What is Shakespeare's most violent play?

Answer 1

Without a doubt, Titus Androniucus. Not well known, but very gory - severed heads!

Answer 2

I'd have to go with Titus Andronicus. I saw the play performed in Theatre Clwyd a few years back. In the first act alone there is ritual human sacrifice and murder.

There is rape, the cutting off of hands, the cutting out of a tongue, more murder, beheading, yet more murder, a cannibal-feast and just for good measure three final murders.

I don't think this can be beaten.

Answer 3

There's 25+ deaths in the Henry VI plays - they are fairly violent depicting one of the bloodiest times in the history of this country (the war of the roses).

Titus Andronicus is also fairly violent with Titus cooking people ...

Answer 4

Titus Andronicus definitely. Practically everyone dies, often in really nasty ways. The level of violence is so high that it begins to seem like a farce.

In King Lear, the blinding scene is apparently so gory that many people faint when watching it.

Answer 5

Definitely, Titus Andronicus. The gratuitous violence, severed limbs, heads, etc., caused one critic to suggest that: "Titus was like a man thrust blindfold into a room full of whirling knives."

T.S. Eliot claimed that Titus was "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written."

I wonder if it were staged today, if it wouldn't be met with applause?

Answer 6

Undoubtedly Titus Andronicus. War, parricide, ritual human sacrifice, rape and mutilation, beheadings, dismemberments, cannibalism, and in the final scene, three characters die in only five lines. Absolute Grand Guignol—though right at the end it strains credibility so much that it becomes more comic than tragic.

Answer 7

Of all that I have read, I would say Macbeth and King Lear are the most violent, since so many people die at the end.

Answer 8

Titus Andronicus.

In one particularly brutal scene a woman is raped, and then her tongue and hands are cut off so that she will have no way to tell anyone what happened.

Eventually her family finds out and this starts a huge escalating cycle of revenge that results in even more rapes, beheadings and severed limbs.

Answer 9

Macbeth, especially if the witches are violent as well as the obvious battles and deaths.

Answer 10

I say it's a toss up between Titus Andronicus and Hamlet