British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Violence, masculinity and the state
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 11.30am-1.00pm,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 3
Participants
Matthew Wagner, Victoria University of Wellington
“The Cause of the King”:
Just War Theory, by William Shakespeare
Heike Grundmann, University of Munich
Aestheticisation of War in Shakespeare’s
and Branagh’s Henry V
John Kunat
Shakespeare and Piracy
Abstracts
“The Cause of the King”: Just War
Theory, by William Shakespeare
Matthew Wagner, Victoria University of Wellington
This paper examines Shakespeare’s treatment of how wars are justified. My work here, focused on Henry V and King John, is part of a larger project whose thesis is that Shakespeare’s interest in matters of war lies in representing on stage the interplay between image and substance. Where Shakespeare’s representations of war address the issue of a war’s justness – and they do so quite frequently – I argue that the surface image reflects specific justifying narratives related to the cause over which a war is fought, narratives that are most commonly aligned with the laws of God, Nature, and Man. The underlying substance, on the other hand, is directly tied to the person – and qualities – of the king. In other words, in spite of a pervasive array of justifying narratives that circulate through Shakespeare’s staged wars, the substantial means by which war is ultimately justified is an identification of the war with its leader: the person is the touchstone for the justness of the war. In the end, Shakespeare is neither promoting nor refuting the justness of specific wars; rather, he is employing the theatre – an arena well-suited for the exploration of how substance and image interrelate – to suggest that ‘justness’ is not located in abstract or narrative arguments, but instead in the corporeal embodiment of the central figure of the king.
Aestheticisation of War in Shakespeare’s
and Branagh’s Henry V
Heike Grundmann, University of Munich
Differentiation between a pro-war and an anti-war film is a highly complex
matter. The necessity that the visual medium depict what it condemns opens it
up to an ambiguity that can only be resolved by the reaction of the audience:
cruelty on the screen can be either shocking or attractive, the horrors of war
might be received as unbearable, but also as sublime, stylisation of brutality
can be read either as belittlement or as the prevention of the brutality- enhancing
‘realism’ of a splatter movie. It is this very ambiguity that has
turned Shakespeare’s Henry V into a battlefield of contesting views. A
play that has since 1599 been regarded as a piece of nationalist propaganda,
celebrating the glorious battle of Agincourt, has also come to be read in this
century as an anti-war play, a demystification of King Henry and of the mythical
victory of 2500 British soldiers against the numerically superior 25.000 French
troops in 1415.
In my paper I shall argue that Shakespeare’s play evades the trap of hero
worship that both Olivier’s and Branagh’s films haven fallen into
by denying the audience the visual enjoyment of the battle of Agincourt, giving
us instead the dubious narrative accounts of an unreliable Chorus, whose word-painting
arouses expectations that the action of the play never fulfils. This teasing
meta-theatricality of deferral and non-fulfilment of audience expectation is
turned upside down by Branagh’s (and Olivier’s) elaborate staging
of the battle itself, which provides a centre for a play that consciously denies
us this centre. The criticism and demystification of war inherent in Shakespeare’s
play, which shows the British soldiers quarrelling, stealing, deserting and
dying, is sacrificed for spectacle and the question will be raised whether the
medium of film can ever do justice to a play whose effect depends on the visual
absence of its thematic centre, the climax of heroic achievement, national cooperation
and pride in the battle of Agincourt.
John Kunat
This paper investigates how Shakespeare used pirates and metaphors of piracy in his plays. Surprisingly, there has been little work done by historians on either Elizabethan or Jacobean piracy, and literary critics are thus at a loss when it comes to how Shakespeare was influenced by the piratical activities for which his countrymen were noted. This paper thus begins with a brief overview of piracy in the Renaissance, distinguishing it from privateering and other forms of state-authorized plundering. It then discusses how Shakespeare variously employed pirates: as plot devices to move a character from one location to another, an inheritance from the romances popular during his day; as signifiers of masculinity improperly channeled into non-productive forms of violence; and as foils to those figures embodying the sovereign authority and power of the state. The paper concludes with a consideration of how piracy allowed Shakespeare to connect the unauthorized appropriation of another’s property with male sexual aggression—a connection most readily apparent in the frequently employed trope of men “boarding” women.
