6 - “The Question of These Wars”

Summary

Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.