A lively collection of essays from scholars from across Europe, North America and Australia. The book ranges from Shakespeare's use of manuals on war written for the sixteenth-century English public by an English mercenary, to reflections on the ways in which Shakespeare has been represented in Nazi Germany, wartime Denmark, or cold war Romania.

How does Shakespeare represent war? This volume reviews scholarship to date on the question and introduces new perspectives, looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past. Through his haunting depiction of historical bloodshed, including the Trojan War, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare illuminates more recent political violence, ranging from the British occupation of Ireland to the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans War, and the past several decades of U. S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can a war be just? What is the relation between the ruler and the ruled? What motivates ethnic violence? Shakespeare’s plays serve as the frame for careful explorations of perennial problems of human co-existence: the politics of honor, the ethics of diplomacy, the responsibility of non-combatants, and the tension between idealism and Realpolitik.

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare’s unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying, and his plays open up important ways of thinking about strategy, economy, the law, and colonialism, providing critical insight into a significant juncture in history. Shakespeare’s plays explore many territorial themes: from the division of the kingdom in King Lear, to the relations among Denmark, Norway, and Poland in Hamlet, to questions of disputed land and the politics of banishment in Richard II. Elden traces how Shakespeare developed a nuanced understanding of the complicated concept and practice of territory and, more broadly, the political-geographical relations between people, power, and place. A meticulously researched study of over a dozen classic plays, Shakespearean Territories will provide new insights for geographers, political theorists, and Shakespearean scholars alike.

Chivalry, one of Shakespeare's central themes, retains its pertinence and topicality in our rules for international humanitarian law and the conduct of war. Against a background of Medieval and Renaissance sources as well as Shakespeare's historical and dramatic realms, Professor Meron considers the ways in which law, chivalry, morality, conscience, and state necessity are deployed in Shakespeare to promote a society in which soldiers behave humanely and leaders are held to high standards of civilized behavior. In doing so, he illustrates the literary genealogy of such contemporary international humanitarian concerns as the treatment of prisoners and of women and accountability for war crimes.

Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

In a remarkable piece of detective work, Shakespeare scholar James Bednarz traces the Bard's legendary wit-combats with Ben Jonson to their source during the Poets' War. Bednarz offers the most thorough reevaluation of this "War of the Theaters" since Harbage's Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, revealing a new vision of Shakespeare as a playwright intimately concerned with the production of his plays, the opinions of his rivals, and the impact his works had on their original audiences. Rather than viewing Shakespeare as an anonymous creator, Shakespeare and the Poets' War re-creates the contentious entertainment industry that fostered his genius when he first began to write at the Globe in 1599. Bednarz redraws the Poets' War as a debate on the social function of drama and the status of the dramatist that involved not only Shakespeare and Jonson but also the lesser known John Marston and Thomas Dekker. He shows how this controversy, triggered by Jonson's bold new dramatic experiments, directly influenced the writing of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet, gave rise to the first modern drama criticism in English, and shaped the way we still perceive Shakespeare today.

'Shakespeare loves loose ends; Shakespeare also loves red herrings.' Stephen Orgel Loose ends and red herrings are the stuff of detective fiction, and under the scrutiny of master sleuths John Sutherland and Cedric Watts Shakespeare's plays reveal themselves to be as full of mysteries as any Agatha Christie novel. Is it summer or winter in Elsinore? Do Bottom and Titania makelove? Does Lady Macbeth faint, or is she just pretending? How does a man putrefy within minutes of his death? Is Cleopatra a deadbeat Mum? And why doesn't Juliet ask 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore art thou Montague?' As Watts and Sutherland explore these and other puzzles Shakespeare's genuius becomes ever more apparent. Speculative, critical, good-humoured and provocative, their discussions shed light on apparent anachronisms, perfromance and stagecraft, linguistics, Star Trek and much else. Shrewd andentertaining, these essays add a new dimension to the pleasure of reading or watching Shakespeare. 'Few modern academics are doing quite so much as Professor Sutherland to connect the "common reader" with great books' Independent

Shakespeare’s works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this ‘universal’ author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.