Snowflakes and trigger warnings: Shakespearean violence has always upset people
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Rebecca Yearling, Keele University
We are repeatedly told that today’s young people are oversensitive, claiming to need “trigger warnings” and to be traumatised by literary texts – including the works of Shakespeare – that previous generations took in their stride. But is it really true that readers and theatregoers of the past were more emotionally resilient than today’s “snowflake” generation?
In his 1765 edition of the The Plays of William Shakespeare, the great 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson admitted that reading certain scenes in Shakespeare’s King Lear gave him a sense of extreme discomfort. He found the death of Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, in the tragedy’s last act, so upsetting that he avoided ever reading the scene again until he was forced to do so by his work as an editor.
Moreover, he claimed, the blind...
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