This essay focuses on the debate over Chamberlain’s attempts at ‘appeasement’ during his negotiations with the presidents of Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, who would soon become the central European Axis powers in the Second World War. It specifically looks at two intertwined public protests in 1938 against Chamberlain’s plans to cede the German-speaking regions of Austria to Hitler, in exchange for Hitler not declaring all-out war in Europe. In addition to analysing Troilus and Cressida, directed by Michael Macowan in modern-day battle dress at the Westminster Theatre in London, this essay turns not only to Punch magazine’s review of the play in their October 1938 issue, but also to the other numerous cartoons, ironic poems, and satiric song lyrics that filled that issue, all clearly condemning Chamberlain’s reluctance, often called cowardice, to realize the consequences of agreeing to Hitler’s demands.

Hamlet dramatizes a problem that began during Shakespeare’s lifetime, when the scientific revolution was replacing the cognitive basis of the Medieval world, faith (in God and the devil, good and evil, ghosts and witches), with that of modernity, which bases knowledge on doubt: take nothing on faith, believe only what you can prove or disprove with empirical evidence. This paralyzed Hamlet, for he could not find a credible answer to his question, “What should I do?,” since no empirical test can prove what one should do. For him “the time [was] out of joint,” for both shame and guilt ethics had lost their credibility, yet he knew of no credible alternative. The resulting moral nihilism made him unable to organize his behavior, which is incompatible with ongoing life, as the play shows. Troilus and Cressida shows the same problem, which still haunts the modern world.

Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.

This chapter focuses on just war theory as an approach to Shakespeare and war. It gives an overview of different theories of war and illustrates their significance in the Elizabethan historical context. This includes a discussion of the most important readings of Shakespeare as a realist or a pacifist and a subsequent analysis of Shakespeare’s use of just war theory. Drawing on a variety of examples, this chapter exemplifies what is considered a just cause, a right intention, or a legitimate authority in Shakespeare’s plays; the analysis shows who is presented as culpable or responsible and under which circumstances the relation between the cause and cost of a war must be considered out of balance. The author traces this line of argument along illustrative readings of 3 Henry VI, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida and suggests that just war theory may offer another perspective on Shakespeare and war.

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.

This chapter establishes a link between the rise in foreign Shakespeare performed on the English stage from the opening of Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych in London in 1964 to the Complete Works Season and the World Shakespeare Festival that took place under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006–7 and in 2012 and the emergence of regional and foreign accents in contemporary Shakespearean performance. This chapter shows how leading national companies are responding to the acoustic diversity introduced by visiting companies during these two major festival seasons. While recent studies on Shakespeare in contemporary performance have focused on the influence of international traditions that draw freely from ‘music, dance and the visual arts in one confident arc, … in total contrast to the text-based British theatre’ (de Wend Fenton and Neal, 2005: 16), I am instead interested in establishing how ‘Global Shakespeare’ is changing the aural dimensions of ‘English Shakespeare’ and, as a result, Shakespeare’s association with traditional ideals of ‘Englishness’.