Everyday Murder and Household Work in Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies

Early modern conduct literature forges a link between the home and female virtue. This chapter suggests that the genre of domestic tragedy places this idealised association under pressure, by demonstrating the extent to which prescribed household ‘normality’ contains within its hierarchical structures, spatial logic, and gendered work, the potential for extraordinary and uncanny violation. Domestic tragedies like Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), and A Woman Killed with Kindness (first performed c. 1603) stage how domestic objects, tasks, and spaces are perverted through their involvement in the act and aftermath of household murder. This chapter argues that in Othello and Macbeth, Shakespeare draws on the genre of domestic tragedy in staging uncanny versions of everyday domestic experiences.