the refugee crisis as just one example: ‘we decide who has empathy, who doesn’t get our empathy’.   

This was a good opportunity for me to ask a little more about Rebecca’s recent articles which explore the relationships between the UK education system, Shakespeare, media, and violence. For her, ‘the idea that Shakespeare can upset people is an important one’, with content warnings often triggering certain students, but the absence of such warnings equally causing issues. Citing Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet as one example, Rebecca indicated that whilst ‘it is a great film’, it ‘aestheticises’ and ‘romanticises the deaths much more so than Shakespeare does’. Returning to the audience once more, (in this instance school students), Rebecca’s work requires teachers to think carefully about what adaptations they show their students.  

To make the most of Rebecca’s broad knowledge of early modern theatre, we side-stepped slightly into Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I wanted to learn more about whether they staged violence differently or might have had a different impact on their audiences. Though Rebecca emphasised that there is much nuance to this question, she explained that Shakespeare stood out amongst ‘the drama of the period’ in treating violence as ‘big, spectacular, and theatrical’. Moreover, in the works of Shakespeare ‘it can be difficult to know how to feel about victims of violence’, as ‘psychologically, socially, and theatrically, it’s all unstable’. Rebecca offered one such example from her book - Gloucester in King Lear. Not only do we have the blinding scene ‘which is very unpleasant’, but Gloucester ‘does not vanish from the play after that’. For Rebecca, ‘the fact that he sticks around’ makes it all the more unbearable- ‘we often don’t want to be around people who are suffering horribly and we can’t fix them because it makes us feel bad’. In this way, Rebecca hopes that this will be one of the key take-aways from her plenary: ‘the role of empathy’ and what Shakespeare’s plays can tell us about this. 

We wrapped up by returning to Rebecca’s thespian childhood. One of her earliest Shakespeare related memories was watching The Merchant of Venice as a seven year old on a sick day, as her father tried to simultaneously entertain her and prepare a Shakespeare seminar! And finally, Rebecca noted her constant fascination with Hamlet. Despite finding the titular character quite ‘awful’ at times, she remains captivated by the history, storytelling, and the audience’s mixed sympathies throughout.