Inspired by the fast-moving scenes and vulnerable, complex characters of Elizabethan drama, this new opera by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp considers what space, if any, exists for love and human affection inside the dangerous machinery of power. A king, compelled to choose between love and political hard-headedness, makes a fatal decision, allowing his country to slide into civil war, and setting his own wife and son implacably against him. Lessons in Love and Violence is Benjamin and Crimp's third operatic collaboration, following Into the Little Hill and the critically acclaimed Written on Skin.