LITMIR.BIZ

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in the sixteenth century. I’ve seen those chopped-off legs and arms and heads on the battlefields of the Middle East, in southern Iraq in 1991 when the eviscerated corpses of Iraqi soldiers and refugee women and children were lying across the desert, their limbs afterwards torn apart by ravenous dogs. And I’ve talked to Serb soldiers who fought Bosnian Muslims in the battle for the Bihac pocket, men who were so short of water that they drank their own urine.

      Similarly, Shakespeare’s censorious Caesar Augustus contemplates Antony’s pre-Cleopatran courage:

      When thou once

      Was beaten from Modena,… at thy heel

      Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against,… with patience more

      Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink

      The stale of horses and the gilded puddle

      Which beasts would cough at…

      Yet Wilfred Owen’s poetry on the ‘pity of war’ – his description, say, of the gassed soldier coughing his life away, the blood gargling ‘from the froth-corrupted lungs’ – has much greater immediacy. True, death was ever present in the life of any Tudor man or woman; the Plague that sometimes closed down the Globe Theatre, the hecatomb of child mortality, the overflowing, pestilent graveyards, united all mankind in the proximity of death. Understand death and you understand war, which is primarily about the extinction of human life rather than victory or defeat. And despite constant repetition, Hamlet’s soliloquy over poor Yorick’s skull remains a deeply disturbing contemplation of death:

      My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning quite chapfall’n?

      And here is Omar Khayyam’s contemplation of a king’s skull at Tus – near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashad – written more than 400 years before Shakespeare’s Hamlet stood in the churchyard at Elsinore:

      I saw a bird alighted on the city walls of Tus Grasping in its claws Kaika’us’s head: It was saying to that head, ‘Shame! Shame! Where now the sound of the bells and the boom of the drum?’

      The swiftness with which disease struck the living in previous centuries was truly murderous. And I have my own testimony of how quickly violent death can approach. Assaulted by a crowd of Afghans in a Pakistani border village in 2001 – their families had just been slaughtered in an American B-52 air raid on Kandahar – an ever-growing crowd of young men were banging stones on to my head, smashing my glasses into my face, cutting my skin open until I could smell my own blood. And, just for a moment, I caught sight of myself in the laminated side of a parked bus. I was crimson with blood, my face was bright red with the stuff and it was slopping down my shirt and on to my bag and my trousers and shoes; I was all gore from head to foot. And I distinctly remember, at that very moment – I suppose it was a subconscious attempt to give meaning to my own self-disgust – the fearful ravings of the insane Lady Macbeth as she contemplates the stabbing of King Duncan: ‘… who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’

      Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were staged in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones. But who can contemplate Saddam’s hanging – the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going ‘to hell’ – without remembering ‘that most disloyal traitor’, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that ‘… nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it’? Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors – ‘to the hell that is Iraq?’ – was truly Shakespearean.

      How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where ‘mouth-honour’ had long ago become the custom, where – as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran – a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was ‘in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er’. The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which – if David Damrosch is right – was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast:

      Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

      And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets…

      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!

      Our treachery towards the Shi’ites and Kurds of Iraq in 1991 – when we encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then allowed the butcher of Baghdad to destroy them – was set against the genuine cries for freedom that those doomed people uttered in the days before their betrayal. ‘… waving our red weapons o’er our heads,’ as Brutus cried seconds after Julius Caesar’s murder, ‘Let’s all cry, “Peace, freedom, and liberty”.’

      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 numb’red?’ he asks.

      This note doth tell me of ten thousand French

      That in the field lie slain; of princes, in this number, And nobles bearing banners, there lie dead One hundred twenty-six; added to these, Of knights, esquires, and gallant gentlemen, Eight thousand and four hundred…

      Henry is doing ‘body counts’. When the herald presents another list – this time of the English dead – Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:

      None else of name; and of all other men

      But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was here…Was ever known so great and little loss On one part and on th’other?

      This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures – while claiming, of course, that he was ‘not in the business of body counts’ and while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.

      Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, ‘safer’ (if non-existent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivier’s Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastard’s final promise in King John is simple enough:

      Come

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