SOURCE: Barish, Jonas. “War, Civil War, and Bruderkrieg in Shakespeare.” In Literature and Nationalism, edited by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson, pp. 11-21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Barish discusses the portrayal of war in Shakespeare's histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances, concluding that the dramatist consistently viewed the pursuit of both foreign and domestic wars as a lamentable but natural human activity that almost inevitably ends with a Pyrrhic victory.

I want to ask who the participants are in some of the wars dramatized by Shakespeare, and what the circumstances are in which war is undertaken, to see if these tell us anything about how Shakespeare viewed war as a human activity.

I start with the observation that Shakespearean wars are often fought between people, or peoples, who may be said to be related to each other, members of the same family—brothers, or cousins...