The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War

Illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about war in all its complexity.

David Loewenstein (Edited by), Paul Stevens (Edited by)

9781108464963, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 October 2021

320 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.5 cm, 0.49 kg

'The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War is much more than an overview of a field or guide to an area and performs valuable intellectual work in bringing together diverse perspectives on a subject that embarrasses as well as attracts readers, many of whom want a straightforward understanding of a complicated subject that will inevitably resist mastery.' Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.

1. Beyond shallow and silence: war in the age of Shakespeare Paul E. J. Hammer
2. Just war theory and Shakespeare Franziska Quabeck
3. Shakespeare on civil and dynastic wars David Bevington
4. Foreign war Claire McEachern
5. War and the classical world Maggie Kilgour
6. 'The question of these wars': Shakespeare, warfare, and the chronicles David Scott Kastan
7. Instrumentalizing anger: warfare and disposition in the Henriad Gail Kern Paster
8. War and Eros David Schalkwyk
9. Shakespeare's language and the Rhetoric of war Lynne Magnusson
10. Staging Shakespeare's wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Michael Hattaway
11. Reading Shakespeare's wars on film: ideology and montage Gregory Semenza
12. Shakespeare and World War II Garrett A. Sullivan Jr
13. Henry V and the pleasures of war Paul Stevens
14. Macbeth and Trauma Willy Maley
15. Coriolanus and the use of power Catherine M. S. Alexander.

Subject Areas: War & combat fiction [FJM], Literary reference works [DSR], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Shakespeare plays [DDS], Theatre direction & production [ANF]