Shakespeare’s canon includes many military figures, but arguably none is more successful than Henry V. In the play, the key to success is shown to lie in the king’s ability to instrumentalize the vehement emotions necessary to wage war. Shakespeare presents anger in Aristotelian terms as a hierarchical emotion reserved for elite men tasked with military leadership. The king’s deft use of anger demonstrates his self-discipline from his decision to invade France until his overwhelming victory there. This self-discipline distinguishes him from the quarrelsome soldiers (like the choleric Fluellen) who serve under him. The efficacy of Henry’s anger becomes evident when juxtaposed with the contrast in 1 Henry IV between his father’s ineffectual coldness and the reckless tempestuousness of Hotspur. In Henry V, the cool performance of hot emotions makes Henry a modern man of wrath.

This chapter argues that, while Shakespeare was deployed in World War II Britain for propaganda purposes, references to the playwright or his works also exposed rifts or contradictions within the national culture he was called upon to embody. It focuses on three major media in which Shakespeare was performed, adapted, or appropriated: the theater, the radio, and the cinema. Whereas state intervention fostered the performance of Shakespearean drama throughout the nation, the BBC underwent dramatic changes that meant that, while Britain’s national poet remained central to its mission, he was also associated with an elitist model of broadcasting whose hegemony was overturned during the war years. As for film, wartime Shakespearean appropriations show that the playwright could trouble propaganda imperatives as well as support them. In sum, while Shakespeare was a cornerstone of British wartime nationalism, he additionally served as a register of cultural, regional, and social difference.

This chapter considers how, in six successful Shakespeare films, exclusively cinematic formal methods of depicting battle serve to interpret and transform the plays’ perspectives on warfare. Special emphasis is placed on the concept (and deployment) of dialectical montage first developed by Sergei Eisenstein in his seminal 1929 essay, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Though Eisenstein’s relatively rigid theory of montage has been endlessly appropriated, expanded and, at times, openly rejected by filmmakers and scholars alike, it remains ground zero for realist cinematic treatments of warfare and a key of sorts for deciphering individual filmmakers’ ideological orientations to their subject matter. The chapter argues that even the least overtly political film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays tend to reveal a certain preoccupation with the ethical, ideological, and, of course, hermeneutic implications of representing battle scenes in a medium that all but demands their representation.

Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.

This chapter focuses on just war theory as an approach to Shakespeare and war. It gives an overview of different theories of war and illustrates their significance in the Elizabethan historical context. This includes a discussion of the most important readings of Shakespeare as a realist or a pacifist and a subsequent analysis of Shakespeare’s use of just war theory. Drawing on a variety of examples, this chapter exemplifies what is considered a just cause, a right intention, or a legitimate authority in Shakespeare’s plays; the analysis shows who is presented as culpable or responsible and under which circumstances the relation between the cause and cost of a war must be considered out of balance. The author traces this line of argument along illustrative readings of 3 Henry VI, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida and suggests that just war theory may offer another perspective on Shakespeare and war.

This chapter analyzes traditions of staging the plays from the beginning of the twentieth century, spanning a period from the Boer Wars until the postcolonial wars of the present. It considers not only ways of depicting fighting and battles, but also perspectives on the morality of war created by Shakespeare and his directors. During this period, post-Victorian pictorial realism and historical “accuracy” survived in cinema, but in the theater they gave way to non-illusionistic and unlocalized sets as companies turned their attention from “history” to politics. This did not mean that spectacle diminished: shocking savagery and violence could be graphically represented, but pageants of royal and aristocratic grandeur along with appeals to patriotism sustained by providence were set against vignettes of common life – no longer “comic relief” but ironic touchstones that detected processes of chauvinism, huffing rhetoric, and heroic posturing as families, factions, and nations tore themselves apart.

The classics not only gave Shakespeare the images of war that he drew on in plays based on classical subjects, they also shaped his representation of war more generally. His knowledge of the place of war in the ancient world influenced his view of the ways in which that past informed his own present. Topics in this chapter include the relation of the classical past to the English present, the relation between foreign and domestic war, and the relation between war and peace. What happens when the hero comes home (the subject of Greek and Senecan tragedy): when Titus finishes killing, Antony lets his hair down, Hector relaxes with his family, Achilles withdraws into his tent, Tarquin takes a night off, or Coriolanus tries to turn politician. How also does war inform peace and, further, what is the relation between the “arts” of war and the arts of peace, especially literature?

This chapter explores the scene of conflict with a foreign power in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the history plays 1 Henry VI, King John, and Henry V, in which war with France provides the testing ground for an exploration of the contrast between foreign and native, or national, values. In these plays, Englishness is largely defined in terms of masculine stoicism and canny tactical knowledge, as opposed to French foppishness. The characterization of the English as providentially favored underdogs up against an overconfident enemy present in Henry V and King John recalls Elizabethan conflicts with Spain and the papacy. Gender identity also factors prominently in Shakespeare’s creation of a sense of the foreign, as he describes England’s island geography as a virginal national space to be defended against invasion. At the same time, Macbeth demonstrates that Shakespeare does not shy away from this conflict between foreign and native on the home front.

Given the challenges war posed for direct physical representation on the Elizabethan stage, much of Shakespeare’s mimetic success depends on his techniques of linguistic construction, especially of narrated war scenes and dialogic encounters. For narrated scenes, Shakespeare follows Marlowe in translating the “high-astounding terms” of the classical grand style to the Elizabethan stage, a choice with ideological implications explored in the chapter. Shakespeare often favors the prospective narration of imagined war scenes, turning potentially static description into the terrorizing speech acts of Henry V and other leaders. In dialogic encounters, Shakespeare develops the dynamics of verbal quarrels and of diplomacy as themselves central events of war. Plays like King John parse war as dysfunctional communication and explore what meager possibilities verbal diplomacy affords for remediation. The chapter assesses contradictions inherent in a rhetorical culture that idealizes eloquence as peacemaking and yet makes eloquence the default language for violent militarism.

Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.

While Henry V is alive with religious echoes, its moral direction seems incoherent or unstable. Accordingly, the focus of this account is the way the play’s use of religion paradoxically intensifies and legitimates the pleasures of war. The chapter aims to explain not only how the sacral monarchy of England’s Plantagenet kings lives on in Shakespeare’s play but more importantly how in instrumentalizing it and its complex political theology, the prince outdoes his royal predecessors and the play aestheticizes war. It does this by enabling Henry to appropriate the dynamism and sheer agency imagined in Scripture’s representation of God’s freedom. The king comes out of a whirlwind and his army appears as Leviathan – all apparently in the service of the new national community. While Henry V is insistently skeptical about the value of war, its delight in the king’s virtù or violent agency complicates the irony and so denies the play any clear-cut moral critique.

It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s erotic plays have war either as their setting or are born out of a recent state of violent conflict. Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra fall most clearly into the former camp, but think also of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where eros emerges from a newly forged peace only to constitute a new battleground of its own. This chapter probes the conjunction of war and eros that appears in almost half of Shakespeare’s plays, first through a broad survey of his corpus and then through studies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. It argues that, far from merely contingent, theatrical conjunctions, Shakespeare provides us a deep conceptual study of the connection between eros and violence, both the potential violence of sexuality and the unsettling underlying sexuality of war.

This chapter considers the contemporary social and military context of the composition of Coriolanus including civil unrest, governance, education, the influence of the classical world, and later conjecture that Shakespeare himself was a soldier. In considering the performance of the play and its afterlives, attention is paid to stage directions, sound, character, and the subsequent adaptation and appropriation of Coriolanus and his mother in other media – art, poetry, film – that focus on the military, civil, personal, and political conflicts at the heart of the play.