Shakespeare's Lessons for Strategists

Robert Farley

Security, Europe

The Bard can teach us about war, the nation and strategic discourse.

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of articles, panels and podcasts on the relationship between popular cultural artifacts and national security. From Battlestar Galactica to Harry Potter, and from Star Wars to Game of Thrones, fiction has generated a vocabulary for teaching, engagement and even a form of strategic analysis.

Partisan disputes may explain the appeal of this kind of work. With analysts bitterly divided over foundational questions of national security and foreign policy, fictional works provide scarce common ground for discussion and debate. Fighting over imaginary landscapes frees analysts, at least in part, from tricky questions of real world assessment.

Williams Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. As we pass the four hundredth anniversary of the passing of the Bard, it is perhaps worthy of our time to grant him the same courtesy that we give to George R. R. Martin. The works of Shakespeare have served as a touchstone for much strategic and military thinking over the years. In all likelihood, they will continue to do so into the future.

The Bard on War

War serves as the setting for many of the bard’s finest plays. Two of the four great dramas involve large-scale combat, as do many of the best historical plays. Shakespeare lived in the Renaissance world of warfare, where early modern forms of military organization competed with medieval affiliations and concepts.

Shakespeare primarily, although not exclusively, attempts to depict the warfare of the late medieval and ancient periods. His depiction of the medieval includes a fixation on personalities, and on the ties that bind feudal lords to their soldiers (as well as to their enemies). His depiction of ancient warfare depends less on the personal, which in some ways proves more familiar to moderns than the medieval.