Critical Survey

How does Shakespeare represent war? Guest editor Patrick Gray reviews scholarship to date on the question, in light of contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey, ‘Shakespeare and War’. Drawing upon St. Augustine’s City of God, the basis for later just war theory, Gray argues that progressive optimism regarding the perfectibility of what St. Augustine calls the ‘City of Man’ makes it difficult for modern commentators to discern Shakespeare’s own more tragic, Augustinian sense of warfare as a necessary evil, given the fallenness of human nature. Modern misgivings about ‘honour’ also lead to misinterpretation. As Francis Fukuyama points out, present-day liberal democracies tend to follow Hobbes and Locke in attempting to ‘banish the desire for recognition from politics’. Shakespeare in contrast, like Hegel, as well as latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, sees the faculty that Plato calls thymos as an invaluable instrument of statecraft.

Looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past has been a prominent aspect of Shakespeare’s afterlife. Even today, his plays continue to be mobilized in the Balkan region in order to address the aftermath of ethnic violence. This article focuses on theatrical and cinematic takes that are chronologically close but geographically distant from the Yugoslav context. Katie Mitchell’s staging of 3 Henry VI (1994), Sarah Kane’s play Blasted (1995) and Mario Martone’s documentary-style film, Rehearsal for War (1998) were all prompted by a deep-felt urge to confront the Bosnian war and reclaim it from the non-European otherness to which it systematically became confined in public discourse at the time. In Shakespeare, these artists found a powerful conceptual aid to universalize the conflict, as well as a means to address their discursive positioning as outsiders and its problematic implications.

The disastrous peace negotiations between John of Lancaster and the Northern rebels in 2 Henry IV show how the political and moral stakes of truth and trust play out, not only between Prince Hal, the king-to-be, and his unruly companions but also among other subjects both loyal and rebellious. Off-stage, similar tensions can be discerned between English officials and Irish rebels during the Nine Years War (1594–1603). In fact, a remarkably well-documented instance of such a case can be traced to the same year that 2 Henry IV seems to have been first staged. The 1597 truce negotiation between Hugh O’Neill, leader of the Irish confederates, and English crown representatives can shed light on Lancaster’s shocking betrayal of the Northern rebels in Shakespeare’s play. The exchange between crown representatives and rebel leaders, both in early modern Ireland and in 2 Henry IV, exposes the limitations of delegated authority and undercuts assumptions of trust and honour between king and subjects in truce negotiations.

Critics to date tend to identify Shakespeare’s perspective on war with either pacifism or militarism, stances seen as embodied by Erasmus and Machiavelli. This dichotomy leads to a stalemate, since the plays articulate both of these extremes. A third option, however, is the more pragmatic, circumstantial approach to the ethics of war formulated through just war theory. Over the course of the plays, characters gradually develop complex ethical arguments both for and against the justice and injustice of wars. They consider traditional prerequisites for a just war such as just cause, right intention and legitimate authority, but give specific emphasis to the principle of proportionality. A violation of this principle, as becomes obvious, renders the war in question unjust.

How do we understand Shakespeare’s invitation to laugh in the context of war? Previous critical accounts have offered too simple a view: that laughter undercuts military ideals. Instead, this article draws on the Aristotelian description of laughable ‘deformity’ and Plato’s description of laughable ignorance in order to characterize Shakespeare’s laughter in the context of war more carefully as an expression of ‘relative painlessness’. It discusses how the fraught amusement of Coriolanus (Coriolanus), the reciprocality of Falstaff and Hotspur as laughable military failures (1 Henry IV) and the laughter of Bertram at Paroles (All’s Well That Ends Well) each engage with an ancient philosophical conundrum articulated poignantly by St. Augustine: the requirement that a Christian civilization engage in war to defend itself against honour-obsessed aggressors without turning into a like aggressor itself. Shakespeare’s laughter at war enacts the desire for that balance.

Shakespeare uses the classical comic archetype of the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) to probe social and ethical issues regarding military honour. These issues are still with us. This article takes as its point of departure the US Supreme Court’s 2012 decision finding the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 unconstitutional on free speech grounds. This high-profile case, centring upon a latter-day avatar of Falstaff or Pistol, suggests both continuity and change in how militarist societies address the challenge of distinguishing true and counterfeit valour. Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays and Henry V, like the Supreme Court opinions, stage a contest between classical epic ideologies of honour and comic recuperations of the coward or braggart. These literary and legal discourses are further contextualized through historical anecdote and Aristotle’s account of courage and cowardice. The Aristotelian figure of the alazōn (impostor) creates a complex interplay between ethics and poetics which plays out in theatre and courtroom alike.

Within the historical context of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, ineffectuality, vacillation and irresolution in social and political commitment came under scrutiny as a kind of ‘Hamletism’. Catalan journalist and writer Paulino Masip (1899–1963) cites Hamlet as a type in his article ‘Carta a un espanñl escéptico’ [‘Letter to a sceptical Spaniard’] in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia on 16 September 1937, as does José Bergamín (1895–1983) in his contribution to the 2nd International Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture, published in the monthly review Hora de España in August 1937. A theatre production of Hamlet in Valencia in December 1937 reveals similar conflicts and anxieties. In the novel El diario de Hamlet García [The Diary of Hamlet García], written during his exile in Mexico, Masip criticizes wartime Hamletism and reflects upon the dilemmas the civil war imposed on him, contemporary intellectuals and the civilian population of Madrid.

This article studies ‘King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings’, the RSC’s recent four-play Henriad directed by Gregory Doran and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2016. In keeping with Doran’s directorial style, the cycle was conspicuously lean on concept, offering few moments of design-driven staging and instead spotlighting character and ensemble acting. The cycle thus presents an opportunity for exploring some of the claims of character criticism, which has recently made something of a comeback in Shakespeare studies. Combining the perspectives of performance theorists, theatre practitioners and literary scholars, character criticism describes dramatic character as a phenomenon constituted through the cooperation of text and body. Thinking about Doran’s Henriad in these terms not only highlights the achievements and flaws of ‘King and Country’ but discloses Shakespeare’s diverse mechanisms for constructing theatrical kings.