In the current climate of global military conflict and terrorism, Shakespeare at Peace offers new readings of Shakespeare's plays, illuminating a discourse of peace previously shadowed by war and violence. Using contemporary examples such as speeches, popular music, and science fiction adaptations of the plays, Shakespeare at Peace reads Shakespeare's work to illuminate current debates and rhetoric around conflict and peace. In this challenging and evocative book, Garrison and Pivetti re-frame Shakespeare as a proponent of peace, rather than war, and suggest new ways of exploring the vitality of Shakespeare's work for politics today.

In the current climate of global military conflict and terrorism, Shakespeare at Peace offers new readings of Shakespeare’s plays, illuminating a discourse of peace previously shadowed by war and violence. Using contemporary examples such as speeches, popular music, and science fiction adaptations of the plays, Shakespeare at Peace reads Shakespeare’s work to illuminate current debates and rhetoric around conflict and peace. In this challenging and evocative book, Garrison and Pivetti re-frame Shakespeare as a proponent of peace, rather than war, and suggest new ways of exploring the vitality of Shakespeare’s work for politics today.

War and Peace is considered one of the world’s greatest works of fiction. It is regarded, along with Anna Karenina, as Tolstoy’s finest literary achievement. Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families.

How does Shakespeare represent war? This volume reviews scholarship to date on the question and introduces new perspectives, looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past. Through his haunting depiction of historical bloodshed, including the Trojan War, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare illuminates more recent political violence, ranging from the British occupation of Ireland to the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans War, and the past several decades of U. S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can a war be just? What is the relation between the ruler and the ruled? What motivates ethnic violence? Shakespeare’s plays serve as the frame for careful explorations of perennial problems of human co-existence: the politics of honor, the ethics of diplomacy, the responsibility of non-combatants, and the tension between idealism and Realpolitik.

A ground-breaking history of the arts of peace, from Confucius and Ancient Greece through to the 21st century, opening an alternative window on history to show the strength of the case for peace which has been argued from ancient times onwards.