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Lists can be dangerous because they sometimes lull readers into a false sense that they are seeing the totality of something. A case in point is Wikipedia’s tally [ [link removed] ] of “plays with anti-war themes.” It begins with three plays from ancient Greek authors and then skips ahead a few millennia to a largely forgotten British play from 1928, after which there are dozens of entries.
But an important omission within the list’s multi-millennium gap are several plays by William Shakespeare, most notably “Troilus and Cressida [ [link removed] ],” penned by the Bard around 1602, about the same time he was working on Hamlet. The play can be read from start to finish as a savage commentary on war. Based on works by Homer and Chaucer, it is set at the time of one of the most famous wars in history (and mythology): the one between Troy and Greece that was fought over Spartan King Menelaus’ errant wife, Helen, and which lasted for 10 brutal years, ending in the violent annihilation of an entire city-state.
In Troilus, Shakespeare—who turns 461 today—has one of his characters ungraciously reflect on the stupidity of the much-storied enterprise fought over Helen: “For every false drop in her bawdy veins a Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple of her contaminated carrion weight, a Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak, she hath not given so many good words breath as for her Greeks and Trojans suffer’d death.”
The play likely benefited from the fact that, unlike “Richard III” and other dramas set during what was then recent English history, Shakespeare was comparatively free to speak his mind. That’s because the Trojan War had no politically complicating connections to the current ruler, Elizabeth I, or to her immediate predecessors.
The play is quite grim, characterized [ [link removed] ] by one modern commentator by “disillusion, misanthropy, and despair” and others as “a sort of dark séance” or “a strange disquieting affair.” Another observes [ [link removed] ] that “None of Shakespeare’s characters are the exemplars of heroism, constancy, or greatness found in Homer’s and Chaucer’s creations.” Indeed, the only potential exception is the Trojan warrior, Hector, who is killed in a more-or-less fair fight in Homer’s version but is ambushed and murdered in Shakespeare’s play by armed minions of Achilles, who then takes credit for the deed while covering up the truth. Moreover, Shakespeare takes a character, Thersites, barely mentioned in Homer, and has him abuse the warriors of both sides and rave at length about the war and about war’s companion, lechery.
For these and other reasons, “Troilus” is often seen as the most “modern” of Shakespeare’s plays. Much of that feeling also likely comes from its decidedly untidy ending: It does not conclude with the end of the war, but with Hector’s murder. As Achilles parades triumphally, dragging Hector’s corpse behind his horse, Trojan Prince Troilus, having been betrayed by his girlfriend Cressida, simply wanders off as the war continues.
War, What Is It Good For?
If the play is taken to be a relatively unaffected reflection of Shakespeare’s hostility toward war, it is likely he learned that such hostility didn’t sell well because his audience was not ready for it. In fact, it is not clear that the play was actually ever performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and several years after its writing, desperate efforts were made to market it as something of a comedy. While Shakespeare reveals a deep antipathy to war in “Troilus and Cressida,” the reaction to it perhaps caused (or reinforced) a conclusion that anti-war barbs should be more incidental and at least somewhat more indirect.
For example, Hamlet is amazed when he comes upon a war between Norway and Poland that is being fought over a piece of land not big enough (not “tomb enough”) to bury the dead. But, while seeing the absurdity of the situation in which, for “a fantasy of trick and fame” thousands “go to their graves like beds,” Hamlet also finds exhilaration in it, declaring, “Rightly to be great is not to stir without argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake.” However, Hamlet’s pursuit of honor (a romantic concept deftly punctured by Falstaff in another Shakespeare play) doesn’t end well for him: He is poisoned and killed in a subsequent scene.
“Henry V,” which likely was written before “Troilus and Cressida,” is often seen as extolling militarism. However, it is bookended by clear, if perhaps underplayed, critiques of war, sequences often either undercut by the staging or by deletion, as in Laurence Olivier’s famed film of the play, which was produced during World War II to boost British morale.
As written, “Henry V” opens with a scene between the Archbishop of Canterbury and an accomplice in which they cynically plot to manipulate the King into going to war with France for their own selfish, parochial reasons: If the King is preoccupied by war, he will be distracted from a plan to seize church properties. Thus the conspirators seek to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” as King Henry IV put it in a previous play by Shakespeare. They are successful at moving the King toward war in a long, pedantic speech, but what really sets him off is an insulting gift from the French crown prince… of tennis balls.
At the end of the play, a narrator casually reminds the audience that all the lands gained in France by Henry were soon lost again by his successor, who “made his England bleed.” Even if you revel in the battlefield successes, suggests Shakespeare bitterly, the war was all for naught.
Impressive as well is the perfunctory way that Henry, learning that French forces have been reconstituted and are advancing, abruptly orders that all French prisoners in English hands be killed—an order cut in Olivier’s rendering. The executions are understandable in military terms because if the prisoners are released, they will again join the battle against the English king. What Shakespeare seems to be saying is not that killing the defenseless prisoners is a war crime, but that war, by routinely creating such moral dilemmas, is the crime.
A Late Bloomer
Although it was readily available in print, “Troilus and Cressida” remained unperformed for nearly three centuries after Shakespeare’s death, and it developed a reputation [ [link removed] ] for being unactable. However, by the 20th century, audiences had become far more open [ [link removed] ] to its anti-war message. This is almost certainly due in part to the rise of an organized pacifist movement, which arose in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. At first, it was a noisy gadfly affair, and it was regularly denigrated by a larger and even noisier element that held war to be, in the words of historian Michael Howard, “an acceptable, perhaps an inevitable and for many people a desirable way of settling international differences.”
Indeed, before World War I, it was very—even amazingly—common to find instances in which serious writers, analysts and politicians in Europe and North America enthusiastically proclaimed war to be beautiful, honorable, holy, sublime, heroic, ennobling, natural, virtuous, glorious, cleansing, manly, necessary and progressive. At the same time, they deemed peace to be debasing, trivial and rotten, and characterized by crass materialism, artistic decline, repellant effeminacy, rampant selfishness, base immorality, petrifying stagnation, sordid frivolity, degrading cowardice, corrupting boredom, bovine content and utter emptiness. One prominent war critic reported that blunt friends advised him to “avoid that stuff or you will be classed with cranks and faddists, with devotees of Higher Thought who go about in sandals and long beards, live on nuts.”
Presumably catering to the growing anti-war movement, “Troilus and Cressida” was at last produced, most prominently by actor and theatrical manager William Poel in London two years before the outbreak of World War I, proving in the process that the play was indeed able to be successfully staged. And as Poel’s biographer notes [ [link removed] ], “We can detect in his liking for the play a tinge of that anti-militarism which was then blowing through the English intelligentsia.”
There had been plenty of horrible wars in the past, including ones like the Trojan War, which led to the utter annihilation of one side. But the horrors of World War I between 1914 and 1918 substantially dramatically boosted the anti-war movement and eradicated war’s glorifiers—it became almost impossible to find examples of the glorification of war in Europe and North America. Instead, recalls [ [link removed] ] military strategist Bernard Brodie, “one must have lived through that postwar period to appreciate fully how the antiwar and antimilitary attitudes engulfed all forms of literature and in time the movies.”
The change has often been noted by [ [link removed] ] historians and political scientists. For example, historian Arnold Toynbee points out that World War I marked the end of a “span of five thousand years during which war had been one of mankind’s master institutions.” In his study of wars since 1400, Evan Luard notes that “the First World War transformed traditional attitudes toward war. For the first time there was an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be justified.”
And political scientist K. J. Holsti observes, “When it was all over, few remained to be convinced that such a war must never happen again.” Tragically however, one of those unconvinced few proved to be crucial. As military historian John Keegan puts it [ [link removed] ], “Only one European really wanted war: Adolf Hitler.”
A beneficiary of this massive change in opinion was the play itself. As a sort of perverse tribute to its relevance, there were no productions [ [link removed] ] in Britain of “Troilus and Cressida” during World War II despite the play’s appeal in that country in the 1920s and 1930s. Nonetheless, although “Troilus and Cressida” has not entered the canon of the most-performed Shakespearean plays, it enjoyed far more productions in the 20th century than in all the centuries before that.
In 1922, a reviewer of the play proclaimed [ [link removed] ] that it “could have been written at any time during the last four years” and was “a realistic picture of war weariness, written by a man who felt an immense disgust with war.” If the play is indeed an expression of Shakespeare’s pacifism, he was hundreds of years ahead of his time.

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