Only two days separate Anzac Day and Shakespeare’s (presumed) birthday and actual death-day. This proximity is coincidental. But amid a war in Ukraine, being reported in horrifyingly graphic detail from the point of view of the victims, and given Shakespeare is the world’s most-quoted, most-performed and most studied writer, it is reasonable to ask: what does he tell us of war?
In 26 of his 38 plays, Shakespeare includes a war in either foreground or background. In all these, anti-war invectives abound in epigrammatic phrases: “O, war thou son of hell” (Henry VI, part 2), “the hideous god of war”, “war and lechery confound all” (Troilus and Cressida), “dogged war bristle[s] his angry crest / And in the gentle eyes of peace”
Soldiers are regarded by civilians as cruelly taking “our goodly men by beards” and indulging unbridled violence in our holy virgins to the stain /Of contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war.
Meanwhile, in other plays, some sympathetic and morally scrupulous characters condemn the tragic futility and violence of war. Hamlet meditates over a piece of worthless, depopulated scorched earth “wasteland”, over which “the imminent deaths [will] go to their graves like beds”, fighting “even for an eggshell” “which is not tomb enough and To hide the slain”.
The saintly, pacifist King Henry VI quotes Christ’s words while brooding on the high moral ground of a hill overlooking battle in civil butchery mafia-like vendettas pitting families against each other and resulting in mutual slaughter of fathers and sons.
The prophetess Cassandra, speaking as much for future generations as her own, condemns the Trojan war, calling upon “Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled old, /Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry”, to weep in protest at the “mass of moan to come”.
The fate of the “heroic” Hector in the play is ignominiously humiliating:
He’s dead; and at the murderer’s horse’s tail, / In beastly sort, through the shameful field … Hector is dead, There is no more to say.
In these and other plays, Shakespeare places the blame for unjust and destructive wars squarely upon the heads of morally fallible military officers. For some reason, the playwright had a fascination for psychologically damaged, high-ranking soldiers, presenting them as case studies of the military mind.
Macbeth is introduced as a soldier credited with “unseaming the nave to the chaps” and decapitating enemies. He rapidly descends into equally bloody regicide and embarks on a tyrannical reign, using hired killers to assassinate political rivals and slaughter innocent families of opponents (Lady Macduff and her children).
Othello’s default position as a general, even in marriage, is to trust his military ensign over his innocent wife, as a result turning his marriage into a misplaced battlefield of domestic violence and murder.
Henry V is predisposed to patterns of threatening, lying and blaming others for his own insecurities and faults. He is also a hopeless lover, curiously vowing to love Katherine “cruelly” and with the stated preference in love to lay on like a butcher.
The article first appeared.
Robert White is a Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia.
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