Hamlet has long been interpreted as a figure who is too paralyzed by moral self-consciousness to act in the way he feels it is his duty to act.  One way of understanding the root of that paralysis is by examining the character of Fortinbras, the warrior-prince, who in his resolute pursuit of...

Crane's famous novel of the Civil War captures one of the paradoxes at the heart of the warrior's experience.  The brute violence of the battlefield seems to reduce men to so many amoral objects, a process memorably described by Simone Weil in her reading of the Iliad.  Yet through their...