Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition

Brought to light in this study is a connection between the treatment of war in Shakespeare's plays and the issue of the 'just war', which loomed large both in religious and in lay treatises of Shakespeare's time. The book re-reads Shakespeare's representations of war in light of both the changing historical and political contexts in which they were produced and of Shakespeare's possible connection with the culture and ideology of the European just war tradition. But to discuss Shakespeare's representations of war means, for Pugliatti, not simply to examine his work from a literary point of view or to historicize those representations in connection with the discourses (and the practice) of war which were produced in his time; it also means to consider or re-consider present-day debates for or against war and the kind of war ideology which is trying to assert itself in our time in light of the tradition which shaped those discourses and representations and which still substantiates our 'moral' view of war.

Paola Pugliatti has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Florence and has also taught at the Universities of Messina, Bologna and Pisa. She has written extensively on Shakespeare and on the European Renaissance; she is also the author of Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2003). Other fields of interest are the novel and textual genetics, with particular attention to the case of James Joyce's Ulysses