Our Wars Are Done: Returning from War in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Abstract

How did Shakespeare stage the end of war? What did early modern military homecomings look like? Our Wars Are Done: Returning from War in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries is the first comprehensive study of the return from war in early modern English drama. Centering not stage combat but stage homecoming, Our Wars Are Done argues that by considering a variety of early modern plays as after-war plays, readers become attuned to representations of uniquely postwar phenomena, including the reintegration into community life, difficulty resuming meaningful employment, the struggle with war wounds, and peculiar entanglements with criminality. At the heart of my project sits the returned soldier, a character with a martial past but whose present circumstances are not necessarily dependent upon continued military associations. So pervasive was the early modern culture of war that the returning soldier became a stock figure in popular drama. Reading plays written between 1585– 1625, i.e. from the official commitment of English soldiers to combat in the Low Countries through the resumption of hostilities with Spain following the collapse of the Treaty of London (1604), Our Wars Are Done studies a period of sustained military activity that coincided with what was perhaps the greatest flourishing of English dramatic poetry. Plays like Coriolanus, The Fair Maid of the West, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday capture many of the trials faced by returning early modern soldiers and their communities, and they challenge prevailing critical and historical assumptions about early modern military homecomings.