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8 - War and Eros

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

By
David Schalkwyk
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Paul Stevens
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Paul Stevens
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s erotic plays have war either as their setting or are born out of a recent state of violent conflict. Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra fall most clearly into the former camp, but think also of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where eros emerges from a newly forged peace only to constitute a new battleground of its own. This chapter probes the conjunction of war and eros that appears in almost half of Shakespeare’s plays, first through a broad survey of his corpus and then through studies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. It argues that, far from merely contingent, theatrical conjunctions, Shakespeare provides us a deep conceptual study of the connection between eros and violence, both the potential violence of sexuality and the unsettling underlying sexuality of war.

Keywords

wareroseroticismsexualityviolenceThe Two Noble KinsmenTroilus and CressidaRomeo and JulietHegelRoland Barthes
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War , pp. 128 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Barker, Simon. War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Dalwood, Mary, new ed., San Francisco, City Lights Publishers, 2001.Google Scholar
Bowen, Barbara E. Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” New York, Garland, 1993.Google Scholar
Girard, René. A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, Leominster, Gracewing Publishing, 2000.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Turner. Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, Paul A. Shakespeare’s Military World, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1956.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love, trans. Roudiez, Leon S., New York, Columbia University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Meron, Theodor. Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monsacré, Hélène. The Tears of Achilles, trans. Snead, Nicholas J., Hellenic Studies Series 75, Washington, DC, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Schalkwyk, David. Shakespeare, Love and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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