Why weren't Elizabethan audience horrified by the violence in Shakespeare's tragedies?

Answer 1

They were used to it. Shakespeare built on a tradition of tragedies, and his audience would have been familiar with the most popular Elizabethan play of all, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which featured a man being murdered onstage in the presence of his lover, a man being hanged while convinced to the last second that he has been pardoned, a stage play in which some of the actors are really murdered and one really commits suicide (in front of their parents), and finally a man who bites out his own tongue and spits it on the stage. Other playwrights wrote similarly juicy revenge tragedies. At the same time anyone who had been to grammar school had read the extremely gory and violent tragedies of the Roman playwright Seneca, and there were contemporaries of Shakespeare who imitated the Senecan style, Ben Jonson for one. Besides, the realities of violence were well known to the audience. It was a rough time, and people did not whitewash the facts of life.

Answer 2

Elizabethan audiences were not horrified as violence was part of the European culture in the days, even amongst the elite. Take for instance the grotesque and macabre works of Thomas Kyd, the period's most influential play writer and where one would see limbs cut off and gallons of false blood, and sometimes animal blood, to further enhance the realism of his plays. Extreme violence and torture was part of the daily life of Europeans. For instance, Kings and other nobles would put a kitten inside a small cage and then burn it alive slowly just to hear it scream and see it agonizing, delighted with the savage act.

Answer 3

Because it was a violent era.