War in Shakespeare's Plays | Susan Snyder (essay date 1996)
Susan Snyder (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: Snyder, Susan. “‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings.” In Elizabethan Theater, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, pp. 200-13. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.
[In the following essay, Snyder remarks on a similar absence of a crucial battle scene in both Othello and Hamlet, noting that Shakespeare did not dramatize the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and represented Fortinbras's invasion of Denmark in Hamlet as a relatively bloodless one. Both tragedies, the critic suggests, depict the enemy within as a greater threat than the foreign antagonist.]
To explore what seems to me a characteristic Shakespearean strategy, I want to consider two battles that don't happen: the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and the invasion of Danish lands by Fortinbras and his Norwegian force in Hamlet. Both of these loom...
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