A lively collection of essays from scholars from across Europe, North America and Australia. The book ranges from Shakespeare's use of manuals on war written for the sixteenth-century English public by an English mercenary, to reflections on the ways in which Shakespeare has been represented in Nazi Germany, wartime Denmark, or cold war Romania

Together, these essays constitute a new approach to reading Shakespeare; one that integrates historical and cultural research with performance analysis to assess the relevance of the plays as presented and performed in different countries and at different moments in history. By returning several times to Henry V , the book asks how it is that the same play has been used both to comment adversely on the war in the Falklands and to support the war in Iraq.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
War and Shakespearean Dramaturgy--R.King & P.Franssen
I. IDEAS OF WAR AND PEACE
The disciplines of war: Elizabethan war manuals and Shakespeare's tragicomic vision--R.King
War in Shakespeare's Edward III--E.Caldwell
Shakespeare and peace--T.Kullmann
Some social costs of war; R.Morse
II. RHETORIC OF WAR
Henry V and the performance of war--S.Fraser
Drums and Roses: The tragicomedy of war in All's Well That Ends Well; H.Wilcox
Political speech and the wars in King John--D.Chetrinescu
Faking It: Persuasion and the Renaissance military subject--S.Barker
III. TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION
Religion and war in Romanian translations of Henry V--M.Nicolaescu
Shakespeare's Coriolanus as staged in Heiner Müller's Germania 3--R.Ledebur
Something is rotten-- N.Hansen
Never-ending conflict: man (and woman) as death bearer in Testori's Macbetto--C.Dente
IV. WAR TIME INTERPRETATIONS
The nightmare of indifference: Shakespeare's Sonnet 121 and the war in former Yugoslavia--I.Lupic
Whose Triumph: The Taming of the Shrew in Berlin during World War II--Z.Márkus
So the Falklands. So Agincourt. Fuck the Frogs: Michael Bogdanov's English Shakespeare Company's Wars of the Roses--D.Carnegie
Meditations in a time of (displaced) war: Henry V, money, and the ethics of performing history--D.Henderson
Select Bibliography
Index