Robert Fisk On Shakespeare And War

[Hissyspit]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2403298.ece

Robert Fisk on Shakespeare and war

Shakespeare could have been writing about Iraq or Afghanistan, his scenes of battle were so prescient. Robert Fisk dissects the Bard's attitude to conflict - and describes how relevant he has found it to be today

Published: 30 March 2007

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In an age when we are supposed to believe in the "War on Terror", we may quarry our way through Shakespeare's 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 it's not difficult to find a parallel with Bush's disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq - and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran - in Henry IV's deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:

"...Therefore, my Harry, / Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out / May waste the memory of the former days."

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare's plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad. Here's the father, for example, on discovering that he has killed his own child in Henry VI, Part III:

"O, pity, God, this miserable age! / What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, / Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, / This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!"

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My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare's characters. The good guys in Shakespeare's 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. "Now, herald, are the dead number'd?" he asks.

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But the true believers - the Osamas and Bushes - probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear - 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 - shouts that he will:

"...do such things, / What they are yet, I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!"

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[Peace Patriot]

1. Bloody Macbeth, steeped in evil, drawing everyone around him into evil, is BushWorld.

I'm surprised that Fisk misses this Shakespearean parallel, although I think the following sentiment from Fisk is a truly brilliant insight, and one that I share:

"My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare's characters. The good guys in Shakespeare's plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by."--Robert Fisk

Here's the quote from "Macbeth" that I think best sums up Bush. As Macbeth, who has brought evil, and horrid bloodshed and betrayal, into his world, faces death himself, he cries:

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth Quote (Act V, Scene V).

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Is there any better epitaph for Bush and all that he and his puppetmasters and his minions have done to us and to others?

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

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In Macbeth's world, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair". - ( Quote Act I, Scene I).

"There 's daggers in men's smiles". - ( Quote Act II, Sc. III).

"Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness." Macbeth Quote (Act I, Scene V).

Friendliness is an omen of bloody death. And the good, the kind, are held in suspicion.

Lady Macbeth cries--with all the guilt of BushWorld on her conscience: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red" Macbeth Quote (Act II, Sc. II). 

"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." Macbeth Quote (Act IV, Scene I).

"Out, damned spot! out, I say!" - ( Quote Act V, Scene I).

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Macbeth Quote (Act V, Sc. I).

All the "perfumes of Arabia," indeed.

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Of stolen elections, Shakespeare writes:

"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me". Macbeth Quote (Act I, Scene III).

Thus Macbeth (Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blackwell, Gonzales) seeks illegitimate power, via a pact with the devil, leading to egotistical war, bloodshed, mayhem and the deaths of many innocents.

"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't." Macbeth Quote (Act I, Scene V).

"I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, and falls on the other." - ( Quote Act I, Scene VII).

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The "war on terror," "family values," the "sanctity of marriage," Christianity, "conservatism," "freedom and democracy," the "unitary executive," "the axis of evil," "mission accomplished".....

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Macbeth, Act V, Scene V).

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http://www.william-shakespeare.info/quotes-quotations-play-macbeth.htm

[Lisa]

2. know what you and Fisk mean -- I used to like Henry V as a character

Now, whenever I see that play, I can't help thinking how awful and cynical he was. Shakespeare, I suspect, intended that ... or else, why would he have given the suffering troops the best lines?

"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' 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 left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection."

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yeah, it was "Henry V" (Kenneth Branaugh's version) that gave me pause, too.

At first, I was revolted by it. Then I realized that Branaugh was following the play very closely, and picking up on Shakespeare's CRITICISM of warmongers. Shakespeare hedges Henry's warmaking around with a whole lot of if's--if he's a good king, if his cause is just, etc. And it may be the politics of the times that dictated his coming down on Henry's side (plays could cause riots and trips to the Tower, and beheadings, in those days in England). But he makes war a very iffy proposition. And was there ever a better line written about war than this one:

"...for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument?"

But perhaps the most astonishing thing that Shakespeare does is to see every character and every situation from all sides. He is truly a chronicler of the human condition. So he presents the case for "just war," and depicts both the nobility of it, and the harshness and horror of it. And if we don't understand what moves good men to kill in the cause of justice--such a contradiction--or, to kill because it is required by society's notions of manhood--then we will never be able to evolve out of it, and prevent these mass slaughters. Rarely--almost never--does Shakespear preach. He just SHOWS YOU, in his awesome word poems--and in story and drama--all manner of human folly and human tragedy. Understanding a range of human experience is the beginning of wisdom. But you have to really, really understand it--to get inside of it--without judging it, before you can develop compassion and the ability to turn wisdom into policy. I have never read a writer who does this better than Shakespeare--who presents the inside out of human experience--and he was writing plays for the stage--a work of art that has to grab the attention of the audience, the literate as well as the "groundlings", and, in his time, was competing with bear-baitings and hangings as a form of entertainment. Shakespeare is more than brilliant. He is a phenomenon. You think he can't surpass himself, with some play or character, and then he does.

And so this is what he says, on the eve of the great patriotic Battle of Agincourt--the crowning victory of his reprobate prince-turned-noble king and ikon of the British Empire:

"...for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument?"

[Lisa]

4. indeed -- if he'd just been a propagandist, he wouldn't have mentioned the other perspective

An excellent English prof I once had, always told us to look at who gets the best lines in any piece. A great writer like Shakespeare (or even those who aren't great but are just pretty good) will be compelled to show something deeper than the viewpoint which they might have been "told" (by their sponsors, or by public opinion) to portray. Even if it goes against their own political beliefs. (In fact, Alfred Hitchcock was supposed to make a propaganda film for the Allies in WWII -- he certainly wasn't pro-Nazi, but he ended up breaking a lot of the "rules" for propaganda to make what he thought would be a better film.)
http://www.amazon.ca/Hitchcocks-Bon-Voyage-Alfred-Hitchcock/dp/B00000G0DM

I used to think Kipling was a pro-imperialism jingoist, until I came across one of the Stalky and Co. stories, "Their Country's Flag" (which would not be out of place in the US today, with boys questioning being manipulated by politicians).