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Shakespeare and War: Honor at the Stake

Gray, Patrick

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Authors

Patrick Gray



Abstract

How does Shakespeare represent war? Guest editor Patrick Gray reviews scholarship to date on the question, as well as contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey, “Shakespeare and War.” Drawing upon St. Augustine’s City of God, the basis for later just war theory, Gray argues that progressive optimism regarding the perfectibility of what St. Augustine calls the “City of Man” makes it difficult for modern commentators to discern Shakespeare’s own more tragic, Augustinian sense of warfare as a necessary evil, given the fallenness of human nature. Modern misgivings about “honour” also lead to misinterpretation. As Francis Fukuyama points out, present-day liberal democracies tend to follow Hobbes and Locke in attempting to “banish the desire for recognition from politics.” Shakespeare in contrast, like Hegel, as well as latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, and Axel Honneth, sees the faculty that Plato calls thymos as an ineradicable and invaluable instrument of statecraft.

Citation

Gray, P. (2018). Shakespeare and War: Honor at the Stake. Critical Survey, 30(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2018.300102

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Mar 1, 2018
Publication Date Mar 1, 2018
Deposit Date May 21, 2015
Publicly Available Date Mar 1, 2020
Journal Critical Survey: Reading in Early Modern England
Print ISSN 0011-1570
Electronic ISSN 1752-2293
Publisher Berghahn Journals
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 30
Issue 1
Pages 1-25
DOI https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2018.300102

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Copyright Statement
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Critical Survey. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Gray, Patrick (2018). Shakespeare and War: Honor at the Stake. Critical Survey 30(1): 1-25 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2018.300102





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