"When Blood Is Their Argument": Shakespeare on War, Freedom, and the Nature of Man

Suffering remains foreign to knowledge.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)

More than a "golden age" topic, freedom from war, as opposed to freedom to wage it or freedom of action within it, understandably remains a grossly neglected topic in our war-filled times. In view of our current state of terror and multiple wars, we can take modest consolation from Shakespeare, our great forebearer in literature, in whose works warfare or strife—even in love—seem to characterize the very nature of human (and divine) interactions. But what did Shakespeare think about war? Did he think mankind by nature bellicose, with "the blast of war" forever blowing not only in our ears but in our hearts (Henry V 3.1.5)? And what of the alternate view of humanity that emerges for a moment in the militant speech by Henry V just quoted, when he is rallying the English troops to the breech in France, recommending that they "disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage?" (emphasis added). Of course, to ask how Shakespeare thought 'about' a topic misleads, for he never stood outside his impersonating fictions to offer a philosophical defense of his art in his own time, with its multiple wars declared and undeclared (against Spain, the Irish, and Amerindians). Even if he had followed recent literary precedent and expressed a defense of his art, as Sir Philip Sidney had in a formal treatise, Edmund Spenser in a letter, and Sir John Harrington in a preface, the views he may have proposed would not necessarily have been fully supported by the evidence of his own literary works—as scholars of Sidney, Spenser, and Harrington can attest regarding the polysemantic work of these Elizabethan poets. Thus, in order to grapple with how Shakespeare considered war, a question so urgently connected in his time with the tenets of religion and natural law on an international scale, we have to delineate and interpret the pattern created in the complex veil of his imaginings. Yet, from the perspective of 'inside' Shakespeare's works, we face a difficult prospect of translation if we acknowledge that "actions do the work of precepts," as Stanley Stewart remarks, summarizing Agnes Heller's approach to interpretation of the plays as performance (Stewart 2010, 8). The authors of these three books attempt to help us chart a course towards something like the man as a thinker 'behind' or 'inside' his works, to let prepositions collide for a moment, as it were. In assessing these scholars' efforts to converge on Shakespeare, the question now is what do we see?

Specifically, to take up Stanley Stewart's book first, what have philosophers seen in or of Shakespeare? Stewart means philosophy in a normative sense; that is, as practiced by philosophers in universities and catalogued by librarians in the philosophy section. After reading Stewart's useful study, one cannot help but feel confronted by that preposition 'behind,' which my prose attempted to leave behind a moment ago, and the language-game it confronts us with. This is because time and again Stewart's chosen philosophers, from Herder to Nietzsche and beyond, in his agile summaries of their views of Shakespeare appear to find their own image behind the works of the bard—or, I should say, an insight gleaned from Shakespeare proves anticipatory of their own views. Stewart sees this kind of confirming or fashioning of oneself out of Shakespeare as a common occurrence among even today's formal philosophers. This is why one must be alert to not only the semantic force of "propositions" but also to "prepositions," and Stewart specifies that "his book is about Shakespeare in philosophy" (21, emphasis added); that is, about references made to Shakespeare, sustained or...