Shakespeare's Returning Warriors – and Ours

Alan Warren Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000469769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Returning Warriors – and Ours takes its primary inspiration from the contemporary U.S. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)crisis in soldiers transitioning from battlefields back into society. It begins by examining how ancient societies sought to ease the return of soldiers in order to minimize PTSD, though the term did not become widely used until the early 1980s. It then considers a dozen or so Shakespearean plays that depict such transitions at the start, focusing on the tragic protagonists and antagonists in paradigmatic "returning warrior" plays, including Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and exploring the psychological and emotional ill-fits that prevent warrriors from returning to the status quo ante after battlefield triumphs, or even surviving the psychic demons and moral disequilibrium they unleash on their domestic settings and themselves. It also analyzes the history plays, several comedies, and Hamlet as plays that partly conform to and also significantly deviate from the basic paradigm. The final chapter discusses recent attempts to effect successful transitions, often using Shakespeare's plays as therapy, and depictions of attempts to wage warfare without inducing PTSD. Through the investigation of the tragedies and model returning warrior experiences, Shakespeare's Returning Warriors – and Ours highlights a central and understudied feature of Shakespeare's plays and what they can teach us about PTSD today when it is a widespread phenomenon in American society.

1 PTSD and the Failure of Reintegration

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203834-1

The high rate of what is now commonly called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has reached crisis proportions among U.S. soldiers returning from war. This circumstance results largely from America’s numerous and extensive wars of the last half century (most notably Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq) as well as those that preceded them (two World Wars, Korea), the country’s less than whole-hearted commitment to most of these wars, the inadequate screening and training of many who have been sent to them, and the many failures, despite medical gains in other areas, of the Department of Veterans Affairs and other medical support groups.¹ According to David J. Morris – journalist, Marine veteran of the Iraq War, and PTSD sufferer –

A species of pain that went unnamed for most of human history, PTSD is now the fourth most common psychiatric disorder in the United States. According to the latest estimates, nearly eight percent of all Americans – twenty-eight million people – will suffer from post-traumatic stress at some point in their lives. According to the Veterans Administration, … PTSD is the number one health concern of American military veterans, regardless of when they served.²

The impressively thorough National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS) places the percentage of PTSD sufferers among male Vietnam combat veterans at more than one third.

The term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” is not uncontested. For example, John M. Meyer, an army veteran who served from January 2001 to April 2008, much of it in Iraq and Afghanistan, writes,

I simply cannot recall my fellow soldiers using the term to describe their own behavior or someone else’s behavior. … When my friends and I did experience psychological stress, the term PTSD perhaps seemed too general, and the causes for our most extreme disturbances were far more precise.

But after Meyer’s return home he found that the term was commonly employed by those who had not been to the wars, and even by some who had.³

“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” began to be widely used after The American Psychiatric Association officially recognized and described PTSD in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (third edition; 1980). This inclusion culminated a decades-long effort by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) to have the disorder openly acknowledged and treated. Initially known as “Post-Vietnam Syndrome,” PTSD is now known to have many causes – including impoverished upbringings, domestic abuse, family tragedy, rape, torture, and serious illness. Many who suffer from PTSD are not military veterans, and far from all veterans suffer from it; various studies offer widely disparate estimates: “combat-related PTSD ranged anywhere from 1.09% to 34.84%.”⁴ Some find this altered nomenclature a dubious victory. The eminent trauma scholar Jonathan Shay, who considers PTSD too broad a term, maintains that many of the symptoms associated with it are also common to other pathologies.⁵ Meyer agrees that,

while many people undoubtedly suffer from physical, psychological, or moral trauma due to their involvement in a war, our current instruments simplify the problem, and marginalize veteran behavior that, given the environmental inputs that veterans experience at home and abroad, are normal – and perhaps even healthy. Most of the time, Post Traumatic Stress should not be called a disorder. Veterans are neither victims nor deviants.⁶

Yet the term remains commonly associated with combat veterans, particularly with America’s most divisive twentieth-century war and the diagnoses of U.S. soldiers returned from Vietnam. The concept of “trauma,” a term derived from the Greek word for “wound,” was first used in English in Blanchard’s Physical Dictionary (second edition; 1693). Until the late nineteenth century, trauma referred only to bodily injury, and usually in legal, political, or cultural contexts. It is still mainly used that way in medical circles, but, largely owing to industrialization, transportation accidents, and wars, its usage has broadened and deepened exponentially since 1880.⁷ Coming to encompass psychological, emotional, and moral as well as physical change, usually but not always meaning damage, “trauma” became synonymous with, among other terms, shell shock, war shock,⁸ soldier’s heart, bomb shell disease, survivor syndrome, and combat stress reaction/neurosis/disease. It came to be seen as the male analogue of hysteria,⁹ which had been considered strictly a female pathology until the trauma consequences of the Great War caused similar symptoms to manifest in returning veterans. PTSD’s symptoms, like those of trauma generally, can, paradoxically, include both blocking out the traumatizing event and obsessively recalling it. As Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, both professors of English literature, write,

…most cultural and literary theories position trauma as a belated response to an overwhelming event too shattering to be processed as it occurs. Traumatic memories are repressed as they are formed, leaving them unavailable to conscious recall; subsequently, they recur in various displaced ways, as hallucinations, flashbacks, or nightmares. When the traumatic experience returns, unbidden, to consciousness, the sudden collision of past and present “violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound” (Luckhurst 2008: 3). Trauma is both highly resistant to articulation and wildly generative of narratives that seek to explicate the “unclaimed” originary experience. (Caruth 1996)¹⁰

PTSD can manifest as bouts of fearfulness, stress, anxiety, and paranoia; both nightmares and insomnia that stem from harrowing combat events that keep recurring rather than from anything occurring in the present; a sense of isolation, loneliness, and meaninglessness; various otherwise inexplicable health ailments; loss of social trust; alcoholism and drug use; lack/excess of conscience and morality; pent-up grief, depression, and numbness; uncontrollable rage, violence, and recklessness; repetition and avoidance; suicidal thoughts and actions.¹¹ Some of these characteristics sound, and often are, contradictory, even mutually exclusive; but for someone with PTSD they can occur sequentially, sometimes even simultaneously. Further, traumatic symptoms are often delayed or belated, surfacing long after the event that triggers them; “trauma disrupts memory, and therefore identity”¹²; and the condition is haunting and long-lasting:

traumatic memories become dysfunctionally stored and do not naturally diminish in intensity over time but remain vivid, raw and unprocessed, disconnected in the system and taking on a life of their own. Veterans sometimes refer to the past as being more real than the present.¹³

Further, “Each successive edition of the Diagnostic Manual has expanded the categories of those who might be diagnosed with PTSD [to include] witnesses, bystanders, rescue workers, relatives caught up in the immediate aftermath.”¹⁴

Recent studies have shown that, in addition to physical and psychical injuries, returned soldiers may also suffer from “moral injury” or “soul injury,” trauma that can result from either of two kinds of betrayal: inadequate or detestable justification for the war (jus ad bellum) or reprehensible actions in conducting the war (jus in bello), or both.¹⁵ Veterans suffering from PTSD are often physically uninjured, and so may appear to be whole; yet a sense of being betrayed by military leaders can undermine fundamental beliefs about “what is right” and how the world should be: it “destroys virtue, undoes good character.”¹⁶ Moral injury occurs when soldiers begin to doubt the cause for which they’re fighting, or the methods being employed, or the cost of the war in terms, for example, of civilian casualties. Such injury refers to

‘souls in anguish’ – experiences of guilt, shame, and moral and ethical ambiguity that result from a sense of having ‘transgressed one’s basic moral identity,’ abandoned one’s ethical standing as a decent person, and lost any reliable, meaningful world in which to live.¹⁷

Such disorientation and loss can be difficult if not impossible to communicate or overcome, especially without professional assistance. And for many U.S. returnees, whose numbers have increased exponentially and unceasingly since early 2002, unaddressed PTSD symptoms and moral injuries endure, fester, and remain u...