Sep 5, 2008

Shakespeare's World | Shakespeare and Warfare

The Range of Shakespeare's Interest in War
In choosing, from the beginning of his career, to cater to the public's lively interest in dramatized history, Shakespeare was accepting war as a major theme. Staged English history was royal history. And what was interesting about kings—apart from their personalities—was not the economic or administrative histories of their reigns but their foreign wars and the armed crises they had to deal with at home. It was against a background of wars (gains and losses of territory) and of domestic faction (treachery, usurpation, and punishment)...