SOURCE: Barish, Jonas. “War, Civil War, and Bruderkrieg in Shakespeare.” In Literature and Nationalism, edited by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson, pp. 11-21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Barish discusses the portrayal of war in Shakespeare's histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances, concluding that the dramatist consistently viewed the pursuit of both foreign and domestic wars as a lamentable but natural human activity that almost inevitably ends with a Pyrrhic victory.]

I want to ask who the participants are in some of the wars dramatized by Shakespeare, and what the circumstances are in which war is undertaken, to see if these tell us anything about how Shakespeare viewed war as a human activity.

I start with the observation that Shakespearean wars are often fought between people, or peoples, who may be said to be related to each other, members of the same family—brothers, or cousins, or groups of people sprung from the same stock or living in close proximity to each other—so that wars often seem to boil down to civil wars, as in Romeo and Juliet, ‘where civil blood makes civil hands unclean’, and, moreover, where the whole point about the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, if it has a point, is that it has no point. Its origins, whatever they may once have been, go back to some unexplained offence which the participants seem to have forgotten, since they never allude to it, but take the state of chronic hostility in which they live as its own justification. The feud would seem to spring from some deep-seated perversity in human nature that defies rational accounting, an impulse presumably related to whatever produces such violations of kinship or community as the murder of one brother by another (Richard III and Hamlet), the usurpation of one brother's right by another (As You Like It and The Tempest) or that of one cousin by another (Richard II).

Unlike any of these last instances, however, which stem from the craving to seize power, the Veronese vendetta has no aim that can be defined or detected, no object other than its own perpetuation, except perhaps that of tapping a certain reservoir of aggression that clamours for outlet in a few unruly members of the community. Aside from Tybalt among the gentry and Sampson and Gregory among the servants, no one in Verona seems much interested in the feud, but these few provocateurs, like extremists everywhere, prove able to stir up plenty of trouble among otherwise peaceable people.

The York tetralogy of course addresses itself explicitly to civil war, and one of its most affecting moments occurs in the memorable scene in 3 Henry VI in which a son mourns over the body of the father he has killed, while opposite a father grieves over the body of the son he has killed. This provides a powerful image of the horror of intrafamilial violence, a testimony to anarchy mitigated only by the fact that the two similar events are proceeding more or less simultaneously on both sides of the stage, with the king looking pityingly on, so that the ritual symmetry of the action and the antiphonal character of the language might be felt to imply some ultimate order underlying the surface chaos.

A comparable moment might be that in King John in which the new bride, Blanche, laments her intolerable position, torn between loyalty to her uncle, John, and her bridegroom the Dauphin, about to fight each other and so turn her into a battleground. The hostilities between John and France already constitute an intrafamilial quarrel, since France is supporting the rival claim of John's nephew Arthur to the English throne. Familial nastiness spills over during the parley scene where the French and English confront each other, due to the shrill dispute between the Queen Mother Elinor, speaking for John, and her daughter-in-law Constance, speaking for John's older brother Geoffrey, her deceased husband and Arthur's father. The two women fill the air with recriminations; both are ready to impugn the honour of certain of their kin by maligning that of certain others. Elinor does not hesitate to brand Arthur, her grandson, a bastard, nor does Constance hesitate to return the insult by questioning the legitimacy of her own deceased husband in order to strike back at Elinor with her own weapons.

From these and comparable instances, we might conclude that far from such deep-seated malice being ‘unnatural’ among members of the same family, Shakespeare seems to regard it as the most natural, the most depressingly commonplace and least surprising thing in the world, especially among close kin. So much would no doubt only confirm the evidence that lies all about us in our own daily lives, in the newspapers, and in psychoanalytic theory: family closeness breeds intensities of feeling just as dangerously destructive as they can be heroically self-sacrificing, with the closest kinships often breeding the most murderous rivalries.

Shakespearean war sometimes serves as a kind of context within which the particular histories of the principals unfolds. Not infrequently wars are already under way when a play starts: in 1 Henry VI hostilities between the English and the French are a permanent fact of life from the beginning, with the French strenuously exploiting their geographical advantage so as to regain the territories lost to Henry V. The war that begins as an international conflict, however, is also cross-cut by two serious civil disturbances on the English side. One, the almost pathological hatred between York and Somerset, kinsmen themselves and cousins to the king, leads directly to the destruction of the hero patriot Talbot. The other, the more comprehensible but equally ugly feud between an uncle and nephew—between Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and the Cardinal of Winchester—leads in its turn, in 2 Henry VI, to the further fragmentation of the realm. Increasingly in 2 and 3 Henry VI, the opposing clans of York and Lancaster, linked by kinship through their common ancestry in Edward III, turn into warring tribes whose purpose is to dominate and humiliate if not exterminate each other.

We learn at the outset of Hamlet that the war between Denmark and Norway started a generation earlier, when the ‘emulous’ elder Fortinbras ‘dar'd’ the elder Hamlet to combat, and lost. The younger Fortinbras revives the challenge in less chivalric form, first seeking to recover what his father has sacrificed. His later invasion of Poland seems motivated chiefly by a thirst for honour, arousing reluctant admiration in Hamlet: ‘Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honour's at the stake’ (IV.iv.53-56)¹—a suspiciously self-contradictory sentiment, in which the second half comes close to cancelling out the first (unless, with some commentators, we are willing to take ‘not to stir’ to mean the exact opposite of what it says: ‘not not to stir’). Accepting the plain prose sense as it is written out, however: if greatness consists in not stirring without great argument, then it can hardly consist also in finding quarrel in a straw, since a straw, by definition, cannot qualify as a ‘great argument’.

As in Hamlet, so more emphatically in Troilus and Cressida: the war that forms the background and context for the action has become a permanent feature of the landscape. The Greeks remind themselves in frustration that ‘after seven years’ siege yet Troy walls stand', but far from pausing in council to ponder the validity of their enterprise, they concern themselves only with how to prosecute it more effectively. Thanks to Hector, the Trojans probe the morality of their cause at least briefly, weighing the many thousand ‘tithes’ of Trojan souls already slain against the worthlessness of Helen herself, the straw over whom they are quarrelling. But Hector, like Hamlet, decides at last that honour's at the stake—‘For 'tis a cause that hath no mean dependance / Upon our joint and several dignities’—and is noisily seconded by Troilus: ‘She is a theme of honor and renown, / A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds, / Whose present courage may beat down our foes, / And fame in time to come canonize us’ (II.ii.192-202).

Hector's rejoinder to Troilus, revalidating honour as a sufficient reason for imperilling yet more thousands, produces an announcement of the ‘roisting challenge’ he has sent the Greeks. The challenge itself leads to a most unusual instance of intrafamilial conflict. When his Greek opponent proves to be the blockish Ajax, Hector halts the fray after a few moments, because they are cousins:

The obligation of our blood forbids
A gory emulation 'twixt us twain.
Were thy commixtion Greek and Troyan so
That thou couldst say, ‘This hand is Grecian all,
And this is Troyan; the sinews of this leg
All Greek, and this all Troy; my mother's blood
Runs on the dexter cheek, and this sinister
Bounds in my father's’; by Jove multipotent,
Thou shouldst not bear from me a Greekish member
Wherein my sword had no impressure made
[Of our rank feud]; but the just gods gainsay
That any [drop] thou borrow'dst from thy mother,
My sacred aunt, should by my mortal sword
Be drained! Let me embrace thee, Ajax.

(IV.v.122-35)

Ajax's blood, in short, interpenetrates so intimately with Hector's own that there is no distinguishing the hated enemy component in it from that of the valued blood relation. Even this war, then, which began with an act of vengeance on the part of the Trojans—or of aggression, depending on how one views it—bears the earmarks of civil war, a family squabble. One may suspect that had all the actors in all the wars in Shakespeare reacted as Hector does to the fact of blood kinship with their foes, far fewer Shakespearean wars would ever have been fought. In any case, Hector's moral delicacy, his piety toward family ties, which disallows the shedding of a cousin's blood, constitutes a rare exception to a widespread and injurious rule, whereas his last-minute reconversion to honour in the debate with his brothers, reconfirming his allegiance to a less humane code, leads only to his death and the ultimate destruction of Troy. The play ends, if it can be said to end at all, with nothing gained but the spilling of much blood, further bloodshed in prospect, and Troilus' hysterical defiance of the Greeks, the Greeks themselves remaining nearly as tediously far from their goal as they were when they complained at the outset of the interminable length of the siege. The Trojan war, thanks to Hector's capitulation to the bubble honour, will continue to take place.

In comedy things tend to work out less devastatingly. The two interconnected cases of Bruderkrieg in As You Like It—the persecution of Duke Senior by his brother Duke Frederick, the oppression by Oliver de Boys of his brother Orlando—come to a festive rather than a calamitous conclusion at least in part because neither of the injured brothers shows the slightest interest in retaliating against his oppressor. Duke Frederick's military campaign, certainly, undertaken to root out and destroy his brother's forces, is halted by the magic of the forest itself, in the person of ‘an old religious man’ who persuades him to renounce his enterprise and withdraw from the world, while Oliver, already himself a victim of Duke Frederick's tyranny by the time he reaches Arden, needs only the shock of his brother's magnanimous rescue to become completely repentant, and eager for the experience of love—with no thought of Celia's unacceptable family connections. But more essential than the forest's magic would seem to be the native disposition of the two mistreated brothers. Duke Senior, instead of dreaming on revenge, and mustering supporters for a march on the capital, lives quietly in the forest descanting on the pleasures of the natural life, while Orlando devotes his energies to the love game in which he has become engrossed. It is the refusal of them both to answer hate with hate, to plot counter-aggression, or bear a lasting grudge, that really defuses the hatred and makes possible the happy ending.

The same motif reappears thickly years later in The Tempest, only here the tension between brothers is not so satisfactorily resolved. Antonio has not only, many years before, wrested the dukedom from his brother Prospero, and cast him adrift in a rotten skiff, but also, in the dramatic present, incited his companion Sebastian to murder his brother, the King of Naples, and claim Naples for himself—a plot forestalled only by Ariel's supernatural intervention. But in this instance we end with a stand-off, Antonio not breathing a word to suggest regret, let alone repentance, for his crimes and plots, and Prospero's declared forgiveness sounding so harsh and threatening that it cannot be said to augur anything approaching a reconciliatory embrace.

Some of these antagonisms would seem to reflect the natural process of growth implied in the opening lines of The Winter's Tale, where we hear that the two kings Leontes and Polixenes were ‘train'd together in their childhoods’—that is, like brothers—so that ‘there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now’ (I.i.22-24). ‘Branch’ may of course mean simply ‘send out shoots, flourish’, as defined in Riverside, but might equally be glossed ‘to strike off into new paths’ (OED), to divide; and division, of course, is what erupts between these brothers in the very first scene of the play, not to be healed until the very end—from which we might infer that kinship in nurture poses as formidable a threat to peaceful coexistence as does kinship founded in nature.

In the comedies we by and large find war treated lightly, as an arena in which young men may demonstrate their manhood and prove their fitness to become leaders. In Much Ado about Nothing we begin at the conclusion of a war in which Claudio, along with Benedick and Don Pedro, has served with distinction, but we discover nothing about the war itself, about who was fighting whom, or what issues separated them. We do not even learn whether the three young nen themselves belonged by blood or ideological conviction or prior allegiance to one of the contending parties. Clearly they fought chiefly in order to acquire (or simply practise) their martial expertise.

This turns out to be the declared reason also for the entry of the French into the war between Siena and Florence in All's Well that Ends Well, in which the young French courtiers have otherwise no stake. As in Much Ado, we hear nothing about the causes of the dispute or the issues involved. We learn only that ‘The Florentines and Senoys are by th'ears’, that Florence is expected to request aid from France, but that the King of France, having received a plea from Austria not to lend such aid, is prepared to refuse it even before it is requested. Nevertheless, he encourages his young subjects to attach themselves to whichever side they favour, since he views the war as a potential ‘nursery to our gentry, who are sick / For breathing and exploit’ (I.ii.1, 16-17), and the young courtiers thereupon join up so as ‘Not to woo honor, but to wed it’, that ‘fame may cry [them] loud’ (II.i.15-17). Fame, a form of self-aggrandizement through self-advertisement, seems virtually always to be the spur.

The same motif recurs in the Duke of Florence's welcome to the French troops upon their arrival. We hear nothing further about the issues of the war, only that the Duke is disappointed that what he regards as the clear justice of his cause has not won more official support from France. Battle, in any case, becomes a venue for the acquisition of honour in which Bertram, notably, can begin to redeem the disgrace he has incurred through his behaviour at court, and in which, as part of his continuing education, he also learns the truth about his confidant, the braggart Parolles. And that seems to be its sole meaning here.

In Othello it is not altogether clear whether the Turkish advance upon Cyprus represents (as it seems) simply the latest move in a long-standing conflict or the opening gambit in a new one, but in either case it becomes the basis on which the rest of the play is built, the reason for Othello's transfer to Cyprus, with all that happens there to him and in him. For Othello, as distinct from the comic protagonists, war is his natural element, his beloved profession, and its characteristic noises—the shrill trump, the neighing steed, the drum, the cannon, and the ear-piercing fife—are literally music to his ears in a way that a wedding serenade on a bagpipe is not, for which (we are told) he ‘does not greatly care’ (III.i.16-17), even if the wedding in question happens to be his own. It is in war alone that Othello finds serenity of spirit. In the domestic sphere, tragically, he finds only suspicion, bitterness, and anguish.

Much the same would be true of Coriolanus, whose passionate addiction to combat, to bloody face-painting and scarred limbs, seems like a refuge from the more usual longing for a quiet life. As in Hamlet and Troilus, Coriolanus starts with Romans and Volscians living in a state of chronic antagonism which from time to time erupts in military action. The Romans however are also living a second war, a war within the gates, between plebeians and patricians. And Coriolanus proves as helpless to treat the plebeians other than as a loathed enemy as Othello is to demilitarize his own domestic existence.

In all these instances Shakespeare sets up a contrast, no less sharp for being largely implicit, between war and peace. In each case the young or (in Othello's case) middle-aged hero, who has served with success and brilliance in battle, proves inadequate to the more complex demands of peace. War has the advantage of mobilizing aggressions and providing an outlet for them, as well as supplying occasions for intelligence, resourcefulness, and planning. What it does not call into play are the subtler moral and intellectual discriminations required in peacetime. It exacts discipline, obedience to orders, and the courage to face enemies—all valued qualities—but unlike peace, and especially unlike the most prized activity of peace, love, it does not exact trust, the capacity to give one's self unreservedly to those by whom one is loved or whom one claims to love. Nor does it call on the warrior's ability to place himself imaginatively in his enemy's shoes, to understand the needs and feelings of the alien others who are aiming to kill him. Quite the reverse: any softening of the feelings, any upwelling of sympathy, any confession of vulnerability, is felt as a threat to the enterprise. War therefore tests its votaries in certain important ways, calls certain essential faculties into play, but can cripple others. It is Othello's tragedy that he cannot view his married life as other than a battlefield, Coriolanus's that he cannot see the unruly plebeians as other than an enemy army, which he openly longs to put to the sword, with the result that they become a far greater threat to him than the invading Volscians.

Macbeth, an exceptionally warlike play, begins and ends with a military engagement. It starts with the repulse of the invading Norwegians, where Macbeth's exploits are described in terms that suggest that he too depends on combat for his sense of his own reality. Since combat, however, consists largely of depriving others of their reality—that is surely one of its chief aims—the action continues with Macbeth's turning before our eyes, and despite his own despairing qualms, into a bloody tyrant. It ends with a war that is at one and the same time a war against invasion from beyond the borders and a civil war, the rebellion of Macbeth's own forces against him, and, metaphorically, as it is strongly implied, the revolt of whatever remains of substance and value in his own being against that part that he has systematically abused and poisoned. The constant in the picture is the one we have remarked in Othello and Coriolanus: Macbeth is incapable of living wholeheartedly at peace—in his own mind or in a peaceful world. It is as a warrior that we are asked to admire him at the outset—for his leadership and his valour—and it is as a warrior that he makes a partial recovery in our eyes at the end, when he puts on manly readiness, arms himself, and stands the push—sick at heart but defiant and unyielding—against his assailants.

Certain plays—Titus Andronicus, King John, Henry V, Hamlet Macbeth, Coriolanus—involve relatively ‘standard’ campaigns against invading neighbours: England and France, Norway and Denmark, Scotland and Norway, the Romans and the Goths, the Romans and the Volscians. But in such cases victory is nearly always perilous, and costs the victor dear. Titus carries back to Rome in triumph the Gothic fifth column that will destroy him and his family and devastate the city itself. King John defeats his foes in battle only to be himself defeated by his capture of Arthur and the resulting disaffection of his barons. Henry V's success at Agincourt, quite apart from the steady drumfire of suggestion pointing to the ugliness of war—the sleazy way the campaign is authorized, the frequent brutality of Henry's language, the insistent talk of cutting throats—leads only to his early death, the break-up of the holdings in France, and the Wars of the Roses. Caesar's victory over Pompey, which seals his rule over Rome, also brings on his assassination and provokes a fresh round of civil war wherein the lovers of liberty go under, having failed to find any weapon other than the sword with which to combat what they see as the dangerous enlargement of one man's power. Macbeth's stunning victories in the field seem only to presage his ferocious career as a tyrant; and Coriolanus's heroism at the gates of Corioles leads directly to events that culminate in his exile and finally in his death. To be sure, in each case circumstances other than the simple fact of war itself come into play to balk the reign of peace, but in each case also the euphoria of victory proves illusory, and the end that crowns all proves harsh and bitter, a momentary respite at best.

Rare indeed are the cases in which the fruits of war do not turn to ashes in the mouths of the victors: Richard III, no doubt, where Richmond's final defeat of the detested tyrant brings relief to his exhausted country; Timon of Athens, where Alcibiades besieges his native city for reasons we completely endorse and approve; and Cymbeline, where Posthumus seizes the accident of a conflict between Britain and its Roman colonizers to fight for Britain and so atone by his own death for the death-sentence he has cruelly passed against Imogen. The two young princes Arviragus and Guiderius, for their part, join the combat primarily to try their valour and learn for the first time what battle means. In this small band of conquerors we find only one professional soldier, Alcibiades, and he goes to war only after exhausting all possible avenues of petition and negotiation, winning, at length, simply by a show of strength and further negotiation. War does not, for him, seem to be the ‘royal occupation’ it is for Fortinbras, Othello, Macbeth, Antony, and Coriolanus.

Does this limited and hasty sketch enable us to infer any consistent attitude or attitudes on Shakespeare's part? I think so. If I have reported the matter correctly and fairly, it seems to tell us that Shakespeare, while by no means unmindful of the claims of honour won in battle, and indeed, in some ways highly sympathetic to them, nevertheless remains, by and large, irreducibly sceptical as to the effect of warfare and the preoccupation with warfare on the human spirit. Repeatedly we see it become an end in itself, stunting and deforming even the most heroic of souls, while at the same time turning cities and whole countries into spiritual if not literal wastelands.

Notes

1. All citations from Shakespeare will be to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, 1974).