Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war
Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after heâs avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing â in every sense of the word â when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, âpour encourager les autresâ. âBardolph,â laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen, âa soldier firm and sound of heart⌠hanged mustâ a be â
How many such military executions have been recorded in the past thirty years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolphâs cause â not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said â to Henry himself.
But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:
In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell.
And I never pass the moment when Shakespeareâs French king asks if Henryâs army âhath passed the river Sommeâ without drawing in my breath. Did some faint moment of Renaissance prescience touch the dramatist in 1599? But I have still to be convinced that Shakespeare saw war service in the army of Elizabeth. âSayâst thou me so?â Pistol asks of a cringing French prisoner who does not speak English. âCome hither, boy, ask me this slave in French/What is his name.â I heard an almost identical quotation in Baghdad, shorn of its sixteenth-century English, when a US Marine confronted an Iraqi soldier- demonstrator in 2003. âShut the fuck up,â he screamed at the Iraqi. Then he turned to his translator. âWhat the fuckâs he saying?â At the siege of Harfleur, the soldier Boy wishes he was far from battle â âWould I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safetyâ â and Henryâs walk through his camp in disguise on the eve of Agincourt evokes some truly modern reflections on battle. The soldier Bates suggests to him that if the king had come on his own to Agincourt, he would be safely ransomed âand a many poor menâs lives savedâ.
The equally distressed soldier Williams argues that if the English cause is doubtful, â⌠the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, choppâd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all âWe died at such a placeâ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly leftâŚâ
This bloody accounting would be familiar to any combat soldier, but Shakespeare could have heard these stories from the English who had been fighting on the Continent in the sixteenth century. Iâve seen those chopped-off legs and arms and heads on the battlefields of the Middle East, in southern Iraq in 1991 when the eviscerated corpses of Iraqi soldiers and refugee women and children were lying across the desert, their limbs afterwards torn apart by ravenous dogs. And Iâve talked to Serb soldiers who fought Bosnian Muslims in the battle for the Bihac pocket, men who were so short of water that they drank their own urine.
Similarly, Shakespeareâs censorious Caesar Augustus contemplates Antonyâs pre-Cleopatran courage:
Yet Wilfred Owenâs poetry on the âpity of warâ â his description, say, of the gassed soldier coughing his life away, the blood gargling âfrom the froth-corrupted lungsâ â has much greater immediacy. True, death was ever present in the life of any Tudor man or woman; the Plague that sometimes closed down the Globe Theatre, the hecatomb of child mortality, the overflowing, pestilent graveyards, united all mankind in the proximity of death. Understand death and you understand war, which is primarily about the extinction of human life rather than victory or defeat. And despite constant repetition, Hamletâs soliloquy over poor Yorickâs skull remains a deeply disturbing contemplation of death:
And here is Omar Khayyamâs contemplation of a kingâs skull at Tus â near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashad â written more than 400 years before Shakespeareâs Hamlet stood in the churchyard at Elsinore:
The swiftness with which disease struck the living in previous centuries was truly murderous. And I have my own testimony of how quickly violent death can approach. Assaulted by a crowd of Afghans in a Pakistani border village in 2001 â their families had just been slaughtered in an American B-52 air raid on Kandahar â an ever-growing crowd of young men were banging stones on to my head, smashing my glasses into my face, cutting my skin open until I could smell my own blood. And, just for a moment, I caught sight of myself in the laminated side of a parked bus. I was crimson with blood, my face was bright red with the stuff and it was slopping down my shirt and on to my bag and my trousers and shoes; I was all gore from head to foot. And I distinctly remember, at that very moment â I suppose it was a subconscious attempt to give meaning to my own self-disgust â the fearful ravings of the insane Lady Macbeth as she contemplates the stabbing of King Duncan: â⌠who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?â
Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were staged in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones. But who can contemplate Saddamâs hanging â the old monster showing nobility as his Shiâite executioners tell him he is going âto hellâ â without remembering âthat most disloyal traitorâ, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that â⌠nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving itâ? Indeed, Saddamâs last response to his tormentors â âto the hell that is Iraq?â â was truly Shakespearean.
How eerily does Saddamâs shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. âHang those that talk of fear!â must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where âmouth-honourâ had long ago become the custom, where â as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran â a Baâathist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was âin blood/Steppâd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go oâerâ. The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which â if David Damrosch is right â was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast:
In an age when we are supposed to believe in the âWar on Terrorâ, we may quarry our way through Shakespeareâs folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing. Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And itâs not difficult to find a parallel with Bushâs disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq â and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran â in Henry IVâs deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:
The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeareâs plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad. Hereâs the father, for example, on discovering that he has killed his own child in Henry VI, Part III:
Our treachery towards the Shiâites and Kurds of Iraq in 1991 â when we encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then allowed the butcher of Baghdad to destroy them â was set against the genuine cries for freedom that those doomed people uttered in the days before their betrayal. â⌠waving our red weapons oâer our heads,â as Brutus cried seconds after Julius Caesarâs murder, âLetâs all cry, âPeace, freedom, and libertyâ.â
My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeareâs characters. The good guys in Shakespeareâs plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by. Henry V seems more than ever a butcher. âNow, herald, are the dead numbâred?â he asks.
Henry is doing âbody countsâ. When the herald presents another list â this time of the English dead â Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:
None else of name; and of all other men
But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was hereâŚWas ever known so great and little loss
On one part and on thâother?
This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures â while claiming, of course, that he was ânot in the business of body countsâ and while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.
Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, âsaferâ (if non-existent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivierâs Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastardâs final promise in King John is simple enough:
But the true believers â the Osamas and Bushes â probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear â betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance â shouts that he will âdo such things/What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.â
Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a âterroristâ conspiracy with potential 11 September consequences. Similarly, the saintly Prospero in The Tempest contains both the self-righteousness and ruthlessness of bin Laden and the covert racism of Bush. When he sends Ariel to wreck the usurping King Alonsoâs ship on his island, the airy spirit returns with an account of his success which â despite his subsequent saving of lives â is of near Twin Towers dimensions:
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamâd amazement. Sometime Iâd divide,
And burn in many placesâŚ
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and playâd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plungâd in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel;
Then all afire with me; the Kingâs son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring then like reeds, not hair
Was the first man that leapt; cried âHell is empty,
And all the devils are hereâ.
In almost the same year, John Donne was using equally terrifying imagery, of a âfired shipâ from which âby no way/But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,/Some men leapâd forthâŚâ Prosperoâs cruelty towards Caliban becomes more frightening each time I read of it, not least because The Tempest is one of four Shakespeare plays in which Muslims appear and because Caliban is himself an Arab, born of an Algerian mother.
âThis damnâd witch Sycorax,/For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing, from Argier/Thou knowâst was banishâdâŚâ Prospero tells us. âThis blue-eyâd hag was hither brought with child⌠/A frecklâd whelp, hag-born not honourâd with/A human shape.â
Caliban is the âterroristâ on the island, first innocently nurtured by Prospero and then condemned to slavery after trying to rape Prosperoâs daughter, the colonial slave who...
