The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, together with The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, The History of King Lear (or The Tragedy of King Lear) and The Tragedy of Macbeth are much concerned with warfare, despite their preoccupation with matters of seemingly personal or familial disquiet. Located mainly within courts, palaces or castles, each of their protagonists struggles variously across the sequence of plays with the ethics and theology of revenge, social caste and private jealousy, loyalty and love, and in the case of Macbeth, the relationship between fate and ambition. Macbeth simultaneously has to play its part in an ordering of Scottish history that unsurprisingly becomes central to the concerns of audiences in London with the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Yet in all these plays there is war: the tragedy is set against a background of war in the case of Hamlet and Othello, or results in warlike activity in the case of Macbeth and King Lear.

Of the four plays, I want to concentrate on Hamlet, which includes what some audience members in the years leading up to the death of Elizabethan may have considered one of the most astonishing representations of warfare in the whole of the unfolding Shakespeare canon. They may still have been absorbed by the threat of a new Armada and were certainly able to witness the effects of Elizabeth's Irish campaigns in the form of musters and the spectacle of gangs of returned soldiers in the streets of London.