In the result I confess that I am surprised, and, as that result is largely negative and therefore incapable of demonstrative proof, I do not feel much confidence that I shall be believed. When Shakespeare was growing up and beginning to know the world, both war and diplomacy were full of fresh matter for curiosity. Diplomacy, as we now understand it, was an invention of the Renaissance, and especially the Italian Renaissance, flourishing in an exuberant youth and wearing the ornaments of humanist learning not always free from pedantry, and humanist accomplishment often straying into over-ingenious conceits. The letters of Elizabethan statesmen and scholars, even on ordinary business, often conceal their real point from a modern’s first reading by their refined excess of caution. Here, it would seem, the comic Muse might find profitable matter, if only it came within her range of observation.
War, again, was ancient enough in itself, and so indeed were the fundamental rules of military art; but the outward face of war and the whole scheme of manœuvres, tactics, and fortification, had passed or were still passing through critical change due to the general use of fire-arms. Henry VIII.’s castles embodied the latest designs of Italian engineers, and English archery was already decaying though shooting at butts was still a matter of legal duty. Many details of armament and the like were in a state of transition, and came to rest only about the end of the seventeenth century, a rest which was little troubled for a century more. I need hardly remind you that Marlborough would have found very few novelties in Wellington’s army, save for such trifles as the cock of a hat, and the recognition—still not wholly without grudging—of gunners as being soldiers and not mere auxiliary artificers. Shakespeare found the art of war in such a swift new growth as was not to happen again till the times of which I can remember the beginning.
It would seem offhand, therefore, as if we ought to find, in the writing of so keen an observer as Shakespeare, considerable marks of these innovations, and some evidence of intelligent curiosity about their working: not so much, indeed, as would prove Shakespeare either an ambassador or a soldier, though I believe some ingenious persons have let their fancy go so far even as that. But in fact my search up and down the plays has led me to think that Shakespeare the playwright could do nothing with the modern diplomatic art, even if he had any knowledge of it, and that he never troubled himself much about the revolution in the art of war. Observe, I say Shakespeare the playwright. We have very little evidence of Shakespeare’s private pursuits and tastes outside the theatre, and for aught we know he may have been interested in matters for which the stage had no use, or which he did not choose to show there for other reasons. Observe also that beyond question the externals of both diplomacy and war figure in Shakespeare’s works, and those of war rather abundantly. You shall find passages of embassies and ambassadors, many fighting men, a fair number of fights on the stage, not counting brawls and private encounters, and plenty of talk about guns and gunpowder. Fire-arms might still have a smack of novelty at Stratford-on-Avon when William Shakespeare was a lad. And yet he thought them (if he thought at all) older than they were, for we read of cannon in ‘King John’ a century and more before they came into use, and about half a century before Roger Bacon made a cracker. As there is not a word about Magna Carta in ‘King John,’ nor in the older play on which Shakespeare worked, some persons may guess that ‘the troublesome raigne of John, King of England’ was a very dark age to Elizabethan playwrights. But for my part I would rather believe the omission to be a deliberate touch of dramatic fitness. John’s crimes and defaults could not be concealed; nevertheless he is exhibited as becoming at the last a champion of England against foreign encroachment, and it would have spoilt that effect to bring in his differences with the barons on constitutional points. It is true that the Great Charter had not yet become a popular rallying cry, but knowledge of its existence can hardly have been confined to antiquarian scholars. This, however, is not to the purpose here; and in truth the anachronism of the cannon is only a conspicuous example of a kind fairly common in Shakespeare. Thus King Henry V. is made to speak of the Grand Turk as holding Constantinople a full generation too soon.
To return to our theme, the treatment of public affairs and negotiation in Shakespeare is wholly subordinate to stage effect, the Elizabethan stage effect which depended largely on rhetorical set speeches in the more serious passages, and it is therefore rudimentary from a political point of view. Shakespeare knew the conceits of the fashionable epistolary style well enough, and could make sport with them. But when princes and their ministers discourse on affairs of state, contentiously or otherwise, we have no play of dialectic or development of argument. Every speaker gives his own view with little regard to conviction or reply, the matter being taken just as it came to hand in the chronicle or other authority relied upon, and the manner worked up more or less according to the importance of the scene and personages and the opportunity given by the situation. Recrimination is not uncommon, but there is no real critical discussion. Still less is there any indication of what Shakespeare himself thought of the merits. At the beginning of ‘Henry V.’ we find the King’s clerical advisers deliberately encouraging a foreign war of ambition to divert an attack on swollen church revenues,[1] and the Archbishop of Canterbury giving transparently bad reasons (as at this day they seem to us) for the English claim to the crown of France. There is no suggestion of anyone seeing anything wrong in such conduct; not that this is any ground for inferring that Shakespeare approved it. He followed his chronicle, here as elsewhere, mistakes and all.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a live negotiation on the stage is the conference of Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer over the map of England, already partitioned in their imagination, in the third act of ‘Henry IV.,’ Part I. The scene is admirably contrived to bring out Hotspur’s reckless ambition and Glendower’s pride, and for that very reason there is no scope for Italian subtilties. Hotspur blurts out his objection to the proposed boundary without reserve or preparation of any kind:—
Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here,
In quantity equals not one of yours:
See how this river comes me cranking in,
And cuts me from the best of all my land
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.