Shakespeare fans know that the title of the new Jonah Hill / Miles Teller movie
War Dogs comes from a line in
Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony crouches over Caesar's butchered body and predicts that Caesar's spirit will "Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war." (In a
previous post, I talked about why Shakespeare used bearbaiting for the line's imagery.)
The movie has a Shakespearean title, but the book on which it's based has a Shavian/Virgilian one. The title of Guy Lawson's
Arms and the Dudes echoes George Bernard Shaw's
Arms and the Man, which echoes the opening lines of Virgil's
Aeneid: "
Arma virumque cano"—"Of arms and the man I sing."
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