Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T11:52:40.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - War and Eros

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
Paul Stevens
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×