Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage

U N TO T H E B R E AC H

This page intentionally left blank

Unto the Breach Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage PATR ICIA A. CAHILL

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Patricia A. Cahill 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921205–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my mother, Catherine E. Cahill

Acknowledgments This book came into being with the assistance of many individuals, and their extraordinary generosity ensures that they cannot here—or anywhere—be thanked in the measure they deserve. I have proWted immeasurably from the geniality and erudition of David Kastan, who encouraged my course of martial reading, challenged me to reXect on historicism, and provided me with an unexpected and invaluable opportunity to think deeply about Richard III. I oVer warmest thanks to John Archer, who presided with his dazzling intelligence over my Wrst forays into early modern militarism and thereby (and perhaps unwittingly) helped to shape this project from its inception. I am grateful, too, for the support and wise counsel of Masha Belenky, Pat Bellanca, Carolyn Betensky, Lisa Makman, and Yumna Siddiqi, five friends who gave me indispensable feedback at an especially crucial time in the life of this work. I thank Rick Rambuss for being a magnanimous reader and colleague, and I continue to be inspired by his luminous writing and his uncommon enthusiasm for all things martial. I owe a debt of gratitude to other colleagues in Emory’s English Department, especially to my chair, Frances Smith Foster, and to two distinguished scholars, Cathy Caruth and Jonathan Goldberg, whose work has incalculably changed the direction of my own. Special thanks are also due to Robert A. Paul, Dean of Emory College, for enabling me to pursue my research and to graduate and undergraduate students in my seminars, especially Allison Hobgood, Michele Quint, and Gitanjali Shahani. I acknowledge the many other scholars further aWeld who have commented on early drafts; made it possible for me to share my work at venues such as the Shakespeare Association of America, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Modern Language Association; or have in other ways been instrumental in the writing of this book. Among these are David Armitage, David Baker, Pamela Brown, Dympna Callaghan, Julie Crawford, Jonathan V. Crewe, Frances E. Dolan, Richard Dutton, Jean Feerick, David Glimp, Kim F. Hall, Elizabeth Harvey, Hiram Morgan, Louise Noble, Lena Cowen Orlin, Douglas PfeiVer, Mary Beth Rose, Valerie Traub, Henry S. Turner, and Michelle R. Warren. Above all, I owe an inestimable debt to the amazing Jean E. Howard, who continued to mentor me, oVering brilliant critique, steadfast support, and unfailing kindness, even after she learned that, to quote playwright John Webster, I do not write with a goose-quill, winged with two feathers. I feel very fortunate to be able to count myself among her students and to claim her as a friend. At Oxford University Press, I thank Andrew McNeillie for his thoughtfulness and editorial acumen; Jacqueline Baker for her kindness to me and her care with the manuscript; Claire Thompson for her expert attention to production issues;

Acknowledgments

vii

Charles Lauder, Jr., for his impeccable copyediting; and Judith Colleran for her meticulous proofreading. I also register my enormous gratitude to the three anonymous readers for the Press who challenged my claims and corrected my mistakes and whose incisive criticism and helpful suggestions markedly improved my manuscript. All errors that remain are, of course, entirely my responsibility. I am most grateful to the staV of the Newberry Library and the Huntington Library, where I embarked upon my research into early modern militarism while holding short-term fellowships, as well as to the staV of the British Library, the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York Public Library’s General Research Division, Columbia University’s Butler Library, and Emory University’s WoodruV Library. I am fortunate to have had the support of several other individuals who sustained me in the writing of this book. I thank the late Josephine Armstrong Stewart, Val Arnold-Forster, Jackie Bojilov, Jean Callahan, Susan Chance, Chinju Chen, Rick Foster, Kate Heaton, Scott KraVt, Caroline de Messie`res, Murat Paker, Rob Rucker, Teresa Scozzari, and Shuan-hung Wu. For her generosity and her extraordinary bibliographical skills, Susi Pichler deserves special thanks. I am also grateful to Ed Kalaidjian for his lively interest in my work and to Geraldine Higgins and Rob Shaw-Smith, who, as improbable as it may seem to them, made me to want to call Atlanta my home. For helping me to Wnd in Renaissance England a scholarly home, I thank the extraordinary teacher and scholar Phil Finkelpearl, though he would not want me to say anything mawkish about him. The origins of this book project coincided with the death of my father, Martin Cahill, and I completed this manuscript not long after the untimely death of my brother, Christopher Cahill. While these painful losses are undoubtedly woven into the fabric of my text, I am grateful for my many memories of their irrepressible optimism, which furnished me with much-needed inspiration along the way. I thank my other siblings—Mary Dickinson, T. J. Cahill, and Michael Cahill—for their unwavering support of my scholarly pursuits, and I dedicate this book to my mother as a loving tribute to her remarkable resilience and with profound gratitude for her faith in me. Finally, I take great pleasure in publicly thanking Walter Kalaidjian, who has brought so much joy and love into my life and who has responded with care and precision to virtually every word of this book. Even if there were world enough and time, I could never thank him adequately for helping me see my way to the ending and for making things so wonderfully complicated along the way. Earlier versions of some portions of this book Wrst appeared in print in diVerent forms, and I thank the presses involved for permission to reprint. An early draft of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘‘Killing by Computation: Military Mathematics, the Elizabethan Social Body, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine,’’ in David Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (eds), Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),

viii

Acknowledgments

165–86, and portions of Chapters 2 and 3 were Wrst published as ‘‘Nation Formation in Shakespeare’s English Histories,’’ in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II: The Histories (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003), 70–93. Figures 1 through 8, and 11 are reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library; Figure 9 is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Medicine; and Figures 10 and 12 are reproduced courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Contents Introduction

1

1. Martial Formations: Marlowe’s Theater of Abstraction in Tamburlaine Parts One and Two

24

2. Spare Men and Great Ones: Musters, Norms, and the Average Man in Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV

71

3. Biopower in the English Pale: Generation and Genocide in Edward III

102

4. Atrocity in Arcadia: Wounds, Women, and the Face of Trauma in The Trial of Chivalry

137

5. Wound-man Walking: Visceral History and Traumatized Bodies in A Larum for London

166

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches: Traumatic Time and Space in Shakespeare’s Richard III

209

Index

221

List of Illustrations 1. ‘‘A breefe Kalender’’ from Gyles Clayton, The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). 2. A ‘‘square battle’’ from Peter Whitehorne, Certaine Waies for the Ordering of Souldiers in Battelray, appended to Niccolo Machiavelli, The arte of warre (1562). 3. ‘‘The forme of a Crosse Battaile’’ from Gyles Clayton, The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). 4. A ‘‘ring of pikes’’ from Gyles Clayton, The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). 5. A fortification image from Raimond de Beccarie de Pavie, baron de Fourquevaux, Instructions for the warres, trans. Paul Ive (1589). 6. ‘‘The plat for incamping’’ from William Garrard, The arte of warre (1591). 7. ‘‘The Battell in Forme of a Moone’’ from Thomas Styward, The pathwaie to martiall discipline (1581). 8. ‘‘A peece mounted at 6. points or 7.2 minutes’’ from Niccolo Tartaglia, Three bookes of colloquies, trans. Cyprian Lucar (1588). 9. ‘‘Wound-man’’ from Hans von GersdorV, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (1528). 10. Wound-man’’ from Ambroise Pare´, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634). 11. ‘‘Wound-man’’ from Thomas Gale, Certaine workes of chirurgerie (1563). 12. ‘‘The forme of a woodden Leg made for poore men’’ from Ambroise Pare´, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634).

37

38 39 40 50 60 64 180 185 187 188

191

Introduction In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched, And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars, Speak terms of mane`ge to thy bounding steed, Cry ‘Courage! To the Weld!’ And thou hast talked Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents, Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets, Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, Of prisoners ransomed, and of soldiers slain, And all the currents of a heady Wght. Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war, And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep, That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow Like bubbles in a late-disturbe`d stream; And in thy face strange motions have appeared, Such as we see when men restrain their breath On some great sudden hest. 1 Henry IV 1

In the speech that I take as an epigraph for this Introduction—a passage from Act 2 of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (1596–7)—Lady Percy reveals to Hotspur that, while banned from their marriage bed, she has surreptitiously observed him telling and enacting ‘‘tales of iron wars’’ in his sleep. As she recounts with alarm what she has witnessed, the play evokes an image of a man so completely under the sway of martial impulses that his speech and movements seem to occur independently of his will. Through this evocation of bodily constraint—of both Hotspur’s involuntary movements and Lady Percy’s transWxed spectatorship— 1 Henry IV oVers an arresting image of what Foucault famously termed the ‘‘docile body,’’ the body whose every gesture manifests its subjection to disciplinary regimes.2 But the passage, I would suggest, oVers something more complicated than the image of a body in thrall to the rule of military science: it evokes 1 1 Henry IV 2.4.47–62. All references to Shakespeare are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), hereafter cited parenthetically. All references to the plays’ dates of composition also follow this edition. 2 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135–69.

2

Introduction

a performance of trauma. More precisely, Lady Percy’s speech represents the spectacle of a Wgure calling for order even as he himself is out of control—asleep, breathless, drenched with sweat, and at the mercy of intrusive dreams. Indeed, through her speech, the play would seem to insist that the image of the imperious warrior is virtually inextricable from that of a man in the throes of ‘‘strange motions’’ and an alien passion. Moreover, the very form of Lady Percy’s speech might be said to revive—rather than to ‘‘repair’’—the disturbances of the night. Thus while Lady Percy Xaunts an up-to-date jargon of military command,3 this language spills from Hotspur’s lips incoherently in her account. Represented as a list of nouns without a controlling verb, the words themselves seem to be caught up in the ‘‘currents of [the] heady Wght’’ that they describe. Bearing witness to Hotspur’s turmoil, Lady Percy’s speech suggests that he—and perhaps even she—is possessed by his bellicose rhetoric rather than the possessor of it. Moreover, as the speech draws attention to the mixture of fascination and apprehensiveness with which Lady Percy recalls her encounter with Hotspur’s faint slumbers, it points toward the larger subject that I explore in these pages: namely, the complexities of a historical moment when martial performances might, at the very same time, suggest both the ordered rule of war and the unruliness of trauma. Martial performances like those that Lady Percy conjures up have long been recognized as a vital part of the repertory at England’s Wrst commercial playhouses. Indeed, the theater historian Andrew Gurr has observed that, for more than a decade after 1587, dramas about warfare were the mainstay of the London amphitheaters.4 Such plays, which commonly called for battles to be located on or near the stage, are markedly diVerent from the interludes and dramas of earlier generations, which typically invoked warfare only through the stock Wgure of the miles gloriosus.5 SigniWcantly, as much recent scholarship has established, many late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century war plays may properly be regarded as ‘‘modern’’ works—and not simply because they depict warfare as spectacle.6 3 See the six unnumbered pages comprising a glossary of foreign war terms appended to Robert Barret, The Theorike and Practicke of Modern Warres (1598). The list includes at least four words from Lady Percy’s speech—‘‘sallies,’’ ‘‘trenches,’’ ‘‘palisadoes,’’ and ‘‘parapets.’’ 4 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136. 5 See, for example, Thersites in Three Tudor Classical Interludes, ed. Marie Axton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 37–63. According to Richard Vliet Lindabury, A Study of Patriotism in the Elizabethan Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), 45–6, some thirty dramas show battles on or near the stage. Clearly, how war was imagined in playhouses in the late Elizabethan period diVers signiWcantly from how it was imagined in the period’s epic literature. See Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), who observes that epic poets—Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, and Samuel Daniel—seem to have ‘‘reduced war to a small part of their stories,’’ and who further observes that, in their representations of England’s civil wars, Drayton and Daniel ‘‘contrast strikingly with Marlowe and Shakespeare, the dramatists who covered the same material. They did not shy away from battles, even though the dramatic medium is less well suited to such representations’’ (239–40). 6 For an excellent discussion of ideas of modernity and the early modern (non-martial) drama, see the essays in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millenium, ed. Hugh Grady (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Introduction

3

Rather, what links such works to discourses of modernity are their ideological investments in narratives of national identity and their strategies for charting the terrain of otherness. Accordingly, we can read modernity in the ways in which Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV, Parts 1 and 2, and the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V draw upon England’s martial past to produce their diVerent visions of nationhood. And similarly, we can read modernity in the ways in which the late Elizabethan staging of war calls up regions beyond England’s borders, as is evident in dramas such as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, and the two plays featuring the death of the Elizabethan adventurer Sir Thomas Stukeley in the Battle of Alcazar in Morocco.7 In Unto the Breach I oVer a somewhat diVerent perspective on the modernity of the Elizabethan martial repertory—one that focuses less on the plays’ attention to the nation and its others and more on their staging of knowledge and aVect. In the Wrst half of this book, I thus treat the conceptual resemblance between martial dramas and the practical treatises on war that were just beginning to be published in this period when military science emerged as a modern discipline. In a series of close textual readings, I show how certain war dramas, by exploiting the power of the stage to shape the cultural imaginary, helped to produce and circulate new regimes of rationality and abstraction.8 Indeed, I suggest that they performed what Robert Barret, writing in 1598, designated ‘‘the new order of warre.’’9 But while I aim to demonstrate how the London playhouses helped to engender such new modes of intelligibility, I do not propose that Elizabethan war plays be construed as sterile exercises in abstract thinking. On the contrary, this book oVers an exploration of what it means that theater audiences were forced to reckon with the deeply unsettling sights and sounds of early modern warfare. In the latter half of this volume, I thus explore the scenes of horriWc injury and systematic killing that punctuate Elizabethan performances of martial rationality, and I argue that the theater often imagined modern warfare as a phenomenon deWned by its traumatic impact—that is, by the fact that it cannot be fully grasped. Indeed, as I discuss in the Epilogue, the Elizabethan theater’s very turn to abstraction may be read as an eVort to ‘‘master’’ in the playhouse the disturbing 7 The two plays are George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (c.1588) and the anonymous Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley (c.1596). See The Stukeley Plays, ed. Charles Edelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 8 See James Holtsun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), which oVers analysis of rationalities in utopic discourse of the seventeenth century as well as a brief account of the New Model Army as a utopian experiment. Holtsun includes a valuable discussion of Weberian notions of rationalization on which I draw. I Wnd especially helpful his suggestion that rationalization may be thought of as ‘‘that process by which an array of preexistent particulars is ordered, sorted into manageable groups, submitted to a procedure, and above all made calculable’’; it may also be deWned as ‘‘the substitution of a single form of abstract and quantifying bureaucratic domination for all merely customary, magical or ad hoc human actions’’ (18). 9 See Barret’s glossary entry for ‘‘Moderne warre,’’ which describes it ‘‘is the new order of warre used in our age.’’

4

Introduction

and disordering matter that could not otherwise or elsewhere be mastered. Ultimately, what my account of the period’s martial drama aims to show is that modern warfare was, in fact, perceived as a double-edged phenomenon, for even as it created new ways of knowing the world, it also, in its very violence, opened up traumatic gaps, leading Elizabethans to grapple with the limits of their understanding. Uncovering this complex discursive relationship, Unto the Breach explores the new martial calculus of the social order in its encounter with the incalculable force of historical trauma. The title for this study derives, of course, from the King’s rallying cry to his soldiers in Henry V (1598–9), ‘‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, j Or close the wall up with our English dead’’ (3.1.1–2). While I discuss Henry V brieXy in Chapter 3, my contention here is that through those two famous lines one may glimpse the intimate connection between martial structures and traumatic ruptures envisaged on the Elizabethan stage. More precisely, Henry’s lines—which are echoed by Bardolph’s ‘‘On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach’’ (3.2.1–2); Fluellen’s ‘‘Up to the breaches, you dogs!’’ (3.2.21); and MacMorris’s ‘‘An the trumpet calls us to the breach’’ (3.2.52)—can remind us that the spaces that mattered to the new military science were also central to the Elizabethan theatrical imaginary. Indeed, while it was probably only circa 1579 that the word ‘‘breach’’ was Wrst used to signify a military location—speciWcally, it came to designate the gap engendered in fortiWed walls from the blast of artillery during a siege10—more than Wfteen Elizabethan plays conjure up this space.11 The best known of these evocations, perhaps, is Mercutio’s 10 The OED credits 2 Henry IV and the date of 1597 for the Wrst usage of ‘‘breach’’ as a military term, but this is clearly erroneous. The Wrst usage that I have been able to locate is a volume by the soldier–author Thomas Churchyard, A generall rehearsall of warres, called Churchyardes choise (1579). Several military science texts that predate 2 Henry IV also show this usage as do virtually all the pre-1597 plays listed in the next note. 11 In addition to Henry V, three pre-1603 Shakespearean plays—1 Henry VI, 2 Henry IV, and Romeo and Juliet—have at least one reference to ‘‘breach’’ in the military sense. The word also shows up in Othello (usually dated to 1603–4), when Othello recounts his ‘‘hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach’’ (1.3.135). Moreover, in 1606–7 the word’s military signiWcance seems to have been suYciently well known to Wgure in the sexual banter between Helena and Paroles in All’s Well That Ends Well: helen Bless our poor virginity from underminers and blowers-up! Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men? paroles Virginity being blown down, man will quicklier be blown up. Marry, in blowing him down again, with the breach yourselves made, you lose your city. (1.1.119–24) The non-Shakespearean pre-1603 plays with references to ‘‘breaches’’ are Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine Parts One and Two and Dido, Queen of Carthage; Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humor; Thomas Lodge, The Wounds of Civil War; Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus; Thomas Heywood, The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, The Four Prentices of London, and Blurt, Master Constable; and the anonymously authored plays Lust’s Dominion; Soliman and Perseda; and The Tragedy of Selimus. For dates of the non-Shakespearean drama, I rely on the chronological table that appears in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 420–47.

Introduction

5

account in Romeo and Juliet (1595) of how Queen Mab produces nightmares in soldiers, an account that, like Lady Percy’s report on Hotspur’s slumber, showcases a modern and foreign vocabulary of warfare:12 Sometimes she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck. And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades, Of healths Wve fathom deep; and then anon Drums in his ear at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two, And sleeps again (1.5.82–8)

As a theatrical space scrutinized by Elizabethan martialists and as a signiWer of a martial idiom working its way into the popular consciousness, Henry V ’s ‘‘breach’’ metonymically evokes the new military rationalities that are the concern of this book. That is, as I show how particular plays conceived such matters as the ordering of space, the disciplining of bodies, and the regulation of populations, I argue that Elizabethan war narratives produced speciWc forms of knowledge that we have come to identify with the rationalities of modernity. These dramas, I suggest, oVered Elizabethan theatergoers much more than the satisfactions aVorded by a new military lexicon and topical allusions to contemporary political conXicts. As I elaborate in my close readings, the theater of war enabled new understandings of personhood and of the body politic. Departing from past scholarship that places later Baconian projects as the inaugural texts for ‘‘scientiWc’’ rationality, I identify the knowledge-making practices of military science and the drama of warfare as vital sites of the ‘‘new’’ in Elizabethan culture. In Unto the Breach I also aim to show how the production of these new martial formations was linked, as the Queen Mab speech may remind us, with the intensities of overwhelming aVect. Accordingly, my titular allusion to Henry V is meant to underscore that, insofar as this is a book is about breaches, it is also about breaches in understanding—speciWcally, the ‘‘shattering breaks’’ in experience that, in the realm of psychoanalytic discourse, signal psychic trauma.13 More to the point, I would emphasize that while the lines spoken by the English king at the siege of HarXeur may be among the most familiar phrasings in all of Shakespeare, they may also be some of the least coherent, for there is a breach, as it were, between the two lines. Although the presence of the conjunction ‘‘or’’ in the second line seems to posit a choice between two actions—that is, it suggests that the men may either return to the battery of the fortiWed walls or face certain death—the lines articulate only one possibility and only one very grim outcome. 12 The modernity of Mercutio’s language is suggested not only by the reference to ‘‘breaches’’ but also by the word ‘‘ambuscadoes,’’ which is included in Barret’s 1598 glossary of foreign war terms. 13 See Dominick LaCapra’s claim, ‘‘Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated eVects.’’ Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 186.

6

Introduction

Re-deWning the soldiers’ movement as a terrifying entrance into the breach, the lines summon up soldiers who Wll in that empty space with their own dead bodies.14 Henry’s call to his men resonates with the discussion of military breaches oVered by the prominent Welsh militarist Sir Roger Williams in A briefe discourse of warre (1590). Having described how Spanish soldiers customarily cast dice to decide which men will have the honor of charging Wrst into a breach, Williams oVered the following comment: They need not bee so earnest for the matter, because the greatest warriours accompt the Wrst troupe that entreth a breach in more danger, than the Wrst troop that must charge in their severall battailes. They have reason, for I knowe it by good experience, whether they entire or retire the most of them are killed.15

SigniWcantly, the knowledge that Williams claims ‘‘by good experience’’ is not exactly the same as that to which Shakespeare’s play more obliquely refers. While in Williams’s text, we see a frank rendering of a practice whereby ‘‘the Wrst troop’’ is customarily sacriWced so that others may wage war with less danger, in the Shakespearean lines, the macabre ‘‘closing up’’ of a ‘‘wall’’ becomes legible not as a phase of warfare but rather as itself the endless work of war. That is, the repeated phrase ‘‘once more,’’ which frames the beginning and the end of Henry’s Wrst line, introduces the prospect of soldiers continually encountering a gaping, deadly wall. Just as these two Shakespearean lines represent a disturbing vision of perpetual life-in-death intruding upon a scene of well-ordered military bodies, so, too, do many Elizabethan plays conjure up traumatic specters even as they evoke the ‘‘science’’ that would order and discipline the matter of warfare. In this vein, Unto the Breach conceptualizes how such dramas connect the new practical knowledge of warfare with the intrusive scenes, compulsive repetitions, and disorienting temporalities that deWne traumatic experience in the modern social realm. As may be clear from my references to new regimes of rationality and the modern experience of trauma, in this study I frequently address historical questions and explore early modern texts by drawing upon contemporary theory,

14 For another reading of the ambivalence in these lines, see Christopher Pye’s observation in The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990) that ‘‘the heroking’s famous alternative between entering once more into the breach and Wlling it with English dead is not a choice between victory and defeat but represents the single, contradictory destiny of a power which must transgress itself to make itself whole’’ (28). For the play’s usage of the word ‘‘breach,’’ including its relationship to sexual and national boundaries, see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 42–3, 168. 15 Sir Roger Williams, Works, ed. John X. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 22–3. See also Charles Edelman’s wonderfully informative Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London: Athlone, 2000), which in its entry on ‘‘breach’’ cites both this passage from Williams as well as the line from Othello I cited earlier.

Introduction

7

a fact that, to some readers, may well suggest the dangers of anachronism.16 As I scrutinize the workings of early modern texts, however, I aim to preserve a strong sense of historical diVerence rather than to equate the cultural productions of the sixteenth century with those of our own moment. I do not wish to read Marlowe’s Tamburlaine as though it were, say, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Nevertheless, I do contend that there is more continuity between the discursive formations of early modernity and those of later periods than many critics of Renaissance drama allow. For example, while I regard the theater’s fascination with battle array as signaling the emergence of what Eric H. Ash suggests was a peculiarly Elizabethan ‘‘culture of expertise,’’ I show that such martial performances also resonate with what Mary Poovey has identiWed as Victorian discourses of abstraction and homogeneity.17 Accordingly, I not only describe how military knowledge inWltrated Elizabethan culture in unprecedented ways, I also maintain that the period’s martial texts and practices ramify well beyond the military topics they take as their subject. I argue, for example, that many of the period’s practical texts—which codify rules, establish norms, describe technologies, map space, and delineate battle array—represent nothing less than a theory of laboring bodies, a precursor of nineteenth-century eVorts to standardize, quantify, and appropriate the productive energies of workers. Moreover, I suggest that through their preoccupation with ‘‘passing muster’’ (a phrase dating to 157318), the new military texts gave currency to the notion, key to later historical developments, that Man was not the measure of all things but rather a potentially measurable being, someone whose parts and powers might—indeed, must—be reckoned and reproduced as a form of social wealth. My goal throughout this study is to be attentive both to the speciWcities of Elizabethan texts and to the ways in which such works may anticipate later cultural conWgurations. I find psychoanalytic theories of trauma to be invaluable in approaching the Elizabethan martial repertory, despite the fact that the paradigms of psychoanalysis continue to be treated with suspicion within some quarters in early modern cultural studies.19 It is, of course, true that, as the OED suggests, the 16 On the charge of anachronism, see the argument put forth by Cynthia Marshall, Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 32–4. BrieXy, she suggests that the injunction to be more historical is itself vulnerable to charges of anachronism, insofar as the desire for historicist criticism is a desire to supplement the past. For more insight on the matter of anachronism, see also Lowell Gallagher’s perceptive review of Marshall’s work in Shakespeare Studies, 32 (2004), 393–402, esp. 393–4. 17 Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 18 See Oxford English Dictionary, ‘‘muster,’’ (n.1) I2d: ‘‘to pass muster: to undergo muster or inspection without censure; (later in extended use) to come up to the required standard, to be beyond reproach or criticism; to be taken or accepted as (occas. for) something.’’ 19 For an overview of the debates surrounding the use of psychoanalytic approaches, see Cynthia Marshall, ‘‘Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject,’’ in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, 117:5 (2002), 1207–16.

8

Introduction

word ‘‘trauma’’ probably did not even begin its migration from Greek to English until 1656 when Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, or a dictionary interpreting such hard words as are now used deWned ‘‘Traumatick’’ as ‘‘belonging to wounds or to the cure of wounds.’’ Moreover, only with the emergence of psychoanalysis did the word ‘‘trauma’’ begin to signal a linkage between the wounded body and the aZicted psyche. Thus Freud, drawing on the metaphor of bodily injury, inXuentially deWned traumatic wounding in terms of a ‘‘breach’’ or penetration by excessive ‘‘stimuli’’ of what he imagined as the ‘‘protective shield’’ of an organism.20 While Freud’s language is certainly resonant to my project, my intent in invoking modern theories of trauma is not to make a claim about the pathology of individual characters who appeared on the early modern stage. Rather, I call upon such theories because they furnish us with a way of making sense of both the narrative structures characteristic of Elizabethan martial dramas and of the cultural work such stage productions may have performed in early modern England. Above all, I would argue that while no literal lexicon of trauma exists in the early modern period, one can discern in the period’s war plays what contemporary theorists have described as the repetitive structure characteristic of trauma—a structure that as Cathy Caruth, one of the leading literary theorists of trauma, has suggested, may witness to an overwhelming event: one that ‘‘is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.’’21 Similarly, Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst who has worked with Holocaust survivors, has also called attention to trauma in terms of a structure of perpetual revival: trauma survivors, he writes, ‘‘live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.’’22 In this regard, Elizabethan dramas that propose to retell—and revive— 20 Thus Freud writes in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’’ Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. xviii, ‘‘We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield [Reizschutz]. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise eYcacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defense measure’’ (29). For a discussion of the unclear borders between the physical body and psychic injury in early psychoanalytic writing on war trauma, see Wyatt Bonikowski, ‘‘The Return of the Soldier Brings Death Home,’’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 51:3 (2005), 513–35, which suggests that ‘‘Freud’s descriptions of Xows of sensation and their cathectic binding can be read as a psychical, energetistic version of physical wounding, bleeding, and healing’’ (518–19). 21 See Cathy Caruth, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to her edited collection, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4; emphasis in the original. 22 See Dori Laub, ‘‘Bearing Witness,’’ in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69. Similarly, Caruth notes in her ‘‘Introduction’’ to Trauma that ‘‘The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its inherent forgetting, but that it is only in and through its

Introduction

9

the martial events of the past are especially intriguing works, for in many such plays we see a staging both of ‘‘ordinary,’’ chronological time as well as of a temporality gone awry, one which suggests that the past does not, in fact, reside in the past. But, as I aim to show, even Elizabethan war plays that do not claim to chronicle the past appear to be vulnerable to traumatic historicity, insofar as their Wctions seem not to be immune to the disturbing matter of Elizabethan military violence. As I detail in the latter half of this volume, the formal strategies of many Elizabethan war dramas—including the ways in which they oVer visual and aural ‘‘Xashbacks’’ and the ways in which they seem, in eVect, to draw a blank—oVer a stunning register of traumatic possession. In turning to trauma theory, then, I do not wish to turn away from history but rather to take seriously theorist Dominick LaCapra’s insight that traumatic representation deals with the profound impact of historical events.23 If one accepts that the Elizabethan turn towards militarism entailed the culture’s proximity (whether in reality or in fantasy) to events so overwhelming as to be literally ungraspable, then one can only conclude that early modern drama must bear traces of the culture’s encounters with traumatic historicity. Moreover, if one seeks to understand the nature of Elizabethan playgoing—especially the aVective force of the transactions between playgoers and plays in Elizabethan playhouses—then it seems clear that what theorists have had to say about how individuals and cultures ‘‘act out’’ in order to ‘‘work through’’ the impact of extremity may oVer a useful model for critical thinking about audience response.24 Such a model—one that attends to the aVective dynamics of literary production and reception virtually ignored in traditional accounts of Elizabethan forgetting that it is Wrst experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar temporal structure, the belatedness of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time’’ (8). 23 See LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, esp. 43–85. See also Ann Cvetkovich, who persuasively argues in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) that trauma be understood ‘‘as a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events’’ (18). 24 On the concepts of ‘‘acting out’’ and ‘‘working through’’ as two ‘‘interacting processes’’ through which cultures respond to historical trauma, see LaCapra, 43–85 (65). Acting out, LaCapra suggests, is characterized by the ‘‘compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence’’ (66) and ‘‘may be a prerequisite of working through’’ (67 n. 32). In ‘‘working through,’’ LaCapra explains, cultures counter compulsive repetitions through acts of mourning and through ‘‘nontotalising narrative and critical, as well as self-critical, thought and practice’’ (67). For historical accounts of the composition of the audience for early modern drama, see the diVerent conclusions reached by Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1574–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London; and Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005), 44–9. For explorations into the nature of playgoing that take up the question of aVect, see Steven Mullaney’s important book, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). My investigation of traumatic aVect is in many respects a response to the challenging issues Mullaney raises in that work. Among more recent discussions of aVect, playgoing, and Renaissance drama to which I am indebted

10

Introduction

playgoing—can hardly be regarded as ahistorical. Rather, with its appreciation of the complicated relationships that may obtain between the present and the past and its interest in recovering experiences so extreme that they can only be communicated indirectly, contemporary trauma theory may allow us more fully to grasp the cultural work of Elizabethan martial performances. I In Unto the Breach I take issue with the commonplace of literary criticism that Elizabethan martial dramas were composed and drew large audiences because of a national war fever in the wake of the 1588 Armada victory.25 For all its gestures toward historicity, this claim, insofar as it would reduce the complexities of the English interest in warfare at the end of the sixteenth century to one emotion (i.e., euphoria) and to a single event, fundamentally gets history wrong. To begin with, such a view homogenizes the period’s martial plays, which, as is evident even from the relatively small number I discuss in this volume, are neither singlemindedly focused on the politics of the war with Spain nor identical in their modes of address to audiences. Such a view also homogenizes Elizabethan playgoers who presumably attended the theater for a multitude of diVerent reasons and could be expected to possess a range of political perspectives. And, perhaps most important, such a view seems to depend upon an impoverished view of early modern theatricality insofar as it assumes that the playhouse was no more than an inert space where patriotic fervor might be given voice. This assumption, as I aim to show, completely overlooks the richly aVective dimension of Elizabethan theatrical performance, especially the force of the encounter between actors and audiences. To understand the appeal of the period’s war plays, I would argue, we must take into account not only the fact that in the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign militarism inWltrated English culture in are Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Marshall, Shattering of the Self, esp. chs. 4 and 5. 25 For a recent, typical rendering of this view, see Brian Gibbons, ‘‘Romance and the Heroic Play,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197–227. Gibbons writes that ‘‘In 1588 the Armada was defeated. Militarism became extremely popular in the theater and the nation,’’ and he notes in passing that ‘‘in the wake of the Armada patriotic mass emotion was strong enough to prompt the appearance of many plays about war and English history’’ (207, 214). For cautionary words on the enterprise of making historical arguments about the Armada defeat and the emergence of the theater, see the historian Garret Mattingly’s wry observation in The Armada (New York: Houghton MiZin, 1959) that ‘‘the assertion of a causal connection between the defeat of the Armada and the Xowering of Elizabethan drama is hard to refute; even harder, except by the method of post hoc, propter hoc, to prove’’ (398).

Introduction

11

unprecedented ways. We must also acknowledge the playhouse as a visceral site, a space of overwhelming and often contradictory aVect. What the vogue for martial drama represents, then, is not so much a clear moment of triumphalist warmongering, but rather a far messier eVort to come to terms with the culture’s unequivocal turn toward warfare. Before turning to the drama, I shall brieXy rehearse the historical narrative that underpins my study, one in which the period between the 1580s and the early seventeenth century emerges as a period of intense militarization. SigniWcantly, while Paul Jorgensen’s ‘‘old historicist’’ study, Shakespeare’s Military World (1956), opened up the Weld of military history to literary critics, it is only within the past decade that signiWcant numbers of literary critics have begun to engage this historical narrative.26 Possibly, as Curtis Breight has suggested, a new historicist concern with the stage as a site of power led some scholars of the drama wrongly to contend that early modern England lacked a real army.27 Possibly, too, because the classic accounts of the Elizabethan army and militia by C. G. Cruickshank and Lindsay Boynton emphasize the problems that plagued these emerging institutions, scholars tended to overlook the signiWcance of Elizabethan militarization.28 In fact, the accounts by Cruickshank and Boynton frequently present a picture of a largely outdated and ineYcient military apparatus, oVering little sense that Elizabethans were aware of and aVected by some of the period’s 26 The best book-length historical study of Elizabethan military eVorts is Paul E. J. Hammer’s deWnitive work, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); unless otherwise indicated, I rely on it for the summary that follows. For other important accounts of Elizabethan militarization, see Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Taurus, 1995); Mark Charles Fisssel, English Warfare 1511–1642 (London: Routledge, 2001); Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585– 1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 199–268 and passim; Wallace T. MacCaVrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); John S. Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ The Journal of Military History, 58 (1994), 391–420; and R. B. Wernham, After The Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For a concise overview of Elizabethan militarization, see Ian Roy, ‘‘Towards the Standing Army 1485–1660,’’ in David Chandler and Ian Beckett (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25–47. Among several recent works on drama and warfare, see especially Nick de Somogyi’s encyclopedic Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) and Nina Taunton’s 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), which oVers valuable insights into the place of women in the Elizabethan martial imaginary and the complexities of the period’s spatial rhetorics. See also Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); and Theodor Meron, Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws: Perspectives on the Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 27 Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama, 6. 28 See Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 391–420. The works by Cruickshank and Boynton are cited above.

12

Introduction

momentous changes in military organization and weaponry—among them, the introduction of new Wrearms and trace italienne fortress architecture; the transformation in the size of armies and the scale of warfare; and the development of practices of discipline, tactics, and drill. But as much recent historical research has shown, while it would be a mistake to imagine that the Elizabethan state underwent all this change—that is, underwent what many scholars suggest amounted to a ‘‘military revolution’’ in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and France—there is good reason to challenge the traditional view of the English army as antiquated, ineVectual, and insular.29 Accordingly, the historian John S. Nolan, marshalling much evidence about the scale and scope of militarization under Elizabeth, has recently argued that the Elizabethan state was ‘‘far more involved in the activities of its army than its critics . . . have suggested.’’30 To make sense of warfare on the early modern stage requires that we attend in some detail to the military exploits of Elizabeth’s government, a subject that tends to be less familiar to literary critics than is that of her government’s naval commitments. BrieXy, in the last two decades of her reign, Elizabeth successfully levied thousands of soldiers—members of the Wrst English army not to depend on feudal retinues—for expeditions to Ireland, France, Portugal, and the Low Countries. Moreover, as Paul E. J. Hammer, one of the leading scholars of Tudor military history, emphasizes, Elizabeth’s resources for war were far more slender than those of her father. Observing that the largest armies that Elizabeth sent abroad were half the size of the force of some 32,000 troops that Henry VIII 29 The literature of the ‘‘military revolution’’ is extensive. For diVering views on the English contexts, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 259–64 and Eltis, esp. ch. 2. The classic works on the subject are GeoVrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1550–1650: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before Queen’s University of Belfast (Belfast: Marjory Boyd, 1956). Michael DuVy’s editor’s introduction to The Military Revolution and the State 1500–1800 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1980) summarizes the so-called revolution as follows: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was an enormous growth in the size of the permanent armed forces of European states as well as in the numbers they mobilized for war. By the late seventeenth century these forces were better disciplined than ever before and much more uniform within each state in weapons, drill and dress. They were paid and maintained by the state on a professional basis to a far greater extent, and to accommodate and sustain these developments there was a major growth in state bureaucracy, state Wnance and state intervention in the economy and society. The net result was a great increase in the power of the state in early modern Europe. (1) Parker, as Nolan points out, inXuentially suggested that England’s island geography eVectively insulated the country and thus ensured that the country had no need for the trace italienne fortress architecture, which he deems both a cause and consequence of the revolution (394). For an argument that ‘‘the military revolution . . . be extended backwards well into the later medieval centuries,’’ see Andrew Ayton and J. L. Price (eds), The Medieval Military Revolution: State, Society and Military Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 17. For an overview of the debate and access to the classic articles, see CliVord J. Rogers (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995). 30 Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 393.

Introduction

13

led to France in the 1540s, Hammer deems it ‘‘remarkable that Elizabethan England could sustain war for 18 years, often on multiple fronts and spanning a vastly greater geographic range than the conXicts of the 1540s and 1550s’’; such warfare, he argues, is indicative of ‘‘a major military and political achievement.’’31 Between 1585 and 1604 many soldiers from England and Wales were participating in a war with Spain waged largely on land in the Low Countries and near the Channel ports of France. Others, meanwhile, were carrying out what historians often identify as Elizabethan England’s most arduous project—namely the eVort to re-conquer and colonize Ireland.32 As Hammer notes, at the end of the 1590s, ‘‘the Elizabethan regime . . . poured men, money, and supplies into Ireland on a scale far greater than any other enterprise of the reign, stretching the realm to its very limits.’’33 Statistics on the numbers of men who were conscripted for service abroad are, of course, imperfect, but they can provide an idea of the massive scale of these military eVorts. Between 1585 and 1602, the Privy Council authorized the levying of more than 117,000 men for foreign military service, or an average of 6,529 men per year; the year 1588 saw an extraordinarily high rate of some 15,000 men; the year 1596 saw the conscription of more than 11,000 men; and each of three other years—1597, 1598, and 1601—saw the conscription of more than 9,000.34 Moreover, as Hammer notes, because such tallies do not include several categories of men who served abroad in large numbers— among them sailors, volunteers, and privateers—the total number of men who served the war eVort abroad during these eighteen years should probably be approximately 385,000.35 Many of these men went to France in support of Henry IV; still more went on the ‘‘Counter-Armada’’ to Portugal in 1589 and on the earl of Essex’s voyage to Cadiz in 1596.36 But the greatest numbers who went abroad were likely stationed in Ireland and the Low Countries and served in what Nolan identiWes as de facto standing armies.37 31 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 6. 32 For English enterprises in Ireland, see ibid., esp. 209–35; Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State’’; John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997); Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London: Constable and Robinson, 1950); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976); and Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993). 33 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 212. 34 Ibid. 245–8. Hammer oVers a total of 117,525 but notes the need to reduce this number by some 7% to compensate for so-called ‘‘dead pays’’—that is, the Wctional men who, for budgetary reasons, were included in Elizabethan accounts. 35 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 248. 36 On these expeditions, see ibid., which notes, for example, that some 15,000 went on the ‘‘Counter-Armada’’ to Lisbon (246). 37 See Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 396. Nolan also notes that ‘‘the largest armies Welded by Elizabethan England were deployed in the paciWcation of Ireland between 1599 and 1603, reaching a level of nineteen thousand in 1599’’ (407). For the most recent calculations of Elizabethan troop levels, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, which provides an overview of levies and which cites D. J. B. Trim’s calculation that some 43,000 English and Welsh troops served in the Dutch and French armies between 1585 and 1602 (244–8, esp. 248).

14

Introduction

Virtually all able-bodied men who were not clergy and who were below the rank of baron and between the age of 16 and 60 were liable by statute for military service, but in actual practice English war eVorts relied disproportionately on men at the margins of society. The poor, the old, and the unwell made up the bulk of those conscripted for expeditions.38 The drafting of masterless men was regularly lamented—a Privy Council report from 1598 complained that the soldiers levied for Irish service were ‘‘taken out of the gaols and of rogues and vagrant persons, evil armed and sent forth so naked and bare, without hose or shoes, as they are not any way Wt for service’’39—but it was a common practice throughout Elizabeth’s reign. Although lowborn men may have felt the brunt of this militarization, virtually all Elizabethans were materially aVected by it. It encompassed not only actions in garrisons and battleWelds; it also encompassed the more mundane workings of domestic institutions devoted to warfare, which made signiWcant claims on much of the populace. While the nobility probably did not reduce their vast private arsenals as was once inXuentially suggested, local oYcials such as lords lieutenant, sheriVs, and constables were continually called upon to enforce the militia statutes that required citizens to supply the realm with armor and horses and to participate regularly in assemblies. One of the most signiWcant markers of Elizabethan military change in this regard was the establishment in 1573 of the new domestic army known as the ‘‘trained bands.’’ This new army, which was envisioned as a national militia representing the realm’s most capable men, comprised mostly men of the middling sort, who were regularly trained and drilled by professional mustermasters.40 Between 1585 and 1587, the Privy Council called upon lords lieutenant—that is, the oYcials responsible for the military preparation of an entire county—to implement uniform standards and ensure that the militias had more rigorous oversight. In April 1588, the lords lieutenant were ordered to increase the numbers of men in the trained bands; in a short time, the numbers rose from 54,000 men to nearly 88,000.41 Between 1587 and 1588, some of the men of the trained bands even went to government-administered sleep-away camps for two to three weeks at a time, where they learned the art of communal living and participated in martial drills and performances. And in the 1590s, some rushed to the Low Countries, where they were introduced to the famous Dutch system of tactics and drill.42 These oYcial martial practices were augmented by private 38 MacCaVrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 47. 39 As quoted in Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, 52. 40 My discussion of the trained bands here draws upon the classic account by Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia (esp. 90–125), as well as the more recent analysis in Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, which includes the claim that the establishment of the trained bands was a ‘‘monumental task’’ and had been accomplished by the 1590s (99–102; 140–3; 256–8). 41 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 142. 42 Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 401. On the Dutch system, see M. D. Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army 1589–1609,’’ Armed Forces and Society, 1 (1975), 419–42.

Introduction

15

endeavors, such as those of the London military society known as the Honorable Artillery Company: incorporated under Henry VIII, the Society grew extremely popular in the 1580s and 1590s as a school where men of the nobility and the middling sort met weekly for training in the use of Wrearms. Their gatherings and mock battles in London’s Old Artillery Ground, near the playhouses, reputedly drew scores of spectators.43 Finally, while the Elizabethan Privy Council was by no means a centralized bureaucracy with rigorous oversight of military matters, it did actively participate in these militarization eVorts. Indeed, despite its notorious ineYciencies, in moments of crisis it was capable, so Wallace MacCaVrey has suggested, of ‘‘transform[ing] itself into something resembling a war oYce in full control of logistics.’’44 Among its responsibilities were the supervision of local eVorts to muster, arm, and train the land forces; the export of munitions; the purchase of foreign supplies, such as German and Flemish armor and Moroccan saltpeter and copper; the maintenance of weapons, especially the new Wrearms that replaced the longbow in use at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign; the development of strategic alliances and an arms trade with the Ottoman Empire; and the construction and modernizing of fortiWcations on England’s southern coastlines.45 The emergence of this expensive Elizabethan war machine dramatically altered the domestic economy: citizens were assessed for military taxes; merchants made loans to the government and contracted to supply soldiers with food, clothing, and equipment; and both men and women found work both in military camps— as victuallers, artisans, armorers, surgeons, nurses, laundresses, and prostitutes— and in industries such as gun founding and saltpeter-mining that arose to support the new ways of waging warfare.46 It was in this milieu that military science—a discipline with classical roots47— was more or less re-invented as word of the signiWcant military reforms occurring 43 See George Raikes, A History of the Honourable Artillery Company (London: R. Bentley and Son, 1878), and G. Goold Walker, The Honourable Artillery Company, 1537–1947, 2nd edn (London: Aldershot, Gale and Polen, 1954). 44 MacCaVrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 34. For an overview of these changes in the Privy Council, see ibid. 17–58. 45 For an account of English eVorts to establish an ambassador at Istanbul as well as the English/ Turkish trade in gunpowder, muskets, and the like, see Brandon H. Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987) and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), esp. 43–82. 46 For the economic transformations, see, in addition to Hammer’s Elizabeth’s Wars, Nolan, ‘‘Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 413–20; MacCaVrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 59–69; and Barton C. Hacker, ‘‘Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance,’’ Signs, 6 (1981), 643–71. 47 For an account of the classical background, see Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 5–16. Webb points out that four books on Greek and Roman tactics were published between 1539 and 1572: Frontius, The Stratagemes, Sleyghtes and Policies of Warre (1539); Onosander, Of the Generall Captaine and of His OYce (1563); Caesar, The Eyght Bookes of Caius Julius Caesar Conteyning His Martiall Exploytes in Gallia (1565); and Vegetius, The Foure Books of Martiall Policye (1572).

16

Introduction

on the Continent began to seep into England and as English men increasingly participated in warfare abroad. Thus, in 1590, Sir Roger Williams, the famous Welsh soldier whose description of soldiers dying in the breach I cited at the start of this chapter, set out his views in virtually pedagogical style in A Briefe Discourse of Warre. A client of the earl of Essex, Williams had served in several Continental armies (including that of Spain in the 1570s) and his arguments in favor of the new military science and Spanish military practices had enormous inXuence on English war strategies in the 1590s.48 In his Briefe Discourse, Williams expressed wonderment at the transformation in the nature of warfare, noting that ‘‘There are evrie day newe inuentions, strategms of warres, changes of weapons, munition, and all sorts of engins newlie invented, and corrected dailie.’’49 While other kinds of printed texts increasingly made warfare visible to Elizabethans—including, of course, contemporary news accounts of foreign warfare such as those on the subject of the Low Countries that I discuss in Chapter 550—the appearance of books like Williams’s was a key sign of war’s modernity. That is, the appearance of books that prescribed elaborate rules for choosing soldiers; codiWed army hierarchies; expounded on the relevance of classical military history to contemporary questions; explicated principles of training, tactics, drill, gunnery, fortiWcation, and battle array; and, in short, constituted warfare as a science was one marker of the unprecedented changes in the English culture of war.51 While a few military science books appeared early in Elizabeth’s reign, this genre did not explode into print until the late sixteenth century, a time when the word military began to designate matters pertaining speciWcally to soldiers rather than simply ‘‘to warfare or defence.’’52 Between 1575 and 1600, some Wfty military treatises, both original works and translations of classical and continental texts, were published in London, and several went through multiple editions.53 Many of these books were written or translated by men who had served in the wars in Ireland or on the Continent and were addressed to men who were or would be

48 For Williams’s relationship with Essex and his inXuence on Elizabethan military policies, see Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, 237–8. 49 Williams, A Briefe Discourse of Warre, 27. 50 For a discussion of the dissemination in England of French accounts of civil strife, see Lisa F. Parmalee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996). 51 For a related claim, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, who writes, ‘‘Thanks to the creation of the trained bands and the proliferation of books and treatises on war, the new adaptations to contemporary warfare and knowledge of ‘military science’ were disseminated to an unprecedented degree’’ (262). 52 While the OED dates the more general usage of ‘‘military’’ to the Wfteenth century, it suggests that it was not until 1585 that the word began to mean ‘‘Pertaining to soldiers; used, performed, or brought about by soldiers; beWtting a soldier.’’ 53 The standard bibliographies of early modern books on war are Anthony Bruce, A Bibliography of British Military History (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1981) and Maurice J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 (London: Holland, 1900).

Introduction

17

soldiers. Those that named women often did so to praise that exceptional woman, their Queen, or to proclaim that women endanger military order and must be banned from military sites.54 And virtually all these works were the product of royal or noble patronage; many were dedicated to Elizabeth, to members of the Privy Council, and to courtiers, especially Philip Sidney and Essex, who were, of course, associated with the Elizabethan revival of chivalry.55 Despite this elite pedigree and despite a contemporary eVort to make knowledge of military science a marker of high social status,56 the Elizabethan treatises circulated well outside aristocratic and court circles. Booksellers and printers— ranging from the prominent printers associated with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Foxe’s Actes and Monuments to the more obscure ones who specialized in broadside ballads57—made military works readily available to the middling sort, many of whom were destined to pursue military careers.58 And militarists often pointedly included men of low rank within their designated readership. Thus, in 1578 Thomas Proctor produced Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres in an eVort to ‘‘styrre anye man to the studye of this knowledge’’ despite his claim that martial knowledge was ‘‘principallie and properlye . . . of the profession of noble menne, and gentlemen of greate revenues.’’59 One year later, GeoVrey Gates, a self-described ‘‘unlettered man’’ engaged a notary to set 54 See, for example, Matthew SutcliVe’s injunctions in The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (1593): ‘‘Common women let them be whipped out of the Campe, and garrison . . . Suspicious women let them be banished the campe, or garrison’’ and ‘‘No women are to be suVered to follow the campe, nor any supecte women to keepe in the place of garrison’’ (Tt1r). 55 On the politics of the chivalric revival, see Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 56 For an instance of the eVort to mark military knowledge as the discourse of an elite class, see Humphrey Gilbert’s ‘‘The Erection of an Achademy in London for Educacion of Her Majesties Wardes,’’ printed in Queene Elizabethes Achademy, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, Extra Series, No. III: London, 1868), 1–12. This manuscript, which dates from around 1572, advocates the founding of a London school where ‘‘her Majesties Wardes and others the youth of nobility and gentlemen’’ might acquire knowledge of gunnery, fortiWcation, battle array, and artillery (4). 57 For example, William Ponsonby, Edmund Spenser’s printer, printed Barret’s The Theorike and Practicke of Modern Warres; John Day, who saw John Foxe’s work through the press, printed William Blandy’s The Castle, or Picture of Pollicy Shewing Forth Most Liuely, the Face, Body, and Parts of a Commonwealth, the duety, quality, Profession of a Perfect and Absolute Souldiar (1581); and Richard Jones, who dealt primarily in so-called cheap print, was responsible for the printing of John Smythe’s controversial Certain Discourses . . . Concerning the Formes and EVects of Diuers sorts of Weapons, and other Very Important Matters Militarie (London, 1590; reprint with an introduction by J. R. Hale, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). 58 There are obvious resemblances between the military literature and the Renaissance literature of courtesy as discussed by Frank Whigham in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Like that literature, the military literature articulates a notion of masculine identity premised upon achievement rather than birth, a message that may help to explain their appeal to readers in that era of unprecedented social mobility. 59 Thomas Proctor, Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres (1578), sigs. 5v; 4r; emphasis mine.

18

Introduction

down his Defence of Militarie Profession and issued his call to exercise arms to ‘‘every citizen & rurall man, gentle or ungentle, noble or unnoble, riche or poore, that meaneth to proove himself a good christian, a faithful Englishman.’’60 And throughout subsequent years, many other writers and translators followed with similarly broad invitations to men of war.61 Such texts—and the practices that they detail—are, I would suggest, a key part of the material economy and symbolic register in which the Elizabethan martial repertory was embedded. II In the chapters that follow, I explore a broad spectrum of this martial repertory, including both canonical works and lesser known dramas, all of which have a relationship—sometimes obvious, sometimes more oblique—to the then-new genre of the history play.62 The chapters move sequentially, considering, Wrst, how speciWc plays are implicated in the era’s new discourses of measurement—discourses having to do with organizing bodies in a spatial grid, comparing bodies on a horizontal axis, and reproducing bodies as a socially engineered population—and second, how such plays represent, through narratives of trauma, a sense of the incommensurability of bodies and spaces. The Wrst three chapters probe the ways in which the culture’s new practices of aggregation, accounting, and administration are inscribed in the language, stage properties, and spatial practices of dramas about war. These chapters show how martial dramas produce recurring visions of what, after Foucault, we may term disciplinary and biopolitical modes of power. Attending to the literary dimension of these plays, I detail how they register the imprint of militarization on individual bodies even as they represent an abstract social formation in which certain generic qualities—such as ‘‘suYciency’’—matter more than individual distinction. Resisting the truism that what makes Renaissance drama modern is its commitment to the fashioning of the individual, Unto the Breach Wnds modernity in the theater’s preoccupation

60 GeoVrey Gates, The Defence of Militarie Profession (1579), A3v, G2r. 61 For example, in 1591, Gyles Clayton dedicated The Approved Order of Martial Discipline not only to the Queen but also to ‘‘the freendly readers in generall, and specially to all young Gentlemen of Englande which most honourably attempteth to get renowne and honour, in thys most famous and renowned exercise’’ (A3v). And in 1587, Barnaby Rich promised his readers on the title page of A Path-Way to Military Practise ‘‘sundry Stratagems very beneWciall for young Gentlemen, or any other that is desirous to have knowledge in Martiall exercises.’’ 62 The drama with the least obvious relationship to the genre of the history play is that discussed in Chapter 4—namely, The History of the Trial of Chivalry. Although typically read as a romance, it actually represents a more hybrid text insofar as it as it tells its pseudo-historical narrative by drawing on the conventions of the English history play, something underscored by its many allusions to Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.

Introduction

19

with disciplined multitudes, impressed common men, and regulated populations. While the Wrst half of this book considers the cultural production of a regulated and reproducible social body, the second part focuses on a collective sense of disorientation, which comprises an important part of the legacy of Elizabethan militarization. Thus the chapters in this second part analyze how the theater, by representing a world in which bodies are uncanny and time and space are out of joint, registers the traumatic impact of the era’s preoccupation with war. One chapter explores what it means to both know and not know about the horror of battleWeld injury; another investigates the possibility of passing beyond the events of a massacre; and the epilogue conjures up the symptomatic aftermath of battle. By moving from plays about order and proportion to plays about the disorderly and disproportionate, not only do I make explicit some of the ambivalence attached to the Elizabethan project of disciplining Xesh into killing machine, but I also show how the new, measured ways of thinking about the social body are at once distinguished from, and sustained by, discourses of martial excess. Reckoning with the incommensurable trauma underlying the theater’s investments in the discipline of military science, Unto the Breach sheds light on the nascent forms of knowledge that have helped to constitute modernity as well as on the martial unconscious of the Elizabethan stage. Chapter 1 examines the status of military science in the playhouse, especially the ways in which the invocation of arithmetical discourses, processional marches, and battle formations displaces cultural fantasies of individual distinction. My argument turns on Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine, one of the most popular and most explicitly militaristic plays in the Elizabethan repertory and a play that has long been a touchstone for critical discussions of the emergence of the modern subject. By recontextualizing this familiar narrative about the birth of the individual in Renaissance England, I analyze the play’s inscription of other practices of subjectiWcation. I argue that Marlowe’s play exempliWes how, in the late sixteenth century, earlier modes of subjectivity having to do with aristocratic codes of honor were being re-constituted through the modern practices of quantiWcation and abstraction. Tamburlaine’s preoccupation with military calculation and the organization of bodies in space thus produces a spectacle not just of overreaching singularity but also of uniform personhood and mathematically rationalized violence. Ultimately, by pointing to the play’s sustained attention to visions of men in the aggregate—visions indebted, as I show, to Elizabethan accounts of hyper-disciplined Turks and swarming Scythians—I revise the usual reading of Marlowe’s text so as to tease out its renderings of modern ‘‘massifying’’ practices, which presage a new world of social abstraction. My second chapter explores how English discipline was aimed at individuals (rather than collectivities) as well as how Elizabethan military culture helped to produce norms of manhood not unlike those associated with later statistical

20

Introduction

thought and the concept of the ‘‘average man.’’ Focusing on English history plays that thematize impressment—especially Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV—I align various practices associated with the selection and training of soldiers with recurring narratives about expendable men and extractable labor. Reading the Elizabethan soldier as a worker of sorts, I focus on a theatrical preoccupation with inspections, reckonings, and inventories and, via an analysis of 2 Henry IV’s socalled recruiting scene, I consider the cultural meanings of a key stage property, the Elizabethan muster book. In my reading, this property—an ad hoc, idiosyncratic text that, typically, oVered inventories of men and evaluations of their Wtness for war—is intimately bound up with modern disciplinary economies of service and labor. Through analysis of key moments in the Henry IV plays, I point to the way that, in the late 1590s, emergent modes of classiWcatory thinking— what we might think of as the hallmark of a rationally ‘‘administered’’ social world—were envisioned and resisted. In the third chapter, I turn from modes of disciplinary power to the regulation of social phenomena at the mass level in order to show how ideas about ‘‘biopolitics’’—about the making of a reproducible social body—are inscribed in Elizabethan martial dramas. Exploring how discourses of fertility overlap with discourses of warfare in the theater, I focus on the anonymous Edward III, a play, partly Shakespearean, which is haunted by Elizabethan military experiences in Ireland, and which, in fascinating ways, anticipates the similarly biopolitical concerns of Shakespeare’s Henry V. My analysis forges links between the two main strands of Edward III’s plot: one re-enacts medieval English campaigns in France and Scotland, and the other narrates the English king’s adulterous passion for a countess who lives on the contested border between Scotland and England. Through these two plot lines, I argue, Edward III obliquely discloses its engagement both with the matter of the Irish wars and with a kind of ‘‘race panic’’—a fear of the erosion of Englishness—that arose in concert with the English ‘‘plantation,’’ or re-peopling, of Ireland. Here again, I seek to reveal how concerns with abstraction—especially the notion of a homogenized population—underlie the drama’s martial narrative. While the Wrst three chapters focus mainly on the relationship between martial drama and emergent conceptions of the social body, Chapter 4, which opens the second half of the book, turns explicitly to the matter of Xeshly bodies and traumatic representation. In this chapter, I show how, long before nineteenthcentury discourses of shell-shock, the Elizabethan theater represented the experience of battleWeld injury as an occurrence so overwhelming that it could not readily be assimilated or even seen. SpeciWcally, the chapter explores the staging of repetitive images of trauma in The Trial of Chivalry, an anonymous drama that takes it pseudo-historical plot from some episodes in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Tracing its three intertwined narratives of wounding, I ultimately focus on the way this drama brings two injured Wgures together: a robust English soldier whose body nevertheless bears the imprint of war damage and a French princess

Introduction

21

whose face is disWgured when she is poisoned by a spurned lover. Arguing that the representation of the princess’s injury depends upon contemporary theories connecting gunpowder wounds with poison, I show how the play’s gender politics enable the wounded woman to become legible as a kind of stand-in for the injured soldier. Finally, I elucidate the way in which the drama, in its Wnal moments, performs its own possession by trauma. Chapter 5 looks at war casualties from a singularly uncanny vantage point as it considers how Elizabethan histories narrate trauma through the Wgure of the survivor of military violence. The chapter considers the question of survival as it is represented in the anonymous A Larum for London, a drama based on George Gascoigne’s eyewitness account of the 1576 storming of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish soldiers. Much of my discussion focuses on the play’s staging of its main character, a wounded lieutenant, identiWed in speech preWxes as ‘‘Stump,’’ who appears to be aZicted with gangrene and who, at times, brandishes his wooden leg as a weapon. Juxtaposing this wounded soldier with the medical image known as the ‘‘wound-man,’’ a Wgure meant to embody the variety of injuries that a surgeon might be called upon to treat, I examine A Larum in the context of Elizabethan texts on the care of war wounds, works that suggest, through Galenic paradigms, that bodies can partake of death while remaining alive. Like the wound-man, the wounded soldier condenses opposites: he is both a vulnerable war casualty and a menacing warrior. As a survivor of the bloodshed, he seems to be caught between two states of being, unable to Wnd his place with either the living or the dead. Reading the prosthetic body of this soldier, I suggest that A Larum for London not only negotiates the new disciplinary models of corporeality in which men are imaged as mere extensions of their deadly weapons; it also engages the question of survival, ensuring that Elizabethan playgoers have visceral encounters with traumatic history. Unto the Breach ends by considering the problem that historical trauma, by its very nature, poses for representation as such. I argue that critics of Renaissance literature have yet fully to reckon with the fact that early modern traumatic experience is deWned not only by its subject matter—including the wounds, shocks, and disasters that accompanied Elizabethan militarization and warfare— but also by what can be described as its ‘‘belated’’ or ‘‘latent’’ temporal structure.63 Accordingly, I argue, literary analysis of the trauma of war must go beyond discussion of a given play’s representation of social destructuring and violent death to account for the ways in which drama, through its aesthetic elements, bears witness to experiences of confusion and bewilderment. As a Wnal instance of such analysis, I consider in the Epilogue the question of traumatic

63 I discuss these ideas in detail in the second half of this book. The locus classicus of these theories in trauma studies is Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

22

Introduction

address in Richard III, a play that in the last act turns its attention to the forms of modern warfare and to discourses of abstraction not unlike those under consideration in the Wrst half of this volume. Rather than read the play’s ending as presaging the triumph of modern rationalities, I suggest that the play’s interest in the disposition of space and the forward march of time is deeply bound up with its aesthetics of discontinuity and disorientation. More speciWcally, by focusing on the ghostly visitations on Bosworth Field, I propose that the play, through its destabilizing representations of space and time, ultimately presents audiences with an experience not unlike Richard’s own uncanny meeting with the past. The Epilogue is thus less a conclusion than an attempt to gesture toward the traumatic intensities that underlie many of the Elizabethan war dramas’ seemingly straightforward depictions of early modernity. It is my hope that the book as a whole will enable readers to recognize such performances not only as explorations of new rationalities but also as eVorts to ‘‘work through’’ the traumas of a war-suVused age precisely by acting them out. Before concluding this Introduction, I think it worth emphasizing that while this book focuses on works, such as the Tamburlaine plays and A Larum for London, in which most characters are male, I see no reason to assume that such performances were imagined to address themselves primarily to men. This questionable assumption—which may perhaps help to explain the relative paucity of literary scholarship on women and the early modern drama of warfare—is implicit even in Andrew Gurr’s otherwise authoritative work on playgoing in early modern England. Thus, he writes: In all the seventy-Wve years between 1567 and 1642 no decade supplied less of what was expected to please the women in the audiences [than the 1590s]. Shakespeare provided his romantic comedies, and a few domestic dramas . . . may have been designed to attract women, but the masculine aVairs of war and military history. . . which pervade the repertories show less concern for the women playgoers than any plays before or after.64

Rather than assume that norms of gender-appropriate viewing were in place in the early modern period or, equally problematically, that it was possible somehow for Elizabethan women (but not men) to ignore the putatively ‘‘masculine aVairs of war and military history,’’ I would emphasize that the historical evidence seems to point in the other direction. As I began by noting—and as Gurr himself has allowed us to see—martial performances were the mainstay of the amphitheaters for more than a decade, and we have little reason to assume that they did not hold the attention of women. Indeed, there is no reason to posit that women were absent from the audience that inspired what Gurr describes as the ‘‘Wrst description of a mass emotion other than laughter in any London playhouse’’—namely, Thomas Nashe’s famous image of 10,000 tearful spectators weeping over Talbot’s wounds at what seems to have been a series of stagings of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry 64 Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 141.

Introduction

23

VI.65 Perhaps, then, the speech with which I began—the speech in which Lady Percy appears both as an entranced spectator and as a performer of martial passions—may oVer us a more valuable way of approaching this drama. At the very least, this speech may warn us away from the notion that the period’s warsuVused repertory encouraged audiences to identify with characters in neat, gender-speciWc ways; it might also, so I would hope, alert us to the Elizabethan theater of warfare as a site of the period’s most compelling scenes. 65 The full quotation reads as follows: ‘‘How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.’’ As cited by Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 140. For a related discussion, see Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), which discusses the Elizabethan perception of tragedy as appealing to ‘‘female’’ emotions (100–88). See also Thomas Page Anderson’s incisive account of Nash’s words in terms of their performance of traumatic temporality in Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 5.

1 Martial Formations Marlowe’s Theater of Abstraction in Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two In his celebrated preface to the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570), the mathematician and magus John Dee defends the study of the ‘‘Mathematical Arts’’ against the claims of those who would associate such study with charlatans and conjurors.1 As part of this defense, Dee turns to the world of warfare and proclaims that military captains must understand the principles of numerical analysis. Asserting that the best soldier will always ‘‘affirme the Science of Arithmetike to be one of his chief Counsaylors, directors and aiders,’’ Dee eulogizes John Dudley, the earl of Warwick, a soldier-courtier who amassed an exceptional library and who, as the son of the duke of Northumberland, was a member of one of Tudor England’s most powerful families before his political downfall and early death in 1554 (A1r).2 According to Dee, Warwick possessed a vast knowledge of mathematics, which, because of its capacity to augment military advantage, would surely have marked him as a man of exceptional authority. As evidence of this laudable passion for numbers, Dee cites one of the earl’s most treasured possessions, an unusual item of jewelry: This John, by one of his actes . . . did disclose his harty love to vertuous Sciences and his noble intent to excell in Martiall prowesse, When he, with humble request and instant Solliciting got the best Rules . . . for ordring of all Companies, summes and Numbers of men (Many or few) with one kinde of weapon or mo[re] appointed; with Artillery, or without; on horsebacke, or on fote; to give or take onset; to seem many, being few, to seem few, being many. To march in battaile or Jornay—with many such feates to Foughten field, Skarmoush, or Ambushe appertaining. And of all these, lively designementes (most curiously) to be in velame parchement described, with Notes & peculier markes as the

1 Euclid, The Elements of Geometrie, trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570). For an account of Dee’s rhetoric in this preface, see Kenneth J. Knoespel, ‘‘The Narrative Matter of Mathematics: John Dee’s Preface to the Elements of Euclid of Megara (1570),’’ Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), 26–46. 2 See David Loades’s entry on Warwick’s father, ‘‘Dudley, John, duke of Northumberland (1504– 1553),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn ed. Lawrence Goldman), which identifies Dee’s words as referring to the son rather than to his father, who was executed for treason in 1553.

Martial Formations

25

Arte requireth; and all these Rules and descriptions Arithmeticall, inclosed in a riche Case of Gold, he used to weare about his necke, as his Juell most precious, and Counsaylour most trusty. Thus Arithmetike of him was shryned in gold. Of Numbers frute, he had good hope. (*4v)

By figuring this object as a ‘‘most precious’’ locket, Dee would seem to link it not so much to the dials and clocks owned by the earl’s scientifically minded contemporaries3 as to the ornate love-tokens worn by many an Elizabethan courtier. In place of the courtier’s conventional portrait of the beloved, the necklace houses a cherished text of another sort—one inscribed with theorems and ‘‘lively designementes,’’ or images, of troop formations. For Dee, the necklace represents more than an ingenious device of the kind that readers with an interest in practical mathematics and warfare might be counted on to admire. Rather, as Dee describes its ‘‘most curiously’’ rendered designs and ‘‘peculier’’ notations, he invests it with the aura of the arcane. ‘‘Shryned’’ within a rich gold case, Warwick’s vellum parchment is like a venerated body enclosed in a sumptuous tomb. Moreover, it is allied with the creation of compelling illusions: with it, one can learn how ‘‘to seem many, being few, [and] to seem few, being many.’’ Although small in size, it is somehow able, so Dee suggests, to account for everything a soldier might need to know—‘‘all’’ companies, ‘‘all’’ variations, and ‘‘all’’ rules. In short, Dee represents the necklace as a talisman, possessing the power—a power identified with the mathematical text encased within the locket—to keep danger away and bring its wearer good fortune. Although Dee refrains from divulging the particular secrets housed within the earl’s locket, such seemingly esoteric knowledge became more widely available in the 1580s and 1590s as a culture of practical mathematics—which linked the art of calculation with that of war—began to flourish in London.4 Thus, in 1588, the Privy Council, responding to widespread fears of invasion and with financial 3 On the interest of England’s elites in commissioning mechanical objects and scientific instruments, see Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 196–206. For a fascinating discussion of one such object, see Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who notes Essex’s ownership of an astronomical pocket dial, which he kept in his possession from 1593 until the morning of his execution for treason in 1601, when he presented it to his chaplain (258–9, 309). 4 See, especially, Stephen Johnston, ‘‘Mathematical Practitioners and Instruments in Elizabethan England,’’ Annals of Science, 48 (1991), 319–44, which focuses on Thomas Hood and Thomas Bedwell as exemplary figures. See also the classic studies by E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship; and Gerard L’E. Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a brilliant account of the linkage between mathematical thought and the period’s literary works, see Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), whose account of the relationship between drama and theories of space is especially pertinent to this chapter.

26

Martial Formations

support from city authorities and merchants, appointed Thomas Hood to be London’s first official lecturer in mathematics with the understanding that he would focus on martial matters. As City Mathematician from 1588 to 1592, Hood offered public lectures on a wide variety of mathematical topics, but his primary aim, as he declared in his inaugural address, was to instruct the leaders of the ‘‘trained bands’’ of London’s newly established militia in ‘‘mathematical science,’’ which he declared was ‘‘knowledge most convenient [i.e., ‘‘proper’’] for militarie men.’’5 During this period, many English scientists and artisans— several of whom had seen military service of some kind—began to promote the sale of new mathematical tools devised for use in fortification, battle formation, surveying, gunnery, and other martial pursuits.6 Hood, for example, wrote books explicating the two precision instruments he designed—namely, the sector and the Jacob’s staff, which could be used for the design of fortifications.7 Similarly, the mathematical practitioner Thomas Bedwell, who worked as a military engineer, as Keeper of the Ordnance at the Tower of London, and, during the earl of Leicester’s 1585 expedition to the Low Countries, as a colonel who oversaw pioneers (that is, the men who dug trenches and the like), also designed innovative carpenter’s and gunner’s rules. In fact, what has been called the ‘‘massive expansion’’ of English mathematical practice in the sixteenth century ensured that the arts of calculation were featured in many of the dozens of treatises on warfare—both original works and translations of classical and Continental texts—published in the late sixteenth century.8 Typically, as I noted in the Introduction, these books were addressed to captains or to those who aspired to this position, men who, as part of an expanding military bureaucracy, were responsible for the training of English soldiers en 5 For the transcript of Hood’s first address from which I quote, see Francis R. Johnson, ‘‘Thomas Hood’s Inaugural Address as Mathematical Lecturer of the City of London (1588),’’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 3.1 (1942), 94–106 (100). On Thomas Hood’s appointment and practice, see Johnston; and Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), which offers a lively discussion of military mathematics and the Elizabethan theater (54–64). 6 For a discussion of the relationship between Elizabethan mathematics and military technology, see Jim Bennet and Stephen Johnston, The Geometry of War 1500–1750 (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 1996), an illustrated catalogue that accompanied the exhibit at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, as well as Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers. 7 Thomas Hood, The Use of the Two Mathematicall Instruments, the Cross Staffe . . . and the Jacob’s Staff (London, 1590) and The Making and Use of the Geometricall Instrument called a Sector (1598). The first of these works was reprinted as Two Mathematicall Instruments, the Crosse-Staffe and the Jacobs Staffe (1596). For discussion of Hood and mathematical tools, see Johnston, 334–5. 8 Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers, 4. For important discussions of the social contexts of the new military science, see Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965); Paul Jorgenson, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956); G. Geoffrey Langsam, Martial Books and Tudor Verse (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951); and Hammer, Polarisation, 235–40. Webb suggests that almost 200 military works appeared during Elizabeth’s reign ‘‘if one includes reprints, enlarged editions, and military newsbooks’’ (170).

Martial Formations

27

masse, a practice that began in the 1570s.9 Many of these works, which proffered arithmetical rules and geometrical figures, were likely to have found use as manuals, for it would be some fifty years before the Privy Council issued its first official guidelines for the instruction of troops.10 The appearance of these works certainly points toward the emergence of a new subject position—namely, the man whose authority derives from his technical expertise as a militarist.11 But more important, as I show in what follows, these works also gesture toward forms of subjectivity that ramify well beyond the domain of the military. Specifically, such works—like the mathematical text contained within Warwick’s locket— pose a challenge to received ideas about the ‘‘birth’’ of individualism in this period, for the (presumptively male) subject these texts envision is implicated in, and constituted by, an abstract, geometrically and arithmetically manipulable, social body.12 In Elizabethan military mathematics, as shall become apparent, the individual is scarcely visible. Significantly, if the roots of this quasi-mathematical understanding of the social realm may be traced, at least in part, to late sixteenth-century martial 9 For a wide-ranging discussion of the introduction of mass training into the English military system as well as related innovations in this period, see David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: I. B. Taurus, 1998), esp. 99–135. See also Robert Barret’s satirical description of ‘‘reading Captains’’ in his 1598 treatise, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres, which lampoons dependence on the written word: Now let one . . . come into the field . . . he must call to his boy, hola sirra, where is my Booke? And hauing all ranked them, then marcheth he on faire, and farre wyde from a souldiers march: then commeth he to cast them into a ring, about, about, till he hath inclosed himselfe in the Center; now there is he puzzelled, hola Maister stand still until I haue looked in my Booke. (5–6) 10 As Eltis notes, the first government-issued handbook for training, Instructions for Musters and Armies, and the Use Therof: By Order From His Majesties most Honourable Privy Counsayle, was not published until 1623 (Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 138, 140). 11 On the emergence of this new class of military writers and martialists, see, especially, Webb, Elizabethan Military Science; Michael Hattaway, ‘‘Blood Is Their Argument: Men of War and Soldiers in Shakespeare and Others,’’ in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and M. D. Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army 1589–1609,’’ Armed Forces and Society, 1 (1975), 419–42. On the cultural meanings of expertise in this period, see Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), passim. 12 For a seminal work on the emergence of conceptions of the social body in a later period, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). I am especially indebted to Poovey’s incisive theorization of the operations of regimes of modern abstraction (9). The classic scholarship on the emergence of individual is, of course, that of Jacob Burckhardt who writes, ‘‘In the Middle Ages . . . man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. . . . [In Renaissance Italy] man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such’’ (Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. C. G. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper-Colophon, 1958), i.143), as cited by Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 168 n. 34. In her discussion of Burckhardt, Marshall suggests that Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)—one of the key texts of twentieth-century Renaissance (including Marlovian) literary criticism—unwittingly relies on Burckhardt’s paradigms of individualism (26).

28

Martial Formations

practices, its widespread dissemination was made possible by the staging of war plays in the public theaters. The claim that Elizabethan plays participated in such a reconceptualization of the social world may seem inconsequential to those committed to a materialist understanding of early modern culture. But, in fact, the interest of Elizabethan theaters in corporate social bodies and in militarymathematical paradigms is manifest in their rich materiality. It was precisely the ‘‘matter’’ of Elizabethan performances—not simply the costumes and props but also the language and movements of actors on the stage—that enabled audiences to reckon with modern concepts of aggregation and plurality and, more broadly, with an emergent social formation premised on abstraction and rationalized forms. Moreover, to look closely at how militarists and playwrights used numbers and imagined space is to see that, well before the rise of statistics in the late seventeenth century, martial texts gave shape to an understanding of personhood as intimately bound up with notions of the collective and the uniform.13 Numbers may still have been imagined as harboring the mysterious power to which Dee alludes, but by the late sixteenth century they had also acquired recognizably ‘‘modern’’ meanings: to invoke them could be to inaugurate a social realm in which individual distinction is effaced because individuals appear to be entirely interchangeable. No text better evinces the Elizabethan theater’s interest in the permutations of the social body than Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1588–9), and its immediate popularity can tell us much about the enthusiasm with which Elizabethan culture embraced the new military rationalities.14 While this twopart historical drama has long been a touchstone for critical discussions of the emergence of the modern subject,15 its fascination with aggregate—as opposed to individual—bodies has received little attention. Equally overlooked has been the way in which the play’s staging of lowborn men as ordered bodies stands in stark 13 On the rise of statistics, see Ian Hacking, ‘‘How Should We Do the History of Statistics?,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 181–95. Hacking traces the links between an eighteenth-century enthusiasm for numbers and the accumulation of statistics, which he defines as ‘‘part of the technology of power in a modern state’’ (181). For a capacious account of early modern England’s demographic imaginary, see David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 14 On the play’s publication and its ‘‘blockbuster’’ status, see ‘‘Introduction’’ to Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine Parts One and Two, ed. Anthony B. Dawson (London: A & C Black, 1997), vii; xxviii–xxxvix; and xlii–xliv. All quotations from Tamburlaine—referenced by part, act, scene, and line number—are from this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. Dawson notes that ‘‘With twenty-two performances in all, Tamburlaine was one of the most popular plays of those years, a fact that can be gauged not just from frequency of performance but from the gate receipts also recorded by Henslowe’’ (xxix.). Moreover, as Andrew Gurr notes in The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), the drama was probably staged throughout the country in the 1590s when the Admiral’s Men went on tour (235). 15 Among the most influential accounts are Harry Levin’s discussion of Tamburlaine as ‘‘an exponent of the new age overreacher’’ in The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1974), 33, and Greenblatt’s discussion of Tamburlaine and the making of modern selves in Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

Martial Formations

29

contrast to the more usual image of the populace as a ‘‘many-headed monster,’’ a trope to which the historian Christopher Hill has famously drawn attention.16 In fact, the play’s emphasis on quantification and on the systematization of violence is so pronounced that it requires us to supplement critical accounts of the play focusing primarily on Marlowe’s depictions of bodies in pain. Such accounts, like that which regards Tamburlaine as carrying out a ‘‘sensory assault’’ on the audience and as emblematic of an early modern ‘‘theatre of cruelty,’’17 underestimate the significance of Marlowe’s spectacular visions of plurality. Attesting to the ways in which the period’s new military-mathematical discourses were transforming earlier models of subjectivity,18Tamburlaine may also be understood as ‘‘assaulting’’ playgoers with its martial rationalities and as inaugurating an early modern theater not of cruelty but of abstraction. I Before looking in detail at some of the Elizabethan texts with which Tamburlaine engages, it may be useful to consider a scene from Ben Jonson’s city comedy Every Man in His Humour (1598), which suggests something of the way in which military-mathematical notions were reshaping cultural understandings of the social body.19 Although Jonson’s drama is not centrally concerned with warfare, 16 See Christopher Hill, ‘‘The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking,’’ in Charles H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), 296–324. It may also be useful here to contextualize my account of Elizabethan concepts of martial plurality in relation to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent discussion of social collectivity in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). Elizabethan texts tend to imagine multitudes in two ways—either as anarchic (as Hill has discussed) or as unified and disciplined, as we can see in Marlowe and other military texts. For Hardt and Negri, the multitude can be distinguished from other ‘‘plural collectives, such as the crowd, the masses, and the mob’’ insofar as the multitude ‘‘is not unified but remains plural and multiple’’ (99–100; emphasis mine). As such, it is not ruled but rules itself and thus represents, for Hardt and Negri, ‘‘the only social subject capable of realizing democracy’’(100). The extent to which Marlowe’s representation of ordered plurality allows for this utopian vision of multitude is, I think, a question well worth exploring. 17 See Janet Clare, ‘‘Marlowe’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’,’’ in Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74–87 (82). 18 For related discussions of early modern subjectivity and quantification, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Carla Mazzio, ‘‘The Three-Dimensional Self: Geometry, Melancholy, Drama,’’ in David Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (eds), Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004). 19 Jonson’s play exists in two versions, a quarto version first published in 1601 and set more or less in Florence, and a folio version first published in 1616 and set in London. Both texts include the mathematical scene I discuss here. All quotations from Jonson are cited parenthetically in the text and are from the folio version reprinted in The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G. A. Wilkes, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), vol. i.

30

Martial Formations

it does share with many Elizabethan military texts (including Tamburlaine) an interest in the production of an exquisitely ordered world. That is, from its use of generic character types to its rigorous adherence to the classical unities of place and time—a characteristic that ensures that ‘‘the day [is more] elaborately mapped out’’ in this play than in any other20—Jonson’s play is, at every level, obsessed with disciplinary notions of the normative, the typical, and the regulated. The play’s evocation of arithmetic, which suggests this concern with order, occurs in Act 4, in a scene featuring Bobadil, a soldier whose cowardice is the target of Jonson’s unrelenting satire. Remarkably, when Bobadil shares with a companion his immodest proposal to ensure England’s safety from its enemies, this scene enlists mathematical concepts on the side of braggadocio: I would select nineteen, more to myself, throughout the land; gentlemen they should be of good spirit, strong, and able constitution, I would choose them by an instinct, a character that I have; and I would teach these nineteen the special rules, as your Punto, your Reverso, your Stoccata, your Imbroccato, your Passada, your Montanto: till they could all play very near, or altogether as well as myself. This done, say the enemy were forty thousand strong, we twenty would come into the field, the tenth of March, or thereabouts; and we would challenge twenty of the enemy; they could not, in their honour, refuse us, well, we would kill them: challenge twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them too; and thus, would we kill, every man, his twenty a day, that’s twenty score; twenty score, that’s two hundred; two hundred a day, five days, a thousand; forty thousand; forty times five, five times forty, two hundred days kills them all up, by computation. (4.7.63–78)

A complex network of concerns surfaces here in Bobadil’s wonderfully copious (and woefully inaccurate) calculations. On the one hand, his speech, with its emphasis on gentlemanly codes of honor and on a host of stylized bodily movements—the Punto, the Reverso, and the like—foregrounds the aristocratic culture of the duel, which continued to flourish despite the advent of the new military science in Elizabethan England.21 But on the other hand, this speech betrays no yearning for an idealized chivalric ethos with its evenly matched combatants and individual feats of prowess. Bobadil’s solution to the problem of national defense—a solution that may remind us of the Privy Council’s efforts throughout the 1580s to standardize the trained bands or county militias22—is to create a uniform force trained in ‘‘the special rules,’’ which can ‘‘play very neare or altogether as well as [him] selfe.’’ Framed as a mathematical equation, Bobadil’s speech displaces the ideal of the heroic trial by combat in favor of 20 C. H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52), iii.343. 21 For a related discussion of the relationship between martial culture and dueling culture between 1585 and 1702, see Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 51–80 and 193–216. 22 For a discussion of the Privy Council’s efforts to improve the trained bands in the late 1580s, see Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 140–2.

Martial Formations

31

rule-bound and routinized slaughter. Moreover, while the speech may allude to the past—specifically to medieval bands of twenty soldiers, which were presided over by officers known as vintiners23—what it conjures up is a distinctively modern assemblage: a killing machine capable of repeating the same murderous actions time and time again. Central to this fantasy of serial killing is both a calendar and a calculator, for the military violence Bobadil envisions occurs at regular intervals and in precisely measured quantities: twenty men killing twenty of the enemy each day, beginning on March 10 and concluding 200 days later. Significantly, while Bobadil begins with the notion of himself as a member of an elite military unit (‘‘well, we would kill them: challenge twenty more, kill them’’), he ends up with a fantasy in which numbers themselves seem to be bearers of a murderous force, a flight of the imagination in which ‘‘computation’’ itself does the killing: ‘‘forty times five, five times forty, two hundred days kills them all up, by computation.’’ Similarly, while Bobadil starts with a notion of manly distinction—he would choose for his fencing force only those of ‘‘good spirit, strong, and able constitution’’—he ends up with a world in which manly distinction is pointless: in his reckoning, men’s bodies have meaning insofar as they are amenable to abstraction as sheer quantities, or, better, as mere placeholders, in a modern regime of military ‘‘computation.’’ Bobadil’s scheme of murder by numbers had a life well beyond Jonson’s satire, for his application of mathematics to warfare resonates with the Elizabethan treatises mentioned earlier, in which (as I shall show) a similarly exuberant rhetoric of numbers and a concomitant dispersal of the fleshly body are on view.24 These practical military texts somewhat resemble the eighteenth-century French treatises that Foucault discusses in Discipline and Punish, works that ‘‘envision a calculated manipulation of [the body’s] elements, its gestures, its behavior’’ whose aim is to fashion a ‘‘docile [body] that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.’’25 Certainly, the goal of instilling such docility clearly lurks beneath cheery pronouncements such as William Garrard’s assertion in The Arte of Warre (1591), often ranked as one of the most authoritative of the period’s military books, that ‘‘a Souldier must be as well acquainted, and as able to beare continual travail, as a Bird can endure to flye.’’26 But what makes these military science texts most remarkable is not that they summon up an English 23 For an Elizabethan instance of this not-yet obsolete terminology, see the training orders from 1589 reproduced in John Harland, The Lancashire Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts, 2 vols. (Manchester: Charles Simms, 1859–60), vol. i, p. xxxix. 24 For a related discussion of military enumeration, see Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 124–31. Taunton interprets the cultural preoccupation with military numbers as a sign of a cultural shift toward modern modes of warfare, a ‘‘wish-fulfillment fantasy,’’ and an ‘‘incitement to accumulate yet more men to secure the nation’s boundaries from harm’’ (130). 25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135–69 (138; 136). 26 William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591), B1v.

32

Martial Formations

predecessor of Foucault’s disciplined subject; rather, it is that they also represent a de-corporealized social realm. In other words, even as the military texts envision disciplined male bodies—thus, for example, the books celebrate the virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience, which books of female instruction routinely prescribe27—they call upon mathematics to produce an abstract social body. That is, they produce an aggregate body that has little to do with physical embodiment. This de corporealized social realm comes into view clearly in many discussions of soldiers as laborers. While some authors on military subjects merely sermonize about the need for soldiers to work hard—the clergyman and polemicist Matthew Sutcliffe writes, for example, that it is ‘‘the duty of a souldier no lesse to worke with a spade in trenches, then to fight with the sword in the open field’’28—others, by calling upon ideas of efficiency and quantification, make it possible to conceptualize an entire economy of laborers. Consider, for example, one of the best-known Elizabethan treatises—namely, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, Named Stratioticos, which was published in 1579 and then issued in a second edition in 1590. Dedicated to the earl of Leicester, this work, which takes its title from a Greek word for the military arts, was begun by the mathematician Leonard Digges and finished after his death by his son Thomas, who later served under Leicester in the Netherlands. A preeminently practical text, which William Garrard recommended to readers in the pages of his own treatise,29 this volume offers introductions to arithmetic and to algebra as well as a detailed account of the duties of soldiers of various ranks. As the father and son articulate their views on ‘‘What Natures prove Souldiors,’’ significantly, their emphasis is on a soldierly community sustained not so much by individual virtue as it is by collective toil, not by personal distinction but by group productivity. Consider, for example, how the authors expound on the need for generals to instill in soldiers a distaste for spending money and an appetite for physically demanding work: It is above all other things for a Generall requisite by al meanes to animate his Souldiors to Frugalitie in expences, and Tolleration of Labour: For it is not the wilde, rashe, fantasticall heade, but the sober obedient minde, and the harde painfull [i.e., able to endure pain] bodie that maketh the Noble Souldior. And nothing more continueth the Bodie in Health and Strength than Exercise. Sundry sortes therefore of Militaire Activities and Traynings the Generall shoulde devise, and enjoyne his Coronelles and Captaines to keepe their Souldioures in continuall Actions, for the Body of man is in qualitie like yron.30 27 For examples of the militarists’ interests in these supposedly female virtues, see Thomas Styward, The pathwaie to martiall discipline (1581), who cites as soldierly traits ‘‘silence,’’ ‘‘obedience,’’ ‘‘secretnesse,’’ ‘‘sobrietie,’’ ‘‘hardinesse,’’ and ‘‘truth’’ (G3v–G4r), and Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, who writes, ‘‘let our souldier be chaste and honest in his living, refraining sensuality with all possible instancie, avoyding all occasions which might moue him to that vice’’ (10). 28 Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practise, Proceedings and Lawes of Arms (1593), Yy1v. 29 Garrard, The Arte of Warre, 171. 30 Leonard Digges and Thomas Digges, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, Named Stratioticos (1579), T3v.

Martial Formations

33

As is clear from these descriptions of physical (‘‘harde’’ and ‘‘painfull’’) bodies, Stratioticos remains interested in the corporeal; however, its figuration of the ‘‘Body of man’’ as ‘‘in qualitie like yron’’ also points toward an abstract social realm, for it hints at the emergence of labor power as a commodity. Indeed, it produces a ‘‘commodified’’ male body, one whose parts—the head, the mind, and the body—are imagined as remarkably generic; whose movements are ordered rather than ‘‘wilde’’ and disciplined rather than ‘‘rashe’’; and whose ‘‘nobility’’ depends, paradoxically enough, on its machine-like ‘‘continuall Actions’’—that is, on the human labor materialized in it.31 Not by chance, martial manhood is figured in this treatise through a substance of increasing importance to English markets: J. U. Nef has noted that iron manufacture took on ‘‘a new and highly capitalistic form’’ in England between 1540 and 1640.32 By 1600, English foundries were producing 800–1,000 tons of iron each year, and English castiron cannon and guns—which Sir Walter Raleigh termed ‘‘a jewel of great value’’—were in high demand throughout Europe.33 Envisioning the soldier’s body as ‘‘in qualitie like’’ this immensely valuable (and surprisingly fragile) material, the authors elide the social relations in which the soldier’s value originated, treating such working bodies as raw material, like iron ore, that is simply exploitable. This comparison of men’s bodies to iron ore in Stratioticos is even more striking when one considers that, within a few decades, civic pageants would celebrate English military power by showcasing the products of the English iron industry. Among such pageants is Anthony Munday’s Lord Mayor’s Show, Sidero-Thriambos Or Steele and Iron Triumphing (1618), which was put on by members of the ironmonger’s guild.34 It opens with a scene of an iron mine in which ‘‘nimble and dexterious youths’’ who are ‘‘busily employed’’ with hammers or with the fire and bellows ‘‘doe out-weare their work merrily, as accounting no toyle tedious, thus bestowed in the Societies seruice.’’ The subsequent scene features Sideros, a 31 In calling attention to nascent conceptions of labor as a commodity, I am drawing on Robert S. DuPlessis, ‘‘Capital Formations,’’ in Henry S. Turner (ed.), The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27–50, which defines ‘‘commodified’’ as meaning ‘‘offered regularly, and over time, primarily for exchange in markets’’ (31). My point is not that full-fledged capitalism existed in Elizabethan England; rather I aim to highlight one aspect of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For informative overviews of the transition, see Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985). 32 J. U. Nef, ‘‘The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large-Scale Industry in Great Britain, 1540–1640,’’ Economic History Review, 5.1 (1934), 3–24, esp. 11. 33 As quoted by Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion 1400– 1700 (London: Collins, 1965), 44. 34 See also Thomas Dekker’s London’s Tempe or the Feld [sic] of Happiness (1629), which in its fourth show represents Vulcan at a forge along with several ironworkers who offer a song in which they celebrate their manufacture of Mars’ armour and ‘‘Jove’s roaring cannons and his rammers.’’ Jove is seated on top of the forge, where he proclaims iron the ‘‘best of metals’’ and the ‘‘pride of minerals’’ and celebrates its ‘‘strong charmes,’’ noting that ‘‘armies wanting iron are puffes of wind.’’

34

Martial Formations

beautiful nymph representing the Iron Age, who is said to hold ‘‘chiefe predominance’’ in the triumph for she ‘‘affordeth out of her bounteous Myne, all kinds of Martiall and Military weapons, honouring with them Armes and Souldiers.’’ After this, Jupiter who is clad in the armor of Mars, also appears. The pageant ends with what must have been one of the period’s most spectacular scenes of martial excess—a scene in which the master gunner and his mate supervise the charging and discharging of ‘‘a fair and goodly cannon’’ while men mounted on horses stand nearby and fire their petronels or pistols. While Munday’s text is clearly more interested in staging the wealth of London’s iron merchants than it is in considering the industry of either ironworkers or gunners, Elizabethan military texts seem to be preoccupied with the notion that the labor of soldiers might be amenable to commodification. Consider, for example, Sir Roger Williams’s claim in A Briefe Discourse of Warre (1590) that it is ‘‘an errour to thinke that experimented [i.e., experienced] Souldiers are sodeinlie made, like glasses, in blowing them with a puffe out of an yron instrument.’’35 Williams’s assertion—which is part of his larger argument about the need for arduous and systematic training of soldiers—offers a revision of the tale from Genesis, obliquely linking the creation of soldiers to a process in which the breath of life comes not from God but from an artisan who presides over a world of iron instruments. Williams argues, of course, for a distinction between the making of soldiers and the manufacture of glass; nevertheless his trope of glass-blowing clearly suggests a view of human labor power as a material resource. Repeatedly, in this practical literature, the work of soldiers is implicitly allied with a notion of production and with an economy in which human labor represents a valuable object, if not quite a commodity. In linking the labor of soldiers with processes of production and commodification, military writers anticipated the concept that nineteenth-century thinkers would term ‘‘manpower,’’ the notion that ‘‘the power or agency of man in work’’ can readily be calculated.36 The emergence of the Elizabethan concept, it bears emphasizing, hinges on the proliferation of printed texts that call upon mathematics—and especially algebraic equations—to enumerate the work of war, texts that ask again and again: How many men are needed? How much can they do? How long will it take them to do it? In The Arte of Gunnery, Thomas Smith explains the calculations needed to determine ‘‘what number of men, horses, or oxen, is sufficient to draw any peece of Artillerie.’’37 Indeed, Smith goes on to explicate ‘‘How you may wanting both oxen and horses to draw any peece of Ordinance, know presently how many men is able sufficiently to draw the same’’ (M3r). Perhaps no military text summons up early notions of 35 Roger Williams, A Briefe Discourse of Warre . . . with His Opinion Concerning Some Parts of the Martiall Discipline (1590), B3r–v. 36 See OED, ‘‘Man,’’ def. 20, which dates the first usage of ‘‘manpower’’ to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer’s discussions of industry in 1862. 37 Thomas Smith, The Arte of Gunnery (1600), M2r.

Martial Formations

35

manpower with more clarity than does Stratioticos in the pages in which it teaches readers how to formulate and solve a host of military word problems. For some twenty pages, Thomas and Leonard Digges ponder labor and provisions, quantifying the amount of food needed to keep soldiers alive and answering questions such as ‘‘If 500 Pioners can in tenne houres cast up 400 rodde of trench . . . how many labourers will be able with a like trenche in three houres, to intrench a Campe of 2300 rodde compasse’’ (K2v). Dividing the work of war into specialized tasks and actions that might be calculated in advance, military writers disseminated a view of manhood as an overwhelmingly social phenomenon. Calling upon mathematics, Elizabethan militarists were preoccupied not only with this abstract, economic division of labor but also (as Dee’s description of Warwick’s locket suggests) with another kind of abstract order—namely, that associated with ‘‘imbattailing’’ or the arrangement of soldiers in various kinds of formations for training and combat. For example, the title page of Thomas Styward’s popular manual The pathwaie to martiall discipline (1581, 1582, and 1585) includes in its encyclopedic list of things ‘‘verie necessarie for young souldiers, or for all such as loveth the profession of armes to know’’ such matters as: the offices from the highest to the lowest, with the lawes of the field, arming, mustering and training of souldiers, with the imbattailing of such numbers, to the greatest force of the like regiments, [as well as] sundrie proportions and training of caleevers, and how to bring bowes to a great perfection of service, with imbattailling of greater regiments: also how to march with a campe royall: likewise how to encampe the same, with divers tables annexed for the present making of your battells, as otherwise to know how manie paces they require in their march & battels from 500. to 10000.

Echoing Dee’s account of Warwick’s locket, Styward’s title page clearly emphasizes the importance of arithmetical and geometrical knowledge to soldiers: his is a language of rankings, of ‘‘proportions,’’ and of calculations. Moreover, as the title page promises, his treatise—like Stratioticos before it—includes mathematical tools in the form of ‘‘divers tables’’ to help readers figure out how to achieve particular martial formations. Styward’s treatise is especially noteworthy for the emphasis it places on the disposition of soldiers’ bodies in space. This interest in placing men in formation was, according to some writers, merely a sign of their fidelity to ancient Roman ideals; but, in fact, as others correctly recognized, the practice of ‘‘imbattailing’’ quickly became a hallmark of modern European warfare.38 Historically speaking, ‘‘imbattailling’’ had everything to do with England’s (belated) adoption of new European infantry tactics, which brought pikes and firearms together in immense 38 See, for example, Barnaby Rich, The Fruites of Long Experience (1604), in which one of Rich’s fictional military captains declares, ‘‘In the beginning, before they knew any maner of forme, or order of aray, the victorie was evermore caried away by the stronger part: but sithens they have learned to order themselves into Rankes, and to fight in good aray, the conquest now is not so proper to the strength of men, as it is to this experimented order’’ (K2r).

36

Martial Formations

configurations known as ‘‘pike squares,’’ and which ensured that mass instruction began to replace traditional ways of training, especially the individualized guidance in usage of the longbow and other weaponry characteristic of the late medieval period.39 More than fifteen years after Styward’s book was first published, Robert Barret published his self-consciously ‘‘modern’’ text, The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres (1598), which also focused at considerable length on putting men in martial formations. This work, which consists of a dialogue between a knowledgeable captain and a naı¨ve gentlemen and purports to address ‘‘any willing minded Gentlemen . . . desirous to understand some points of martiall matters,’’ makes it clear that, even in 1598, mathematical principles of array were still perceived to be part of a difficult new discipline.40 Thus Barret’s gentleman, after being informed by the captain of ‘‘the order and rules by going paces, to know any seate or peece of ground: and how to embattell men thereupon,’’ proclaims the utility of the printed figures and tables that accompanied many printed works: such texts, so the gentleman says, ‘‘may give a wonderful instruction and perceiverance unto such as are not thoroughly experimented [i.e, experienced] in most of your martial actions & may also greatly aide and helpe all such martial officers as be not perfectly skilled in the art of arithmeticke’’ (233). Whether or not many individuals actually mastered the mathematical principles involved in organizing men in array, it seems clear that such mathematical tables—which theoretically would have enabled officers to set hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of men in formation on the training ground and in the battlefield (see Figure 1)—helped to disseminate a disciplinary discourse in which, as Foucault puts it, ‘‘each individual has a place and each place has its individual’’ (143). At the same time, of course, such tables also generated visions of the social realm as an abstraction. Ascribing an almost sovereign power to geometrical formation, Elizabethan military writers offered strategies for (literally) keeping men in line as well as precise demarcations of space—Barret’s captain, like many militarists, indicates that ‘‘every man martialled in battle array to fight, will require in his station, 3 foot of ground in breadth, that is from shoulder to shoulder, and 7 foote of ground for length, that is 3 foot for before him, 3 foote for behind him, and 1 foote of ground for his own station’’ (54). Clearly, in these tables—as in the militarists’ number-laden word problems—men were defined through a rhetoric of equivalence. Such texts posited that all men consume identical quantities, carry out the same amount of work, take up the same amount of space, and, in short, are virtually interchangeable. Constituting a norm based on measurement and enumeration, these books translated disciplined individuals into ordered multitudes and physical bodies into abstracted social embodiment.

39 Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 93. 40 Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, 82.

Martial Formations

37

Figure 1. ‘‘A breefe Kalender for the better understanding how to augment your Companies by degrees,’’ from Gyles Clayton’s The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

What is perhaps the most succinct expression of this ‘‘modern’’ corporate body may be found in the diagrams of troop formations that turn up frequently in the pages of the Elizabethan military treatises. Such diagrams may be seen in English manuscripts dating from the early sixteenth century—indeed, Dee’s account of Warwick suggests that his locket contains one—but they did not appear in print in England until the 1560s, when Peter Whitehorne appended his illustrated treatise to his translation of Machiavelli41 (see Figure 2). Soon after Whitehorne’s

41 See Peter Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray (1562). On the history of these diagrams and Warwick’s locket, see J. R. Hale, On a Tudor Parade Ground: The Captain’s Handbook of Henry Barret 1562 (London: Society of Renaissance Studies, 1978). For more recent commentary on these diagrams, see Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 57–63; Timothy J. Reiss, ‘‘Calculating Humans: Mathematics, War, and the Colonial

38

Martial Formations

Figure 2. Peter Whitehorne’s image of the ‘‘square battle’’ from Certain Waies for the Ordering of Souldiers in Battelray appended to The arte of warre, written first in Italia[n] by Nicholas Machiauell, and set forthe in Englishe by Peter Whitehorne… with an addicio[n] of other like marcialle feates and experimentes, as in a table in the ende of the booke maie appere (1562). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

publication, military treatises began routinely to include such diagrams—which range from straightforward squares to more eccentric shapes such as ‘‘the wedge,’’ ‘‘the sheers,’’ ‘‘the saw,’’ ‘‘the moon,’’ and ‘‘the cross,’’ for which it is difficult to imagine any practical use was ever conceived.42 It is hard to know to which group one should assign Gyles Clayton’s illustrations of a ‘‘Crosse Battaile’’ and of a ‘‘ring’’ of pikes in The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591)43 (see Figures 3 and 4). In these diagrams, which use different letters to distinguish among soldiers with different functions, the captain is represented by a ‘‘C,’’ the soldier who wields a caliver or small musket is represented by an ‘‘o,’’ one who wields a Calculus,’’ in David Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (eds), Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), 137–64; and Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism, 121–5. 42 See, for example, Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, 77. 43 Gyles Clayton, The Approoved order of martiall discipline (London, 1591), 58, 68.

Martial Formations

39

Figure 3. “The forme of a Crosse Battaile” from Gyles Clayton’s The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

pike by a ‘‘p,’’ one who carries a drum to communicate orders by a ‘‘D,’’ and so on. As Clayton’s visual schemes suggest, the formation of the collectivities of men depends upon regimes of differentiation and particularization; this process of ‘‘massifying’’ thus happens at two levels as bodies are first distinguished by their

40

Martial Formations

Figure 4. A ‘‘ring of pikes’’ from Gyles Clayton’s The Approoved order of martiall discipline (1591). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

specific functions and then submerged within the homogenized space of the larger martial formation.44 Although, as several historians have recently shown, the emergence of military professionalism was often compatible with the persistence of an Elizabethan culture of chivalry, one cannot overstate the difference between the martial 44 It is worth noting that these military spaces may instantiate some of the preconditions for capitalist spatiality as theorized by Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For LeFebvre, the space of capitalism is both ‘‘abstract’’ in that ‘‘it has no

Martial Formations

41

body produced in these texts through invocations of number and that on display in the early modern courtesy literature.45 Consider for example Clayton’s diagrams alongside Castiglione’s Courtier (London, 1561), which famously advocates that a man ‘‘seperat[e] himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to do with as little company as he can, and in the sighte of noble men that be of most estimation in the campe.’’46 Unlike Castiglione, many Elizabethan militarists imagine the individual soldier as, properly, inseparable from the multitude—as is evident, for example, in Garrard’s description of the ideal soldier as one who ‘‘ought . . . ever to have good regard to weare his weapon of like length the other Souldiers use, which in marching doth make the rancks to be of one just line, and in a shew of a seemely and straight proportion, causing the whole band to carrie a brave and singular grace’’ (B4v–C1r). As Garrard’s language suggests, the embrace of numbers helped to produce an aesthetic of uniformity and precision. Simultaneously, as the makers of these austere diagrams celebrated the just line and straight proportion—as they emptied out space and dematerialized bodies—they also helped to bring into being the abstract social domain satirized in Jonson’s comedy, a world in which men are purely functional, no more than disembodied markers of collective military might.

existence save by virtue of the exchangeability of its component parts’’ and ‘‘concrete’’ in that ‘‘it is socially real and as such localized’’ (341–2). 45 See, for example, the writings of D. J. B. Trim and Roger B. Manning, which refute the notion, famously proposed by Lawrence Stone in The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), that the emergence of militarists was accompanied by the ‘‘demilitarization’’ of the nobility in the Tudor era. In his ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed. D. J. B. Trim (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 1–38, Trim argues that the military role of the nobility persisted for centuries, while Manning, in Swordsmen, seems to go further, positing a ‘‘rechivalrization’’ of English aristocratic culture between 1585 and 1700 as men of the elite increasingly served in armies abroad and as naval officers (19). 46 Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio Divided Into Foure Bookes, trans. Thomas Hoby (1561), M1r–v. Clearly, some Elizabethan soldiers did not disregard the advice of the courtesy literature and the chivalric actions it endorsed, for as Manning observes there are examples, as late as the seventeenth century, in which men of the elite classes proposed to settle military conflicts by dueling (Swordsmen, 7). On this point, see, for example, the discussion of Sir Walter Raleigh’s self-conscious theatricality offered in Hammer, Polarisation (233), as well as a similar account of Williams in D. J. B. Trim, ‘‘Williams, Sir Roger (1539/40–1595),’’ in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). As Trim observes, Williams was both expert in the new military science and eager to achieve singularity on the battlefield: He also had a propensity for arranging single combats and jousts with soldiers from the enemy side, and during Norris’s Friesland campaign, when his general was challenged to single combat by a Welsh Catholic officer in Spanish service, Williams fought as Norris’s representative. The duel was a draw and ended with each combatant drinking the other’s health. Similarly, Williams and a Spanish counterpart had an exchange of courtesies, carried by heralds, in June 1584. In this regard, see also de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, who offers a capacious discussion of the way the battlefield was imagined as a site for theatrical enterprises.

42

Martial Formations II

Some version of the play now known as Tamburlaine, Part One was first staged by the Admiral’s Men, probably at the Rose Theater, in late 1587 or 1588; Part Two quickly followed.47 Until about 1595, this two-part drama chronicling the rise and fall of Timur Khan—the fourteenth-century warrior whose extraordinary feats of conquest are the subject of some one hundred Renaissance texts48—was staged frequently, often at the Rose. In addition, both parts were printed at least four times in the 1590s (1590, 1592, 1593, 1597) and then again in 1605–6. While scholarship on this crowd-pleasing play has often considered its military contexts, it has not adequately addressed its articulation of a distinctively modern, martial aesthetic—one characterized in part by its representation of the ‘‘massifying’’ practices I have outlined. Instead, as I suggested earlier, critical commentary has identified the play’s modernity with its representation of untrammeled individual aspiration—especially with its evocation of what Stephen Greenblatt has so influentially described as ‘‘self-fashioning.’’ What I would emphasize, by contrast, is that the play’s modernity inheres not so much in its fiction of individuated subjectivity as in the way this fiction is bound up with the quantifying and spatializing discourses of military science. Through such discourses, Tamburlaine conjures up a subject whose authority and nobility derive from military-mathematical expertise rather than from birth. But more important, Marlowe’s play discloses that this new subject is coterminous with an abstract social body, a disciplined totality imagined in terms of an impersonal economy of laborers and knowable primarily through number and geometric form. The new military-mathematical patterns of thought on view in Tamburlaine are bound up in complex ways with received ideas about Scythians, a people who, according to early modern popular lore, were naturally bellicose. Theories about the connection between geography and martial temperament were, of course, commonplace in this period, such that early modern writers routinely linked one’s affinity for warfare with the part of the world one inhabited, and Elizabethan travel writers typically included in their narratives some commentary on ‘‘The disposition and spirit of the people whether warlike and valiant, or faint-hearted

47 On the play’s stage and publication history, see Dawson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxviii–xxxvix and xlii–xliv. 48 This is W. L. Godshalk’s estimation in The Marlovian World Picture (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974), as cited by Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman (eds), Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), 70. For related discussions of the play’s mathematical and military contexts, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 63–88; Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of His Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 241–62; Richard Wilson, ‘‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,’’ ELH, 62.1 (1995), 47–68; Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 21–52; and Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism.

Martial Formations

43

and effeminate.’’49 Most notably, when the influential French political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) discussed the conventional division of the world into three regions—the northern zone, the southern zone, and the temperate zone—he claimed that Scythians were inhabitants of the northern zone, the region over which the planet Mars was said to preside.50 Significantly, in drawing on these theories, rooted in antiquity, Bodin reported that those who lived in Britain, Ireland, and Lower Germany were also northerners and that all such people had a proclivity for things mechanical and martial: Because the Scythians are less suited to contemplation, on account of the supply of blood and humor . . . they voluntarily began to take an interest in those things which fall under the senses, that is, in the exercise of the arts and fabrication. Hence from the northerners come those objects called ‘‘mechanical’’—engines of war, the art of founding, printing, and whatever belongs to the working of metals . . . It should not seem remarkable that Italians and Spanish are accustomed to seek aid from Germans and Britains because by some celestial gift they know how to find the hidden veins of earth, and, when found, to open them, Likewise the same sons of Mars in former times always cultivated military discipline and still do with incredible enthusiasm (111–12).

Clearly this discourse of dispositions helps to make sense of the fact that the Elizabethan drama’s most famous Scythian is, as shall become soon become more obvious, a disciplined warrior who presides over a highly technologized empire of workers. Moreover, Bodin’s writings may also help us to see that Tamburlaine draws on a related notion of the Scythians as a peculiarly collective and numerous people, a view evident in Bodin’s declaration that ‘‘the Scythians . . . like associations and assembles of men; hence they are called by the ancients ‘nomads,’ and in these days also ‘hordes,’ as the Tartars say, when they roam the plains in countless numbers’’ (129).51 Significantly, while the English, as Bodin suggests, were conventionally included among the northern peoples, their status as great martialists was far from secure. Indeed, in Elizabethan England it was a commonplace that English were in danger because the men of the country did not engage enough in military exercises. English military power was a source of worry not simply because many in Elizabethan England were keenly aware of the country’s weakness as a military power, but also because, as Mary Floyd-Wilson has noted in her important study of early modern ‘‘geohumoral’’ discourses, northern dispositions, 49 Albrecht Meyer, Certaine Briefe, and Speciall Instructions for Gentlemen, Merchants, Students, Souldiers, Marriners, &c. Employed in Seruices Abrode, or Anie Way Occasioned to Conuerse in the Kingdomes, and Gouernementes of Forren Princes, trans. Philip Jones (1589), C4r. 50 See Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 85–152, in which Bodin mentions the ‘‘army of Tamerlane’’ in his discussion of northern stamina (128). 51 For an incisive account of the classical view of Scythians as nomad warriors of the north, see John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 106–11.

44

Martial Formations

by their very nature, were understood to be vulnerable to change.52 Consider, for example, Thomas Proctor’s Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres (1578), which, as Floyd-Wilson notes, provides an inventory of the dispositions of men of the world in which the Englishman—by virtue of his climate and soil—holds pride of place as the most martial type.53 Significantly, Proctor’s assertion of the superiority of the English specimen—the man whose native soil ensures that he has been formed and imprinted with the ‘‘right stampe’’ by a divine Author—is accompanied by the suggestion that English distinction has been compromised (}3r). Rather than positing the ‘‘more excellent [English] disposition’’ as an unchanging essence, Proctor emphasizes male fluctuation, suggesting that the English man is not as potent as he once was; the ‘‘honourable desire to the exercyse of armes’’ is merely a remnant ‘‘that yet remains’’(}3v). Thus, he suggests that English men are disposed toward ‘‘imperfection’’ and inclined to neglect the martial feats that are ‘‘practises meete for men’’ in favor of ‘‘tryfles,’’ a category that includes ‘‘delicate meates,’’ ‘‘divers curious buyldinges,’’ and ‘‘manye almost infynite guyses, sortes, and fashions of habyte’’ (}3r–v). In short, Proctor’s discussion quickly unravels, moving from certainty of the preeminence of English manhood and of its status as the guarantor of England’s future as a great martial power to certainty that the English man is disposed to unmanly tendencies that prophesy disaster. What is most certain to Proctor, finally, is not an English desire for ‘‘the exercyse of armes,’’ but rather the English man’s alarming lack of military interests and skills (}3v). Thus Proctor’s description of Englishness as a ‘‘race undegenerate’’ insistently raises the specter of decadence and ruin, underlining the point that the ‘‘right stamp’’ imprinted on the English man’s body is not an indelible mark, that English manhood is on the wane (}3r). If Tamburlaine deals in geohumoral discourses about northern disposition, it is also, as several scholars have recently elaborated, deeply bound up with early modern English fears and fantasies about the Ottoman empire, which reached its apex of power in the sixteenth century.54 In common critical parlance, 52 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Floyd-Wilson uses the term ‘‘geohumoralism’’ to refer to ‘‘regionally framed humoralism’’ (3), which she locates in texts by English writers such as William Harrison, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Proctor as well as in translations of works by Juan Huarte, Levinus Lemnius, and Jean Bodin. Of particular relevance to this chapter is Floyd-Wilson’s valuable discussion of Tamburlaine (89–110) in which she highlights the supposed tendency of northern peoples to wander throughout the world. 53 Thomas Proctor, Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres (1578), }3r. 54 For the classic account of early modern English images of Turks, see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Octagon, 1974 [1937]). For more recent and nuanced discussions, Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 13–55; Jonathan Burton’s ‘‘Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine,’’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30.1 (2000), 125–56 and his Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1625 (University of Delaware Press, 2005); Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press,

Martial Formations

45

Tamburlaine is a ‘‘Turk play’’—that is, one of the many early modern works ‘‘that brought Turkish villains to center stage, representing Islamic culture in the form of Moorish or Turkish characters.’’55 As such, Tamburlaine shows Marlowe’s Scythian (anti)hero facing Turkish opposition while simultaneously embodying a stereotype of the Turkish warrior.56 Thus while it is true that the play does not represent Tamburlaine either as a Turk or as a friend to Turks or to Islam—he overthrows Bajazeth, emperor of the Turks (something that the historical Timur in fact succeeded in doing in 1402); fights against Turkish soldiers; and burns the Koran—it shows awareness of the Elizabethan theory that Turks, Scythians, and Tartars comprise one ‘‘people,’’57 and it insists, in a variety of ways, that Tamburlaine be read as Turkish. So, for example, the names of Tamburlaine’s children link them to the Ottoman Empire, for the name Celebinus appears to be adapted from a title associated with the heir of Bajazeth, and the names Calyphas and Amyras suggest ‘‘such Turkish titles as those now familiar to us in Caliph, Emir and Ameer.’’58 Significantly, many of the accounts of the Ottoman Empire available to Elizabethan readers portrayed the Turkish forces not simply as fierce warriors, but also as remarkably disciplined ones, so that even military writers who denounced Turks as savage noted as a truism that the qualities most necessary for the men of England were visible in abundance in the armies of the Great Turk. Proctor, for example, declared it to be common knowledge ‘‘what numbers hee [i.e., the Turk] causeth from very young yeares, to bee brought up, and skillfully practiced unto the feats and services of warres, and what huge garrisons, and armies of Souldiours, he continually maintaineth’’ (F4v). And William Garrard similarly cites an authority who includes such physical stamina among the four ‘‘myracles’’ he had witnessed during his travels among the Turks: that they maintained an ‘‘infinite armie almost without number’’; that ‘‘amongst so many men, he saw not one woman’’; that they needed no wine; and that they kept silent in the camp at night (E3v).59 1999); Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Daniel Vitkus, ‘‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 145–76; his Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and his wide-ranging introduction to Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–53. 55 Vitkus, Introduction to Three Turk Plays, 2. 56 Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). 57 See, for example, Proctor’s conflation of Scythians and Turks: ‘‘principallye by the huge monstrous multitudes of barbarous Scithyens, the Turkes in no longe time . . . extended their Empyre so farre, into all the three partes of the worlde’’ (Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres, }4r). On Tamburlaine’s Turkish affiliation, see also Giles Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, ed. Albert J. Schmidt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), which notes that Tartars are ‘‘much ordered after the manner and direction of the Turke’’ (90) and discusses the theory that ‘‘the Turkes tooke their beginning from the nation of the Chrim Tartars’’ (94). 58 See Ethel Seaton, ‘‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe,’’ Review of English Studies, 5.20 (1929), 385– 401 (388). 59 See, for example, Raimond de Fourquevaux, Instructions for the Warres, trans. Paul Ive (London, 1589), which emphasizes that Turks were trained to hardship—they ‘‘need no wine,’’

46

Martial Formations

Crucially, I would suggest, it is the nature of Ottoman military might as it was understood by Elizabethans—rather than the mere fact of that power—that is most significant to Tamburlaine’s imagining of the social realm. Specifically, Elizabethan writers seem to have been as impressed by the extraordinary organization of the men in Ottoman armies as they were by their soldierly fortitude.60 As a result, accounts of the Turks typically include extended discussion of the ordered ways of the janissaries, the class of soldiers on whose might the empire was said to depend and who were said to be composed of Christians who had been abducted and converted to Islam. Consider, for example, the way the 1585 translation of French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay’s navigations, peregrinations and voyages, made in to Turkie—an illustrated work dedicated to Henry and Philip Sidney and probably known by Marlowe61—takes English readers into what it represents as a hitherto undiscovered country of Turkish men, a counterpart of the female space of the ‘‘sarail’’ or harem. Significantly, as Nicolay exposes and explains the ways of the janissaries, he tells a story about the efficient arrangement of huge numbers of men. For Nicolay, the ‘‘most principal strength & most puissaunt force of the army of the great Turke’’ is located not in any particular great man, but in the fact that huge numbers of subservient men compliantly carry out their particular functions for the good of all.62 Explicating the workings of these Turkish communities, he thus emphasizes their attention to elaborate hierarchies and units of command, spatial divisions, timetables, codes of conduct, schemes of pay, and systems of advancement. For example, he writes: Their order universall is distributed in tenths, hundredths, and thousands: every tenne of these Janissaries, going to the warres, have a pavillion or tent, & a tenth person in their language called Oda Bassi, which distributeth and parteth amongst them the offices of the chamber, as to the one to cut the wood, the other to dress up the pavillion, and the other to make ready their meate, an other to keepe the ward, and so consequently al the rest: and by this order of equality, they live together as in a fraternity, quietnes and incredible concord. (K5v)

Lingering at length on the efficiently divided labors of those who inhabit this space where housework and warfare go hand in hand, Nicolay insists upon this community as a smooth-running unit; indeed, he evokes the possibility that can ‘‘go long without eating bread,’’ and ‘‘if famine doe too much oppresse them, they do kill their horses, and eate them before they do forsake to do their Prince loyall service . . . which our delicate Souldiers will not do’’ (N2r). 60 As an anonymous reader for the press has pointed out, there is an unmistakable irony at work here insofar as Christian armies achieved success in resisting the incursions of the Ottoman Empire (for example, at the siege of Malta in 1565) largely through their mastery of modern military tactics such as the use of the pike square—tactics that demanded their embrace of the regimes of efficiency and order that they so frequently identified as Turkish. 61 See the editor’s note to 3.3.1 of Part one in Tamburlaine the Great in Two Parts, ed. U. M. EllisFermor (New York: Gordian Press, 1930), 125. 62 Nicolas de Nicolay, navigations, peregrinations and voyages, made in to Turkie, trans. T. Washington the younger (London, 1585), K5r.

Martial Formations

47

every component of their ‘‘order universall’’ is amenable to measurement. Nicolay’s vision of laboring multitudes clearly resembles that which the writers of Elizabethan military science texts hold out as an ideal for their English readers. It is also, I would suggest, not unlike that which Marlowe produces in Tamburlaine. Given the world in which Tamburlaine opens—a Persian state menaced by ‘‘Turks and Tartars [who] shake their swords’’ (T1, 1.1.16) as well as by its own idle and ‘‘warlike soldiers’’ who ‘‘threaten civil war’’(T1, 1.1.140, 148)—the claim that Marlowe’s play has anything at all to do with such an orderly martial economy may seem dubious. After all, the play’s first descriptions of Tamburlaine and his men identify them as a ‘‘Tartarian rout’’ and as a ‘‘lawless train’’ who must be prevented from ‘‘display[ing] j [a] vagrant ensign in the Persian fields’’ (T1, 1.1.71, 39, 44–5), images which connect both the men and the banner that they carry with the ungoverned movements of vagabonds.63 Moreover, the first stage appearance of Tamburlaine shows him ‘‘countermand[ing]’’ the ‘‘letters and commands’’ that promised Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian sultan, safe passage through the land (T1, 1.2.21–2) and prepares us for the way both parts of the play will link him and his men with figures of anarchy. One might also note that far from being characterized as a regiment of disciplined and docile bodies, Tamburlaine’s men are described in Part One as figures ‘‘void of martial discipline, j All running headlong after greedy spoils’’ (T1, 2.2.44–5) and as ‘‘thieves j That live confounded in disordered troops’’ (T1, 2.2.59–60), an image that reappears several times in Part Two where Tamburlaine and his men are once again denounced as ‘‘barbarous Scythians full of cruelty’’ (T1, 3.4.19). Against such denunciations of Tamburlaine and his men, however, must be set Marlowe’s repeated evocations of abstract order and rationalized labor, which decisively reconfigure the social body, ultimately eclipsing these visions of lawless, ‘‘swarming’’ men. Contrary to the common reading of Tamburlaine as a meditation on individual aspiration and its excesses, I would argue that the play is actually preoccupied—not only in its language but also in its production of numerical and spatial orders—with regimes of martial discipline and with a vision of organized and obedient multitudes. To see how the play carries out this ideological work, consider the extraordinary passage in Part Two in which Tamburlaine abandons his lament over the sudden loss of his beloved Zenocrate and begins to instruct his sons on warfare, offering them a detailed list of what he’ll ‘‘have them learn’’ (T2, 3.2.55), including: the way to fortify your men, In champion grounds what figure serves you best; For which the quinque-angle form is meet, Because the corners there may fall more flat Whereas the fort may fittest be assailed, And sharpest where th’assault is desperate. 63 See Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘‘Tamburlaine: An Elizabethan Vagabond,’’ Studies in Philology, 84.3 (1987), 308–23.

48

Martial Formations The ditches must be deep, the counterscarps Narrow and steep, the walls made high and broad, The bulwarks and the rampires large and strong, With cavalieros and thick counterforts, And room within to lodge six thousand men. It must have privy ditches, countermines, And secret issuings to defend the ditch. It must have high argins and covered ways To keep the bulwark fronts from battery, And parapets to hide the musketeers, Casemates to place the great artillery, And store of ordnance that from every flank May scour the outward curtains of the fort, Dismount the cannon of the adverse part, Murder the foe and save their walls from breach. When this is learned for service on the land, By plain and easy demonstration I’ll teach you how to make the water mount, That you may dry-foot march through lakes and pools, Deep rivers, havens, creeks and little seas, And make a fortress in the raging waves, Fenced with the concave of a monstrous rock, Invincible by nature of the place. (T2, 3.2.62–90)

In these some thirty lines (excerpted from a speech of approximately ninety lines) Tamburlaine closely echoes Paul Ive’s The Practice of Fortification (1589), a manual authored by one of Elizabethan England’s most prominent military engineers, which stands as the first English text on the design of fortifications and as one of the first to grapple with the ways in which firearms had transformed siege warfare.64 Scholars have long noted Marlowe’s debt in this passage to Ive’s seminal treatise, which may have been only in manuscript at the time of the play’s composition. However, critical commentary on Marlowe’s use of Ive has been scant: while few scholars today might agree with an early editor’s characterization of these lines as an ‘‘undramatic and barely relevant speech,’’ commentary on the passage has been mostly limited to efforts to gloss the arcane military jargon or to explain why this passage is really about something other than warfare, such as Tamburlaine’s grief over Zenocrate’s death or his rivalry with Bajazeth.65 By 64 On Marlowe’s use of this text, see Kocher, Christopher Marlowe. For discussion of Ive’s place in English military engineering, see Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 116–17. 65 For the claim of the irrelevance of the passage, see the ‘‘Introduction’’ to Tamburlaine the Great in Two Parts, ed. U. M. Ellis-Fermor (New York: Gordian Press, 1930), 45; for a discussion of it in terms of Tamburlaine’s attempt to recover from Zenocrate’s death, see Thomas and Tydeman (Christopher Marlowe: Plays and Their Sources, 80); and for a discussion of it in terms of Tamburlaine’s efforts to emulate and conquer Bajazeth, see Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 65. The most considered discussions of the passage’s military dimensions are Kocher’s tour de force explanation of its technical terminology, an explanation whose purpose, however, is to disclose Marlowe’s erudition rather than the speech’s significance in terms of the play as a whole (Christopher Marlowe, 248–55),

Martial Formations

49

contrast, I would suggest that the ‘‘undramatic’’-ness of the scene be taken seriously insofar as what the play invites the audience to do is witness a performance not of action but of a certain kind of speech. What has not been noted about the passage, in other words, is the way it works as rhetoric: beginning with Tamburlaine’s assertion that he will set out ‘‘rudiments’’ or first principles (T2, 3.2.54), the passage rhetorically produces warfare as a rationalized science. Specifically, the speech delimits specific tasks that make up the work of fortification; it refers to mathematical and geometrical understandings of numbers, ‘‘figures,’’ and ‘‘forms’’; it presents a specialized ‘‘scientific’’ vocabulary of counterscarps, cavalieros, casemates, and the like; and it suggests that certain matters can be learned by ‘‘plain and easy demonstration’’ (see Figure 5). Bringing together the need for adherence to codified rules (e.g., ‘‘It must have privy ditches, countermines, j And secret issuings’’) with the need for ad hoc solutions (e.g., deciding ‘‘what figure serves you best’’)—this passage insists upon warfare as practical knowledge.66 Although this lecture may stand as the only passage in Tamburlaine explicitly to produce military expertise as a science, both parts of the play clearly assume the existence of such a systematic body of knowledge. Accordingly, I think it crucial to repudiate the notion that Marlowe’s representation of warfare entails a portrayal of a raging ‘‘otherness’’—a view that has been commonplace at least since 1927 when U. M. Ellis-Fermor discussed the staging of ‘‘barbaric and primitive war’’ in one of the first critical studies of the playwright.67 In recent years, scholars have sought to theorize and historicize this putative barbarity— thus Emily Bartels has called upon postcolonial theory to analyze Tamburlaine’s ‘‘displays of barbarity’’ and the process whereby he becomes a ‘‘thirsty slaughterer’’; Fred B. Tromly has invoked classical mythology to explicate Tamburlaine’s ‘‘savage game of tantalization’’; and Mary Floyd-Wilson has turned to early ethnographic writings to explain his ‘‘northern barbarity.’’68 By contrast, I would and de Somogyi’s account, which stresses the play’s engagement with modern warfare and acutely observes that the passage offers ‘‘the clearest evidence of the military hi-tech which Tamburlaine espouses’’ (Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 73–6, esp. 74). 66 For a formidable account of the emergence of fields of practical knowledge, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge Production in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HMF. On the ‘‘culture of expertise’’ in Elizabethan England, see Ash’s engaging study of what he posits was a new figure in Elizabethan England—namely, the ‘‘expert mediator’’ who embodied a ‘‘particularly pragmatic, action-oriented branch of Renaissance humanism’’ (214, 18). Ash’s study is of particular relevance to this one insofar as he offers both a fascinating account of the mathematician and militarist Thomas Digges as the expert mediator during the rebuilding of Dover Harbor and a discussion of how mathematical technology changed navigation practices in the 1580s. For excellent discussions of surveying as practical knowledge in early modern England, see Kristen Poole and Martin Bru¨ckner, ‘‘The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England,’’ ELH, 69.3 (2002), 617–48, esp. 624, and Henry S. Turner, ‘‘Plotting Early Modernity,’’ in idem (ed.), The Culture of Capital, 85–127, esp. 95–103. 67 See U. M. Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1927), 25. 68 Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, 65 and 64; Fred B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 67; and FloydWilson, 89–110.

50

Martial Formations

Figure 5. A fortification image from Raimond de Beccarie de Pavie, baron de Fourquevaux’s Instructions for the warres, trans. Paul Ive [who mistakenly ascribed the work to G. du Bellay] (1589). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Martial Formations

51

note that the play relentlessly foregrounds the language of technical expertise in its representation of war, thereby representing mass slaughter not as barbarity but rather as a complex ensemble of routinized tasks. Consider, for example, Part One’s representation of the plans to besiege Constantinople as set out by the Turkish emperor Bajazeth: I will the captive pioners of Argier, Cut off the water that by leaden pipes Runs to the city from the mountain Carnon; Two thousand horse shall forage up and down, That no relief or succor come by land; And all the sea my galleys countermand. Then shall our footmen lie within the trench, And with their cannons mouthed like Orcus’ gulf Batter the walls, and we will enter in: And thus the Grecians shall be conquere`d. (T1, 3.1.58–67)

Although framed as a statement of intent rather than a pedagogical lesson, Bajazeth’s speech clearly resembles Tamburlaine’s lecture to his sons. With its breakdown of the task of conquest into component parts, its foregrounding of technological mastery and temporal sequence (e.g., I will cut off the water; then our footmen shall lie within the trench and batter the walls; then we will enter in), and its logic of cause and effect (underlined by the use of ‘‘thus’’), the passage proclaims that warfare makes sense. Insofar as this passage envisions the conflict as primarily a series of carefully sequenced undertakings having to do with ‘‘pipes’’ and ‘‘walls,’’ it barely mentions the people to be conquered. Remarkably, the meeting of the opposed forces is named, as though it is an afterthought, only in the last two of Bajazeth’s ten lines. Indeed, given that these lines about the imagined confrontation actually keep the ‘‘Grecians’’ and Turks ‘‘confined’’ on separate lines, one might even say that the passage omits the scene of encounter, offering instead a vision of war as an efficiently managed work process in which the messiness of actual flesh has little place. The scene depicting Tamburlaine’s siege of Balsera in the middle of Part Two offers an even more elaborate example of how the play insistently evokes war as a domain with its own abstract rationality. In this scene, which immediately follows that in which Tamburlaine lectures to his sons, the play—without offering another explicitly pedagogical setting—lays out the principles of siegecraft. At the start of the scene, Tamburlaine’s men discuss their plans; subsequently, Techelles requests, and wins, the soldiers’ consent to begin the siege by moving small cannons—‘‘minions, falc’nets, and sakers’’ (T2, 3.3.6)—into trenches. Rather than stage these actions immediately, however, the play stops the action, as it were, to impart another lesson. Specifically, it shows the soldier’s decision to warn the Captain of Balsera of the dire consequences of not yielding the town. Theridimas thus summons the Captain, and, sounding much like

52

Martial Formations

Bajazeth, describes the manual labor of the ‘‘pioners,’’ who ‘‘shall raise a hill j Of earth and faggots higher than [a] fort’’ and, with ‘‘ordnance’’ make a breach in the walls (T2, 3.3.21–2, 25). Returning to the language of ‘‘pipes’’ and ‘‘walls,’’ Techelles subsequently intervenes to describe in precise terms how another group will ensure that the besieged residents of Balsera will be cut off from food and drink: [T]hese Moors shall cut the leaden pipes That bring fresh water to thy men and thee, And lie in trench before thy castle walls That no supply of victual shall come in, Nor any issue forth but they shall die. (T2, 3.3.29–33)

As the scene continues and the Captain refuses to yield, Techelles orders the ‘‘pioners’’ to ‘‘labor low’’ and ‘‘intrench with those dimensions I prescribed,’’ explaining that he will determine where the artillery will best penetrate the walls by employing the ‘‘Jacob’s staff ’’—that is, the instrument discussed earlier in connection with the mathematician Thomas Hood (T2, 3.3.42, 44, 50). Then Theridimas commands that ‘‘gabions of six foot broad’’—huge baskets filled with earth to serve as protection against gunfire—be brought out along with the ordinance (T2, 3.3.56). As the scene ends a few lines later, Theridimas evokes the overwhelming sights and sounds of gunpowder warfare: Our ordnance [shall] thunder forth, And with the breach’s fall, smoke, fire, and dust, The crack, the echo, and the soldier’s cry Make deaf the air and dim the crystal sky. (T2, 3.3.58–61)

Significantly, while the sensory images in these four lines conjure up the phenomenological experience of warfare, they constitute only a very small part of this protracted portrayal of the siege. The bulk of the scene, as I have suggested, is devoted not to the embodied affect of the soldier’s cry, but rather to the staging of war as a series of particular technical and labor-intensive tasks. Rhetorically, then the scene is quite similar to any number of passages in Elizabethan practical texts, such as Robert Barret’s account of how to make trenches, Rampiers, Minings, Countermines, ditches; to make plaine the wayes for the army to marche; to accommodate the passages for the Artillery to pass; to raise mounts to plant ordinance upon; to place and fill the gabions; to digge earth for the same; to undermine wals, and townes, and to raze those of any gained places. (136–7)

Naming and showing this rationalized and new ‘‘science’’ of war—a science which has everything to do with the purposeful work of the spade and the rule—Marlowe’s play identifies Tamburlaine’s martial enterprises with the vision, familiar from the period’s military treatises, of men whose labor has been extracted as they have been subordinated to a carefully apportioned work process.

Martial Formations

53

Given the play’s insistence upon Tamburlaine’s practical knowledge and expertise and its attentiveness to the discipline of military science, it makes little sense to read all the play’s violence in terms of individual acts of barbarity and as antithetical to the regimes set out by the Elizabethan martialists. In fact, a more rigorously historicizing view enables us to see that many of the scenes depicting Tamburlaine as torturer resonate uncannily with the idealized accounts in the Elizabethan military literature of instrumental bodies and spartan physical regimens. That is, even as the play insists upon the brutality of Tamburlaine’s actions in these scenes, it draws clear parallels between, for example, the punishments that Tamburlaine inflicts on the imprisoned Turkish emperor and empress (in Part One) or on the captive kings (in Part Two) and the stark visions of warfare set out in the treatises. Withholding food from the Turkish prisoners and daring them to feed upon each other, Tamburlaine taunts the emperor with having been ‘‘daintily brought up’’ (T1, 4.4.36–7), a charge that numerous military texts levy against Englishmen who are said to lack Turkish discipline. Warning the captive kings that he will ‘‘have [them] learn to feed on provender j And in a stable lie upon the planks,’’ Tamburlaine sounds much like he did in his lecture to his sons, when he shared his military knowledge and told them that he would ‘‘have [them] learn to sleep upon the ground, j March in [their] armour thorough watery fens, j [and] Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold, j Hunger and cold’’ (T2, 3.5.106–7; 3.2.55–8). Forcing the captive kings to ‘‘draw his coach’’ and taunting them with assessments of their meager progress—‘‘What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day’’ (T2, 4.3.2)—Tamburlaine commands their physical energies much as, in the military books, generals were advised to appropriate the labor of their soldiers, men who (as the word problems of the militarists suggest) were required to stand in place of draft animals and, like Tamburlaine’s victims, move massive pieces of artillery long distances. Indeed, Tamburlaine’s famous command, ‘‘Bring out my footstool’’ (T1, 4.2.1) and the stage business that follows—in which Bajazeth is commanded to ‘‘Fall prostrate on the low disdainful earth’’ while Tamburlaine ‘‘gets up upon him to his chair’’ (T1, 4.2.12, s.d. after 29)—can be read as an all-too-literal representation of the Elizabethan martialists’ image of the docile body, the body imagined solely in terms of its utility. Rather than staging a world permeated by barbarism and at odds with the military ideals imagined by his contemporaries, Tamburlaine explores the period’s new martial formations. The impress of the Elizabethan military writers is visible, I would argue, even in the play’s most notorious scenes of torture, such as the scene that depicts Tamburlaine’s murder of his son Calyphas in Part Two. Certainly, Marlowe remains at something of a critical distance: the play, after all, portrays the King of Natolia, a spectator at the scene of son killing, as condemning Tamburlaine’s act as ‘‘barbarous damned tyranny’’ (T2, 4.1.139). But the play also works to disrupt a reading of Tamburlaine as a tyrant tout court. For one thing, as Paul Kocher long ago pointed out, Tamburlaine’s stabbing of his son is

54

Martial Formations

accompanied by the invocation of codes of martial law, codes laid out in detail in the period’s military books.69 But more important, Tamburlaine’s denunciation of his son as an ‘‘effeminate brat’’ (T2, 4.1.161) echoes the Elizabethan militarists’ accounts of the tireless campaign against effeminacy waged by Agesilaus, the king of ancient Sparta. In a 1578 treatise, for example, Barnaby Rich describes how Agesilaus abducted ‘‘certayne of the Persians, whose aspect was very terrible as long as their clothes were on . . . [and] striped them starke naked, shewing their effeminate bodyes to his Souldiers, to the ende they might despise them.’’70 As is suggested by Rich’s account, Elizabethan military texts commonly identify men of the East, especially men of Persia, with effeminacy as they chronicle in detail and without overt criticism the severe disciplining to which such bodies are to be subjected. This equation of effeminacy with the East is evident in Part Two in Tamburlaine’s sneering comments about the ‘‘dainty’’ kings of Persia and the ‘‘faint-hearted, base Egyptians [who] Lie slumbering on the flowery banks of Nile’’ (T2, 4.1.8–9), but it is staged most strikingly, perhaps, at the start of Part Two in a scene in which Tamburlaine voices his fears that he has not passed on what he terms his ‘‘martial flesh,’’ that his sons appear ‘‘amorous’’ rather than ‘‘martial’’ and ‘‘too dainty for the wars’’ (T2, 1.4.21–2, 28–31), for in this scene, Tamburlaine stands on ‘‘fair Larissa Plains j Where Egypt and the Turkish empire parts’’ (T2, 1.4.5–6). Occupying this liminal space, Tamburlaine is positioned between opposing realms made to represent warring masculinities. Significantly, in staging the murder of the effeminate Calyphas—a man who renounces war in favor of wine drinking, card-playing, and dreams of naked ladies in nets of gold—the play defines effeminacy as something that ramifies in the social world well beyond the father/son relationship it represents. Thus, the brothers of Calyphas join with Tamburlaine in their scorn, insisting that their brother has ‘‘dishonored manhood’’ (rather than, say, his particular family or even his people); the charge that Calyphas has transgressed against all men seems implicit as well in Tamburlaine’s command that the Turkish concubines bury the corpse, for ‘‘so faint a boy’’ has the power to ‘‘defile . . . manly fingers’’ (T2, 4.1.162–4). It is worth pausing over the logic by which the play and the military culture of which it is a part invest the effeminate man with such power. Kocher’s 69 See Kocher who argues that ‘‘Calyphas deserved death under every code of contemporary military law’’ and cites as typical an Elizabethan treatise that states ‘‘All souldiers that wilfully absent themselves without lawfull cause from their colours, or companie, that goeth to charge, or resist the enemie, deserve death’’ (Christopher Marlowe, 263). 70 Barnaby Rich, A Right Exelent and Pleasaunt Dialogue Betwene Mercury and an English Souldier (London, 1574), C5r. See also Fourquevaux, who repeats the tale of Agesilaus’ war against effeminacy (Instructions for the Warres, M3v), and Lodowicke Lloyd’s The Stratagems of Jerusalem (London, 1602) in which Lloyd writes that when Agesilaus sawe young brave souldiers of Asia in his campe, which had more pride in their apparell, then care of their service, more like to women then to men, [he] took their brave and fine apparell from them, and gave it to those souldiers that better deserved it, and forced them to serve very bare and naked, until they knew better how to become souldiers. (Ii1r)

Martial Formations

55

account of this scene links it with the tale, told and re-told in Elizabethan military books, of Manlius Torquatus, a Roman soldier who commanded that his son’s head be cut off because he disobeyed his commands in war.71 But in the tale of Manlius Torquatus, the son’s crime consists in his excess of martial fervor, a vice that simply doesn’t exist in the world of Tamburlaine. In Marlowe’s play, I would emphasize, the spectacularly public punishment attaches to idleness, the play’s name for Calyphas’ unwillingness to go to war. Thus Calyphas is deemed the ‘‘lazy brother’’ and the ‘‘image of sloth and picture of a slave’’ (T2, 4.1.91) and is charged with ‘‘folly, sloth, and a damned idleness’’ (T2, 4.1.69, 126). More precisely, although the play uses the language of effeminacy, its staging of the repudiation of Calyphas seems to imply something more complex than an anxiety that men will act like women. Instead it suggests that what is most disturbing is not Calyphas’ proximity to women but rather his steadfast idleness, his refusal to take his place in a martial formation. Or to put it another way: Tamburlaine’s murder of Calyphas betrays the play’s profound indebtedness to the logic of the Elizabethan military texts, where the rejection of effeminacy is manifestly linked to an avowed effort to ‘‘harden . . . bodies unto labours’’ and thus to create a martial economy premised on the ‘‘great actions’’ of constant toil.72 III Having traced some of the ways in which Tamburlaine produces an ordered martial realm not unlike the social domain imagined by the Elizabethan militarists, we are now in a position to consider how the play’s regimes of number and space participate in Marlowe’s theater of abstraction. An earlier generation of theatergoers may have had to imagine large numbers of soldiers where they saw very few, as is suggested by Philip Sidney’s Apology, which mocks the way actors used ‘‘four swords and bucklers’’ to represent two armies and a pitched field.73 But those who witnessed Tamburlaine probably saw something different, for each part of Marlowe’s play calls for nearly thirty named characters. Thus while Tamburlaine may have been acted with as few as fifteen players—Andrew Gurr hypothesizes a group of eleven men and four boys—its cast would still have been sizeable as compared to those typical of the late 1580s.74 Indeed, Gurr suggests that, even with doubling of parts, Marlowe’s play would have called upon every member of the Admiral’s Men, assuming that the company was of the usual London size. 71 Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, 263. 72 Fourquevaux, Instructions for the Warres, E2r. See also Barret’s claim that ‘‘effeminacy [is] many times the hinderance of great actions’’ (The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, 10) and Proctor’s definition of ‘‘Effeminatenes’’ as that which is ‘‘contrarye to force & manlynesse’’ (Of the Knowledge and Conduct of Warres, E3v). 73 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 76. 74 See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 122.

56

Martial Formations

Equally important, the play not only evokes numbers exponentially larger than the probable number of bodies of men and boys on stage; it also repeatedly makes the point that martial enterprises require vast quantities of men, that conquests are a matter of armies rather than individual warriors. Consider, for example, what may be the play’s only reference to single combat—namely, the moment in Part Two when Tamburlaine visits the camp of his enemies and tells the kings who oppose him that he has ‘‘come j As Hector did into the Grecian camp’’ (T2, 3.5.64–5) to see his rival: I do you honour in the simile, For if I should as Hector did Achilles (The worthiest knight that ever brandished sword) Challenge in combat any of you all, I see how fearfully ye would refuse And fly my glove as from a scorpion (T2, 3.5.69–74)

Raising the possibility of a chivalric trial by combat—and with it a world where worthy knights brandish swords to settle their disputes—Marlowe immediately indicates that such ritual encounters are devoid of value in the world of this play. Thus rather than issue an actual challenge, Tamburlaine confines himself to the realm of the hypothetical, claiming that none of his foes would dare to encounter him in a duel while implicitly suggesting that his is a world defined not by codes of honor but by the exigencies of battle. Orcanes’ response—‘‘Now art thou fearful of thy army’s strength j Thou wouldst with overmatch of person fight’’ (T2, 3.5.75–6)—emphasizes the play’s refusal to take chivalric codes seriously by suggesting that Tamburlaine’s challenge represents no more than a ruse to prevent likely defeat on the battlefield. Placed only moments before an actual scene of battle, this encounter between foes evokes a vision of a world where the rites of knighthood have been emptied of meaning and the possibility of true valor cannot even be recognized.75 As such, the scene allows us to see how strikingly Marlowe’s military vision stands out from that of his contemporaries, many of whom routinely call upon a language of social distinction and seem to assume the truth of Barnaby Rich’s observation that warfare is ‘‘the Theater wheron Nobilitie was borne to shew himselfe.’’76 What Tamburlaine offers instead of a chivalric scene of single combat is a vision of undifferentiated warring multitudes. At times, the play conjures up this kind of plurality through a language of ‘‘infinite’’ or uncountable numbers. Thus, in Part One, a Persian lord speculates that Tamburlaine’s forces may ‘‘be in 75 For a sense of the dueling culture that Tamburlaine here refuses, see Manning’s discussion of the way English medieval warrior traditions continued through the seventeenth century such that swordsmen ‘‘retained an obsessive preoccupation with personal honour, reputation, and face-to-face contact fought with edged weapons, and did not readily accept corporate discipline and endeavour and the subordination of individual displays of prowess and motives of personal revenge to political and military objectives’’ (Swordsmen, 246). 76 As quoted in de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 98.

Martial Formations

57

number infinite,’’ and, later, one of Tamburlaine’s henchmen dares the Turks to ‘‘bring millions infinite of men’’ (T1, 2.2.43; 3.3.33). Similarly, in Part Two, Tamburlaine describes his growing forces as ‘‘In number more than are the drops that fall j When Boreas rents a thousand swelling clouds’’ (T2, 1.6.32–3); Tamburlaine’s enemy boasts that he possesses ‘‘numbers more than infinite of men’’ (T2, 2.2.18); a messenger reports that Tamburlaine’s ‘‘host of men . . . [is] j In number more than are the quivering leaves j Of Ida’s forest’’ (T2, 3.5.4–6), and Tamburlaine himself announces that his ‘‘sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell’’ (T2, 5.1.178). The play’s most common references to multitude, as Emily Bartels has noted, are references to specific large numbers.77 Thus Part One begins with a chorus of nine references to the ‘‘thousand’’ men on horse that the Persian king sends out against Tamburlaine’s men (T1, 1.1.47, 52, 62; 1.2.111, 118, 121, 168, 189, 191), and the play soon conjures up more prodigious figures such as ‘‘ten thousand horse’’ (T1, 1.2.185); an army ‘‘forty thousand strong’’ (T1, 2.1.61); ‘‘twenty thousand expert soldiers’’ (T1, 2.5.25); ‘‘ten thousand janizaries’’ (T1, 3.3.15); ‘‘two hundred thousand footmen’’ (T1, 3.3.18); ‘‘three hundred thousand men in armour’’; and ‘‘five hundred thousand footmen’’ (T1, 4.1.22, 25). Such sheer quantification is even more marked in Part Two, where playgoers and readers are treated to several scenes of enumeration as various military leaders announce the arrival of their troops and specify their numbers. What are we to make of all these numbers? The fact that the census figures are at times patently inconsistent might lead us to conclude that this naming of number is essentially meaningless—simply a staging of Elizabethan stereotypes of Scythian nomads and Turkish armies. By contrast, I would argue that, while Tamburlaine’s invocation of number certainly draws on cliche´s and may thus, as Bartels suggests, be read as bombast—mere rhetoric—on all sides,78 it is nevertheless significant rhetoric insofar as it contributes to the play’s production of a social realm in which bodies are united through something other than the conventional markers of identity. My point here is not to discount the considerable scholarship on Tamburlaine as a staging of racial, religious, and national difference.79 Rather, I suggest that the play, in enumerating the troops brought to 77 Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, 73. 78 Ibid. 74. 79 On the play’s engagement with Elizabethan foreign policy and England’s ‘‘others,’’ see, especially, Barbour, Before Orientalism; Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness; Burton, ‘‘Anglo-Ottoman Relations’’; Floyd-Wilson; and Wilson, ‘‘Visible Bullets.’’ As an anonymous reader for the press has also pointed out, the play’s emphasis on the vast size of these warring forces might connect the play to the many virulently anti-Spanish texts published in England in the sixteenth century, works that, as William S. Maltby has documented, describe Catholic Spain’s conquest of the New World in terms of the cruel killings of huge numbers of Native Americans (The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971), esp. 12–28. As such, the play’s embrace of an Elizabethan discourse of numbers may be seen as a sign of its endorsement of Protestant England’s war with Catholic Spain.

58

Martial Formations

the field by Tamburlaine and his foes, foregrounds its investment in a modern, ‘‘scientific’’ discourse whose significance critics have yet to acknowledge. Insofar as the play represents collectivities through numbers—through a mode of knowledge, that by its very nature, as Mary Poovey suggests, tends to ‘‘privilege quantity over quality and equivalence over difference’’80—it produces something more complex than a mere staging of Scythian or Turkish or even supranational military power. Depicting a world in which ‘‘the ground is mantled with such multitudes’’ that ‘‘neither rain can fall upon the earth j Nor sun reflex his virtuous beams thereon’’ (T1, 3.1.51–3), the play also constitutes an ordered plurality. In short, we are, here again, in the theater of abstraction. As the image of the ‘‘ground mantled with . . . multitudes’’ may suggest, a primary way in which Tamburlaine produces this abstract social body is through its mapping of space. I refer here not to cartography and the play’s wellestablished links to competing systems of mapping the world,81 but rather to a topic that has only recently been noted: namely, the play’s relationship to the spatial imaginary engendered by the New Militarism and on view in the diagrams I discussed earlier.82 In a sense, I am drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s brilliant discussion of the homogeneity of the play’s spaces, a characteristic he identifies as the play’s ‘‘reduction of the universe to the coordinates of a map’’ (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 195). While Greenblatt connects this ‘‘vacancy’’ and ‘‘abstraction’’ with the infinitude of Tamburlaine’s desire—what he terms the ‘‘voice of wants never finished and of transcendental homelessness’’(195–6)—I would suggest that the play’s turn toward the abstraction of space can be read as a sign of its embrace of modernity in the form of a new martial aesthetic and a new kind of social body. Through this ‘‘modern’’ imaginary, space is, at times, made to signify as that which is pure form and thus empty of difference. Tamburlaine opens, in fact, with a striking gesture toward such ‘‘scientific’’ abstraction. In the Prologue of Part One, the speaker thus famously derides the ‘‘jigging veins of rhyming mother wits’’ while promising to ‘‘lead’’ audiences to a new kind of theatrical performance identified with a quintessential martial space: 80 Poovey, HMF, 4. 81 For important discussions of geographic and cartographic space in Tamburlaine, see Ethel Seaton, ‘‘Marlowe’s Map,’’ Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 10 (1924), 13–35; John Gillies, ‘‘Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,’’ in Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds), Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 203–29; Floyd-Wilson, 95–6; and Garret A. Sullivan, Jr., ‘‘Geography and Identity in Marlowe,’’ in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 231–44. For an incisive discussion of Tamburlaine in relation to the measured spaces of the English surveyor’s art, see Garret A. Sullivan, Jr., ‘‘Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine,’’ Renaissance Drama N.S. 28 (1997), 3–27. 82 For two important discussions of military spaces in the play, see de Somogyi’s discussion of the ‘‘military map’’ Tamburlaine examines before dying (Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 84–6) and Taunton’s discussion of female spaces in Tamburlaine, which also includes an astute consideration of the space of the camp in Shakespeare and Chapman (1590s Drama and Militarism).

Martial Formations

59

‘‘the stately tent of war’’ (T1, Prologue 1, 3). The tent summoned up here— which may even have been erected on stage—can be read in accordance with the full range of Elizabethan meanings that attach to ‘‘stately’’: that is, it may be seen as at once ‘‘splendid,’’ ‘‘powerful,’’ and ‘‘imposing or majestic in size and proportions.’’83 As this last definition suggests, the Prologue’s language hints at the play’s investment in precisely those martial rationalities that I have connected with the abstraction of space. Specifically, the Prologue’s repudiation of a style of rhymed poetry it associates with the jerky, irregular movements of a jig draws attention to what Russ McDonald has described as the ‘‘foundational regularity’’ of Tamburlaine’s own blank verse form.84 In so doing, as McDonald notes, the Prologue suggests a deep commitment to a linguistic ‘‘proportion’’ like that which George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie connects with the ‘‘Mathematicall Sciences’’ (64).85 More significantly, the Prologue’s evocation of ‘‘the stately tent of war’’ suggests that the play’s concern with proportion encompasses an interest not just in the proportionate sound of the blank verse—a sound defined by the ‘‘rolling succession of equivalent lines,’’ the parallel clauses, and the repeated phrases86—but also in the proportionate forms that can be seen, or imagined, on stage. Indeed, we might note that such forms may at times include bodies, such as the Turkish soldiers who are described as ‘‘stately janissars,’’ when they are conjured up in Part Two (T2, 3.3.26). What is at stake in the Prologue’s reference to the ‘‘stately tent of war’’ becomes clearer when that text is set alongside an illustration entitled ‘‘The plat for incamping,’’ which is included in all three editions of Styward’s pathwaie to martiall discipline and reproduced in both Garrard’s and Clayton’s treatises from 1591 (see Figure 6). Styward describes this image—which shows a tent set neatly in the center of a square and surrounded by a series of functional, partitioned spaces as well as by heart-shaped bulwarks, which precisely delineate each of the square’s four corners—as ‘‘partlie borrowed of antiquitie, & partlie imitated of [the] Turkish manner of encamping, in the assiege of any citie’’ (129). Emphasizing its formal regularity, Styward indicates that the construction of such a space depends upon the technical expertise and physical strength of ‘‘cunning men’’ who can cause to ‘‘be made a square vale . . . wel trenched & cast into this forme’’ (126). Whether or not Marlowe was familiar with Styward’s illustration, Tamburlaine certainly includes an extraordinary number of references to martial 83 See OED, ‘‘Stately,’’ defs.1, 3, 4. 84 Russ McDonald, ‘‘Marlowe and Style,’’ in Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, 55–69, esp. 64. See Sullivan, Jr., ‘‘Space, Measurement, and Stalking Tamburlaine,’’ which offers a related discussion of the Prologue in terms of the relationship between ‘‘measured language’’ and ‘‘measured strides’’ (23). For a related discussion of Puttenham’s aesthetic and of parallels between the work of a surveyor and that of a poet, see Poole and Bru¨ckner, ‘‘The Plot Thickens,’’ 624. 85 See Knoespel, who discusses links between rhetoric and mathematics in the Elizabethan period and notes that Puttenham’s chapter on prosody is entitled ‘‘Of Proportion Poetical’’ (‘‘The Narrative Matter of Mathematics,’’ 32). 86 This is McDonald’s analysis of Tamburlaine’s rhythm (‘‘Marlowe and Style,’’ 67).

60

Martial Formations

Figure 6. ‘‘The plat for incamping’’ from William Garrard’s The arte of warre (1591). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

tents, camps, and pavilions.87 As is evident from the scenes of fortification and siegecraft discussed earlier, they also include many references to ways of constructing, measuring, and taking possession of space. Such language clearly invites spectators to envision on stage a world of geometric form much like which is visible in Styward’s ‘‘plat.’’ 87 See, for example, T1, 2.2.15; 3.3.161; 4.1.49; 4.2.117; 5.2.9; 5.2.148; and T2, 1.2.22; 1.2.43; 1.2.82; 3.2.37; 3.2.106; 3.5.111; 4.1.159; 4.2.3; 4.2.14; 5.1.86; 5.3.7.

Martial Formations

61

When one recalls that actual tents and walls—not to mention the cage listed in the only extant Elizabethan inventory of stage properties—feature prominently in Tamburlaine, one recognizes how insistently the play, through its very props, conjures up the linear and geometric forms of martial abstraction. Consider, for example, the infamous scenes in Part One in which the play stages Tamburlaine’s command to kill six virgins who plead for mercy during his siege of Damascus, scenes which explicitly invite spectators to ‘‘read’’—rather than simply to notice—the stately tents of war.88 In these scenes, which end with the grim report that soldiers have ‘‘hoisted up’’ the ‘‘slaughtered carcasses’’ of the virgins on ‘‘Damascus’ walls’’ (T1, 5.2.67–8), Tamburlaine’s response to the virgins underlines his adherence to what he terms his ‘‘martial observations’’ (T1, 5.2.59)—that is, to his custom (described in numerous European accounts of the warrior) of changing the color of his tents from white to red and, ultimately, to black as a way of communicating to the besieged his increasingly deadly intentions. The play’s tendency to make the forms of military science a focal point for spectators is also plainly apparent in the episode from Part Two that most strikingly recalls that of the tearful virgins—namely, the scene that opens with the Governor of Babylon ‘‘upon the walls with . . . others,’’ then shows soldiers ‘‘scal[ing] the walls,’’ and then, notoriously, reveals the Governor ‘‘hanging in chains on the walls’’ as Tamburlaine gives the order for soldiers to shoot at him (T2, 5.1.s.d.; s.d. after 5.1.62; s.d. after 5.1.147). Strikingly, Tamburlaine’s description of the governor’s hanging body ‘‘[h]aving as many bullets in his flesh j As there be breaches in her battered wall’’ (T2, 5.1.159–60) suggests that his damaged flesh has taken on the qualities of the wall—indeed, that it may have become virtually indistinguishable from the structure. As such episodes foreground broken bodies, they make legible—and perhaps aim to master—the disturbing matter that, as I will discuss in later chapters, is central to the Elizabethan theater’s imagination of warfare. Here, however, I want to emphasize the underlying logic of these horrifying scenes. Rather than view these episodes as simply two more instances of Tamburlaine’s cruelty, one might more productively interpret them as part of the play’s larger preoccupation with a world governed solely by martial rationalities—that is, by rules that are as inflexible as the lines that mark the geometric forms of the hypervisible tents and walls. In much the same way as Styward’s ‘‘plat’’ offers its Elizabethan readers a way of mapping space in the new—that is, partly ancient and partly ‘‘Turkish’’—modes of ‘‘scientific’’ abstraction, so, too, Marlowe’s rendering of the spaces of the camp provides spectators with a conceptual apparatus—a ‘‘plat’’ of a different, and dramatic, kind—for making sense of the actions depicted on the stage.89 88 See Sullivan, Jr., ‘‘Space, Measurement and Stalking Tamburlaine’’ for a related discussion of this scene, which focuses on measurement and ‘‘custom.’’ 89 See Poole and Bru¨ckner for a related discussion of the dissemination of new geometric knowledge as well as of the polyvalence of the Elizabethan term ‘‘plat,’’ which could refer to a surveyor’s map, a ‘‘conceptual expression of narrative form,’’ and ‘‘the relatively new theatrical practice of creating a graphic schematic of a play’’ (‘‘The Plot Thickens,’’ 630, 635). Other key work

62

Martial Formations

As part of this conceptual apparatus, Marlowe’s drama pays sustained visual attention to the way that bodies are organized in space. Indeed, in describing a scene of soldiers marching in array, the play identifies such martial spectacles as overpowering to sight—that is, as forceful enough to ‘‘chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyes j That stand and muse at our admired arms’’ (T1, 2.3.33–4). In this context, it is perhaps worth recalling that the best-known contemporary response to Tamburlaine—Ben Jonson’s scornful comment that the ‘‘tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age . . . had nothing in them’’ but the ‘‘scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers’’— suggests that (at least to some putatively ‘‘ignorant gapers’’) the exaggerated movements of bodies on stage may well have been as impressive as Marlowe’s language.90 With such comments in mind, it is perhaps easier to perceive how, over the course of the play, the initial sense of disordered multitude—as emblematized by Tamburlaine’s ‘‘lawless train’’—is completely supplanted by scenes evoking the spectacle that Orcanes, the King of Natolia, aptly terms ‘‘warlike progress’’ (T2, 3.5.23). That is, as the play refers again and again to leaders accompanied by drums and trumpets and their ‘‘train’’—and Part Two alone contains nine such stage directions91—the word ‘‘train’’ increasingly becomes identified with something more substantial than a band of followers, taking on what the OED designates as its ‘‘military’’ meaning as the ‘‘artillery and other apparatus for battle and siege, with the vehicles conveying them and the men in attendance, following or in readiness to follow an army.’’92 Once again the play summons up the realm of the militarist’s ‘‘scientific’’ rationality, where for example, one can find Robert Barret’s lengthy and precisely enumerated list of an exemplary train, which includes about 150 cannon of various sizes as well as such items as ‘‘9 or 10 thousand Cannon shot,’’ ‘‘7 or 8 thousand demy Cannon shot,’’ ‘‘2000 iron shouels,’’ ‘‘4 or 5 thousand pickaxes,’’ ‘‘4000 great iron nayles for the carriages of the Artillery,’’ ‘‘3000 muskets and calivers in store,’’ ‘‘60 bundels of scaling ladders,’’ and ‘‘eight great coffers’’ filled with candles, lanterns and ‘‘cere-clothes’’ (The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, 134–5). As on the stage, so in Barret’s text, the military world is composed of multitudes, for such materials, as Barret notes, would be carried by ‘‘horses, oxen, carts, waines [i.e., large wagons], carters, wainemen, engineers, gunners, carpenters, smiths, soulders, armorers, mariners, calkers, pioneers, [and] labourers’’ (132). And as on these topics includes Sullivan, Jr., ‘‘Space, Measurement and Stalking Tamburlaine’’; Lorna Hutson, ‘‘Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth Century England,’’ Representations, 41 (1993), 83–103, esp. 86–7; and Turner, ‘‘Plotting Early Modernity,’’ esp. 87–95. 90 Cited in Richard Levin, ‘‘The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine,’’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 1 (1984), 51–70. Levin also cites references to the actor’s gait, including Dekker’s description of a ‘‘stalking Tamburlaine’’ and Joseph Hall’s satirical references to Tamburlaine’s ‘‘stalking steps’’ and ‘‘high-set steps.’’ 91 See the entry for ‘‘train’’ in Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomason, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 92 See, for example, stage directions for T2, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, 3.3, and 3.5.

Martial Formations

63

Barret’s list so strikingly suggests, in this vision, there is no need to separate animals from humans or to distinguish between the human and mechanical elements of the train: as in Tamburlaine, what matters most is the spectacle of size and number. How this spectacle was given shape on stage remains, of course, a matter of conjecture. Although no one knows with certainty which stage properties were available to the actors who staged Tamburlaine at the Rose playhouse and elsewhere, recent scholarship has made it clear that the Elizabethan stage was far from bare.93 The list of stage properties associated with Philip Henslowe—the entrepreneur who helped build the Rose and who managed the Admiral’s Men— includes numerous weapons, such as ‘‘wooden and leather axes . . . eight lances, a gilt spear, seventeen foils [i.e., swords], one buckler, four wooden targets, nine targets of iron, one of copper, a shield with three lions on it . . . and one helmet.’’94 In addition, firearms, cannons, and other ordnance were routinely in use by Elizabethan theater companies, as is clear from printed stage directions as well as other sources, including the 1574 proclamation that denounced the ‘‘sundry slaughters and mayhemminge of the Quenes Subjects [that] have happened by. . . engynes, weapons and powders used in plaies’’95 and the anecdote suggesting that two spectators may have been accidentally slain during a 1587 performance of Tamburlaine.96 Taken together, the play’s frequent evocations of large numbers of men and its many references to Tamburlaine’s chariot and to a diverse assortment of military technology (such as measuring tools, cannons of various sizes, shot, pikes, lances, artillery, ordnance, balls of wildfire, and the like) argue for a reading of the play’s several ‘‘train’’ scenes in terms of the vast and ordered processions described by militarists like Barret. As Tamburlaine maps theatrical space in accordance with the conventions of the military diagrams, it also demands that readers and spectators imagine men ‘‘imbattailed’’ within the geometrical formations associated with the new modes of ordered warfare: The Persian usurper Cosroe describes Tamburlaine as ‘‘Staying [after a battle] to order all the scattered troops’’ (T1, 2.5.45); the Turkish basso speaks of ‘‘Two hundred thousand footmen that have served j In two set battles’’ (T1, 3.3.18); the Hungarian commander Frederick notes that ‘‘tents are pitched’’ and ‘‘men stand in array, j Ready to charge’’ (T2, 1.2.43–4); Tamburlaine, 93 See, in particular, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), esp. 61–88. 94 See Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 69. 95 As quoted by Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 2. 96 See E. K. Chambers The Elizabethan Stage, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), ii.135, which notes that at a November 1587 performance of Tamburlaine, a ‘‘player’s hand swerved, his calliver being charged with bullets, missed the fellow he aimed at, and killed a child and a woman great with child, and hurt another man very sore in the head.’’ For a discussion of this incident, see Wilson, ‘‘Visible Bullets,’’ 60, and de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War.

64

Martial Formations

Figure 7. ‘‘The Battell in Forme of a Moone’’ from Thomas Styward’s The pathwaie to martiall discipline (1581). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

in a lecture on military science to his sons, advocates the ‘‘ring of pikes’’ formation illustrated by Gyles Clayton (T2, 3.2.99); and Orcanes, the King of Natolia, vows that his battle will be ‘‘in martial manner pitched’’ and that his troops will assume ‘‘the figure of the semicircled moon’’ (T2, 3.1.64, 66), the ‘‘Lunula’’ or crescent shape illustrated in Thomas Styward’s manual and described by Thomas and Leonard Digges as a formation ‘‘wherein the Turke especiallie delyteth’’ (H4v) (see Figure 7). Not infrequently, the play conjures up an image of men covering empty space that it characterizes as ‘‘the plains’’—as for example when the King of Hungary tells Orcanes to ‘‘view my royal host j That hides these plains and seems as vast and wide j As doth the desert of Arabia’’ (T2, 1.2.29–31). Much of Part One is, in fact, set on Scythia’s ‘‘champion plains’’ by the river Araris (T1, 2.2.40), while much of Part Two takes place on Larissa Plains in Egypt and on the Asphaltis Plains near Babylon. Because the word ‘‘plains’’ might denote not simply the open spaces of battle but also geometrical figures (‘‘planes’’) and indeed any flat surfaces, such as those on which military diagrams and ‘‘plats’’ were inscribed, the play’s use of this

Martial Formations

65

language is noteworthy.97 Just as the military books identify such open space with regimentation—Barnaby Rich, for example, refers to the ‘‘plaine’’ as a site ‘‘where there is nothing to trust but order’’98 while Clayton offers diagrams of men ‘‘in . . . order for the playnes’’ (The approoved order of martiall discipline, F2r)—so, too, Marlowe makes the plains synonymous with the efficient ordering of men. In this theater of abstraction, then, the plains represent not only an arena to show martial encampment and battle but also a homogenous space in which the play’s understandings of the social body can best be seen.99 IV Given Tamburlaine’s obsessive preoccupation with the abstractions of form and number, it is necessary, I think, to reconsider readings of the play that find in it only a staging of modern (anti)heroic individualism. It would, of course, be absurd to maintain that Tamburlaine is not singled out in Marlowe’s play, especially given that the Admiral’s Men staged the drama with star actor Edward Alleyn playing the lead role. Rather, I would argue that the ways in which the play distinguishes Tamburlaine, paradoxically enough, enforce an idea of plurality. Consider, for example, a moment that critics have traditionally regarded as one of the play’s most clear-cut stagings of his singularity—namely, the scene, early in Part One, in which the Persian king, alarmed by the reports of Tamburlaine, nervously asks one of his lords, ‘‘What stature wields he, and what personage?’’ (T1, 2.1.6). To this question, Marlowe’s audience might have expected an answer like those available in early Western accounts of the warrior, which portrayed him as ‘‘a grim-faced man, with sunken eyes that always held a threatening look’’ or a man whose ‘‘noble bearing’’ is countered by a ‘‘misshapen [foot that] caused him to limp visibly,’’ a ‘‘truculent’’ mouth, and ‘‘deep set and slanting eyes that glittered with all the savagery of some exceptionally ferocious beast.’’100 Departing from these received ideas, the Persian lord describes him as follows: Of stature tall, and straightly fashione`d, Like his desire, lift upwards and divine; So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear

97 See OED, ‘‘Plain,’’ defs. 1, 2, and 4. 98 Barnaby Rich, Path-Way to Military Practise (London, 1587), F1v. 99 See also the careful explication of the measurement of plains in Leonard and Thomas Digges, A Geometrical Practise, Named Pantometria (1571; 1591), a work on practical geometry explicitly addressed to soldiers. 100 These descriptions, from Giovio and Perondinus respectively, are quoted in Thomas and Tydeman (Christopher Marlowe: Plays and Their Sources, 133, 118).

66

Martial Formations Old Atlas’ burthen; . . . . Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion, Thirsting with sovereignty, with love of arms, His lofty brows in folds do figure death, And in their smoothness, amity and life: About them hangs a knot of amber hair, Wrapped in curls as fierce Achilles’ was, On which the breath of heaven delights to play Making it dance with wanton majesty: His arms and fingers long and sinewy, Betokening valour and excess of strength— In every part proportioned like the man Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. (T1, 2.1.7–16, 19–30)

Clearly, this description is indebted to a store of classical myth such that Tamburlaine is Atlas and Achilles rolled into one. What may be less obvious is that the description is also indebted to the geohumoral theories, discussed earlier, that Elizabethan militarists pondered as they considered the world’s martial men.101 And yet, this question and answer session on the subject of Tamburlaine’s stature and personage may have less to do with Renaissance biographical or geohumoral narratives than with the militarists’ discussions of normative bodies for warfare. Compare the play’s rhetoric with Peter Whitehorne’s translation of Machiavelli’s Arte of Warre (1560; 1573; 1588) in which the ‘‘personage’’ of the soldier is said to be marked by ‘‘eies lively and cherefull, the necke full of sinowes, the breaste large, the armes full of musculles, the fingers long, little beallie, the flankes rounde, the legges and feete dry.’’102 John Sadler’s 1572 translation of the writings of the ancient Roman theorist Vegetius offers a similar view.103 And the description of the soldier’s body offered by Raimond de Fourquevaux’s Instructions for the Warres—which one bibliographer has deemed to be among the ‘‘most famous, most widely read, and most widely quoted of sixteenth century [military] books’’ and which was translated by Paul Ive, the author of the fortification treatise Marlowe quotes from in Part Two—also corresponds to this model.104 In this context, the terms of the play’s description of Tamburlaine—his great stature, straight fashioning, large limbs, strongly knit joints, wide shoulders, piercing eyes, long and sinewy arms and fingers—come into view not as the mark of an ‘‘overreacher’’ or ‘‘Herculean hero,’’ to use the appellations given currency 101 See Floyd-Wilson for the related claim that this speech must be read in terms of a discourse of northern peoples, which linked the English temperament with that of the Scythians (90–1). 102 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre, trans. Peter Whitehorne (London, 1560), D3v. In reading this account as one that establishes norms of martial embodiment, I depart from Foucault’s interpretation of a similar description from seventeenth-century France, which he regards as ‘‘belong[ing] for the most part to a bodily rhetoric of honour’’ (135). 103 Flavius Vegetius, The Foure Bookes of Martiall Policye, trans. John Sadler (London, 1572), A3r. 104 Fourquevaux, Instructions for the Warres, D3r–v; Cockle, Bibliography of English Military Books, 37.

Martial Formations

67

in two seminal studies of Marlowe, but rather as a blazon of the common soldier, the new martial English man.105 Indeed, the concluding couplet of this famous speech—with its reminder of the martial ideal of ‘‘proportion’’ and its odd phrasing, which describes the warrior as ‘‘like the man’’ who should subdue the world—emphasizes that Tamburlaine functions here as a synecdochal figure for the disciplined multitudes that help to constitute him. In much the same way, while the play’s famous scene of sartorial transformation—that is, the scene in Part One in which Tamburlaine exchanges his Scythian shepherd’s weeds for a suit of armor and proclaims his intent to rule the world—might lead one to invoke Greenblatt’s language of ‘‘self-fashioning,’’ the effect of Tamburlaine’s makeover is less to reveal an extraordinary personage than to give a singular intensity and focus to his identity as a common soldier. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently argued, given the way in which suits of armor might be passed down from fathers to sons, the armored body must be understood, by definition, as less an ‘‘individual body’’ then a ‘‘genealogical’’ body.106 In the case of Tamburlaine, who appears to have acquired his armor through theft, however, what is at stake is not genealogy but rather what Jones and Stallybrass refer to as the ‘‘detachability of armor’’—the way it ‘‘reaches out beyond a single body to take hold of other bodies’’ (257). More specifically, Tamburlaine, as a figure encased in armor, would no doubt resemble—and share a social identity with—a great many of the men in this play, from the troops who wear ‘‘sun-bright armour’’ as they march alongside him in Part One (T1, 2.3.22) to the men of Barbary who march in his army ‘‘with armour on their backs’’ in Part Two (T2, 1.6.48). Moreover, given the vast amount of armor that this play requires—so far as I have been able to tell, the play has more references to armor than most plays in the extant Elizabethan repertory—it is likely that, when the Admiral’s Men staged these scenes, what spectators saw may not have suggested individual distinction. Rather, it may have evoked the anonymous, and often rusty, armor housed in parish halls, maintained by men of the middling sort, and still routinely issued by the Ordnance Office to English soldiers.107 My point, then, is that even as Tamburlaine represents the spectacular 105 See Harry Levin, The Overreacher, and Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962). 106 See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 107 For a discussion of the use of armor on stage and of the claim that Elizabethan actors must have used ‘‘functional’’ light armor and helmets on stage, see Charles Edelman, Brawl Ridiculous: Sword Fighting in Shakespeare’s Plays (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 1992), 30. It may be worth underscoring that Tamburlaine clearly does not associate armor with ‘‘outmoded’’ traditions in the way that Jones and Stallybrass suggest many early modern plays do (Renaissance Clothing, 258). On the continuing necessity of armor in the Elizabethan period, see Bert Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), who cites a 1590 document in which Sir Henry Lee cautions Lord Burghley that ‘‘the worlde . . . is lykelye to use more [armor] hereafter than in the tyme past’’ (147). On the inspection of publicly held armor, see Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 18–25. On the operations of the Ordnance Office see John

68

Martial Formations

conquests of its over-reacher, Marlowe’s play is preoccupied by another vision: namely, that, as the military texts would have it, there is no new ‘‘man’’ on the horizon; instead there are only quantities of men. There is an unmistakable irony here, for while critics celebrate Marlowe’s portrayal of a protagonist who determinedly fashions himself as a conqueror, Tamburlaine remains inextricably bound up with the cultural production of an oppositional figure: the man who is no longer knowable apart from abstraction, the man who may be no different from an indeterminate number of others. V What is the reach of the fantasies of uniform men and killing by computation that emerge in Elizabethan dramas and treatises? Implicit in the texts I have been discussing are perhaps the beginnings of what Mark Seltzer’s cultural study Serial Killers terms ‘‘a basic shift in our understanding of the individuality of the individual.’’108 More specifically, Seltzer makes the case for serial killing as a uniquely modern phenomenon bound up with a cultural embrace of numerical thinking. In language that resonates with that of the Elizabethan military texts, Seltzer defines the serial killer as: the statistical person . . . [the person who] is not merely one of an indeterminate number of others but an individual who, in the most radical form, experiences identity, his own and others, as a matter of numbers, kinds, types, and as a matter of simulation and likeness. (128)

What it may have meant, in Elizabethan England, to experience one’s identity as a matter of numbers is perhaps impossible to ascertain. But given that Marlowe’s math-suffused play about men who are experts at killing is thought to have been one of the most popular dramas in London in the 1580s and 1590s, it seems likely that many Elizabethans found the representation of subjects as subjects of numbers to be a strangely compelling phenomenon. Surely, the popularity of the play suggests that the space of the London stage proved to be a congenial place for audiences to witness new ways of conceiving the social order. And perhaps this should not surprise us, for the Elizabethan militarist Peter Whitehorne pointed out in his introduction to Machiavelli’s The arte of warre the ‘‘orders and exercises’’ of ancient Rome were enacted in public, ‘‘in sundrie places and specially. . . in their wonderfull sumptuous Theaters, which chiefly they builded to that purpose’’ (a2v).109 S. Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ Journal of Military History, 58 (1994), 391–420, esp. 410–11. 108 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4. 109 For an engaging account of the links between the Elizabethan theater and the battlefield, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, esp. 90–130.

Martial Formations

69

Although the martial formations on view in Tamburlaine have everything to do with new understandings of the social order, they should not be understood as having existed in a world of ideas far removed from the domain of affect.110 Elizabethan audiences may well have taken great pleasure in Marlowe’s theater of abstraction—in visions of proportionate lines, ordered movements, forward progress, and accumulating number. However, there is also good reason to believe that at least some audience members may have viewed the new rationalities with considerable anxiety. A symptom of the disquietude generated by numbers may be seen even amidst the comedy of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor when Bobadil recounts to a companion the dangers he has faced while walking alone in deserted regions of London: bobadil . . . they have assaulted me, some three, four, five, six of them together, as I have walked alone, in diverse skirts i’the town; . . . I hold it good policy, not to go disarmed, for, though I be skilful, I may bee oppressed with multitudes. edward knowell Ay, believe me, may you, sir: and . . . our whole nation should sustain the loss by it, if it were so. bobadil Alas, no: what’s a peculiar man, to a nation? Not seen. (IV.vii.38–52)

In this comic vision of a man ‘‘oppressed with multitudes’’ and ‘‘assaulted’’ by numbers—indeed, by a progressively increasing force of numbers—surely something of a cultural apprehension about the arts of calculation is on view. Bobadil’s recognition of his insignificance—his invisibility—adds urgency to Dee’s description of the mathematical wonders of Warwick’s locket—‘‘to seem many, being few, [and] to seem few, being many.’’ With its echo of this discourse, Jonson’s play hints at what Dee passes over: namely, the absorption of the ‘‘peculiar’’ body—the repository of all that is supposedly distinctive, particular, and individual—in the systems of reckoning that increasingly define modernity. As it stages a regime of the disciplined body in which materiality vies with abstraction, and even the singular body of its protagonist risks absorption by the aggregate, Tamburlaine seems to register a unease not unlike that suggested by Bobadil’s plangent speech. Thus as Marlowe’s play shows forces steadily laying waste to one enemy after another—as it shows its ‘‘serial killers’’ operating like the unstoppable fighting machine envisioned by Jonson’s Bobadil—Marlowe repeatedly hints at the way numerical thinking unexpectedly morphs into a spectacle of horror, in which, for example, human flesh can be imagined as undifferentiated multitude. Consider, for example, how quantification exists at the center of the atrocities imagined by Bajazeth in his haughty response to Tamburlaine, ‘‘Let thousands die, their slaughtered carcasses j Shall serve for walls and bulwarks to the rest (T1, 3.3.138–9), and by Techelles in his extraordinary description of the dead bodies of the conquered Babylonians, which includes ‘‘scientific’’ analysis of buoyancy and density: 110 For a related discussion of numbers as a source of bafflement in early modern England, see Mazzio, ‘‘The Three-Dimensional Self.’’

70

Martial Formations Thousands of men drowned in Asphaltis lake, Have made the water swell above the banks, And fishes fed by human carcasses, Amazed, swim up and down upon the waves, As when they swallow asafetida, Which makes them fleet aloft and gasp for air. (T2, 5.1.201–7)

Just as Tamburlaine’s invocation of ‘‘numbers more than infinite of men’’ may raise the possibility that numbers are somehow incommensurate with, or more potent than, men, so, too, in moments such as these, the play draws attention to a bewildering impasse between the matter of calculation and the matter of the flesh (T2, 2.2.18). As bodies are grotesquely transformed by warfare—as they are turned into walls, bulwarks, and, even, food for fish—numbers in Tamburlaine, far more spectacularly than in Jonson’s play, seem to take on a murderous life of their own. As I will argue in subsequent chapters, to take the traumatic matter of Elizabethan martial drama seriously may be to recognize the turn toward rationalities as itself symptomatic, part of an effort to master what threatens to overwhelm. For some time now, criticism has theorized the Renaissance stage as a spectacle of corporeality, a site where damaged and violated bodies were continually put on display. Clearly, as is plain from Marlowe’s extraordinary images of bodies breached by warfare, there is much in Tamburlaine to warrant such an understanding of the stage. Overlooked in this theorization, however, is the cultural work of the martial formations I have sought to recover here. Marlowe’s attention to the new military science—and particularly to the mathematical abstractions of the new military science—suggests how important it is to refine our understanding of embodied subjectivity in this period. Ironically, it is perhaps Marlowe’s text—a play rightly notorious for its scenes of bodily torments—that may speak most insistently to the ways in which the stage operated as a crucial site for the de-corporealization of the ‘‘peculiar’’ body, whose flesh is abstracted by modern regimes of calculation. As I make clear in the next chapter, it was left to other playwrights, including Shakespeare, to, as it were, bring this de-corporealized body home through the staging of scenes of English levies.

2 Spare Men and Great Ones Musters, Norms, and the Average Man in Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV In his classic study of the Shakespearean history play, E. M. W. Tillyard declared in 1944 that ‘‘From first to last Shakespeare was loyal to country life. He took it for granted as the norm, as the background before which the more formal or spectacular events were transacted.’’1 As it happens, the ‘‘country life’’ which inspired Tillyard’s almost reverential claim is the wonderfully Monty Pythonesque scene from 2 Henry IV in which Falstaff and two Gloucestershire justices, Shallow and Silence, together scrutinize a group of men assembled as potential soldiers.2 Before the scene concludes, it shows Falstaff sending most of these men off to war; it also shows him poking fun at them, secretly pocketing bribes, and (on this basis) publicly dismissing two men whom Shallow, at Falstaff ’s invitation, had chosen for the royal army. Most memorably, perhaps, the scene depicts Falstaff silencing Shallow’s meek protests with a punning disquisition on the virtues of spare men and the defects of great ones, a speech that wittily parodies Elizabethan precepts about how to appraise fitness for war: Will you tell me Master Shallow, how to choose a man? Care I for the limb, the thews [i.e., strength], the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit, Master Shallow . . . . O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones. (3.2.254–66).

Revisting this scene in the light of Tillyard’s comments, one is likely to be puzzled by how its portrayal of a corrupt captain, a dimwitted justice, and the five hapless men at the mercy of these two figures might be found evocative of a bucolic world that it is our ill fortune to have lost, as Tillyard implies in his account of Shakespeare’s text. At best, his gauzy idealization of a scene whose brutalities Orson Welles would later capture in the film Chimes at Midnight (1966) and his 1 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944), 302. 2 All quotations to Shakespeare’s plays are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. However, I depart from the Oxford text by using the name Sir John Falstaff (rather than Sir John Oldcastle) for the character who appears in the Henry IV plays.

72

Spare Men and Great Ones

claim to an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s loyalties might be described as quaint. Nevertheless, Tillyard has called attention to something important: this scene can instruct us as to what can be ‘‘[taken] . . . for granted as the norm’’ in Shakespeare’s play. Or rather, I would suggest that through its satirical portrait of the Gloucestershire levy, this scene can enable us to glimpse how Elizabethan militarism contributed to the emergence of the very concept of the ‘‘norm,’’ an idea that would, of course, later find powerful expression in nineteenth-century statistical thought. Put differently, the Gloucestershire scene, like Tamburlaine, registers a cultural preoccupation with the reconceptualization of the social body; while Marlowe’s play primarily negotiates mathematical abstractions, the Gloucestershire scene engages with epistemologies of a different order. More broadly, as I aim to show in this chapter, the evocation of levies in 2 Henry IV and its predecessor play 1 Henry IV is bound up with nascent forms of the ‘‘classificatory thinking’’ that Mary Poovey associates with late seventeenthcentury political and economic writers such as Sir William Petty, whose works privilege productivity and emphasize quantity over quality.3 For Poovey, such classificatory thinking holds in tension two ancient ways of thinking about the natural and social order: one has to do with description and the creation of a taxonomy of ‘‘discrete particulars,’’ and the other has to do with prescription of ‘‘value’’ to things that can be counted (16). Certainly, a fully consolidated epistemology like that which Poovey associates with the late seventeenth century is not legible between the lines of these two Shakespearean dramas. However, insofar as both plays do engage conceptions of the ‘‘norm’’ as well as related questions about how to keep track of individuals and arrange them into separate (and unequal) classes, both plays do suggest rudimentary forms of classificatory thinking.4 As I examine some key moments in the Henry IV plays—both of which were first staged and printed in London during the late 1590s when the 3 Mary Poovey, ‘‘The Social Constitution of Class: Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking,’’ in Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (eds), Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 49–56. Poovey cites Bacon and Hobbes as precursors and suggests that this discourse was consolidated in the writings of William Petty and Adam Smith. Following Poovey, I call upon the notion of ‘‘classificatory thinking’’ rather than Foucault’s related notion of ‘‘governmentality’’ because the latter concept, as Poovey writes, ‘‘stresses the end to which what I call classificatory thinking was put instead of the tensions written into the discourse as its practitioners attempted to advance that end’’ (49 n.4). 4 I invoke the language of class here as a ‘‘heuristic’’ rather than a ‘‘properly historical’’ category, to borrow David Scott Kastan’s language in ‘‘Is There a Class in This (Shakespearean) Text?’’ in Shakespeare after Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 149–64. I share Kastan’s view that the period’s ‘‘social vocabularies of ‘estate’ or ‘degree,’ while insisting on social differentiation on the basis of status rather than on the basis of income or occupation, no less powerfully testify to a system of social inequality that the concept of class would help articulate and analyze. Classes in the most precise economic definition perhaps can be said to come into being only within the social conditions of bourgeois production, but classes, in their abstract social sense, can be seen to have existed as long as social organization has permitted an unequal distribution of property, privilege, and power’’ (149–50). It is the Elizabethan instantiation of this ‘‘abstract social’’ sense of class that I seek to uncover in this chapter.

Spare Men and Great Ones

73

Crown was regularly ordering troop levies5—I aim not only to link the emergence of classificatory constructions to the militarization of the Elizabethan state; I also call attention to what I would argue was a profound cultural ambivalence toward this new way of knowing the world. If, as I suggested in Chapter 1, Elizabethan military mathematics helped to produce a de-materialized domain of the interchangeable—a world in which Jonson’s Bobadil rightly fears he will become invisible—the Henry IV plays explore the routine (and frequently text-dependent) processes that make such invisibility possible. At the same time, both Shakespearean dramas contemplate alternatives to such new regimes of rationality. Significantly, the plays do not locate alternatives in discourses of chivalry; that is, unlike some critics, I do not believe that they offer a narrative of chivalric distinction featuring a reformed Prince Hal. Rather, I would suggest that the plays’ resistance to the new regimes of rationality comes into being through the performance of a different kind of narrative—namely, one that might be termed the revenge of the mundane particular. Before turning again to Shakespeare, a few caveats and a brief rehearsal of some historical matters may be in order. First, I would note that, in order both to avoid anachronism and to foreground the structures of power on view in the drama, I do not use the more usual critical designation for the Gloucestershire scene—that is, the ‘‘recruiting’’ scene.6 As a look at the OED suggests, the sense of 5 For an overview of the supposed dates of composition and first performance, see the editor’s commentary in the Oxford Shakespeare. Printed in two quarto versions in 1598 (and in seven editions before the 1623 folio), 1 Henry IV is usually dated to 1596–7, while 2 Henry IV, which first appeared in print in 1598, is usually dated to 1597–8. For historical accounts of the levying of English troops, see the introduction to The Montagu Musters Book, A.D.1602–1623, ed. Joan Wake (Peterborough: Peterborough, 1935); Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966); Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2003), esp. 97–104; and Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare, 1511–1642 (London: Routledge, 2001), 82–113. See also the recent invaluable account of the London levies offered by Ian Archer, ‘‘The Burden of Taxation on Sixteenth-Century London,’’ The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 599–627, esp. 614–27, along with his extraordinarily detailed companion piece, the ‘‘Gazeteer of Military Levies from the City of London, 1509–1603,’’ which is available online at http://senior.keble.ox.ac.uk/fellows/extrapages/ iarcher/levies.htm. 6 Many scholars have offered valuable insights into Shakespeare’s rendering of Falstaff in these plays in the context of the widespread abuse and fraud by Elizabethan captains. For historical perspectives on such abuses, see, for example, Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 133; Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, esp. 13–50 and 155–60; and S. J. Stearns, ‘‘Conscription and English Society in the 1620s,’’ Journal of British Studies, 11 (1972), 1–23. The most detailed response to this scene and to the discourse of military selection by a literary critic is undoubtedly to be found in Paul Jorgensen’s Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), 120–68. For related critical discussions, which have influenced my reading of this scene, see William Empson’s discussion of Falstaff in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Charles Whitney’s discussion of Falstaff and the practice of impressment in ‘‘Festivity and Topicality in the Coventry Scene of I Henry IV,’’ English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 410–48; Harry Berger, Jr., ‘‘The Prince’s Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998), 40–73; and G. Geoffrey Langsam, Martial Books and Tudor Verse (New York: King’s Crown, 1951), 87–95. Although Jonathan Crewe’s ‘‘Reforming Prince Hal: The Sovereign Inheritor in 2 Henry IV,’’ Renaissance Drama, 21 (1990), 225–42, only touches briefly on what he calls the ‘‘Falstaff-Shallow-Silence’’ episodes, his insights into the ways in which Shallow is imagined have also figured importantly in my reading of the play.

74

Spare Men and Great Ones

‘‘recruit’’ as meaning ‘‘to strengthen or reinforce (an army, etc.) with fresh men or troops’’ did not enter the language until 1645, which, not insignificantly, was the year in which the New Model Army, England’s first official standing army, was organized by Parliament. It is not recruiting but rather mustering, the practice of gathering men in a county for inspection of numbers or for training, that Shakespeare depicts in the Gloucestershire scene—and that he refers to elsewhere in 2 Henry IV, including in the Induction in which Rumour grandly takes responsibility for the ‘‘fearful musters’’ that have uprooted the men of the country (Induction 12).7 Large formal assemblies known as general musters, which had been formally authorized by an English statute of 1558, usually happened once every four years over the course of a few days; they happened more frequently, however, in times of perceived danger. In 1588, for example, a muster brought out at least 40,000 trained soldiers throughout the country,8 while similar, if smaller in number, gatherings happened in response to the invasion scares of 1596 and 1599.9 Special musters, which might be limited to a single company and which focused on training, happened much more frequently. Significantly, it was as a result of one of the major military reforms undertaken by Elizabeth— namely the creation in the 1570s of trained bands—that musters began to be concerned with standards of selection, such as those to which Falstaff alludes in his response to Shallow.10 After the 1570s, in other words, local officials, such as lords lieutenant and commissioners of the muster in each shire, were required to report in their returns on all men eligible to serve—that is, all between the ages of sixteen and sixty under the rank of baron who were neither members of the clergy nor of the trained bands—and to indicate which were unable to serve, which were able, and which had been chosen for service. In addition to alluding to these practices surrounding the mustering of forces for home defense, the Gloucestershire scene in 2 Henry IV also clearly draws on the Elizabethan practices of mustering men for service abroad, something that happened with great frequency throughout the 1580s and 1590s as the Crown continually prevailed upon local communities to provide them with properly outfitted and equipped troops. Impressment for overseas service, did not, of course, originate with Elizabeth, but it has been argued that the practice was institutionalized during her reign and the difference between her approach to 7 For 2 Henry IV ’s most famous ‘‘muster’’ reference, see the soliloquy in which Falstaff describes alcohol summoning his vital spirits to war: ‘‘as a beacon, [sherry] gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart; who, great and puffed up with his revenue, doth any deed of courage’’ (4.2.104–9). 8 For discussion of these musters, see John S. Nolan’s essays, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ Journal of Military History, 58 (1994), 391–420, esp. 405, and ‘‘The Muster of 1588,’’ Albion, 23 (1991), 387–407. 9 As Archer’s ‘‘Gazeteer’’ no. 99 records, in July/August 1599, for example, the Privy Council twice ordered training sessions in London for some 3,000 men. 10 Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 91.

Spare Men and Great Ones

75

raising an army and that of her father is significant.11 To raise the huge armies that underwrote his 1544 invasion of France, Henry VIII at times authorized commissioners to press great numbers for a single, relatively brief expedition, such as the 4,000 levied for the defense of Boulogne; he also hired foreign mercenary forces and raised many English troops by a ‘‘quasi-feudal’’ system, whereby select landowners were responsible for raising retinues.12 By contrast, Elizabeth raised many of the soldiers she needed for the war in Ireland (and to a much lesser extent for service in the Low Countries and France) with the help of bureaucratic machinery that she and her Privy Council established. Thus between 1585 and 1602, her government routinely sent orders to county authorities to choose specified quantities of men for service abroad. As might be expected, the Crown’s demand for men escalated in the last years of the sixteenth century along with the intensity of the war effort. For example, it has been estimated that each year between 1585 and 1588, the city of London alone provided 610 men; between 1589 and 1594, it provided 870 men; and between 1597 and 1602, it provided 1,593 men—or more than two-and-a half times as many as it had demanded just a decade earlier.13 Against the more voluntarist connotations of the word ‘‘recruiting,’’ then, it is useful to recall that Shakespeare’s scene of inspection and selection is about apparatuses of power rather than trajectories of individual desire, about coercion rather than choice. Second, in focusing much of this chapter on the short scene in Gloucestershire, I am mindful of the verdict of the eighteenth-century commentator who denounced this ‘‘much too farcical’’ episode and who summed it up as follows: ‘‘the jests quaint, low, and laboured; many words; little meaning; and, upon the whole, exceedingly tedious.’’14 But I am also mindful of Patricia Parker’s acute observation that the so-called ‘‘marginal’’ scenes in Shakespeare—the scenes typically cut from stage productions and omitted from critical readings—‘‘are often the sites of the dismantling of what only looks whole without them.’’15 For all its low and labored jests, the Gloucestershire scene is, I would suggest, one such site of dismantling; as it focuses attention on the militarists’ ‘‘science’’ of managing men, it takes apart ideologies of social distinction, including the chivalric ideal that the plays so famously produce as an emblem of an outmoded, ‘‘Hotspurian’’ past. But, crucially, the Gloucestershire scene also points to the way the two plays dismantle the newer dispensation as well. Underlying the scene’s farce—and implicit in many moments elsewhere in the two plays—are traces of Elizabethan desires and anxieties about the ever-present imperative to produce expendable men and the men who would expend them and the new practices that legislated who would be placed on either side of this economic divide. 11 On this point, see, for example, Fissel, English Warfare, 85–113. 12 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 28–9. 13 Archer, ‘‘The Burden of Taxation,’’ 615. 14 Quoted in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Henry the Fourth, ed. Samuel Burdett Hemingway (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1936). 15 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16.

76

Spare Men and Great Ones I

My inquiry into how the practices of mustering and levying men are bound up with both classificatory thinking and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays begins by considering the Elizabethan texts about the selection and training of men for war to which the Gloucestershire scene alludes. Early modern military writers routinely declared that any man might be a soldier, that all English men possessed what one writer described as a ‘‘naturall strength of bodie, valore of minde, and aptnes of spirit,’’16 but their instructions on how to choose men for the wars belied this claim, for they routinely insisted on the need to instill in readers the capacity to discern the worth of individual men and to discriminate among them. The idea of promulgating principles of selection is, of course, fraught with irony when one considers the country’s at times desperate needs for troops and the regularity with which unwilling and poor men were pressed into service—witness the (not all that unusual) Privy Council order of April 1595 demanding that London’s vagrants be rounded up for service under Sir Francis Vere in the Low Countries or the emergency levy for the Calais expedition of 1596, which was carried out partly by locking churchgoers inside a London church on Easter Sunday.17 Nevertheless, it was a commonplace that the selection of the proper men for war mattered more than virtually any other duty a captain might be called upon to discharge. Indeed, one militarist went so far as to identify the selection of men for war as ‘‘the beginning, and first care, or at least act of warres.’’18 Thus militarists scrutinized the lowborn man from virtually every angle: Was a man of 40 ‘‘too aged’’ to be chosen for the wars? Was a boy of 16 too young? Were ‘‘countrie men, who are used to tille the grounde’’ better suited for war than those of the towns?19 Were men of the north of England fiercer than men of the south? Were shopkeepers less suited to war than husbandmen? Such were topics of fierce debate. A consensus emerged, however, on one matter: namely, that, to trained eyes, ‘‘sufficiency,’’ as it was termed, was legible on the body. Accordingly, the military treatises set out to train their readers’ eyes, providing detailed descriptions of ‘‘proper’’ shapes for martial men and directing their readers to attend to what Matthew Sutcliffe termed ‘‘the lineaments, and outward proportion of the parts’’ of the common man (M1r). As we may recall, it 16 Henry Knyvett, The Defence of the Realme, ed. Charles Hughes ([Oxford] Clarendon, 1906), 11. 17 On the levy of the London indigent, see Archer, ‘‘Gazeteer,’’ no. 81; on the Easter Sunday levy, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 193. 18 Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (London, 1593), M2r, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19 For discussions of these questions, see Raimond de Beccarie de Pavie Fourquevaux, Instructions for the warres, trans. Paul Ive (London, 1589); Niccolo Machiavelli, The arte of warre, trans. Peter Whitehorne (London, 1560); Vegetius, The Foure Bookes of Martiall Policye, trans. John Sadlier (London, 1572); and Matthew Sutcliffe, Practice. Further citations to these authors appear parenthetically in the text.

Spare Men and Great Ones

77

is precisely such descriptions that underlie Marlowe’s blazon of the Scythian warrior’s ‘‘long and sinewy’’ form in Part One of Tamburlaine. Much of this discourse was derived from John Sadler’s 1572 translation of The Foure Bookes of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century Roman treatise on warfare, which had been available in English manuscript treatises since the fifteenth century and which was a major source for Christine de Pizan’s Livre des faits d’armes et de chevallerie published in English translation in 1489–90.20 Suggesting that Vegetius’ work on Roman warfare remains relevant despite the great difference between Roman and sixteenth-century English military technology, Sadler invites his readers to ‘‘gather and choose out the best and chiefest pointes of all their knowledge, which nevertheless may be used so farre forth as shall seeme expedient, and as occasion may serve & time require.’’ Among the practical expertise on offer for Elizabethan readers was a chapter on how ‘‘To knowe by the countenaunce and making of the body whiche souldiours are like to prove good,’’ which reads in part as follows: He that wyll goe about to muster men, must be verye carefull that by the continuance, by the eyes, by the sure compacting and joyning of the lymmes, he chose them whiche may be able to perfourme the parte and dutie of souldiours. For not only in men, but also in horses and in dogges, the chiefest power is signified by many tokens . . . Let the young man therefore that shalbe a souldiour, not looke drowsely, let hym be straighte necked, broade brested, let his shoulders be well fleshe, let him have stro[n]g fyngers, longe armes, a gaunte belly, slender legges, the calfe and feete not to full of fleshe, but knitte faste with harde and stronge synowes. Fynding these tokens in a souldiour, you neade not greatly complayne for wante of tall stature. For more requisite it is that souldiours be stronge and valiant, then huge and great. (A3r)21

Implicit in Vegetius’ text are inklings of the two strands of modern classificatory thinking that Poovey has identified: namely, the descriptive work of taxonomy and the prescribing of value. Specifically, insofar as Vegetius is here concerned with ‘‘what souldiours are like to prove good,’’ he represents their bodies as a subcategory of a larger taxonomy or class of signifying bodies, a class encompassing not only men but also horses and dogs. Figuring male bodies through the language of characteristic marks or ‘‘tokens,’’ Vegetius, who also authored a work 20 On the history of this work and its enormous popularity throughout the medieval period, see Vegetius, Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, 2nd edn, trans. N. P. Milner, Translated Texts for Historians 16 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996); The Earliest English Translation of Vegetius’ De re military, ed. Geoffrey Lester, Middle English Texts 21 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universita¨tsverlag, 1988); and Christopher Allmand, ‘‘The De re militari of Vegetius in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,’’ in Corrine Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (eds), Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 15–28. 21 See also Fourquevaux’s 1589 text, which begins by noting that ‘‘not only in men, but also in horses and in dogges, the chiefest power is signified by many tokens,’’ and then goes on to allow that The best tokens to knows them by. . . are lively and quicke eyes, straight headded, high breasted, large shoulders, long armes, strong fingers, little bellied, great thighes, slender legges, and drie feete, all which poynts are comely in any man who so might finde them ordinarily: because he that is so shaped, cannot fayle to be nimble and strong. (D3v)

78

Spare Men and Great Ones

on cattle and horses, easily slips between comparison of men and beasts. His comments on bodies may seem merely entertaining, but in fact Elizabethan commentators routinely cited them. And, crucially, his appraisal of male ‘‘tokens’’ moved from the domain of classical ideal to contemporary social practice, as military writers linked his words to the bureaucratic apparatus of the Elizabethan state. Certainly, many militarists were eager to dispute Vegetius’ conclusions about the value of particular bodily features. Some, like Thomas Proctor, went so far as to question the wisdom of ‘‘sett[ing] downe a precyse order for the same by his shoulders, brest, armes, thyghes, feet, or composition of anie other parte of the [soldier’s] body. . . [for] the courage and mynde is as much to bee respected, as the bodye.’’22 But even as Elizabethan militarists disputed Vegetius’ specific guidelines, they affirmed the assumption underlying his words: namely, that men’s fitness for war might be judged by measurable standards. In assenting to the existence of a common standard—a norm—to be employed in the selection of soldiers, Elizabethan militarists may not seem to be doing anything remarkable. Yet, as Georges Canguilhem has influentially suggested, ideas of norms and the normal are in fact strikingly modern concepts, whose emergence is connected with the increasing influence in Western culture of (among other things) the arts of measurement and calculation that I discussed in Chapter 1.23 Indeed, in his study The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem directly connects a measuring instrument with the idea of the normal, noting that the Latin root of normal—norma—designates an instrument, the ‘‘T-square,’’ that is commonly used as a guide for drawing lines. From this etymology, so Canguilhem notes, one can get a sense of the normal as ‘‘that which bends neither to the right nor left, hence that which remains in a happy medium’’ (125). As Karma Lochrie has recently observed in a study that explores ‘‘prenormative’’ thought and medieval sexuality, Canguilhem’s account of the normal crucially insists on a fundamental incoherence in the modern concept.24 She describes this ambivalence, which is not unlike the tension between the descriptive and the prescriptive that I discussed earlier in relation to classificatory thinking, as follows: ‘‘On the one hand, the normal is that which is usual, in the sense of being most prevalent, most quantifiable as common, and most susceptible to averaging. On the other, it is a rule or standard, a type that defines an ideal as well as deviations from that ideal’’ (3). Further, as Lochrie also recounts, in the 1830s, this tension in the very idea of the norm found a resolution in a paradoxical fiction—namely the novel notion of ‘‘l’homme moyen’’ or the ‘‘average 22 As cited by Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, 135–6. 23 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 24 Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). For another provocative discussion of norms and normalcy, see Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995). Further citations appear parenthetically in the text.

Spare Men and Great Ones

79

man,’’ which was set out by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (6–10). Intriguingly, this idea of a man who embodies the average of all human features was derived from observation of the bodies of countless conscripted soldiers: having compiled an extensive series of measurements of these men (e.g., of height, weight, skull size), Quetelet came up with the notion that the ideal man would be a man who corresponded to the mean value of all the physical features he measured, the deviant, the one who deviated from this norm. As Lochrie underscores, this conflation of the normative and the ideal—which comes into being with the very concept of the norm—is utterly alien to medieval thought. Most importantly, it flies in the face of the medieval category of the natural, for the latter category, of course, places no premium on the measurable prevalence of a person or phenomenon. In a medieval world, so Lochrie reminds us, one might aspire to be virtuous, but one could not aspire to be normal. Could one desire to be normal in Elizabethan England? I would argue that, at least in the domain of the new militarism, one could indeed so desire, for while it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Elizabethan discussions of ‘‘good’’ bodies for warfare be read simply as instances of the average man avant la lettre, they do anticipate a modern world of normativity. That is, they invoke as a norm that which is, in effect, an ideal. As they imagine an endless line of English bodies lined up for inspection and possible selection, they imagine a rule by which these bodies can be placed into one of two classes—the good and the not good or, as they were sometimes described in early modern writings, the ‘‘sufficient’’ and the ‘‘unable.’’ The Elizabethan militarists obviously do not, like Quetelet, provide literal body measurements and establish a mean. Yet, as they contemplate the inspection of soldierly limbs and shoulders and the like, it seems clear that they are looking for—and finding—something in excess of the physical body. Behind such language would seem to be the proposition that with a properly trained appraising glance, what one will see is not so much a man awaiting judgment about his life and livelihood, but rather an abstract standard of sufficiency or value. The point to be made here, however, is not simply that the Elizabethan military treatises articulate social hierarchies (such as that between the man who inspects and the man who is subject to such inspection) but rather that, as they articulate these hierarchies, they help to constitute the classes they purport to describe. In setting out precepts for the evaluation of common men, in other words, such treatises don’t simply install a normative order for common soldiers, they also implicate their readers—that is, the men who would carry out the work of the levy or the administration of a variety of other military projects—in the discourse of the norm. Specifically, in their very mode of address to such individuals—to men who were enjoined, as one militarist put it, to see that their underlings were not only chosen but also ‘‘sorted, proportioned, armed, disciplined, and orderlie conducted’’25—they defined the typical captain in terms 25 Knyvett, The Defence of the Realme, 11–12.

80

Spare Men and Great Ones

of his ability to keep accurate records and to prudently manage men, money, and time. Thus, as was noted in Chapter 1, the captain is said to know how to carry out a range of calculations—for example, how to compute wages, how to determine the exact number of men needed to dig trenches or build fortifications, and how to calculate the precise amount of bread and beer required to feed an army housed in a garrison for a year.26 Equally important, he is said to keep detailed inventories and account books and to use press-money carefully. Accordingly, one might say that, with the modernization of the English militia and the advent of Elizabethan military science came a more precise imagining of the division of labor and a more consolidated discourse of manly thrift, a discourse that depended upon the availability of large numbers of men to be mustered, arrayed, set to work, and treated as fungible material. Here, one cannot overstate the particularities of this moment: for while lowborn men had always served in English armies and systems of social inequality long precede this era, it was the emergence of military professionalism in the early modern period that helped to make English common men legible as a kind of proto-national capital, a kind of wealth that might wisely, or unwisely, be spent.27 A martial discourse that combines ideas of the normative with such economic rationalities may at first glance appear alien to the Henry IV plays, whose militaristic ethos has frequently been identified with an ideal of chivalric masculinity embodied by Hotspur—the man who early in 1 Henry IV declares his ‘‘roan shall be [his] throne’’ (2.4.70)—and that is either achieved or calculatedly claimed by Hal before that play concludes.28 But I would suggest that the critical 26 See, for example, Thomas Digges and Leonard Digges, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, named Stratioticos (London, 1579 [repr. 1590]) and Robert Hitchcock, ‘‘A generall proportion and order of provision for a yere . . . to victual a garrison of one thousande souldiours,’’ in William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591). 27 On the emergence of military professionalism, see Maury D. Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army 1589–1609,’’ Armed Forces and Society, 1 (1975), 419–42, reprinted in The Structure of Violence: Armed Forces as Social Systems (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1977), 169–203. On English professionalism, see Michael Hattaway, ‘‘Blood is Their Argument: Men of War and Soldiers in Shakespeare and Others,’’ in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition, see the essays collected in The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed. D. J. B. Trim (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), especially Trim’s ‘‘Army, Society and Military Professionalism in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War,’’ 269–90, which challenges Feld’s influential claims about the Dutch army. 28 For a traditional reading of the place of the chivalric in the Henry IV plays see John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943). Among the recent discussions of the plays’ engagement with a discourse of chivalry, see, for example, R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), who says of 1 Henry IV, ‘‘There seems no doubt that Shakespeare’s sympathies in this play are with the aristocratic values of what Hal calls ‘chivalry’ (5.5.94), meaning knighthood or martial prowess, the word stemming from the French ‘cheval’ or horse’’ (93), as well as the persuasive analysis of Hal’s appropriation of Hotspur’s role at Shrewsbury in Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 160–85. See also Barbara Hodgdon’s valuable discussion of the neochivalric in her recent edition of The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), which emphasizes the importance of

Spare Men and Great Ones

81

focus on a (neo)chivalric world—whether in its ‘‘authentic’’ or debased form— often ensures that 2 Henry IV, including the Gloucestershire scene, is left out of the interpretive net, a habit that, as Jonathan Crewe has suggested, may be commonplace but is hardly desirable.29 Rather than read the plays as merely preoccupied with the chivalric and its absence, then, I would call attention to what they produce even as they are staging the loss or transmutation of chivalry. Consider, for example, Lady Percy’s elegiac description of her horse-loving husband in 2 Henry IV, which explicitly invokes a chivalric ethos. Hotspur, she says, was the man ‘‘by [whose] light . . . all the chivalry of England [did] move j To do brave acts’’ and ‘‘the glass j Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves’’ (2.3.19–21, 21–2). She continues: He had no legs that practiced not his gait; And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, Became the accents of the valiant; For those that could speak low and tardily Would turn their own perfection to abuse To seem like him. So that in speech, in gait, In diet, in affections of delight, In military rules, humours of blood, He was the mark and glass, copy and book, That fashioned others. (2.3.23–32)

Lady Percy’s speech conjures up a past golden age marked by a widespread aspiration to certain styles of speech and walking, dress and appetite, disposition and temperament, an age in which the chivalric ideal itself is imagined not only to be legible on the bodies of all England’s ‘‘noble youth,’’ but also to be itself as a kind of norm, a ‘‘copy and book, j That fashioned others.’’ In conjuring up the putative loss of this manly ideal of valiance—an absence that, as a number of critics have noted, is articulated long before Hotspur’s actual death—the passage thus symptomatically suggests that even the rhetoric of the chivalric itself is not immune from conceptions of the norm. Indeed, Hotspur is here imagined in the guise of a type—he is the copy-text that can be endlessly reproduced and transmitted. If the speech envisions a present moment in which chivalric distinction figures as an always already lost ideal, in other words, it also suggests a world preoccupied with fantasies of the endlessly reproducible man—the man who, to use an expression that dates from 1573, can ‘‘pass muster.’’30 More generally, one might say that far more than the Henry IV plays mourn the loss of a chivalric ethos—an ethos that, in fact, would persist even amidst the material ‘‘martial, individualistic values of lineage honor culture’’ and defines the new military science as part of an ‘‘Elizabethan Neochivalric Culture’’ (318–48). And finally, see Richard McCoy’s classic account of chivalry in Elizabethan politics in The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 29 Crewe, ‘‘Reforming Prince Hal,’’ 225–42. 30 OED, s.v. ‘‘Muster.’’

82

Spare Men and Great Ones

changes in warfare in the sixteenth century31—they represent the possibility of a world subject to new epistemological regimes. Put another way, they explore what it means that, as the thief Gadshill professes in 1 Henry IV, ‘‘ ‘homo’ is a common name to all men’’ (2.1.95). Significantly, the narrative of the English common man at the center of the Gloucestershire scene resonates with a narrative of English impressment served up to audiences in the 1590s in other plays such as Thomas Dekker’s city comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday or the two anonymous histories, The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine and the Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Strikingly, these dramas, which focus on the cobbler or shoemaker as the prototypical pressed man, share a concern with war not as a threat to life, but rather as a threat to economic livelihood.32 For example, in Locrine, a play that depicts invasion and civil warfare in ancient Britain, the impressment scene opens in a workplace where a cobbler, his new wife, and his assistant are cobbling shoes, drinking tankards of ale, and merrily singing a song about the pleasures of work.33 Noticing the presence of the Captain, the cobbler stops his singing and cheerily offers a sales pitch. In reply, the Captain shows him the press-money and says, ‘‘I came not to buy any shoes but to buy yourself. Come sir you must be a soldier in the king’s cause’’ (70). As the Captain enters the workshop and re-writes the terms of the business transaction so that the shoe and the cobbler become interchangeable, the scene foregrounds the period’s new market relations and the distinctly modern bargain that Elizabethan militarization called upon ‘‘common’’ men to strike: namely, the sale of their labor for a sixpence or a shilling.34 In this moment, so Locrine suggests, such men lose their hold on themselves: in an instant, they are transformed into someone else’s goods. From this perspective, then, impressment signifies not so much the end of a man’s labor as the beginning of a new kind of work relationship: one imagined in terms of a loss of autonomy and a subjection to a new order. Such scenes of once-independent workers being ‘‘sold’’ to the pressman may, of course, be read in the context of the profound shifts in England’s social and economic order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Foremost among the historical factors that render Locrine’s narrative intelligible to us today, in other 31 On this point, see Barbara Donagan, ‘‘Halcyon Days and the Literature of War: England’s Military Education before 1642,’’ Past and Present, 147 (May 1995); Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen, The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and D. J. B. Trim, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Chivalric Ethos. 32 Although the subject falls outside the parameters of this chapter it is important to note that women—especially disorderly women—could also be rendered legible through these discourses of conscription. For example, in The Famous Histories of Henry the Fifth, a woman who assaults her husband is threatened with the ‘‘manly’’ discipline of impressment. 33 See The Tragedy of Locrine, 1595, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Malone Society, 1908), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 34 On the subject of press-money, see Stephen J. Stearns, ‘‘Conscription and English Society in the 1620s,’’ Journal of British Studies, 11 (1972), 3. For a full account of the other expenses involved in providing for Elizabethan troops, see Archer, ‘‘Burden of Taxation.’’

Spare Men and Great Ones

83

words, is the English transition to capitalism, a transition that, as Richard Lachmann has noted, was remarkably fast compared with the rest of Europe.35 While Locrine’s cobbler is, of course, no peasant, his plight seems similar to that of the some 40% of English peasants who in the period from 1570 to 1640, according to Lachmann, were ‘‘proletarianized—that is, [they] lost their land rights and were forced to work for wages or for poor relief payments’’ (16). Much of this change was happening in the last decades of the century in the midst of the country’s intense militarization.36 In fact, it has been proposed that Elizabethan militarization contributed substantially to the increase in the numbers of individuals who sold their labor rather than their goods: as men who had been peasants or artisans were pressed into military service by entrepreneurial captains, they took up places as workers within a strict hierarchy of command, a position somewhat analogous to the wage laborer.37 And it is clear that such change did not pass unnoticed: one Elizabethan militarist, for example, observed with reference to the possibility of military service outside of England, ‘‘he that is once become a souldier is now no more his own man but he under whose government he is paid.’’38 Envisioning working men at the mercy of stern captains, these Elizabethan dramas frequently conflate impressment with the making of wage laborers and with the un-making of communities. This understanding of Elizabethan militarism as a force redefining labor as it defines war as work is crucial to the Henry IV plays. It not only helps to explain particular lines, such as Falstaff ’s offhand response to a young man who importunes him in 2 Henry IV: ‘‘What, a young knave and begging! Is there not wars? Is there not employment? Doth not the King lack subjects? Do not the rebels want 35 Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536–1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 16. See also Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). DuPlessis notes that proletarianization ‘‘was a gradual, uneven, and varied process that occurred largely within existing structures’’ (298). The literature on the transition is, of course, extensive. For a classic account, see R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985). 36 The percentage of peasants employed as wage laborers nearly tripled between the years 1550–67, when 12% of peasants were employed as wage laborers, and the first decade of the seventeenth century, when this figure rose to 35% (Lachmann, From Manor to Market, 17). 37 On the class position of soldiers in general, see Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society’’; Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 400; and Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Citing E. P. Thompson’s classic essay, ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline, Industrial Capitalism’’ [Past and Present, 38 (1967), 56–97], Hall draws a comparison between the ‘‘de-skilling process’’ that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the technological changes that marked early modern armies (235). See also V. G. Kiernan, ‘‘Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy,’’ in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (New York: Basic Books, 1965). Kiernan asserts that the ‘‘common soldier was almost the first proletarian. He had his wage disputes, his strikes, and lockouts . . . War had become the biggest industry in Europe. Every officer, collecting recruits for a government and making what he could out of their pay, was an entrepreneur, a businessman great or small’’ (131). On the politics of common men as laborers in the first Henriad, see Ronda Arab, ‘‘Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Labourer in 2 Henry VI,’’ Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2 (2005), 5–36. 38 Garrard, The arte of the warre, C4v.

84

Spare Men and Great Ones

soldiers?’’ (1.2.74–6).39 It also underlies the way the play’s male characters—both commoners and elites—are rendered legible in terms of a new economy of labor such that the Henry IV plays, much like Locrine, unequivocally equate men to be pressed with goods to be bought and sold.40 In 1 Henry IV, the initial locale for talk of conscription, is, of course, a place of business, the Eastcheap tavern, where Hal’s promise to ‘‘procure [Falstaff ] . . . a charge of foot’’—that is, to obtain for him the command of a group of foot soldiers (2.5.548)—is framed rather like a promise to make a purchase. In a later scene, Falstaff, standing alone on stage, describes the levy as a series of financial transactions that have made him rich, noting, for example, that he has ‘‘got in exchange of one hundred and fifty soldiers three hundred and odd pounds’’ (4.2.14–15). And still later, Falstaff responds to the charge that the men whom he has pressed straight from prison are ‘‘exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly’’ (4.2.69) by deploying the language of property: Claiming the men as his own, he drolly disclaims responsibility for their impoverished condition: ‘‘Faith, for their poverty, I know not where they had that, and for their bareness, I am sure they never learned that of me’’ (4.2.70–2). If 1 Henry IV relegates impressment to the margins—to the shady dealings that happen offstage—2 Henry IV, as I have begun to suggest, attends in detail to Elizabethan practices of merchandizing men and thereby brings together discourses of the economic and the normative. Indeed, the mustering scene heightens the sense of crisis that Locrine and the other plays rehearse in at least two ways. First, it is set in Gloucestershire, a place which in the sixteenth century was largely inhabited by peasant farmers and from which more Elizabethans were levied for the Irish wars than were levied from London or indeed any other county save Yorkshire, the region one might note, to which Falstaff is somewhat circuitously headed to meet Prince John.41 Second, the mustering scene protracts the crisis that the other impressment scenes stage. That is, while the other dramas imagine a kind of primal moment when a man is torn from his home and 39 See the discussion of these lines in Curtis Breight, Surveillance, Militarism, and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). They are, he says, ‘‘qualified by two big ironies: war as employment in an age of economic disaster for commoners; and the subversive implication that it does not really matter which side the poor ‘knave’ joins’’ (218). 40 On the social dynamics of a culture in transition from feudalism to a market society—a culture in which, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, ‘‘status relations are being transformed before our eyes into property relations’’—see Sharon O’Dair, ‘‘The Status of Class in Shakespeare; or Why Critics Love to Hate Capitalism,’’ in Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (eds), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 201–223, who cites Greenblatt at 202. For incisive recent readings of the Elizabethan market economy and the Henry IV plays, see the discussion of the tavern scenes in Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 160–85; Jesse M. Lander, ‘‘ ‘Crack’d Crowns’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in 1 Henry IV,’’ Shakespeare Studies, 30 (2002), 137–61; and Nina Levine, ‘‘Extending Credit in the Henry IV Plays,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 403–31. 41 For the population of Gloucestershire at this time, see A. J. Tawney and R. H. Tawney, ‘‘An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,’’ Economic History Review, 5 (1934), 25–64. The Tawneys suggest that wage-labor played only a ‘‘small part’’ in the region’s agricultural economy (52). On the destination of the Elizabethan conscripts, see Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 291.

Spare Men and Great Ones

85

transformed into someone else’s goods, the Gloucestershire one re-enacts that rupture five times as five men fend off Falstaff ’s inquiries about their parentage, their trade, and their health. While the Henry IV plays are well known for their pervasive concern with economic language and practices, it is less often noted that, as the mustering scene illustrates, this concern includes attention to a robust ‘‘traffic’’ in men. This trafficking is evident, for example, at the beginning of 1 Henry IV when the play focuses on ransom and underscores the need to establish ownership of the noble prisoners Hotspur has taken in battle. It is apparent also in 2 Henry IV when the play emphasizes a very different kind of exchange between Falstaff and Bardolph, who is the knight’s social inferior. Thus Falstaff responds to the news that Bardolph has gone horse-shopping at the Smithfield market by observing, perhaps with reference to past erotic transactions, ‘‘I bought him in Paul’s, and he’ll buy me a horse in Smithfield’’ (1.2.51–2). Given the way such commercial visions pervade the play, it is perhaps not surprising that the social order the plays install as normative is that on view in the Gloucestershire scene: one organized by both the getting and spending of common men.42 II As the Gloucestershire scene opens, Justices Shallow and Silent greet each other in front of Shallow’s house, reminisce about their days at the Inns of Court, discuss the market price of livestock, and, with the would-be conscripts, await the arrival of Falstaff and his assistants. The officials, taking up the classificatory thinking writ large in Vegetius’ treatise on the value of soldierly ‘‘tokens,’’ move easily from discussion of the price of ‘‘a good yoke of bullocks’’ (37) to discussion of the selection of good men. When Falstaff arrives, the sale begins: Falstaff ’s queries to the justices, ‘‘Have you provided me here half a dozen sufficient men?’’ (91–2); ‘‘Let me see them I beseech you’’ (94); and ‘‘Come, sir, which men shall I have?’’ (239), are those of the impatient customer. They are answered by Shallow, who, sounding like a merchant eager to proffer his wares, asks, ‘‘What think you, Sir John?’’ (101); ‘‘Do you like him Sir John?’’(131); and ‘‘Come, Sir John, which four shall you have?’’ (244). Shallow assumes the pose of a salesman throughout the scene, but as I noted earlier, he doesn’t matter to the transactions. Instead, Falstaff speaks in the imperative, overrules Shallow’s choices, and, accepts the bribes that account for the outcome of the levy. As the scene closes, he dispenses to one man a ‘‘tester’’ (274) or sixpence, a disbursement indicating 42 In this context, it may be worth noting that 2 Henry IV is unusual in the Shakespearean corpus for its double use of ‘‘man’’ as a verb (s.v. OED def. 3a.‘‘To provide (a person) with followers or attendants’’). Thus, Falstaff says of his page, ‘‘I was never manned with an agate till now’’ (1.2.16), and he follows his comment about his purchase of Bardolph with the observation, ‘‘An I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived’’ (1.2.52–3).

86

Spare Men and Great Ones

that the man had become a soldier and was no more his own. In addition, he orders Bardolph to ‘‘give the soldiers coats’’ (288), thus overseeing the sartorial change that signifies the scene’s movement towards the uniform and the normative. Key to this scene, though easily overlooked in one’s reading, is the muster roll that Shallow holds in his hand, for this stage property functions as a resonant signifier of the play’s engagement with the idea of the norm. Muster rolls have a long lineage, but they are quintessential Elizabethan texts: they proliferated in the 1580s and 1590s as the Privy Council increasingly sent orders to local officials to assemble men and determine their fitness for war, and English common men underwent inspection as never before. In the 1580s, the office of county muster master—which included the task of selecting, training, and inspecting troops— was permanently established and the Privy Council sent out model muster certificates on printed forms.43 In the late 1580s, muster masters used these texts to provide Elizabeth with information about as many as 130,000 men who were deemed to be available for the nation’s defense.44 Certainly, Elizabethans understood that such efforts were always imperfect. Consider, for instance, the moment at the start of 2 Henry IV, when Lord Bardolph, a member of Hotspur’s insurgent party, responds to his ally’s comment that their ‘‘present musters grow upon the file j To five and twenty thousand men of choice’’—that is, that, on paper, they have 25,000 men—with a nervous speech about the insubstantiality of names and the danger of equating inventories of men with actual bodies (1.3.9–10; 32–62). Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that in the popular imaginary, such inventories were often linked to an ideal of completion. Created, maintained, and passed around by county authorities and army functionaries, muster rolls and certificates were often described as ‘‘perfect’’ books in that their purpose was completeness of a certain kind: they were imagined to include data on every man who by statute could be called upon for military service.45 Muster masters who traveled with armies were urged to inspect their soldiers frequently and record their data as precisely as possible. According to William Garrard, who served in the Low Countries as well as in England, the muster master was charged with:

43 A. L. Rowse, The Expansion of Elizabethan England (London: Macmillan, 1955), 357; Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 40. On Elizabethan muster books, see Wake, ‘‘Introduction’’; Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia; and E. E. Rich, ‘‘The Population of Elizabethan England,’’ Economic History Review, N.S. 2 (1950), 247–65. 44 Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 390–1. 45 See, for example, John Harland (ed.), The Lancashire Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1859), which cites the 1589 orders to the lords lieutenant to: make a general view and muster of all the able men within the shire, from the age of sixteen and upwards; wherein they are to have an especial care to make their books so perfect as, upon any sudden occasion, they may from time to time make a present levy of such able and serviceable men as from the Lord Lieutenant shall be commanded and appointed. (xxxvii)

Spare Men and Great Ones

87

often reviewing of the bands, to see how every Captaines bande is furnished, noting the defaults from time to time, and the supplies: and therof to make a perfect booke, exhibiting the same at the paye day to the Treasurer . . . When he first takes the viewe and Muster of any band, he must not only write down the name of the Souldiour and his weapon, but also of what Countrie he is, the townes name where hee was borne and hys fathers name, and what yeeres hee is of: and finally, shall take speciall care to set downe, some speciall marke or cicatrice uppon his face, together with the collour of his haire and beard (334).

Not surprisingly, the clerical work of the musters, which was largely carried out by deputy lieutenants and village constables, led to the production of linear rather than narrative texts. Indeed, many—perhaps most—of these texts were simple inventories containing standard data including the man’s name and age; the branch of the service to which he was assigned; his assessments for weapons, armor, and money; and the amount paid out to him as ‘‘coat’’ or ‘‘conduct’’ money.46 But the inventory, as Patricia Parker has noted in an influential discussion of textual form, is ‘‘both a rhetorical and an economic instrument,’’ and, as such, it is well suited to express relations of domination.47 Enumerating the men of the realm, muster books clearly articulate unequal relations of power as they respond to the imperative to quantify and mark common men as the property of someone other than themselves. Given that the first census of the English population did not take place until 1801, these Elizabethan projects of data collection were not without consequence: as Penry Willams has observed, the Privy Council in 1600 ‘‘knew more about its subjects than had any of its predecessors.’’48 In an obvious sense, the muster rolls and muster books contributed to the consolidation of nonelite English men as an aggregate population: however irregular and eccentric their production may have been, they were vital to the social process of constituting an abstract social body. Francis Bacon likened the data contained in muster books to that contained in ‘‘Carts and Mappes,’’ and his analogy is suggestive.49 Just as Elizabethan cartographers and chorographers attempted to assert control over the lesser-known portions of the kingdom by inscribing unfamiliar localities in their texts, so, too, muster masters took possession of England by recording data on common men.50 One of the most compendious muster books of the early modern period was in fact kept by a chorographer, John Smith of North Nibley, who in the early 46 See Wake, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to which I am indebted for my account of muster books. 47 See Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 150. 48 As quoted in Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 416. 49 The exact quotation is ‘‘The population may appeare by Musters, and the number and greatnesse of Cities and Towns by Carts and Mappes.’’ See Francis Bacon, ‘‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,’’ in A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1965), 21. 50 For a classic discussion of the relationship between map-making and discourses of English nationhood, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

88

Spare Men and Great Ones

seventeenth century composed a three-volume, 900-page inventory of the men of, of all places, Gloucestershire.51 In this extraordinary work, Smith named those men whom he deemed unfit to serve, but focused on those men he found to be ‘‘able,’’ ‘‘sufficient,’’ and ‘‘in body fit.’’ He listed the name and occupation of each such man along with a code indicating the man’s age (e.g., ‘‘about Twenty,’’ ‘‘about ‘‘forty,’’ or ‘‘betweene fyfty and threescore’’) and the military occupation that best suited his stature (e.g., ‘‘of the tallest stature fit to make a pikeman,’’ ‘‘of a middle stature for to make a musketeer,’’ and so on). Clearly, it would be impossible to disentangle such a book from an emergent ideology that defined one segment of the population as expendable. But it would also be a mistake, I think, to see the muster book as nothing more than a disciplinary text, nothing more than an instrument of domination. To do so, I think would be to miss the sense of perverse excess produced by the text’s very adherence to the discipline of the norm. Reading Smith’s work, one wonders about the delights it may have yielded to its maker and early readers: specifically, the pleasures of classifying men according to a standard, the pleasures of seeing by means of a norm, and, perhaps most importantly, the pleasures of seeing how detail can, in effect, overwhelm the norm. By juxtaposing Smith’s overgrown text and the Gloucestershire scene, I aim to suggest the limits of more purely historicist readings of the latter, readings that focus on the question of the scene’s accuracy and on the likelihood that the play’s first audiences would have seen in Falstaff a familiar image of military corruption. Such readings tend to overlook the scene’s attention to an abundance of discrete particulars, an abundance similarly on view in Smith’s muster book. What the play’s staging of particularity underscores, I would argue, is that the Gloucestershire scene—again, much like Smith’s muster book—enacts a kind of stubborn resistance to the regime of the normative precisely through a performance of the name. At the center of the Gloucestershire scene are five woefully inadequate common men—Ralph Mouldy, Simon Shadow, Francis Feeble, Peter Bullcalf, and Thomas Wart—none of whom embodies a desire to serve: one explicitly (albeit unsuccessfully) resists; two offer bribes; and the two who fail to resist, Shadow and Feeble, are represented as devoid of language and of will: thus Shadow replies to Shallow’s interrogation with a mere six words, while the more voluble Feeble responds to the levy by declaring, ‘‘By my troth, I care not. A man can die but once’’ (232). Lacking the ‘‘sufficiency’’ that Smith sees in the men of Gloucestershire, most of these men—to judge by their names—are the antithesis of the strong commoners who constitute the normative order of the military treatises. Indeed, the play’s insistence on a relationship of identity between the body of the commoner and the deficient name he bears accounts for much of the comedy in 51 See the readily available printed edition of this manuscript, The Names and Surnames of all the Able and Sufficient Men in Body Fit for His Majesty’s Service in the Wars within . . . Gloucestershire in August 1608 (London: H. Southen, 1902).

Spare Men and Great Ones

89

this scene. While the names of others in the play may invite the audience’s laughter—Silence is silent and Shallow is shallow—only the names of the conscripts become the target of onstage wordplay. Thus, as Shallow calls the roll, Falstaff makes explicit the connection between name and body: identifying the man with the decay or disease or emptiness signified by his name, he emphasizes the man’s inability to conform to the military norm, indeed his pathology. Consider, for example, the following encounter in which Falstaff, rather like Garrard’s muster master, fixes his gaze on the physical particularities of one would-be recruit: shallow Where’s the roll, where’s the roll, where’s the roll? Let me see, let me see, let me see; so, so, so, so, so. Yea, marry, sir: ‘Ralph Mouldy’.[To Silence] Let them appear as I call, let them do so, let them do so. Let me see, [calls] where is Mouldy? [Enter Mouldy] mouldy Here, an’t please you. shallow What think you, Sir John? A good-limbed fellow, young, strong, and of good friends. sir john Is thy name Mouldy? mouldy Yea, and’t please you. sir john ’Tis the more time thou wert used. shallow Ha, ha, ha, most excellent, i’ faith! Things that are mouldy lack use. (95–107)

Throughout the scene Shallow’s pleonastic rhetoric ensures that impressment is figured as a process of endless—and senseless—enumeration. When Mouldy objects to the ‘‘use’’ to which he has been assigned and protests that ‘‘there are other men fitter to go out’’ than he, Falstaff silences him with a harsh pun: ‘‘You shall go, Mouldy; it is time you were spent’’ (115–16). Similarly, Falstaff calls upon the ‘‘natural’’ relationship between name and identity to teach Simon Shadow a lesson about his proper place. shallow [calls] Where’s Shadow? [Enter Shadow] shadow Here, sir. sir john Shadow, whose son art thou? shadow My mother’s son, sir. sir john Thy mother’s son! Like enough, and thy father’s shadow. So the son of the female is the shadow of the male—it is often so indeed—but not of the father’s substance. shallow Do you like him, Sir John? sir john Shadow will serve for summer. Prick him, for we have a number of shadows fill up the muster book. (123–33)

Clearly, part of what is being staged in this scene is an exploration of the point at which names and things converge. Just as the command to ‘‘prick’’ Shadow approximates a performative utterance—that is, a statement that is by itself an act—so, too, the puns seem to articulate the desire to reduce Shadow to his name,

90

Spare Men and Great Ones

indeed, to a kind of nothingness.52 But paradoxically, even as Falstaff puns on the name and insists that Shallow be ‘‘pricked’’—that his name be marked off in the muster list to indicate that he has been pressed—he multiplies the meanings of Shallow’s name, suggesting that the conscript is at once something without substance, an emaciated man, a poor copy of his father, and a character in whose name Falstaff will secretly amass pay. Through such labored jests, the scene rehearses the muster book’s willful excess of textuality, which suggests that Shadow need not be subsumed by the name—or the norm—but rather has the potential to proliferate beyond the classificatory regimes that would contain him. Significantly, the play also performs a resistance to the normative in what may be one of the Gloucestershire scene’s most risible moments—namely, that in which Wart, whom Falstaff describes as ‘‘little, lean, old, chapped, [and] bald’’ (272), tries to make do with a big weapon that Falstaff has had placed in his hand. Falstaff ’s orchestration of Wart’s movements with the caliver—a three-anda-half-foot-long firearm that was one of the standard weapons of the late Elizabethan infantry—brings to the playhouse, however parodically, the discourse of docile bodies implicit in the new science of drill. That is, through the hilarious encounter between Wart and Falstaff, the play pointedly alludes to contemporary treatises that articulated the art of matching weapons and bodies and that held out a vision of uniformly competent men—the notion that, as one writer imagined it, ‘‘if a man beinge blyndefoulde shoulde pricke eny of them, he mighte be fownde verie fitte & serviceable.’’53 At the same time, the scene satirically evokes contemporary accounts of how to be an exemplary captain, such as Gyles Clayton’s admonition that men must learn to control the movements of their soldiers’ legs, faces, arms, hands, and even fingers: [captains must teach soldiers how] to march, to charge and discharge with a fayre retreit, not touching one another, keeping their faces upon the enemies: and in raine or moiste weather to hould their Peece under their arme, with the touch-hole of their Peece close under their armehole, their match being fyred betweene their fingers in the palme of their hande, so that they shall be ready at every suddaine.54

Staged at a time when, as one military historian has noted, English manual drill was both ‘‘elaborate’’ and ‘‘frequently practiced’’,55 the spectacle of Wart’s drill turns on its head the militarists’ vision of the vigorous, lowborn man under the sway of the new disciplinary regimes. This was a vision that had been realized most impressively in the Low Countries where Maurice of Nassau had by the 1590s instituted a series of ‘‘scientific’’ reforms that turned the Dutch forces into 52 As an anonymous reader for the press has suggested, this scene of pricking finds an echo in the opening scene of Act 4 of Julius Caesar in which Antony, who carries papers on which names have been inscribed, declares, ‘‘These many, then, shall die; their names are pricked’’ (4.1.1). 53 As cited by Boynton, Elizabethan Militia. 54 Gyles Clayton, The Approved order of martiall discipline (London, 1591), D2v. 55 Harald Kleinschmidt, ‘‘Using the Gun: Manual Drill and the Proliferation of Portable Firearms,’’ Journal of Military History, 63 (1999), 601–29.

Spare Men and Great Ones

91

the ‘‘first modern professional army.’’56 At the end of the sixteenth century, England sent thousands of soldiers to the Low Countries, where they were trained in the new systems of tactics and rationalized standards, including, for example, the use of words of command for drill and the technique of combining ordered squares or rectangles of men with orchestrated maneuvers that replaced one line with another.57 This new style of militarism, which was marked by its extraordinary concern with the proper handling of weapons, is memorialized in works such as Jacob de Gheyn’s The Exercise of Armes for Caliures, Muskettes and Pikes (1608), which consists largely of engravings in which a soldier demonstrates some 200 different movements and postures ‘‘for to shewe . . . the better unto their yong or untrayned souldiers the playne and perfett maner to handle these armes’’ (t.p.).58 The contrast between de Gheyn’s work, which had more than 40 plates demonstrating the appropriate postures and movements for this weapon, and the Gloucestershire scene could not be more stark, for in the Shakespearean text the men ostensibly in charge of the exercise cannot even agree whether the soldier’s display demonstrates competence. While Falstaff, who has not received a bribe from Wart, has an obvious self-interest in declaring Wart’s performance to be ‘‘exceeding good’’ (271), Shallow is unequivocal in his disagreement, ‘‘He is not his craft’s master; he doth not do it right’’ (275–6). Moreover, Shallow’s difference of opinion quickly leads to another performance of drill as Shallow energetically re-enacts a performance he recalls witnessing as a youth in London’s famous training ground: I remember at Mile-End Green, when I lay at Clement’s Inn—I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show—there was a little quiver fellow, and a would manage you his piece thus, and a would about and about, and come you in and come you in. ‘‘Ra-ta-ta!’’ would a say; ‘‘Bounce!’’ would a say; and away again would a go; and again would a come. I shall ne’er see such a fellow. (276–83)

What’s striking about this passage—one which seems to conflate the role play of an archery pageant or ‘‘show’’ with the goings-on on a military training ground— is the way it disavows the main premise that underlies the ‘‘science’’ of drill. Insisting on the singularity of the memorable performance of yore and thus on the impossibility of ever witnessing such a remarkable sight again, Shallow’s speech and the accompanying performance to which the speech refers repudiate the notion of drill as a series of uniform and infinitely repeatable movements. Indeed, with its exclamatory language of ‘‘Ra-ta-ta!’’ and ‘‘Bounce!’’ the speech even seems to send up what was in fact one of the radically new features of 56 Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society,’’ 171. 57 On the circulation of English men into the armies of the Low Countries, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 258–9. 58 On de Gheyn’s work as well as the significance of the Maurician reforms, see Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society’’; Kleinschmidt, ‘‘Using the Gun’’; Roger B. Manning, ‘‘Prince Maurice’s School of War: British Swordsmen and the Dutch,’’ War and Society, 25 (May 2006), 1–19; and Trim, ‘‘Army, Society and Military Professionalism in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War.’’

92

Spare Men and Great Ones

military drill—namely, an insistence that specific words of command be attached to particular movements, a practice that the Dutch army had established in a precise way only in 1597.59 Shallow’s speech and performance thus emphasize what the spectacle of Wart’s drill had already implied. Instead of mocking the lowborn men for their putative deficiency, the scene offers the more radical possibility of a world in which one singular performance instantly generates another and each man’s drill is wholly and idiosyncratically his own. III While the play’s conjuring up of this world of riotous particularity in Gloucestershire certainly disrupts the satirical impulses of this scene, it would be wrong to conclude that 2 Henry IV represents Gloucestershire as a utopian space, a site wonderfully free of rules. Rather, given that, as Georges Canguilhem has noted, ‘‘It is in the nature of the normative that its beginning lies in its infraction’’ (242), the scene may have had the odd effect of inciting in its first audiences a desire for the norm, for that which regulates, for the making of rules. Accordingly, what the scene may have underscored for Elizabethan playgoers more than anything else is that Falstaff is unwilling or unable to understand such rules—specifically, the economic modes of rationality emerging in early modern culture. In other words, what makes Falstaff ’s language interesting in the Gloucestershire scene is not so much that it reveals that he sees the men as merchandise, but rather that it shows that he fails to see in ‘‘his’’ merchandise something other than a consumable good. In this respect, the Gloucestershire scene might be read as a return to the Falstaff of 1 Henry IV—that is, to the captain who, in a soliloquy at the end of 1 Henry IV, announces ‘‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life’’ (5.3.35–8). As is suggested by Falstaff ’s description of his soldiers as ‘‘peppered’’—that is, as men who have been ‘‘sprinkled’’ with gunshot as a meal might be seasoned with pepper—the play’s military scenes, no less than the tavern scenes, insist upon Falstaff ’s immoderate appetite. Such consumption may yield him a profit, but the Gloucestershire scene suggests that such consumption is an ‘‘infraction’’ in Canguilhem’s sense, for it goes against the emergent classificatory logic of capital. As the play calls attention to Falstaff ’s transactions in Gloucestershire, then, it suggests that he fails to grasp that men’s bodies potentially offer something more than the money he collects by using them up: to those who would exploit them, lowborn men offer that much more valuable thing, their labor power, which holds the promise of value continually being produced for nothing. 59 Feld, ‘‘Middle Class Society,’’ 178.

Spare Men and Great Ones

93

Insofar as there is ideological conflict underlying the comedy in Gloucestershire—an infraction of the normative—then the Henry IV plays might seem to negotiate this conflict through Hotspur, the martial man who is born rather than made, as is underscored by King Henry’s description of him in 1 Henry IV as ‘‘Mars in swaddling-clothes’’ and an ‘‘infant warrior’’ (3.2.112–13). And yet, however much the plays may hold Hotspur out as an ideal, it is hard to read the chivalric warrior as representing a ‘‘solution’’ to the problem it poses in Gloucestershire, for Hotspur, too, is clearly out of sync with what the plays posit as the new proto-capitalistic order of things. Even before 1 Henry IV offers audiences Lady Percy’s lament for her husband, after all, it has already infused Hotspur with an aura of nostalgia. Indeed, as John Dover Wilson suggested many years ago, Hotspur embodies ‘‘Chivalry, of the old anarchic kind.’’60 An improvident warrior who leads his men to battle with the cry ‘‘die all, die merrily’’ (4.1.135), Hotspur is imagined as, in some respects, remarkably similar to the fat knight who leads his ragamuffins where they are peppered. Together, the two men are made to speak a language of disordered extravagance and to stand opposed to the emergent norm of husbandry and rational expenditure. Rather than Hotspur, it is Hal who represents a kind of solution to the conflict it stages in the mustering scene; not only is he positioned as a kind of middle man—a mean—between the two extremes of Hotspur and Falstaff, but, as many critics have noted, he, unlike them, speaks the language of nascent capitalism. Shakespeare’s narrative about the redemption of a son is, as Jonathan Goldberg has brilliantly observed in his discussion of the Henriad, fundamentally an economic narrative: thus Hal’s ‘‘reformation’’ implies his embrace of habits of thrift and industry, and his arrival on the throne coincides with his being ‘‘written into the economies of an emerging middle class.’’61 The play famously shows Hal calling attention to these economies in 1 Henry IV when he uses the language of accounting to explain to the King his relationship with Hotspur: Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up, Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(3.2.147–52)

As this language of ‘‘factors’’ and ‘‘engrossments,’’ ‘‘accounts’’ and ‘‘reckonings’’ emphasizes, Hal is imagined not only as alert to the interests of the middling sort; he is also depicted as conversant with the archive of documents upholding such financial interests, the texts ensuring that common men become visible as 60 Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, 17; emphasis mine. 61 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 160. See also Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, who explores the language of engrossing and the punning on Falstaff as a gross companion (164).

94

Spare Men and Great Ones

commodities. More broadly, what the tavern scenes in both Henry IV plays point to is a new text-based market economy of abundant commodification, one that, as I will suggest in more detail below, also requires new norms for the production and reproduction of labor power. If the Gloucestershire scene depicts a realm in which it is possible for even profligate captains like Falstaff to amass wealth by the ‘‘spending’’ of men, the tavern scenes evoke a more ordered economy in which Hal is set forth as a supremely efficient manager of men. While the notion that Hal becomes increasingly managerial as the plays unfold has become a critical commonplace, the connection between Hal’s managerial mode and the demands of the new militarism bears emphasizing.62 It is thus noteworthy that when the play shows Hal imagining Hotspur as a factor in his employ who can be called to account, it situates him in a world of clerical functionaries, such as the men whom captains charged with the ‘‘carefull keeping of . . . accounts.’’63 Even when the play stages Hal in his comic, ostensibly reckless mode, it links him to a discourse of careful bookkeeping. Consider, for example, the way in which in a tavern scene Hal is depicted as steadfastly correcting Falstaff’s calculations as to the number of men in buckram he has encountered. Similarly, the scene showing Hal’s satirical portrait of Hotspur at home with his wife emphatically links Hal to a narrative about the keeping of accounts: I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the North—he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’ ‘O my sweet Harry,’ says she, ‘how many hast thou killed today?’ ‘Give my roan horse a drench,’ says he, and answers, ‘Some fourteen,’ an hour after; ‘a trifle, a trifle.’ (2.5.102–9)

Depicting Hal’s performance in the role of a workaholic who continually enumerates his labors, the play underscores Hal’s proximity to such calculative rationalities. Put differently, for all its comedy, Hal’s send-up of Hotspur nevertheless characterizes Hal’s world as one in which accounts—and casualty figures—matter. Indeed, in Hal’s rendering of warfare, there are no chivalrous knights in shining armor, only extraordinarily industrious laborers attuned to production quotas. In 2 Henry IV, the tavern scenes emphasize Hal’s interest in the practices of manly management by stressing his desire to appropriate all that is common. Significantly, as is clear from the scene in which Hal converses with Ned Poins, 62 For another instance of this managerial man, see the discussion of The Duchess of Malfi in Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For Rose, Webster’s Antonio is a representative new man in a neofeudal regime, for ‘‘his valuable skills are administrative rather than military; and . . . his managerial abilities match those that became increasingly important to upwardly mobile men in sixteenth-century England, men who sought and attained advancement at court through education and achievement, rather than assuming elite status as a birthright’’ (158). As I have tried to suggest, Rose’s distinction between administrative and military skills in Jacobean culture has little purchase in the Henry IV plays, where militarism is understood in part through bureaucratic administration. 63 Clayton, Approved order, D1v.

Spare Men and Great Ones

95

one of his tavern companions, about his plebian taste for small beer, the play aligns Hal’s ‘‘greatness’’ with his mastery of particulars: Belike then my appetite was not princely got; for, by my troth, I do now remember the poor creature small beer. But indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness. What a disgrace it is for me to remember thy name! Or to know thy face tomorrow! Or to take note how many pair of silk stockings thou hast—videlicet these, and those that were thy peach-coloured ones! Or to bear the inventory of thy shirts—as one for superfluity, and another for use. (2.2.9–18).

Insisting upon his ‘‘greatness,’’ Hal summons up his royal status. However, his speech—with its references to his skill at remembering names and faces and stockings and shirts—also calls attention to his eye for detail and his capacity to distinguish between men. Such a skill stands out in the world of this play because it is a world nearly overrun by particularity: as Stephen Greenblatt has remarked, the play produces ‘‘a sense of constriction that is only intensified by the obsessive enumeration of details.’’64 Evoking Hal as a master of the inventory, insisting on his knowledge of the particularities of men ‘‘beneath’’ him, the play suggests that he is uniquely suited to rule over a world filled with the clutter of the common people. Crucially, as it links Hal to knowledge of names and faces, the play also links him to a modern discourse of knowledge as power and to the larger normative projects that the musters represent, namely: the amassing of data about common men and the concomitant creation of a class of men whose individuality, in effect, can’t be seen. While it is often said that 2 Henry IV removes Hal from the world of war that looms so large in 1 Henry IV,65 I would argue that this is not the case, for even as 2 Henry IV locates Hal in the tavern world, it continues to connect him with discourses of calculation that are rooted in military science. Accordingly, if, as Steven Mullaney influentially suggested, the tavern functions as a kind of laboratory for Hal, a place where he learns ‘‘strange tongues’’ and ‘‘rehearses’’ strategies of rule, then perhaps what is on view in both parts of the play is not all that different from what is depicted in the Gloucestershire scene—namely, an effort to demarcate and to govern different classes of men.66 This effort is perhaps most obvious in a scene in 1 Henry IV in which Hal encounters Francis, a tapster who gives him a pennyworth of sugar. Hal tells Poins that he has devised a scheme to amuse himself and torment the tapster: instructing Poins to call out for Francis again and again, Hal engages Francis in conversation, questioning him 64 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Invisible Bullets,’’ in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 53. 65 See, for example, Foakes’s description of Hal at the end of 2 Henry IV: ‘‘Prince Hal, sanitized by being separated from his old companions, dissociated from corruption, from war, and from the political deceptions practiced by his brother Prince John, ascends to the throne, with a vision of ideal civil government under king, parliament, and good counsel’’ (96). 66 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 60–87.

96

Spare Men and Great Ones

about his age and his loyalty to his ‘‘indenture’’ (2.4.46), promising him a thousand pounds in return for the sugar, and asking him whether he will rob his master. The comedy, such as it is, inheres in Hal’s ability to set Francis in motion, to wind him up like a mechanical toy so that he runs to and fro, unsure of which command to follow and unable to say anything but ‘‘anon, anon.’’ Once again, the play enters the realm of farce; indeed, the scene appears to epitomize Henri Bergson’s famous claim that the ‘‘comic consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living.’’67 Significantly, this tavern scene not only enables us to see the sadistic pleasure Hal takes in managing the physical movements of the lowly tapster, it also suggests that Hal understands the labor economy in which Francis participates. In this regard, consider the words with which Hal dismisses Francis, cautionary words about the dangers of deserting his tavern post: prince harry Why, then, your brown bastard is your only drink! For look you, Francis, your white canvas doublet will sully. In Barbary, sir, it cannot come to so much. francis What, sir? poins (within) Francis! prince harry Away, you rogue! Dost thou hear them call? (2.5.72–9)

For Stephen Greenblatt, Hal’s comments are but ‘‘a few obscure words calculated to return Francis to his trade without enabling him to understand why he must return to it.’’68 To an early modern audience, however, the link between Hal’s talk of sugar sales and his talk of Barbary may have been obvious rather than obscure, for sugar was a key commodity of the early modern slave trade and Barbary was the region from which the slaves used in Portugal’s sugar mills were transported. Revising an Elizabethan commonplace about the impossibility of washing the Ethiope white, Hal, in his parting comment to Francis, evokes an image of the white-doubleted tapster being sullied by contact with Barbary, thus reminding the tapster of the privilege of whiteness and of his good fortune in escaping such a fate.69 Hal’s assertion of his authority over Francis—which includes his insinuation that the English tapster has a better life than the Barbary slave—evokes a normative order in which the tenuous freedom of lowborn English laborers must be supplemented by the ‘‘privilege’’ of whiteness. Much like William Harrison’s The Description of England, which includes in its taxonomic description of the ‘‘fourth and last sort of people’’ the proud declaration that slaves and bondsmen are unknown in 67 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911). See also Greenblatt, ‘‘Invisible Bullets,’’ who calls attention to the ‘‘Bergsonian comedy. . . [that] resides in Hal’s exposing a drastic reduction of human possibility’’ (44). 68 Greenblatt, ‘‘Invisible Bullets,’’ 44. 69 For important discussions of the image of the white Ethiope, see Karen Newman, ‘‘ ‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,’’ in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1987), and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 62–122.

Spare Men and Great Ones

97

England, Hal’s speech invokes the horrors of African enslavement to articulate the supposed freedom of the English man.70 Moreover, the speech may also bring to mind earlier remarks by Falstaff and Hal, which similarly appear to yoke together discourses of English service and African servitude. Specifically, in 2 Henry IV, Falstaff says to his page, ‘‘Thou whoreson mandrake, thou are fitter to be worn in my cap than to wait at my heels. I was never manned with an agate till now, but I will set you neither in gold nor silver’’ (1.2.14–17), and Hal responds to the sight of this page by remarking that Falstaff ‘‘had [the page] from me Christian, and look if the fat villain have not transformed him ape’’ (2.2.63–5). Hal’s comment, which is typically glossed as a disparaging reference to the apparel in which Falstaff has apparently dressed his page, may also be read as a reproach about Falstaff’s treatment of the boy as an object of display rather than as a worker. Moreover, it is plausible that Hal’s simian language bears racial meanings; that is, the line may be positing an equation between an extravagantly appareled page and the lavishly dressed African boys, whom fashionable English aristocrats had begun to maintain as status symbols and whose image had begun to appear on English jewelry and other objects.71 Indeed, FalstaV ’s description of the page as an ‘‘agate’’ and his evocation of gold and silver settings may bring to mind the Elizabethan fashion for cameos featuring the heads of Africans, such as the ‘‘broache with a very fair Agott like a Blackamore enameled all white about the said agott’’ described in a jeweler’s inventory from 1576.72 Rejecting the notion of Falstaff ’s page as merely a decorative object, Hal implicitly seems to read the boy as a worker. Rejecting the world of Barbary slaves and African servants, he also seems to imply that the labors of the elite must, properly, be carried out by unadorned, white Englishmen—men like the simple tapster of whom he is so contemptuous. In short, Hal’s speech might be read as an articulation of the play’s normative order, for it summons up, as though in a line, a class of manual laborers who might be read as a precursor to the English working class: in this world, the ‘‘free’’ laborer is positioned as the middleman in contrast to the slave and the servant. Moreover, when one considers Francis alongside Wart, one might say that in this tavern scene, as in the Gloucestershire scene, a would-be automaton emerges as a kind of norm, an average man. Subject to an ‘‘indenture’’—significantly, a word that denotes both a military contract and a contract for apprenticeship—as well as to the insistent and derogatory acts of naming involved in Hal’s game, Francis in fact bears a 70 See William Harrison, The Description of England in volume 1 of Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1587; rpt. London: J. Johnson et al., 1808), 289. 71 For a discussion of the era’s simian language and racial ideology, see Kim F. Hall, ‘‘ ‘Troubling Doubles’: Apes, Africans, and Blackface in Mr Moore’s Revels,’’ in Joyce Green MacDonald (ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 120–44. On English connections with the traffic in African slaves and the fashion for African servants and Moors’ head jewelry, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 11–24, 211–53. 72 As quoted by Hall, Things of Darkness, 215.

98

Spare Men and Great Ones

striking resemblance to the men of the mustering scene, one of whom, not insignificantly, shares his name.73 As may be suggested by the slippages between the two men named Francis, the Henry IV plays frequently conflate the practices that govern the military realm with those in place in the tavern. This conflation is especially interesting in the last moments of the Francis–Hal tavern scene, which offer yet more pointed commentary on Hal’s facility with the emergent discourse of manly manufacture and expenditure even as it evokes the written texts that, like the muster book, sustain this discourse. In the scene, Falstaff, after taking refuge from the sheriff in the tavern, has fallen asleep behind an arras. At Hal’s behest, Harvey, another tavern companion, has gone through Falstaff’s pockets and found what he dismisses as ‘‘nothing but papers’’ (2.5.536), documents that Hal, not surprsingly, promptly instructs him to read aloud. The first paper from which Harvey reads is clearly a tavern bill: Item: a capon. 2s. 2d. Item: sauce. 4d. Item: sack, two gallons. 5s. 8d. Item: anchovies and sack after supper. 2s. 6d. Item: bread. ob. [i.e. obulus or halfpenny] (2.5.487–491)

After hearing the contents of this inventory, Hal first responds in mock-horror at the disproportionate quantity of alcohol on the bill: ‘‘O monstrous! But one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack’’ (2.5.543–4). And then, for no apparent reason, he tells Harvey to postpone his reading of the rest of the papers: ‘‘What there is else, keep close; we’ll read it at more advantage . . . We must all to the wars, and thy place shall be honourable. I’ll procure this fat rogue a charge of foot, and I know his death will be a march of twelve score’’ (2.5.544–9). As the scene closes, then, Hal moves from talk of the purchase of sack to talk of the procurement of men, while the soon-to-be captain is left sleeping behind the arras. In this scene Hal’s response to the tavern bill obviously associates him with a discourse of restraint, thereby also identifying him with the militarists’ ideal officer who is, according to Leonard and Thomas Digges, ‘‘in expences moderate, rather sparing than spending.’’74 Moreover, this public reading of the tavern bill works further to associate Hal with protocapitalist transactions, for it none-toosubtly hints at Hal’s privileged position in the nascent market in men. That is, while Hal’s turn from a tavern bill to talk of foot-soldiers may, to a modern spectator or reader, appear as an abrupt shift from one matter to another; in the 1590s, the logic may have been more readily available. The itemizing rhetoric of 73 Moreover, as Charles Whitney has acutely observed, the play, through its depiction of Hal’s fantasy of Francis rebelling against his master, forges a link between this scene and the Coventry scene in which Falstaff identifies ‘‘revolted tapsters’’ (4.2.27–31) as part of his band of destitute soldiers (420). 74 Digges, An Arithmeticall Militare Treatise, L1v.

Spare Men and Great Ones

99

Falstaff ’s bill—a text whose tabular form the printers of both Folio and Quarto texts saw fit to reproduce in their editions—may well have suggested the itemizing rhetoric of the muster rolls and may thus explain why, upon hearing the papers read aloud, Hal’s thoughts so suddenly turn to soldiers. As it foreshadows Shallow’s performance of the muster book, Hal’s reading of this inventory materially connects the economic circuits of the tavern with the accounting logic of Elizabethan militarism. Insofar as this scene prepares us for Hal’s reformation—which, of course, includes his rejection of the man he will denounce as ‘‘surfeit-swelled’’ (5.4.50)—it foregrounds his role in an Elizabethan economy that demands men who know how to appropriate the labor of the lowborn. At a moment when military science produced a discourse of the norm founded on the efficient use of men and the increasing need for exacting work discipline, the Henry IV plays offer Hal—whose first soliloquy marks him off as a man who monitors idleness, pays off debts, and spends time wisely—as the average man who would be king. IV If Hal’s perpetual acts of reformation are to be read as a ‘‘solution’’ to the putative failure of manly production writ large in the Gloucestershire scene, then it must be emphasized that this solution is only partial. In the last scene of 2 Henry IV— the rejection scene—Hal seems to be the efficient managerial man par excellence. ‘‘Make less thy body hence’’ (5.5.52), Hal, as the new monarch, orders Falstaff, asserting once again what Goldberg rightly describes as ‘‘a new regime of trim reckonings . . . mobilized against decaying aristocratic corpulence’’ (172). Certainly, even as Hal issues Falstaff ’s punishment, he evokes a classificatory discourse in which qualities can be quantified and social status can be precisely measured: ‘‘And as we hear you do reform yourselves, j We will, according to your strengths and qualities, j Give you advancement’’ (5.5.68–70). Nevertheless, even in the midst of this moment of exemplary discipline, cultural anxieties about the emergence of an economy of spare men and great ones begin to resurface in the form of the play’s attention to bodily defect. In 1 Henry IV, Hal should epitomize the new normative body, but there, as in the Gloucestershire scene, Falstaff performs the play’s perverse resistance to the norm insofar as he identifies the body of the prince with the fragmentary, the miniature, and the empty: in Falstaff ’s ‘‘reformation’’ of Hal, the prince is but a ‘‘starveling,’’ an ‘‘elf-skin,’’ a ‘‘bull’s pizzle,’’ and a ‘‘bow-case’’ (2.4.226–9).75 75 The play’s focus on inadequate male corporeality may be bound up with the emergence of new economies of labor, which privileged bookish knowledge and clerical skills rather than bodily strength. At least in some quarters, it seems, one might encounter the fear that men of property were not manly enough, that what one commentator said of the soldiers at Tilbury—namely, that ‘‘those rich men, which have been daintily fed and warm lodged, when they came thither to lie

100

Spare Men and Great Ones

More significantly, Falstaff ’s mocking account of Hal’s putatively ‘‘average’’ body has the effect of linking Hal with the shallow justice of the peace, for in 2 Henry IV Falstaff (standing out of Shallow’s earshot) delivers a speech in which he describes Shallow as ‘‘trussed . . . into an eel-skin’’ and into the ‘‘case of a treble hautboy [i.e., oboe]’’ (3.2.315–17). That Hal should be linked to Shallow—indeed, that he should be linguistically contained within the very name Shallow—is especially striking in that, as Jonathan Crewe has observed with regard to Falstaff’s description of Shallow as ‘‘like a man made after supper of a cheese paring’’ (3.2.304–5), the justice is always depicted as a ‘‘remainder—a cheese paring— rather than a body totality’’ and ‘‘is always and already subsumed in an order of figurative likeness.’’76 It is striking, then, that in the rejection scene, the scene that most insists upon Hal’s power and greatness, Shallow’s diminutive body—which Falstaff as elsewhere in 2 Henry IV described as ‘‘so forlorn [i.e., thin] that his dimensions, to any thick [i.e., imperfect] sight, were invisible’’ (3.2.284)—should come into view in all its marvelously rendered particularity. Moreover, when the play shows the last exchange between Falstaff and Shallow—one in which Falstaff, standing in the presence of the new king, assures the justice from whom he has borrowed a thousand pounds that Hal ‘‘will be the man yet that shall make [him] great,’’ and Shallow replies, ‘‘I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet, and stuff me out with straw’’ (5.5.77–9)—the play emphasizes again the doubling of Hal and Shallow. Indeed, it seems to suggest through this doubling that, even as King, the newly great Hal is not immune to an appraising gaze, one that would look beneath his doublet and peer into the very matter of his being. Certainly, as is suggested by Falstaff’s ode to spare men in the Gloucestershire scene—‘‘Give me the spare men and spare me the great ones’’ (3.2.265–6)—the play here acknowledges that some men will be marked off as dispensable (treated as ‘‘spare’’) so that others can be great. Moreover, this acknowledgment contains within it the awareness that the great men who, like Hal, are marked by their leanness and parsimonious regimens, may be something less than ‘‘select’’ male specimens. But more important, perhaps, is the fact that, as the final encounter between Falstaff and Shallow calls attention to the likeness between the man on the throne who asserts his greatness and the spare man who would be ‘‘stuff[ed] out with straw,’’ the play’s classificatory discourse homogenizes all, raising the notion that even the King doesn’t reside in a class of his own.77 To account for the Henry IV plays’ much remarked upon nostalgia for what Hotspur represents is to understand that martial ideals of chivalric distinction were, to a great degree, being challenged by the new codes of Elizabethan abroad in the fields, were worse able to endure the same then any others’’—might be true of the culture’s nascent middle classes (Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 110). 76 Crewe, ‘‘Reforming Prince Hal,’’ 233. 77 On this point, see David Scott Kastan’s classic account of King Henry’s mimicry at Shrewsbury in ‘‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (Winter 1986), 459–75.

Spare Men and Great Ones

101

militarism and their emergent norms of rationality and economic valuation. By placing impressment—a decidedly non-chivalric practice that specifically targets common men—at the center of my reading of the Henry IV plays, I have sought to underscore that martial codes of chivalry were far from the only way in which war figured in the cultural imaginary of early modern England. As the Elizabethan state increasingly prescribed musters and other modes of control over the bodies of boys and men and as it laid the foundation for an economy in which men’s labor came to be understood as a commodity to be used efficiently, there emerged new norms for both the ‘‘great’’ men who were called upon to levy and train soldiers for the wars and for the ‘‘spare’’ men who made up the bulk of those impressed for service. For all the attention to the fantasy of Hal’s appropriation of Hotspur’s noble horsemanship in 1 Henry IV, then, what both Henry IV plays are at pains to show are the classificatory systems through which in this period manhood was increasingly understood as an expendable commodity. Paradoxically enough, the plays’ most energetic resistance to the new norm of ‘‘common’’ manhood may well lie not in their renderings of a martial world rooted in Hotspur’s chivalric ‘‘copy and Book’’ for manhood but, rather, in their insistent performance of the muster book’s own abundant naming. As Anne Barton has observed, 2 Henry IV offers ‘‘a world of quotidian detail, one in which proper names, already a conspicuous feature of [1 Henry IV], increase from a stream to a torrent.’’78 Including far more names than any other Shakespearean text, 2 Henry IV in fact amounts to, in Falstaff’s resonant phrase, a ‘‘commodity of good names’’ (1 Henry IV, 1.2.83). As such, its extravagant linguistic infractions against the norm speak not just to the plays’, but also more pointedly to the period’s, profound ambivalence toward the new modes of classificatory thinking, which aim to reduce discrete particulars into normative abstraction. And perhaps it was precisely because of such ambivalence that military narratives inflected by economics—plays about the labor of war—met with such success in Elizabethan theatres. But crucially, such plays did not always turn on the fantasies of the average man. As we will see, quite often the martial repertory shifted its gaze to the labor of women in dramas that focused not on expenditure but rather on reproduction, offering in place of fantasies about the production of a norm, visions of a perpetually repreducible population. 78 Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 112.

3 Biopower in the English Pale Generation and Genocide in Edward III Edward III, an anonymous drama dating from 1592 or 1593 that has in recent years won critical acceptance as a Shakespearean text, stages England’s entrance into the Hundred Years War with France (1337–1453) and features the monarch who immediately preceded Richard II on the throne.1 Not surprisingly, it has been described as the ‘‘natural prelude’’ to Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, a cycle that ends, of course, with the evocation of another English battle with the French—namely, that of Edward’s great-grandson, Henry V at Agincourt.2 SigniWcantly, however, while Edward III opens with a scene that, like the opening scene of Henry V, promises war—speciWcally, it shows Edward, having been told that the French crown rightfully belongs to him, fervently vowing to go to France and win back ‘‘all the whole dominions of the realm’’ (1.83)—the play depicts nothing of this conXict in its Wrst three scenes, which editors often demarcate as the play’s Wrst two acts. Instead, this Wrst part of the play, which is based on both Jean Froissart’s chronicle (as translated by Lord Berners in 1523–5) and a novella included in William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1575), shows its famous warrior king in the throes of sexual passion. More precisely, in these three long scenes, he is shown traveling northward to Roxborough, where after easily repelling Scottish soldiers at a castle, he unsuccessfully attempts to seduce the castle’s no-longer-besieged occupant, the Countess of Salisbury. The play returns to the realm of the martial only in its second part, which comprises the next Wfteen scenes and is often divided into Acts 3 through 5. Recycling historical 1 For an overview of scholarship on the play’s history and its place in the Shakespearean canon, see Giorgio Melchiori’s introduction to his edition of King Edward III for The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Shakespeare’s Edward III, ed. Eric Sams (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); and G. Harold Metz, Sources of Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 3–20. On the question of authorship, critical opinion has varied widely since 1760, when Edward Capell ascribed it to Shakespeare, but its recent inclusion in several scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s collected works suggests a growing consensus that the work is, at least in part, by Shakespeare. All references to Edward III are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), hereafter cited in the text parenthetically. 2 Melchiori, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 3.

Biopower in the English Pale

103

material from Holinshed and Froissart, these scenes depict Edward’s deferred expedition to France by staging four legendary English military victories: a naval battle oV Sluys (in French Flanders), land conXict in both Poitiers and Cre´cy, and the siege and conquest of Calais.3 In the analysis that follows, I consider the apparent disjunction between the two parts of Edward III in order to suggest how profoundly warfare is imbricated with sexuality in early modern culture. I show that both portions of the play, for all their attention to England’s past wars with Scotland and France, are deeply concerned with the Elizabethan attempt to complete the eVort, begun some 400 years earlier, of colonizing Ireland. As such, I argue, Edward III is preoccupied not only with battles but also with procreation, a matter that, as I aim to demonstrate, emerges in the play—and in this period—as a vital part of the calculus of conquest. Before examining how issues related to reproduction link the play’s two parts, it may be useful to situate Edward III in the context of Irish–English relations in the 1590s.4 In 1593, the year in which many scholars conjecture the play was Wrst performed by either Pembroke’s or Lord Strange’s men, Ireland was the scene of widespread rebellions against English rule, violence which led in 1594 to the outbreak of the Nine Years War in which English troops contended with the powerful army of Hugh O’Neill, the second Earl of Tyrone. In 1596, when the play was Wrst published, England was recovering from major military losses in Ireland. And, in 1599 when it was reprinted in quarto, ‘‘something like the grand nation-wide revolt much feared by the English . . . actually materialized.’’5 Given this charged historical moment, it is easy to imagine that many in the play’s Wrst audiences would have recognized the ways in which Edward III, while never naming the crisis in Ireland, repeatedly summons it up through allusion.6 Most obviously, perhaps, the play’s settings—on the border that England shared with Scotland and in several contested territories in what is now France—may have 3 For an invaluable discussion of these sources, see Metz, Sources, which reprints these, and other, source texts. See also John S. Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ Journal of Military History, 58 (1994), 391–420, which discusses the vital signiWcance for the state of its protection of Continental ports and which notes that ‘‘between 1585 and 1603 only two major ports, Sluys in 1587 and Calais in 1596, fell into hostile hands for a signiWcant period of time’’ (392). 4 Among the many accounts of England’s Irish crisis, see especially Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London: Methuen, 1950); J. J. Silke, Kinsale: The Spanish Intervention in Ireland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1970); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976); Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993); John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997); Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642 (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 96–104; and Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 5 Ciaran Brady, ‘‘The Captains’ Games: Army and Society in Elizabethan Ireland,’’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith JeVery (eds), Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136–59. 6 For an inXuential account of the ‘‘shadowy presence’’ of Ireland in many of Shakespeare’s historical narratives, see Michael Neill, ‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 11.

104

Biopower in the English Pale

suggested to Elizabethans the English-controlled spaces of Ireland known as the Pale. In addition, while the play’s evocation of territories such as Cre´cy in northern France might certainly also have suggested English campaigns in France in 1589 and in the early 1590s, I would argue that Edward III’s conXation of France with Ireland is so powerful that the play’s readers and audiences would be far more likely to Wx their thoughts on Tyrone’s rebellion than on the French king Henri IV, who by 1598 had made a separate peace with Spain.7 In fact, an anonymous Elizabethan poem entitled ‘‘England’s Hope, Against Irish Hate’’ (c.1600), explicitly takes comfort in the memory of the Hundred Years War as it laments English losses in the Nine Years War: But if the plains of Cre´cy, like a book Contain in characters their heavy doom If Bologne, Tournai, Poitiers, pale do look To think what hath, or may hereafter come; If they be witnesses how ill we brooke Disembling lips, when truth the goal hath won Treading on falsehood: Why not then Tyrone?’’8

By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the conXation of France with Ireland had become a familiar rhetorical move in literary texts, one that is evident, as many scholars have noted, in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1598–9), another play that mixes a war plot with a tale of sovereign desire. In fact, Edward III—like several Shakespearean dramas about England’s medieval monarchs—constitutes a formidable counterargument to the claim that the Elizabethan stage took little interest in the military eVort to re-conquer Ireland.9 Indeed, as I discuss below, the play’s focus on Edward III may itself hint 7 For an excellent discussion of the Elizabethan campaigns in France in this period, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 176–82. 8 For more on the poem, which may have been authored by Anthony Nixon, see the commentary that accompanies its appearance in Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Cork: University of Cork Press, 2003), 98–107. 9 For an incisive and detailed response to the common claim that early modern playwrights had little interest in Ireland, see Stephen O’Neill, Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007). Only one extant drama, The Famous Historye of the Life and Death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley, which seems to have been staged by the Admiral’s Men at least ten times between 1596 and 1597 and printed in 1605, explicitly brings the English crisis in Ireland to the playhouse as it rehearses an unsuccessful assault upon an English garrison in Dundalk that was led by Elizabethan Ireland’s most famous rebel, Shane O’Neill, in 1562. There is no record that the historical counterpart of the play’s Thomas Stukeley was ever involved in this attempted siege. For a valuable overview of criticism connecting Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry VI, and Henry V with political events in Ireland, see Willy Maley, ‘‘The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare’s English Histories,’’ in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II: The Histories (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 94–124. Among many other instructive commentaries on Ireland on the Elizabethan stage, see, especially, Joel B. Altman, ‘‘ ‘Vile Participation’: The AmpliWcation of Violence in the Theater of Henry V, ’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 1–32; David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (New York: St.

Biopower in the English Pale

105

at an Irish narrative, for as some Elizabethans recognized, this king’s reign marked an especially uncertain moment in the long history of Anglo-Irish struggle. Opening in the English court and closing with an English victory in Calais—the territory that Edward III conquered and colonized in 1347, and that, until France’s surprise attack in 1558, remained an English colony increasingly valued for its industry as well as for its fortiWcations10—Edward III works largely by analogy. As it conjures up the historical memory of English conquest against its French and Scottish enemies, the play both imagines a triumphant conclusion to Elizabethan England’s ongoing crisis in its neighbor kingdom of Ireland and underscores the fragility of such a victory. While Edward III’s emphasis on warfare has been amply noted by critics, its attention to procreation has received far less attention, although, as is evident from a quick glance at the play, narratives of reproduction in fact frame the drama’s martial actions.11 In the play’s Wrst scene, an exiled French nobleman named Artois rehearses a matrilineal genealogy as he explains why Edward is the legitimate heir of the French throne. He notes that after the death of Edward’s maternal grandfather, Philip le Beau, the French crown passed successively to each of Philip’s three sons and that, after the death of the last of these kings, the French refused to recognize Philip’s daughter Isabella as ‘‘next of blood,’’ instead declaring the le Beau lineage to be ‘‘out,’’ and proclaiming John of Valois their king (1.11–27). In Artois’s account, Edward’s three uncles—men who died and ‘‘left no issue of their loins’’—are juxtaposed with his fertile mother Isabella, whose womb is Wgured as the ‘‘fragrant garden’’ that oVers, as its Wnest ‘‘Xower,’’ an English king who ought, rightly, to be King of France as well (1.9 and 14–15). Violations done to this maternal body motivate warfare and generate the action of the play: Wttingly, the warfare ends with the appearance in the play’s last scene of an inviolate maternal body—namely, that of Edward’s wife, Philippa, the English queen who was celebrated in Elizabethan chronicles for having produced seven sons, and who, as a courtier observes in Scene 10, is in this play ‘‘big with child’’ (10.45). Inviting its audience to contemplate the Queen’s pregnant Martin’s Press, 1997); David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 1–12; Jonathan Dollimore and Alan SinWeld, ‘‘History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V, ’’ in Alan SinWeld (ed.), Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 109–42; Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Willy Maley, review of Cairns and Richards, Textual Practice, 3 (1989), 291–8; Andrew Murphy, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Irish History,’’ Literature and History, 5 (1996), 38–59; and his But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 10 On the wide-ranging signiWcance of the fall of Calais, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 48–53. 11 On the matter of procreation in Edward III, see Phyllis Rackin’s discussion of the pregnant warrior queen Philippa in ‘‘Women’s Roles in the Elizabethan History Plays,’’ in Michael Hattaway (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71–88. To the best of my knowledge, Rackin is the only scholar yet to have addressed this subject in print.

106

Biopower in the English Pale

body—perhaps the only such body in any extant Elizabethan history play— Edward III concludes by literalizing the imagined womb of its Wrst scene. Insofar as Edward III is thus preoccupied with wombs, it would seem to be not unlike many monarch-centered English history plays in which fantasies of male parthenogenesis are connected to fears about the ungovernable sexual desire of women, which is felt to pose a threat to royal bloodlines.12 My claim, however, is that the play’s preoccupation with reproduction cannot be explained away so easily: there is more to this emphasis on maternal bodies than the simple fact that, in English historical dramas, lineage is what typically authorizes an English monarch’s right to the throne. Rather than read the play’s ‘‘womb scenes’’ in terms of monarchical power, I argue that they are symptomatic of the play’s larger concern with cultural matters such as licit sexuality, racial purity, and future generations—issues that come to the fore in the play’s narrative about the King’s amorous adventures in Roxborough and that, as I show, were also of paramount concern to Elizabethan commentators on Ireland. Indeed, it is only once one recognizes that such reproductive issues are central to the staging of the Roxborough scenes that the play’s Wrst part emerges as every bit as bound up with English fantasies of Irish conquest as are its later scenes of warfare. As I aim to show, what unites both parts of the play is their shared engagement with what, following Foucault, we might term the domain of ‘‘biopower.’’13 In Foucault’s writings, ‘‘biopower,’’ like discipline, represents a peculiarly modern form of power, one whose emergence he locates in the late eighteenth century. For Foucault, as was suggested in Chapter 2, the exercise of discipline has to do with the desire to control individual bodies. By contrast, the exercise of biopower aims to control life itself. Thus Foucault suggests that while pre-modern epochs imagined a sovereign who had the ability to take life or let one live, modernity assumes a more insidious form of power, for it concerns itself with ‘‘making live and letting die’’— that is, with the regulation (often through measurement) of matters such as sexuality, health, and fertility (SMDF, 247). Biopolitics has thus been deWned, in the words of Colin Gordon, as a ‘‘politics concerned with subjects as members of a population, in which issues of individual sexual and reproductive conduct interconnect with issues of national policy and power.’’ This key biopolitical concept of ‘‘population,’’ as David Glimp has recently demonstrated, is readily discernible in

12 On this point, see, especially, the discussion of the Wrst tetralogy in Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 43–136, as well as Janet Adelman’s important study of maternity in Shakespeare, SuVocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York: Routledge, 1992). 13 Although Foucault brieXy discusses biopolitics in a number of well-known works including The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), he oVers what is perhaps his most extended discussion of this matter in lectures that have only recently been translated into English—namely, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975– 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Allesandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), esp. 239–64. Hereafter, this work will be abbreviated as SMDF and cited parenthetically in the text.

Biopower in the English Pale

107

English culture well before the eighteenth century.14 Indeed, as Glimp reveals in his valuable study of biopolitics and early modern literature, a wide variety of Renaissance writers, including Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, contemplate such matters as the constitution of particular kinds of people and the governance and reproduction of aggregates in both England and Ireland. In the reading of Edward III that I oVer below, I draw on Glimp’s work in order to show how the Elizabethan stage envisioned a crucial alliance between forms of biopower and forms of warfare. Whereas Foucault frequently contrasts a ‘‘military, warlike, or political relationship’’ with the ‘‘biological relationship’’ he associates with biopower (e.g., SMDF, 255–6), I want to suggest that in this play—and indeed, in this period—military and biopolitical power more visibly supplement each other. Performed and printed at a time when Elizabeth’s government was increasingly attempting to police sexuality in Ireland—and a variety of individuals were considering the ‘‘problem’’ of how to preserve and perpetuate Englishness outside of England—Edward III discloses through its two-part structure a racialized vision of war and its aftermath.15 What the play ultimately shows, I contend, is that the early modern staging of Irish conquest entails far more than a harnessing of historical memories of warfare in Scotland and France. It also involves the representation of a gendered division of labor or what might be described as an imaginative parceling out of the work of generation and the work of what, in hindsight, might be termed genocide. I Before looking in more detail at the intersection of the martial and the biopolitical in the play’s two-part fantasy of wombs and war, I want brieXy to consider the emergent grammar of ‘‘race’’ embedded in the scenes of generation and genocide in Edward III. As has been well established, early modern modes of ‘‘racial’’ thinking—that is, tendencies to link peoples with speciWc cultural practices, qualities of mind, and physical features—were developing in England in the late sixteenth century, more or less at the same time as Elizabethans were beginning to articulate a discourse of national identity.16 Such racial thinking was extraordinarily unstable and certainly far more labile than modern understandings 14 Colin Gordon, ‘‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,’’ in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault EVect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–52, esp. 5. David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 15 For an historical account of the English eVort to police sexuality in Ireland, see K. W. Nicholls, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 1972), which suggests that Irish marriage practices, which were utterly unlike those in other parts of western Europe, may have represented to Elizabethan eyes the culture’s most striking departure from civility. He notes that attorney-general Sir John Popham declared that fewer than one in twenty members of the gentry of Munster was married in church and that Sir George Carew’s reports on Ireland were preoccupied with incestuous births. 16 For an excellent discussion of the instability of race in this period, see the introduction to Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, ‘‘Race’’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1994).

108

Biopower in the English Pale

of race as commensurate with skin color would suggest. Thus, notions of race were bound up with theories of climate and humoralism like those discussed in Chapter 1; they intersected with religious diVerence, enabling Christians, for example, to distinguish themselves somatically from Jews; and they negotiated ideas about lineage and dynasty, the ‘‘stock’’—both familial and national—from which one was descended. One key strand of racial thinking emerged from English encounters with Ireland’s inhabitants, who included, in addition to the indigenous Irish, members of what, today, are often recognized as three other groups: the Protestant English planters who arrived in large numbers in the late sixteenth century and styled themselves the ‘‘New English’’; the descendants of those who invaded Ireland in the twelfth century during the reign of Henry II, many of whom intermarried with the native Irish, lived in the Pale, (mainly) worshipped as Catholics, and became known, in this period, as the ‘‘Old English’’; and the Scottish-Irish, some of whom were settled in Ulster, the northernmost and least anglicized of Ireland’s four provinces, and some of whom (notably the mercenary warriors known as the ‘‘redshanks’’17) traveled back and forth between Ireland, Highland Scotland, and the Western Isles. Elizabethan writings suggest that, at least for some individuals, racial identity seems to have been legible in Ireland as it was not legible in England. It is instructive, for example, to consider how Edmond Tyllney’s inventory of the nobility, a work composed in the late 1590s, deals diVerently with the nobility of England and that of Ireland: while it deWnes the men of England in terms of their family lineage (e.g., ‘‘Bewchamp came into England with the Conqueror who made him Barron of Bedford, from whom Descended Mowbraye, Lattimer, and Piggot’’), it assigns the men of Ireland to a race; indeed, it inserts them into a narrative of racial decline (e.g., ‘‘Bermingham, of An Englishe Race, Barons of Athenrie and Ardigh, Degenerated and become Wilde Irish’’).18 Engaging what the contemporary philosopher Etienne Balibar describes as the logic of modern racist discourse, numerous early modern ‘‘experts’’ on Ireland pursued the kind of classiWcatory thinking discussed in Chapter 2, but for diVerent ends: rather than sort men into the ranks of normativity, they constructed ethnographies, noted body types and dispositions, established genealogies, and called upon ‘‘universal’’ truths about racial purity and mixture.19 Perhaps no Elizabethan text better illustrates the emergence of an Elizabethan language of Irish racial diVerence than does John Derricke’s heavily illustrated and Wercely vituperative verse treatise The Image of Irelande with a Discoverie of 17 On the peoples inhabiting the border communities, see Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘‘ ‘Civilizinge of Those Rude Partes’’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s,’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 124–47. On the problems the redshanks posed to Elizabeth’s government, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 72–3. 18 See Edmond Tyllney, Topographical Descriptions, Regiments, and Policies. Books VI–VIII, ed. W. R. Streitberger (New York: Garland, 1991), 227; 391. 19 Etienne Balibar, ‘‘Racism and Nationalism,’’ in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 37–67, esp. 55–8.

Biopower in the English Pale

109

Woodkarne, whose author was an obscure Wgure who was apparently part of Sir Henry Sidney’s household.20 Printed in London in 1581 and evidently intended for a wide readership, The Image of Irelande not only describes English success in quelling Irish uprisings and, in fulsome language, applauds the good governance of Sidney, who held Wve high posts in Ireland before becoming Lord Deputy in 1575; it also oVers origin myths and tales of Irish manners and customs, some of which were in fact quoted verbatim in ‘‘England’s Hope Against Irish Hate,’’ the anonymously authored poem about the Irish wars quoted earlier.21 For some 100 pages, Derricke thus decries the fact that Ireland is ‘‘possesse[d]’’ by these ‘‘woodkarne,’’ a term that, in Derricke’s treatise, extends far beyond its apparent reference to the Irish foot soldiers known to the English as kern (E3r). More speciWcally, he identiWes the woodkarne as follows: [They are] a people out of the Northe, whose usages I behelde after the fashion there sette doune . . . and least peradventure ye might muse whom I meante, I will not be curious in dischargyng my conscience, lettynge you understande, thei are a people sprong from Macke Swine, a barbarous oVspring, come from that Nation, which maie bee perceived by their Hoggishe fashion. (b2r)

In this passage, Derricke not only Wnds in the proper name of a family associated with Ireland’s northernmost region evidence of the ‘‘naturally’’ bestial nature of the land’s inhabitants, he also merges the Scots and the Irish, making use of a venerable English stereotype of the Celt, which held that ‘‘Scotland and Ireland are all one and the same.’’22 More speciWcally, through his invocation of the Macke Swine as the Wrst woodkarne, Derricke alludes to the MacSwineys (or MacSweenys), one of the most prominent of Ireland’s hereditary families of mercenary soldiers or ‘‘gallowglasses,’’ whose forebears had migrated from the Scottish Isles in the thirteenth century and who, during the years of Elizabethan crisis in Ireland, controlled large sections of the North of Ireland and, as infantry, often served as allies to the Irish 20 John Derricke, The Image of Irelande with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (London, 1581). Unless noted otherwise, all quotations from The Image of Irelande are from this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. Derricke indicates in his preface that he composed the work in Dublin in 1578. Issued by the prominent London printer John Day, the work appeared in quarto format, which probably placed it at the less expensive end of the book market. In the introduction to his edition of Derricke (Belfast: BlackstaV Press, 1985), David B. Quinn notes that ‘‘We cannot tell how large an edition was published but the indications are that it was popular with its readers for its plates, many of which were torn out, probably for use as wall-decorations’’ (xvii). For other discussions of Derricke, see Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English, 59–64; Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, 44–8; 56–8; O’Neill, Staging Ireland, 32–4; and Sir Walter Scott’s commentary on the version of Derricke’s text, which appears in A collection of scarce and valuable tracts . . . particularly that of the late Lord Somers, 2nd edn (London: 1809–15), vol. 1. 21 On this poem’s debts to Derricke, see Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English, 103. 22 See Maley, Salvaging Spenser, who notes that Edmund Spenser attributes this observation to Irenius in his A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew HadWeld and Willy Maley (London: Blackwell, 1997) (45). For an excellent discussion of the stereotype of the Celt associated with ‘‘England’s border peoples,’’ see Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, 68–70.

110

Biopower in the English Pale

armies.23 Repeatedly directing his readers’ gaze to the images that appear in his treatise’s twelve two-page woodcuts, Derricke insists that such images capture not only the triumphs of Sidney but also the ‘‘physiognomie’’ (I4r), ‘‘gestures,’’ (E1v), and ‘‘lively shape’’ of Ireland’s ‘‘wilde’’ inhabitants (D3r). In addition he oVers what cultural critics have shown to be a familiar Elizabethan ethnography of the Irish, describing their ‘‘straunge’’ and ‘‘monstrous’’ apparel (E4r), ‘‘glibbed’’ hairstyles (E3r), and peculiar food and drink (F1v–F2r). In Derricke’s text, in other words, ‘‘woodkarne’’ works as a principle of racial meaning, a sign that condenses the diVerences among the inhabitants of Ireland’s northern province into a single, knowable, and contemptible type. While Derricke’s text stands out for its virulence, the writings of other more ‘‘moderate’’ writers on Ireland—men who often revived medieval accounts of Ireland as a land of temperate climate, fabulous beasts, and peculiar customs— also, of course, participate in the period’s racial discourse.24 That is, while their texts recorded Ireland’s complex history of conquest, plantation, and migration, they also frequently put forth the notion that Ireland was inhabited by two distinct and naturally opposed ‘‘peoples’’—the Irish and the English—rather than by a heterogeneous populace. Consider, for example, how a manuscript treatise dating from circa 1600 by an obscure Englishman named John Dymmok accomplishes this act of compression: The inhabitantes generally are of fowre sortes. English Irish, meer [i.e., ‘‘pure’’] Irish, degenerate Englesh, and wilde Scotts. The meer Irish, degenerate English, and Scott are growne into one faction, by reason of the devision of the English race, contynewinge till within these few yeares: by which meanes the Irishrye grew to such strength, that the Englesh, for their own defense, were gladd to ally themselves with the Irish of contrary factions, to make them to be folowed after the Irish order, and so became wholly Irish, or at the least scant good Englesh.25

Acknowledging the presence of four ‘‘sortes’’ in Ireland, Dymmok suggests that ‘‘the Irish order’’ has swallowed virtually everyone up so that the only English left are ‘‘scant good.’’ Without ever acknowledging the presence of the colonizers who would become known as the New English, Dymmock’s account clearly serves their interests, for the New English were in the process of claiming true 23 On the Scottish presence in Ireland in this period, see Gerard A. Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenary Forces in Ireland 1565–1603 (Dublin: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1937), 30–7, and Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, 76–85. On the history of the MacSwineys in Ireland, see also Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, in which Irenius observes that some people deem the MacSwineys to be ‘‘aunciently English,’’ and a note in the margins reports that they ‘‘are by others held to be of the ancient Irish’’ (68). 24 In addition to Spenser, such writers include Fynes Moryson, who wrote an eyewitness account of the Nine Years War and a narrative of his travels throughout Ireland and elsewhere; Richard Stanyhurst, a member of a prominent ‘‘Old English’’ family whose description of Irish manners and customs appeared in Holinshed’s Chronicles; and John Hooker, who contributed a history of Ireland as well as his translation of Giraldus Cambrensis to the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles. 25 John Dymmok, ‘‘A Treatice of Ireland,’’ in Richard Butler (ed.), Tracts Relating to Ireland, 2 vols. (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1843), ii.7.

Biopower in the English Pale

111

Englishness for themselves and of ousting not only the Irish and the Scots, but also the Old English establishment. Invoking Irishness and Englishness as the poles of racial diVerence, Dymmok here warns his readers that Englishness is in danger of dissolution in Ireland. Although critics interested in Elizabethan England’s relationship with Ireland have often turned their attention to degeneration narratives like Dymmok’s— tales of people born in England or of English descent who have, so the writers claimed, ‘‘gone native’’ and ‘‘fallen into’’ Irishness—the relationship between such tales of degeneration and early modern biopolitical ideas demands further scrutiny.26 SpeciWcally, I would argue that in many early modern accounts of English degeneration in Ireland, the language of race cannot easily be separated from the language of reproduction. Claims about racial diVerence—as is apparent from Derricke’s account of a ‘‘people sprong from Macke Swine’’—are often, simultaneously, claims about progenitors and oVspring.27 Consider, for example, how Fynes Moryson who served as secretary to Lord Mountjoy, Elizabeth’s last lord deputy, accounts for the transformation of Ireland’s Wrst English colonizers: But as horses Cowes and sheepe transported out of England into Ireland, doe each race and breeding declyne worse and worse, till in fewe yeares they nothing diVer from the races and breeds of the Irish horses and Cattle. So the posterities of the English planted in Ireland, doe each discent, growe more and more Irish, in nature manners and customes, so as wee founde in the last Rebellion divers of the most ancient English Familyes planted of old in Ireland, to be turned as rude and barbarous as any of the meere Irish lords.28

Moryson’s text lays bare the language of reproduction often repressed in narratives of racial decline. For Moryson, ‘‘race’’ has to do with the sexual intercourse or ‘‘breeding’’ of animals as well as with the ‘‘breeds’’ or types that ensue from such intercourse. Central to Moryson’s account, moreover, is the idea that it is through generation, in an Irish climate, that degeneration—the production of inferior breeds—occurs. Crucially, Moryson’s analogy collapses the diVerence between generation and degeneration as it suggests that English racial decline— the ‘‘turn[ing]’’ of ‘‘ancient English familyes’’ into the rudeness and barbarism that he terms ‘‘meere’’ or pure Irishness—is a consequence of procreation itself. For English people in Ireland, he implies, reproduction is racially dangerous. And this sentiment, it seems, was something of a commonplace: as one anonymous treatise 26 On racial degeneration, see especially Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England,’’ in Andrew Parker et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157–71; Neill, ‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish,’’ 4–10; and Claire Carroll, ‘‘Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland,’’ Albion, 25.3 (1993), 379–93. 27 It is worth noting that traces of this linkage are evident in the word’s history. The OED indicates that, by the early seventeenth century, the word ‘‘race’’ denoted both ‘‘oVspring or posterity of a person; a set of children or descendants’’ and ‘‘Breeding, the production of oVspring.’’ It cites Edward Topsell’s ‘‘It behooveth therefore that the mares appointed for race be well compacted, of a decent quality’’ (1607) and John Milton’s ‘‘Male he created thee, but thy consort Female for Race’’ (1667). 28 Fynes Moryson, The Itinerary of Fynes Moryson, 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1907–8), iv.481.

112

Biopower in the English Pale

noted in 1599, ‘‘it is a thing observed in Ireland, and growen to a Proverbe that English in the second generation become Irish but never English.’’29 II Edward III emerges as a drama concerned with Ireland at the moment it shifts, in its second scene, from the English court to the realm’s northernmost border with Scotland, which like Derricke’s Ulster, was a frontier territory. Certainly, the play’s evocation of the Countess’s castle at Roxborough—a structure under siege by the ‘‘treacherous [Scottish] King . . . [who has] made invasion on the bordering towns’’ (1.124, 127)—may have recalled an actual royal residence in Roxborough, which changed hands several times between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries as the boundaries between northern England and Scotland were Wercely contested.30 The play’s Scottish location may also have suggested to audiences events from more recent Anglo-Scottish history, such as the Elizabethan campaigns in Scotland in 1559–60 on behalf of the Scottish Protestants against the French and the 1582 ‘‘Throckmorton plot’’—that is, the Catholic plot to murder Elizabeth and set Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, which was described by Francis Throckmorton under torture, and which entailed an invasion of England by way of Scotland.31 But I would argue that, for Elizabethan audiences, the play’s staging of the Scottish attack on the Countess’s castle may have most pointedly conjured up the Irish rebellions of Elizabeth’s reign, which by the mid1590s had become increasingly worrisome to the Crown. Thus, the Countess’s fearful description of the treatment she expects at the hands of the Scots—that she will ‘‘be wooed with broad unturne´d oaths, j Or forced by rough insulting barbarism’’ (2.8–9) and that ‘‘they will deride us in the North, j And, in their vile, uncivil, skipping jigs j Bray forth their conquest and our overthrow’’ (2.11–13)— echoes the very language used by Derricke and others in Elizabethan accounts of rebellion in Ireland. In addition, the Countess’s evocation of rape, ‘‘conquest,’’ and ‘‘overthrow’’ may hint at an anxiety about the possibility of racial degeneration that becomes increasingly apparent as the action unfolds. SigniWcantly, the Scots appear on stage immediately after the play has evoked the specter of Irish rebellion through the Countess’s talk of the skipping jigs of the barbarous northerners. Moreover, no sooner do they appear than the play’s action stops for a few minutes as David, the Scottish king, sounding like yet another ethnographer of Ireland’s northern province, describes his cohorts in 29 As quoted in D. B. Quinn, ‘‘ ‘A Discourse of Ireland’ (circa 1599): A Sidelight on English Colonial Policy,’’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 47 (1942), 151–66. 30 See W. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh: Donald, 1977). 31 See Hammer’s Elizabeth’s Wars for concise accounts of both the 1559–60 campaigns in Scotland (57–62) and the so-called Throckmorton plot (116–17).

Biopower in the English Pale

113

language that emphasizes their foreignness. They are, he says, ‘‘bonny riders’’ who carry ‘‘snaZes,’’ or bridle bits; wear ‘‘jacks of gimmaled mail,’’ or iron-plated tunics; and hold ‘‘staves of graine`d Scottish ash’’ and ‘‘whinyards,’’ or short swords, that are attached to their ‘‘tawny leathern belts’’ (26–33). Apart from the depiction of the Scots on horseback, King David’s detailed description of the attire and weaponry of his cohorts resonates with the racialized images of the (Scottish-Irish) gallowglass infantry that were oVered in early modern accounts of the North of Ireland, ranging from Derricke’s account of the woodkarne to the illustration appearing on an English map dating from 1567. The latter depicts much of Ulster as the land of the ‘‘McSwyny’s,’’ representing their dominance through images of three men in chain mail garb who are armed with axes.32 Describing his soldiers, the Scottish king in fact sounds much like Dymmok, who in his treatise on Ireland, pronounces the gallowglasses to be the Wercest of all Irish soldiers and oVers an exacting account of their appearance: They are armed with a shert of maile, a skull [i.e., an armored head-piece], and a skeine [i.e., an Irish dagger]: the weapon they most use is a batle-axe, or halberd, six foote longe, the blade whereof is somewhat like a shomakers knyfe, and without pyke; the stroake whereof is deadly where it lighteth.33

While the martial attire conjured up by Dymmok is not, of course, identical to that of the play, both texts are clearly invested in a certain kind of scopic regime: both invite study of the outward forms of the men of England’s borderlands and both demand that one recognize in their bodies, apparel, and weaponry the shape of a dangerous Irishness.34 Crucially, however, the play repudiates the portrayal of Werceness that Dymmock and others associate with Ireland’s northern warriors. Instead, the play shows its Roxborough invasion put down without any warfare, as the Scottish troops, learning of the approach of the English, manifest their cowardice by instantly taking Xight. What Edward III represents as the great danger in its borderland is not the deadly stroke of the rebels, but rather the force of Edward’s desire for the Countess. Indeed, as I suggested at the start of this chapter, most of what happens in the play’s early scenes has to do with the force of Edward’s desire, for no sooner does the King meet the Countess than he denounces his wife and renounces the martial valor that the play sets forth as the essence of English masculinity. 32 This map is reproduced as ‘‘Map of Ireland, 1567,’’ in Great Britain. Record Commission. State Papers, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission . . . King Henry the Eighth, Vol. II, Part III (London: J. Murray, 1834). 33 Dymmok, ‘‘A Treatice of Ireland,’’ 7. 34 This scene may also draw upon a play dating from 1587, perhaps the earliest extant Elizabethan play with an Irish character, Thomas Hughes’s Misfortunes of Arthur ([London]: Issued for subscribers by the editor of the Tudor facsimile texts, 1911). In this play’s dumb show, a man with ‘‘a threatening countenance’’ ‘‘furiously chase[s] the king.’’ As the argument of the dumb show explains, this Wgure who ‘‘signiWes Revenge and Furie’’ is ‘‘a man bareheaded, with long black shagged haire down to his shoulders, apparrailed with an Irish jacket and shirt, having an Irish dagger by his side, and dart in his hand’’ (26–7).

114

Biopower in the English Pale

Sequestered in his closet and pining with desire, he enlists the Countess’s father to enforce his will. Dissociating himself from his knights, he bids farewell to war, refuses to go to France, and, in a climactic moment, agrees to the murder of both the Queen and the husband of the Countess. Moreover, as the play shows the Countess’s power over Edward as well as her attempts to deXect his ever more aggressive overtures, it suggests that Edward is poised on the brink of destruction and that the fate of his kingdom hangs in the balance. Edward III’s narrative of the King’s desire for the Countess plainly stages male sexuality as a problem of epic proportion. Less obvious to modern readers perhaps is the way in which this narrative draws on the racial discourse I discussed above to link sexuality with degeneration in Ireland. Certainly, the play withholds explicit explanation for the abrupt transformation of the King, but Elizabethan accounts of Ireland in the period of Edward III’s reign—a period that has been described as a moment when ‘‘the English colony in decline faced a Gaelic society in resurgence’’—may suggest an implicit one.35 Elizabethan writers declared that, under Edward, England had very nearly lost its hold on Ireland, and they interpreted this political turmoil in racialized terms: Edward’s reign was said to mark the beginning of the end of pure Englishness in Ireland. Holinshed’s Chronicle of Ireland thus averred that this was the moment when English identity in Ireland began to bifurcate: the ‘‘English of byrth, and the English of blood falling at words, were devided into factions’’ so that ‘‘the realme was even upon the point to give over all and to rebel.’’ SigniWcantly, Edward’s reign also witnessed the enactment of the Statute of Kilkenny, which was passed in the Irish Parliament by Edward’s son Lionel during his tenure as viceroy.36 Testifying to the emergence in the culture of a biopolitical impulse, this act, which was notorious for its zealous attempt to legislate Englishness in Ireland, prohibited all inhabitants of the English colony not only from adopting Irish customs and speaking the Irish language but also from forming marriages and alliances with the indigenous peoples. SigniWcantly, one prominent Elizabethan who served as lord chancellor of Ireland, Sir William Gerard, read history through the lens of the culture’s new racial paradigms, characterizing the Statute as a response not to strife among diVerent groups of English settlers but rather to the problem of degeneration.37 In a long report to the Privy Council in 1578, Gerard invoked a racial discourse as he decried the transformations on view in Ireland—the manner in which ‘‘rebells [who] . . . refuzinge Englishe nature growe Irishe in soche sorte as (otherwise then in name) not to be discerned from the Irishe.’’ Referring to his research in some unnamed ‘‘recordes,’’ he summarily 35 J. A. Watt, ‘‘The Anglo-Irish Colony under Strain, 1327–1399,’’ in Art Cosgrove (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 307. 36 See ‘‘A Statute of the Fortieth Year of Edward III enacted in a parliament held in Kilkenny, AD 1367, before Lionel Duke of Clarence, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,’’ in James Hardiman (ed.), Tracts Relating to Ireland, Vol. 2. (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1843), 1–43. 37 William Gerard, ‘‘Notes of his Report on Ireland—May 1578,’’ Analecta Hibernia, 2 (1931), 93–291.

Biopower in the English Pale

115

declared that ‘‘this degenratinge . . . beganne about the xxxth yeare of the sayd Kinge Edwarde the third his reigne’’ (120). One might say that Edward III goes further than Gerard, displacing the threat of English racial degeneracy from Edward’s Ireland onto the King himself. Moreover, as it connects Edward’s crisis with the culture’s mythology about the propensity of Englishmen to ‘‘turn’’ Irish in Ireland—a mythology that conventionally identiWed the English man’s degeneration with his ‘‘de-gendering’’ or subordination to women—it oVers a doubly racialized narrative: not only does the play identify the English king with degeneracy, but it also allows the audience to entertain the possibility that the Countess, though nominally English, has somehow declined into Irishness. Indeed, her liminal place in the play—alone on the walls of a besieged castle in a frontier zone—makes visible the unstable position she occupies in the play’s discourse of race. Living in a northern castle apart from her husband who is soldiering in France, she might be understood to resemble the notoriously independent wives of wealthy Irish lords, women whose autonomy New English colonizers sought to curtail.38 SigniWcantly, the play suggests the possibility of her racial diVerence through its treatment of her speech, one of the Elizabethan theater’s primary means of representing Irishness.39 While knowledge of how the actor playing the Countess actually spoke is, of course, unavailable, the play emphasizes her intimacy with the speech of the borderlands, an intimacy that many early modern writers identiWed as the sign par excellence of English degeneration. Thus, in a scene that appears to be derived from Holinshed’s account of a Scottish countess who ‘‘used manie pleasant words in jesting and tawnting’’ English soldiers, the Countess mocks the Xeeing Scots by repeating their boasts and mimicking their Scottish phrases.40 Shortly thereafter, the play recalls this scene of mimicry as Edward, recollecting a conversation with the Countess that has not been staged, marvels at her ‘‘broad’’ speech and at her facility in performing the ‘‘epithets and accents’’ of ‘‘her barbarous foes’’ (2.195–6, 201). In an era when it was popularly held that the women of Ireland spoke English with what Richard Stanyhurst called ‘‘a harsh and brode kind of pronunciation’’ the Countess’s speech may well have signaled her degeneration from Englishness into Irishness.41 An especially striking rendering of the place of Irish women in degeneration mythology may be found in Derricke’s allegorical description, or ‘‘discoverie,’’ of Irish nymphs, a section of The Image that relates yet another story of Irish origins (B4v–C2r). Derricke’s account of the nymphs—female creatures whom he depicts as Ireland’s Wrst inhabitants—is shot through with sexual puns, including an inaugural pun on ‘‘nymph’’ as slang for ‘‘whore.’’ The fanciful sprites who live 38 On the purported autonomy of Irish women, see Nicholls, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages, 17. 39 On Irish speech, see Neill, ‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish,’’ 14–22. 40 Metz, Sources, 13. 41 Carroll, ‘‘Representations of Women,’’ 383.

116

Biopower in the English Pale

beneath the Irish ground and spend the days disporting within its forests and streams are thus conXated with real women whose debased nature is bound up with their habitation of a supposedly savage soil. As this account opens, it is not yet apparent that Derricke’s rendering of this ‘‘celestiall paradice’’—a world in which women are more skilled in the art of lovemaking than is Venus herself— will veer back and forth between lust and disgust (C1r). Derricke writes, coyly, for example, of the pleasures of watching naked nymphs depart from the waters after Cupid’s bell has signaled for them to ‘‘enter other Rites’’ (B4v–C1r). Interpellating the reader as a male gazing guiltily at such scenes of female eroticism, he imagines Englishmen who are compelled (‘‘forceth’’) to lose themselves in this sexualized landscape, where they long to ‘‘daunce attendaunce’’ with ‘‘reverent [sexual] service’’ and ‘‘waight upon’’ the ‘‘case,’’ or genitals, of their partners (C1r). But in marginalia that frames the text, Derricke supplements this description with caustic invectives against the nymphs. Ultimately, Derricke shifts in his verse from allegory to exhortation, warning the reader that the pleasures of the nymphs are chimerical and that the celestial paradise he has described is a perilous place, for an encounter with these nymphs must invariably lead to ‘‘sodaine death’’ (C2r). In language far more strident than any of the English statutes banning English/Irish alliances, Derricke urges Englishmen to recognize the nymphs as the source of all harms that might beset the English man in Ireland: And be not witched evermore with their externall sight: For why should men of Th’englishe pale, in suche a Crewe delight? Or eke repose suche conWdence in that unhappie race: Since mischeef lurketh oftentimes even in the smothest face? (C2r)

To fall prey to the smooth faces of Irish women, he suggests, is to ‘‘cherishe a sarpent . . . redy daily both to devoure, and destroye’’ (marg. C1v). He likens the danger of the English man’s intimacy with Irish women to that which might ensue from his bringing ‘‘into his nakked bedde a poysning tode’’ or his taking a deadly crocodile as ‘‘his mate’’ whom he ‘‘place[s] nexte to his breste’’ (C1v–C2r). In Derricke’s hysterical vision, Irish females are ‘‘dangerous snares’’ set by ‘‘secret foes’’ with ‘‘craftie nette[s]’’ (C1v). Encounters with them result not simply in the English man’s degendering and degeneration, but in death, the ultimate manifestation of racial and sexual contamination. Derricke’s description of the dangers of male submission to the women of England’s borderlands is common in Elizabethan writings about Ireland. Indeed, the scene resonates with a tale related by Fynes Moryson in his description (c.1600) of another man’s encounter with the ‘‘wild Irish’’ women of the North:

Biopower in the English Pale

117

[A] Bohemian Barron, comming out of Scotland to us by the North parts of the wild Irish, told me . . . that he comming to the house of Ocane a great Lord among them, was met at the doore with sixteene women, all naked, excepting their lose mantles; whereof eight or ten were very faire, and two seemed very Nimphs: with which strange sight his eyes being dazelled, they led him into the house, and there sitting downe by the Wer, with crossed legges like Taylors, and so low as could not but oVend chast eyes, desired him to set downe with them.42

When the great Lord returns and invites the Baron ‘‘to sit naked by the Wer with his naked company,’’ the Baron is struck dumb by the oVer: ‘‘when he came to himselfe after some astonishment at this strange sight, he professed that he was so inXamed therewith, as for shame he durst not put oV his apparrell.’’ In Moryson’s tale, the sexual desire felt by the man who ventures into the North is framed as an act of female domination: thus, the man is blinded, struck dumb, rendered compliant, and forced to acknowledge the physical arousal that he deems shameful. Entry into the world of the nymphs entails entrance into a world in which women overcome men and sexual pleasure is tied up with humiliation. With this cultural discourse in mind, one may recognize how deeply the Roxborough scenes are preoccupied with the vulnerability of English manhood to the Irish sexual menace that the Countess is made to embody. The scenes are animated, after all, by the notion that the English man courts grave peril when he ventures into England’s borderlands. Thus, as the play represents Edward’s Wrst meeting with the Countess, it shows him arduously resisting her invitation to enter the castle. Suggesting that she is a sorceress, he muses on the ‘‘strange enchantment’’ in her eyes and the ‘‘power’’ that enables her ‘‘to draw j [his] subject eyes . . . j To gaze on her with doting admiration’’ (2.102, 104–6). He expresses the fear that in stopping at the castle he is ‘‘yielding’’ to the Countess and will, as a result, ‘‘pine in shameful love,’’ and, of course, as it turns out, he is right (2.117). As the Countess entreats Edward to come inside, telling him that the ‘‘ragged walls’’ of her castle conceal the interior splendors as ‘‘a cloak doth hide . . . the under garnished pride,’’ the play deals in the fantasy that the Countess, like Derricke’s nymphs and Moryson’s nymph-like women, is a prototypical Irish temptress, an ally of the wild women of the North so full of hidden ‘‘pride’’ (here, a synonym for ‘‘sexual desire’’ as well as ‘‘rich clothing’’) that they doV their cloaks at the mere sight of a man, let alone the English king (2.157–9). And when Edward berates his secretary for failing to cast the Countess as another Venus in his sonnets—‘‘I did not bid thee talk of chastity, . . . For I had rather have her chased then chaste!’’—the play again evokes this fantasy of libidinous Irish womanhood (2.318–20). Although the Countess insists upon her virtue and resists Edward’s pursuit of her, the play keeps alive the notion that a treacherous Irish creature lurks beneath the fac¸ade of the smooth-faced woman. As the play’s portrayal of this encounter suggests, Edward III evokes Roxborough as a place 42 Moryson, The Itinerary of Fynes Moryson, iv.327–32.

118

Biopower in the English Pale

where snares and traps abound, a place, like Derricke’s Ireland, where alluring women are not what they seem to be. Without ever producing an Irish Circe who wreaks havoc upon the King, the play produces a fantasy of a dangerous sexual and racial encounter that is not all that diVerent from Derricke’s tale of Englishmen and Irish nymphs. Edward’s unruly passion for the Countess is thus represented as endangering a world in which, as the play’s opening scene makes clear, Englishness is said to be manifest in lineage and in the bonds that link England’s soldiers—the chivalrous knights, whom Edward’s son later describes as the ‘‘choicest buds of all our English blood’’ (3.82). Accordingly, in a scene that turns this racial and sexual anxiety into comedy, Edward responds to a sonnet comparing the Countess’s constancy to that of Judith, by nervously invoking Holofernes’ fate: ‘‘O monstrous line! Put in the next a sword, j And I shall woo her to cut oV my head!’’ (2.338–9). These fears for the integrity of the King’s body are not Edward’s alone; his secretary and sonnet-writer also observes, ‘‘when she blushed, even then did he look pale, j As if her cheeks by some enchanted power j Attracted had the cherry blood from his’’ (2.172–4). Associating the Countess with these images of blood-letting, castration, and vampirism, the play here positions her as a threat to the supposed fountainhead of Englishness. Moreover, through Edward’s comparison of his desire for her to the nightingale’s song of ‘‘adulterate wrong’’ (2.277)—an allusion, of course, to the Ovidian myth of Philomel—the play raises the possibility that a union between them is not only adulterous but also racially dangerous, ‘‘corrupted by base intermixture’’ (OED).43 Before the Roxborough episodes end, the play disavows its suggestions of the Countess’s racial diVerence, oVering instead, via Edward, a compensatory assertion of the Countess’s Englishness. Indeed, even before Edward asserts her racial purity (in a scene to which I shall return), the play works against its depiction of the Countess’s racial ambiguity. Most notably, when the play shows the Countess reacting to her father’s apparent collusion on Edward’s behalf, it begins to suggest that it is the King who really endangers English racial identity: Hath he no means to stain my honest blood But to corrupt the author of my blood To be his scandalous and vile solicitor? No marvel though the branch be then infected, When poison hath encompasse`d the root; No marvel though the leprous infant die, When the stern dame envenometh the dug. (2.583–9)

43 For a suggestive comparison, see Thomas Heywood’s drama The Fair Maid of the West, Part II, in which a white English maid pursued by the black King of Fez names her husband’s eVorts to prevent the liaison as an eVort to ‘‘rescue his dear Bride j From adulterate sheets’’ (3.3.137–8). See Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1967).

Biopower in the English Pale

119

Invoking images of contamination at the site of generation—including a poisoned root that has infected its branches and a venomous breast that has killed a newborn seeking sustenance—this speech inverts the scene’s racial logic so as to position the Countess as an emblem of purity and the transgressing King as the source of corruption. In his response to his daughter, the Countess’s father similarly links Edward with contagion through images of ‘‘polluted’’ chambers, ‘‘taint[ed]’’ and ‘‘loathed carrion,’’ poison in a golden cup, and, in a echo of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, festering lilies that ‘‘smell far worse than weeds’’ (2.601, 606–7, 619). As the Countess declares herself to be the embodiment of ‘‘honest blood’’ (2.583) and the possessor of a soul, which is ‘‘an angel pure, divine, unspotted’’ (2.408), the play transforms her into an image of unsullied English womanhood. Drawing female chastity into the net of its racial discourse, the play grounds Englishness— both that of the King and that of the Countess—in female sexual purity. The Wnal scenes of the Roxborough episodes assign to the Countess—now portrayed as a pure English woman—the task of arresting the King’s desire by returning it to its ‘‘proper’’ object: the maternal body that turns out to be a repressed point of origin for Englishness in the play. Maternity comes to the fore in a remarkable encounter between Edward and his son when the King in the midst of his crisis twice sees in the Prince’s facial features the imprint of his English queen: ‘‘I see the boy. O, how his mother’s face, j Modelled in his, corrects my strayed desire,’’ he exclaims in Scene 3, and ten lines later he is still possessed by the vision, ‘‘Still do I see in him delineate j His mother’s visage. Those his eyes are hers, j Who looking wistly [i.e., steadily] on me makes me blush’’ (3.74–5, 85–8). Although Edward dismisses his son with an aside in which he declares that the Prince’s appearance ‘‘[d]ost put it in [his] mind how foul [the Queen] is’’ (3.107), the play registers the considerable disruptive power of the maternal visage. Ultimately, like the English Queen whose steady gaze has the capacity to disrupt the King’s adulterous and adulterating desire, the Countess is made to appear in the Roxborough scenes as a Wgure of biopolitical containment. Thus when the play shows her audaciously telling Edward that his desire for her is a crime against heaven, for he dares, like a counterfeiter, to ‘‘stamp [God’s] image in forbidden metal’’ (2.426), it imagines her body as proscribed matter and emphasizes her resistance to illicit reproduction. Even more striking perhaps is the moment in which the play shows the Countess’s declaration that Edward’s desire breaks a ‘‘sacred law’’ that is more consequential than kingship: ‘‘In violating marriage’ sacred law j You break a greater honour than yourself: j To be a king is of a younger house j Than to be married’’ (2.428–31). Subordinating kingship to kinship, the Countess reproaches Edward and, shortly thereafter, in an scene for which audiences have not been prepared, she brandishes two knives that she has hidden under her cloak. OVering one to Edward with the proposal that he kill himself, she then kneels in the posture of a petitioner and insists that she will take her own life if he does not stop pursuing her.

120

Biopower in the English Pale

As the play stages this moment of crisis, it seems to be returning in a powerful way to earlier moments in the text, for the Countess’s display of these weapons echoes the gestures of the rebellious Scots who shortly before had Xaunted their daggers. As it summons up the body of the Countess as a Wgure whose ‘‘chaste blood’’ Edward sought to ‘‘stain’’ (3.183–4), however, the play pointedly distances her from the world of the borderlands, linking her instead to the knights whose blood we may recall, the Prince earlier idealized as a symbol of Englishness (3.82). SigniWcantly, the Countess is shown to defend Englishness itself—not simply herself and her marriage, but the King and the kingdom as well—by means of what she identiWes as her ‘‘wedding knives,’’ by a pair of ornate knives that were, by English custom, given to aristocratic brides to hang from their waist (3.169).44 These implements—speciWcally female, speciWcally English, weapons— are in fact the obverse of the Scottish swords that threatened the King in the earlier scene. While those swords stood in for the supposed barbarity of the borderlands, these knives emblematize the social order that the play imagines as necessary to allay the threats to Englishness inherent in the King’s journey out of England. In staging the Countess’s display of the wedding knives, in other words, Edward III deWnes the regimes of English marriage as what keeps Englishness safe from racial contamination. In portraying the Countess as the defender of the English body and a would-be martyr for marriage, the play undoes its association of her with the borderlands, whose ‘‘barbarous’’ inhabitants, so Elizabethan commentators on Ireland regularly claimed, would deny the claims of English marriage law.45 AYrming the need to manage sexuality through the institution of marriage, the Countess stands in for a biopolitical ‘‘cure’’ for racial degeneration, a means of preserving ‘‘pure’’ Englishness outside of England. At the end of this scene, the King is reborn, paradoxically enough, as an exemplary English subject, one who repudiates his illicit desire as an ‘‘idle dream’’ (3.196). Reclaiming his role as a guardian of English manhood, he calls for his son and his knights and, in an act that would seem to restore patriarchal authority in the borderlands, he designates the Countess’s father as a Warden, charged with guarding against incursions from the North (3.197–9). Notwithstanding Edward’s full-throated assertion of 44 For a brief discussion of wedding knives, see C. T. Bailey, Knives and Forks Selected and Described (London: Medici Society, 1927), 4. Edward J. Wood, The Wedding Day in All Ages and Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1869), oVers a detailed description of a pair of wedding knives on exhibit at a British Archaeological Association meeting: The hilts of both were of silver, with cruciform and vase-shaped terminations, richly engraved with arabesques, together with scriptural and allegorical subjects. Both hilts were engraven with the name of the owner, and the date 1629. The iron blades were about Wve inches long; one was stamped with a pair of shears and a dagger, and the other with an arched crown and a star of six points. The sheath was a double receptacle, measuring about nine inches and three quarters in length, and was intended for suspension at a girdle. (195) 45 On Irish refusal to observe English marriage law, see, for example, Edmund Campion, Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, ed. A. F. Vossen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1963), 16–19.

Biopower in the English Pale

121

power, the play continues to suggest that the Countess, the woman who keeps the King from dangerous sexual and racial crossings, is the real guardian of the borderlands. Accordingly, the play stages her resurrection as well in a scene in which Edward instructs her to relinquish her position as supplicant: Arise, true English Lady, whom our isle May better boast of than ever Roman might Of her, whose ransacked treasury hath tasked The vain endeavor of so many pens. (3.190–3)

Alluding to the tale of Lucrece, the Roman wife whose rape and subsequent suicide were part of the founding myth of Rome, Edward imagines the Countess as inaugurating a new era of Englishness with the ‘‘treasury’’ of her chastity. As this chaste English wife rises into view, the threat of English racial degeneration disappears. Moreover, as the play continues, it becomes clear that the (primarily) female biopolitical regulation of sexuality in these scenes has its counterpart in the (primarily) male work of genocide to follow.46 Edward’s sojourn with the Countess is thus framed as producing the martial manhood on view in the play’s subsequent acts. Fittingly, then, the Countess’s wedding knives may be read as not only forestalling English degeneration by preventing a mixing of racial kinds; they may also be understood as the weapons that inaugurate the warfare that was the deferred promise of the play’s Wrst scene and that is here imagined as yet another means of defending Englishness. III The concerns about racial mixture that are apparent in the Roxborough scenes cast a long shadow over the play’s second part, in which the King travels over water to France—to England’s other English ‘‘pale’’—and successfully conquers the French. In fact, as is evident from a closer look at a passage marking the King’s turn from the borderlands to France, the scenes of English martial violence that follow the resolution of the Roxborough narrative are represented as an extension of that racialized plot—a connection that ultimately helps to make the violence suggestive of genocide. The passage in question is Edward’s Wrst speech after his farewell to the Countess, a speech in which he ruefully announces his intent to invade France: Ah, France, why shouldst thou be this obstinate Against the kind embracement of thy friends? How gently had we thought to touch thy breast, 46 I say ‘‘primarily’’ (rather than ‘‘exclusively’’) because the play shows that Edward’s secretary Lodowick does his part to restrain Edward’s desire and because the play explicitly refers to Queen Philippa’s stint as a warrior in the Battle of Newcastle.

122

Biopower in the English Pale And set our foot upon thy tender mould, But that in froward and disdainful pride Thou, like a skittish and untame`d colt, Dost start aside, and strike us with thy heels.

(6.26–32)

Bemoaning France’s rejection of England, Edward here oVers nothing less than a reprise of his earlier petitions to the Countess, for his speech turns on his imagining of the English conquest of French territory as a union, or ‘‘embracement,’’ of two of the same ‘‘kind’’ or type, and as a sexual union, as the ‘‘kind embracement’’ of lovers enfolding themselves in each other’s arms. Marrying Wgures of desire and conquest, the speech represents the contested territories of France as a ‘‘breast’’ that might be lovingly ‘‘touch[ed]’’ and as a ‘‘tender mould,’’ a body that might willingly receive the (racial) imprint of the English forces. By Wguring unconquered territory as a woman, the speech not only resonates with Elizabethan cliche´s about English/Irish mixture; it also serves as a reminder that the racial matters that haunt the Wrst part of the play remain unresolved. That is, as Edward calls attention to the French refusal of union, he simultaneously returns to Wgures prominent in the Roxborough scenes: the inordinate desire to touch the taboo female body, the breast that was imagined as an ‘‘envenomed dug,’’ the longing for embrace between diVerent racial ‘‘kinds,’’ and the understanding of the material of the body as ‘‘tender’’ and vulnerable to imprint or stamping. It is not simply that the play retains this racialized language as it shifts the scene from the English/Scottish borderlands to the disputed ground of France. Rather, it is that the play shows English violence emerging in response to the prohibited sexual encounter in Roxborough. Warfare thus comes into view as the attempt to maintain outside of England a racial identity that is proper to itself and that is not vulnerable to diVerence. The Wrst explicitly martial scene in Edward III is a scene evoking the naval battle at Sluys, a locale that, as it happens, was the site not only of one of the Wrst battles of the Hundred Years War but also of a 1587 siege by Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, Spain’s captain-general in the Low Countries, which entailed a ‘‘bombardment of unprecedented intensity’’ and high casualty numbers on both sides.47 After seven weeks, the port, which had been defended by English troops under Roger Williams as well as by Dutch forces, was lost and the prospect of a Spanish invasion of England, which of course did come in 1588, grew ever more likely. Although the play’s evocation of Sluys consists merely of a French mariner’s description of the way in which the sun, wind, and tide took the side of the English so that the French Xeet was entirely destroyed, it resonates with the Roxborough scenes and the Spanish subtexts in important ways. Most notably, as critics have observed, the mariner’s reference to ‘‘the proud armada of King 47 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 134–5. In 1590, Thomas Digges, the mathematician, militarist, and muster-master discussed in Chapter 1, published an anonymous pamphlet detailing the actions of the English forces at Sluys, which is discussed in Henry J. Webb, ‘‘Thomas Digges, An Elizabethan Combat Historian,’’ Military AVairs, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1950), 53–6.

Biopower in the English Pale

123

Edward’s ships’’ and his allusion to a particular Spanish ship (the Non Pariglia) echo a contemporary account of the Armada crisis of 1588 in which nature was similarly said to have been on the side of the English (4.64 and 177).48 But what is perhaps more remarkable is the way that the mariner’s praise for this ship—‘‘A bonnier vessel never yet spread sail’’—forges a link with the Roxborough scenes through the use of a variant of the word ‘‘bonny,’’ a word that the play seems to associate with the Scots, who in their brief stage appearance use it twice, a fact that the play underlines when it shows the Countess using it again to mock them (4.179).49 In fact, Elizabethans may easily have understood the report of the Armada-like battle at Sluys as a continuation of the borderlands narrative (rather than as an intrusion of another story), for in the years when Edward III was performed and printed, Spain and Ireland were closely linked in the Elizabethan imaginary not least because Tyrone repeatedly sought Spanish aid against the English.50 In September 1588, for example, the MacSwineys welcomed Spaniards who landed in the North of Ireland.51 Elsewhere in Ireland, the Spanish met a diVerent fate: at least twenty-Wve Armada ships—one third of the total number—were lost on the Irish coast, and English oYcials in Ireland responded by torturing and executing the survivors.52 Given this context, the play’s account of the French shipwreck at Sluys—a gruesome account of the ‘‘streaming gore that from the maimed fell,’’ of a ‘‘head dissevered from the trunk,’’ and of ‘‘mangled arms and legs . . . tossed aloft’’ (4.162, 164–5)—may be understood as a revision of the scenes of Spanish shipwreck in Ireland. Evoking these horrors, the play may be said to naturalize—literally to turn into an eVect of sun and wind and tide—the atrocities meted out by English soldiers to Spanish survivors on the Irish coast. The suggestion that the warfare depicted in the play’s second part is bound up not only with conXict in Ireland but also with biopolitics and ideas of racial diVerence emerges forcefully in the subsequent scene, set near Cre´cy, in which 48 For the scene’s links to the Armada, see Karl Wentersdorf, ‘‘The Date of Edward III,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 227–31. 49 Thus the King of Scotland vows that ‘‘never shall our bonny riders rest’’ (2.26); his ally Sir William Douglas orders his servant to ‘‘saddle [his] bonny black’’ (2.57); and the Countess mockingly advises them to beat a retreat and ‘‘Excuse it that your bonny horse is lame’’ (2.70). 50 For the links between Spain and Ireland, see Silke, Kinsale. See also Falls who observes, ‘‘Ireland linked to Spain by refugee Irish soldiers and sailors in Spanish armies and navies, by refugee bishops and priests in Spanish cities, by commercial intercourse which made Irish pilots familiar with Spanish and Portuguese harbours—and Spanish pilots to some extent familiar with those of Ireland—was a weak point in the English armament. Anxiety was most acute during the period when the Armada was awaited because it was thought probable that the Spaniards would land a force on Ireland’’ (Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, 9). 51 Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenary Forces, 188. 52 On the Armada shipwrecks, see Colin Martin and GeoVrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (London: Norton, 1988), who note that, by contrast, only one ship was lost on the English coast (245) as well as John Knox Laughton (ed.), State papers relating to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1588, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Temple Smith for the Navy Records Society, 1987), 300–1, in which the Governor of Connacht dispassionately reports that more than 1100 executions had occurred under his watch.

124

Biopower in the English Pale

Ireland is once again evoked and a less mystiWed vision of English violence obtains. This scene—the only section of the martial plot that appears to be wholly the invention of the playwright(s)—depicts warfare not as a struggle between soldiers but rather as the destruction of entire villages. Accordingly, in the following exchange, a group of townspeople (a woman, two children, and some men) encounter another group and learn that the English army is nearing their village: frenchman without baggage Well met, my masters. How now? What’s the news, And wherefore are ye laden thus with stuV ? What, is it quarter-day, that you remove, And carry bag and baggage too? first frenchman with baggage Quarter-day, ay, and quartering day, I fear. Have ye not heard the news that Xies abroad? frenchman without baggage What news? second frenchman with baggage How the French navy is destroyed at sea, And that the English army is arrived. frenchman without baggage What then? first frenchmen with baggage ‘What then,’ quoth you? Why, is’t not time to Xy, When envy and destruction is so nigh? (3.2.1–12)

In this scene, the quarter-day—one of the four days of the English calendar year on which rents ordinarily became due and tenants took possession of land— becomes, in the Frenchman’s ironic pun, a day of dispossession and butchery, a day on which the English army will slaughter (and quarter) the land’s inhabitants. Indeed, the pun may also contain an Irish allusion, for quarter was a term (derived from the Irish ceathramhadh, sometimes anglicized as carrow) that English oYcials used, circa 1607, to denote a speciWc quantity of Irish land (OED, ‘‘quarter,’’ def. 6c). If the Roxborough scenes are about the biopolitical regulation of sexuality, then these scenes in the French countryside, with their conjuring up of the mundane bureaucracy of property administration, may be read as oVering a vision of the biopolitics of population. More precisely, in moving from the mariner’s report of the naval battle in Sluys to the citizens’ news of English ‘‘quartering’’ in the French countryside, the play connects an older vision of English expansionism—one embodied in the image of English vessels triumphantly displaying heraldic shields that ‘‘quartered equally’’ the arms of England and France (4.6; emphasis mine)—with the new guerrilla tactics common in late sixteenth-century Ireland, where conquest had little to do with knightly deeds and heraldic display. For decades, Elizabethan

Biopower in the English Pale

125

warfare in Ireland, as Paul E. J. Hammer has recently observed, consisted of ‘‘persistent guerilla warfare, punitive raids, and summary executions’’: For the military oYcers who led these brutal sweeps, the business of ‘‘colonization’’ was highly attractive: under martial law, those commissioned to execute the law were entitled to one-third of the possessions of ‘‘dead rebels,’’ which gave them a distinct incentive to increase the body-count of ‘‘suspected traitors.’’ Local collaborators had a similar incentive to boost the death-toll because they received a set fee for every dead ‘‘rebel’’ as ‘‘head money.’’53

That Irish warfare entailed regular episodes of indiscriminate killing of the ‘‘civilian’’ population was, in fact, widely reported by both sides in the Elizabethan period. Given this context, it seems clear that as the play shows the French townspeople Xying from their homes and expressing the fear that they will be killed and the ‘‘country will be subjugate’’ (5.28), it might evoke both the dispossession so common in Ireland and the still darker vision of enforced famine and outright extermination that Elizabethan commentators set forth as a possible (biopolitical) solution to England’s Irish crisis.54 This vision became a reality by 1599 as both sides were engaged systematically in a scorched earth policy that would continue until 1602.55 As one historian of the period has observed, those individuals who were granted estates after the war were among the most likely to comment on the destruction. Indeed, Lord Mountjoy, the last Elizabethan Lord Deputy, wrote in 1602, ‘‘We do now continually hunt all their woods, spoil their corn, burn their houses, and kill so many churls as it grieveth me to think that it is necessary to do it.’’56 Anticipating Mountjoy, Edward III also imagines the killing of the inhabitants as necessary: the goal of the new landlords, so the language of ‘‘quartering’’ emphasizes, is to ensure that, when the work is done, there will be no non-English survivors. 53 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 74. 54 The most famous articulation of such a policy is no doubt the one summarized by Andrew HadWeld and Willy Maley in their introduction to A View—that is, Irenius’ proposal: A huge English army of 11,000 men will be placed in garrisons constructed throughout Ireland and an ultimatum will be issued demanding the surrender of all Irish rebels. . . . Part of this process will be the destruction of all fertile land and all goods and cattle . . . in order to prevent surviving rebels from using them as sustenance. Irenius estimates that the war and the subsequent famine will take about a year. (xix) See also Barnaby Rich’s discussion of military policy in Allarme to England (1578), which, as Willy Maley suggests, can be seen as ‘‘anticipat[ing] the Ulster plantation and the policies advocated by those such as Spenser’’ (‘‘Rich, Barnaby (1542–1617),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)). And see also one of Derricke’s twelve woodcuts, reproduced as Plate II in Sypher’s edition of Derricke’s The Image of Irelande, which depicts such domestic destruction, albeit in a scenario that sounds fairly unlikely: the image is of Irish peasants looking on as their house in ‘‘the Englishe borders’’ is ‘‘surpris[ed] and burn [ed]’’ by (Irish) woodkarne. 55 On the systematic destruction of crops, see McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 225–6. 56 As cited in ibid. 226.

126

Biopower in the English Pale

The play continues to evoke this possibility of ‘‘eugenic’’ warfare in subsequent scenes that stress the English army’s brutality to the inhabitants of the French countryside. Like similar imagery in the Henriad, this imagery of slaughter and desolation seems designed to evoke Elizabethan accounts of the waste and pillage of English armies in Ireland. Thus, when a Xeeing Frenchman arrives in the village and announces that the ‘‘conquering King’’ and ‘‘his hot, unbridled son’’ together ‘‘conspire . . . to leave a desolation where they come’’ (5.64–8), the play keeps alive the notion of a calculated policy of extermination. SigniWcantly, the play not only shows this Frenchman warning his companions about such scenes of obliterated communities—‘‘ransack-constraining war j Sits like to ravens upon your houses’ tops. j Slaughter and mischief walk within your streets j And, unrestrained, make havoc as they pass’’ (5.49–53)—it also provides the audience with a kind of distanced perspective on the destruction, which literally renders the population abstract. This viewpoint emerges as the Frenchman reports on the conXagration that he has seen from atop a mountain: ‘‘Wve cities all on Wre,’’ ‘‘[c]ornWelds and vineyards burning like an oven,’’ and ‘‘poor inhabitants [who] escaped the Xame’’ only to ‘‘[f ]all numberless upon the soldiers’ pikes’’ (5.56– 61). OVering this aerial view of the smoldering towns and ‘‘numberless’’ victims—rather than a perspective from the ground, as it were—the play conjures up the domain of biopower in which the individual easily disappears into the (soon-to-be-executed) mass. Scene 10 oVers an especially striking example of the way in which the play’s staging of England’s warfare with France evokes the strategies of depopulation contemplated by commentators on Ireland. BrieXy, this scene stages Edward’s declaration of siege in which he, sounding much like Tamburlaine, promises that he will ‘‘entrench’’ his army outside Calais so ‘‘That neither victuals nor supply of men j May come to succour this accurse`d town. j Famine shall combat where our swords are stopped’’ (10.3–6). Immediately after this pronouncement, six Frenchmen who describe themselves as ‘‘disease`d, sick, and lame’’ appear on stage, revealing that they have been cast out by their town’s captain who, as part of his austerity measures, has rid the town of those unable to Wght (10.18). As the play shows a nobleman addressing these excluded men—‘‘You wretched patterns of despair and woe— j What are you? Living men, or gliding ghosts j Crept from your graves to walk upon the earth?’’ (10.12–15)—it points to the way in which regimes of biopower include abject bodies—what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘‘bare life’’57—within their calculations. That is, in the course of this scene, the play may seem simply to contrast French cruelty with English charity as it depicts Edward’s benevolence towards the outcasts—‘‘scorn[ing] to touch [such] yielding prey’’ (10.33), he spares the lives of the six men and orders that they be supplied with food and money. Yet by staging this spectacle of abjection in the midst of 57 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Biopower in the English Pale

127

scenes evoking policies of extermination, the play resists such an idealization of English conquest. Raising the unsettling possibility of a land always and already haunted by the ghosts of its former inhabitants, the nobleman’s question to the six men reminds spectators of the English production of a population for whom the law does not apply. Indeed, his words uncannily echo Spenser’s description of those who survived Elizabethan scorched earth policies in Ireland: ‘‘Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.’’58 As it invests the dismal spectacle of the six Frenchmen with an exemplary status—they are identiWed, after all, as ‘‘patterns’’—that is, copies—of ‘‘despair and woe’’—the play gestures toward a more widespread desolation and toward a vision of English warfare as genocide. The repressed biopolitical terms that link Edward III’s two parts are disclosed most pointedly perhaps in the play’s last scenes. Set in Calais after the English have vanquished their Scottish enemies and reclaimed the crown of France, these scenes not only bring the English royal family together for the Wrst time, they also assemble the kings who stand in for the newly conquered peoples. Thus the French king and his sons are brought on stage as the captives of the Prince, who has returned exultantly from the Battle of Poitiers, and a northern squire who has refused to hand over the Scottish king to the English queen—an act that momentarily revived the threat of rebellion earlier identiWed with the borderlands—immediately hands his prisoner over to Edward. As the play nears this celebratory conclusion, the Countess’s husband, the Earl of Salisbury, arrives to report on his success in Bretagne, and Edward looks to the future, proposing to establish a garrison of English soldiers in Calais. Edward’s proposal must have sounded especially compelling in the late 1590s, a period when the 1558 loss of Calais remained suYciently troublesome that Elizabeth sought (as it happened, unsuccessfully) to persuade Henri IV to cede her control of the town in return for her support. Nevertheless, in the play’s penultimate speech, the Prince sounds the dominant note of national triumph as he stands alongside the Queen, who has just come to France from England. Imagining his deeds as the stuV of chronicles and contemplating the future readers of such a text, the Prince thus petitions his father that ‘‘many princes more, j Bred and brought up within that little isle, j May still be famous for like victories!’’ and that: hereafter ages, when they read The painful traYc of my tender youth, Might thereby be inXamed with such resolve As not the territories of France alone, But likewise Spain, Turkey and what countries else That justly would provoke fair England’s ire, Might at thy presence, tremble and retire. (18.221–36) 58 Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, 101.

128

Biopower in the English Pale

Looking into a future age marked by dissension among competing countries whose expanding dominion many in Elizabethan England viewed with anxiety, the Prince fuses England’s past and future, uniting chronicle history and the martial enterprises of the 1590s. Moreover, his temporal sleight of hand is accompanied by a signiWcant geographic move. Looking outward from England, he turns, elliptically, toward Ireland. That is, his reference to sixteenth-century enemies intent on ‘‘provok[ing] fair England’s ire’’ contains a common Elizabethan pun on Ireland as a ‘‘Land of Ire,’’ a pun that enables him, linguistically, to establish English possession of Ireland and to Wx the country in relation to Britain, the ‘‘little isle’’ that he does not name but implicitly identiWes as the source of English manly might.59 Even as the play establishes the Prince as the warrior around whom the English nation will be constituted, it complicates his vision of English conquests as the labor of warriors by returning to the sexual imagery of reproduction with which the play began. More precisely, the Prince’s prayer is not simply another instance of the fantasy of male self-replication. Rather, the prayer, with its explicit reference to the breeding of princes, calls attention to the Wrst appearance in the play of Philippa, the pregnant English queen who, as we learn in Scene 10, has been, despite her pregnancy, ‘‘every day in arms’’ in England (10.45).60 Inviting its audience to contemplate this body, the play concludes by returning to its opening image of the fertile womb of Edward’s French mother and substituting this English warrior woman. Reviving the narrative of male sterility and female generative power with which the play begins, the Prince’s speech emphasizes that the play’s vision of martial conquest depends upon another economy of scale: one whose domesticity is nurtured by the putatively English woman with the teeming womb. Set forth as a Wgure of English racial purity, Queen Philippa—who, historically speaking, is in fact ‘‘of Hainault,’’ an independent kingdom now part of France—appears here, in the newly conquered land, as the sign of a new order.61 Her pregnant body seals the promise of English births in the new colony and serves as an antidote to the reproductive dangers associated with the borderlands. Staging this royal family reunion amidst the ‘‘civil towns . . . That now are turned to ragged heaps of stones,’’ the play thus assigns the newly Englished woman a key role in the proto-colonial order of early modernity (18.204–5). Underwriting the expanding nation, the reproduction of 59 For examples of this pun, see Andrew HadWeld and Willy Maley, ‘‘Introduction: Irish Representations and English Alternatives,’’ in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew HadWeld, and Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of the ConXict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–23, esp. 18. 60 On the anomalousness of this play’s performance of its pregnant warrior, see Rackin, ‘‘Women’s Roles.’’ 61 For a discussion of Philippa’s origins and of her part in the story of the burghers of Calais, see David Wallace’s fascinating study, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Biopower in the English Pale

129

the English royal family functions as a metonym for the reproduction of Englishness in a land that has been emptied of its non-English inhabitants. In its last moments, I would emphasize, Edward III gestures toward a regime of biopower in which female generation may be more vital than genocide. More precisely, just as the play earlier suggested that it was the Countess in her guise as the true English lady who alone was able to stop Edward’s unrestrained sexuality in Roxborough, so, now, it suggests that it is the queen who alone is able to stop Edward’s conquering march through France and to preside over a new population. Thus, in a scene that may evoke Foucault’s description of a pre-modern world in which the sovereign’s power consists in his ability to take life or let one live, the play’s last scene shows Philippa, upon her arrival in Calais, successfully entreating Edward to show mercy to another group of the town’s inhabitants— namely, the six citizens who stand barefoot on stage with halters on their necks and oVer themselves so that their town might be spared. Strikingly, as the play stages this well-known narrative about the burghers of Calais, it may once again evoke images of the Elizabethan crisis in Ireland, for the scene may call to mind a woodcut in Derricke’s The Image of Irelande in which Irish rebels, with halters around their neck, similarly submit to Sidney.62 Moreover, as Edward sentences the Frenchmen to death, the play recalls the language of the Sluys scene—their bodies, he says, shall be drawn about and ‘‘feel the stroke of quartering steel’’ (18.38; emphasis mine). SigniWcantly, as the Queen intervenes on behalf of the burghers, indicating through her pregnant body that violence alone cannot ensure conquest, the play seems to point toward the modern rule of biopower—that is, toward what was described earlier as ‘‘making live and letting die.’’ Or to put it diVerently, as Philippa asks pardon for the burghers, she signals to Edward that the work of exterminating has ended and the work of populating—here, imagined as the speciWcally female work of procreation—must begin.63 It is worth reXecting further upon the curious way in which the play, by locating Philippa in England while Edward is in France, suggests that the Queen’s pregnancy occurs without the aid of the King. As Edward III represents the Queen’s pregnancy, it stages the fantasy that, in the new colonial order, conception might be conWned to England. One might thus read Edward III as an oddly premonitory drama, oVering a magical resolution to the biopolitical problem of propagating ‘‘pure’’ English subjects in Ireland, a problem that had long troubled English commentators and that would assume great importance in the next few decades as the north of Ireland was subject to large-scale plantation. The problem 62 The woodcut is reproduced as Plate XII in Sypher’s edition of Derricke’s The Image of Irelande. The scene may also call to mind the staging in Stukeley of the submission of Shane O’Neill, who wears a ‘‘hateful cord’’ around his neck ‘‘in sign of true repentance of [his] treasons past’’ (ll. 1179–84). 63 As Wallace has noted, Berners’s translation of Froissart follows its account of Philippa’s successful intervention on behalf of the burghers with an account of Edward’s subsequent proposal to ‘‘repeople agayne the towne with pure Englysshmen’’ (Premodern Places, 38). His discussion of the historical Edward’s policy of ‘‘repeopling’’ Calais overlaps in several instances with mine (33–40).

130

Biopower in the English Pale

was exacerbated by the gender imbalance among the English people who came to Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s: many of the 4,000 inhabitants of the Munster plantation established in southern Ireland in the mid-1580s and probably all of the some 20,000 soldiers who, at the height of the Nine Years War, lived in garrisons throughout Ireland, were men.64 Historians have noted that many soldiers, ignoring the military codes that warned of severe punishment for ‘‘adulteries or fornications,’’ married into Irish communities, learning the Irish language and living in estates near the garrisons.65 Moreover, while New English polemicists inveighed against Old English alliances with the Irish, the Munster plantation was said to have failed because the New English settlers did not keep a proper distance from the natives. In a culture newly enamored of the notion of racial purity and opposed to sexual relations across the colonial divide, the paucity of English-born women made reproduction a fraught issue. Given that the reproduction of English families in Ireland was not exactly the horticultural feat that the language of ‘‘plantation’’ suggests, the Elizabethan conquest inevitably raised both the question of race and a speciWc racialized question: how was Englishness to be preserved and perpetuated in the English colony? IV To get a sense of what distinguishes Edward III’s approach to the biopolitical from other, better known, cultural texts, it is helpful to consider how Henry V—the play that perhaps ends a cycle that began with Edward III—articulates warfare, race, and reproduction. There are, of course, clear similarities between the tales of warfare and desire that the two plays oVer. Like Edward III, Henry V features a highly eroticized woman, Catherine of Valois, who speaks a foreign tongue and is said to ‘‘have witchcraft in [her] lips’’ (5.2.274).66 And like Edward III, Henry V is framed by scenes that place maternal ties at the center of dynastic politics: it opens by mocking the French ban against female succession and closes with the English King’s pursuit of the princess whom he envisions as the consummate breeder of soldiers. But the diVerence between these two plays is unmistakable, for while both plays oVer reassuring scenes of English victories over the French, Henry V embraces, albeit ambivalently, the mixed union that Edward III so vehemently rejects. 64 Demographic information about the plantations is scant. It is known, however, that the English-born population of Munster, the largest Elizabethan plantation, reached 4,000 before its overthrow in 1598. See Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 65 McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 220. The full quotation, taken from Lawes and Orders of Warre, established for the good conduct of the service in Ireland, reads as follows: ‘‘adulteries or fornications shalbe punished by imprisonment, banishment from the Army or such other penaltie.’’ 66 All references to Henry V are to The Oxford Shakespeare, hereafter cited in the text parenthetically.

Biopower in the English Pale

131

From its complicated opening scene, which shows Canterbury and Ely identifying Henry’s entitlement to France with that of his great-grandfather Edward III even as it hints that Henry’s claim is bound up with Edward’s French mother Isabella (and thus with inheritance through the female line), Henry V shares Edward III’s preoccupation with the matter of origins and oVspring.67 Like the earlier play, Henry V also repeatedly sets out a racialized language of English purity.68 So for example, the French king describes the Black Prince as Edward III’s ‘‘heroical seed’’ (2.4.59), literally, an embodiment of his semen, and imagines Henry as the descendant of a distinct (though possibly depleted) distinct racial stock: ‘‘he is bred out of that bloody strain j That haunted us in our familiar paths’’ (2.4.51–2).69 A similar racialized rhetoric of breeding permeates Henry’s speech at the siege of HarXeur, in which the notion of a ‘‘bloody strain’’ is implicit in Henry’s description of his highest ranking soldiers as the ‘‘noblest English, j Whose blood is fet [i.e., derived] from fathers of war-proof’’ (3.1.17–18). Such racialized language is central to Henry’s admonition to the nobles that they ‘‘Be copy now to men of grosser blood, j And teach them how to war’’ (3.1.24–5) as well as to his address to the ‘‘yeoman,’’ which urges these men to manifest their Englishness on the battleWeld: And you, good yeomen, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding—which I doubt not For there is none of you so mean and base That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. (3.1.25–30)

In as much as Henry’s speech brings together corporeality (‘‘blood,’’ ‘‘limbs,’’ and ‘‘eyes’’); a geographic region of birth or acculturation (England as the site of manufacture, ‘‘pasture,’’ and ‘‘breeding’’); and an inherited disposition or ‘‘mettle,’’ it clearly envisions the emergent nation within the period’s evolving racial paradigms. Its imagination of Englishmen who are at once copies and copying matter depends upon notions of the somatic that cannot easily be subsumed in a discourse of the familial, the dynastic, the regional, or the national. Indeed, even the language of status evoked here—‘‘Be copy now to men of grosser blood’’— 67 On this point, see Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), who points out that Canterbury accompanies—perhaps even supports—his assertion of Henry’s right to the French throne by forcefully repudiating the so-called Salic law, according to which, so he maintains, the French prohibit female inheritance (167). Edward’s mother Isabella is the daughter of Philip IV of France. 68 For a searching discussion of the place of the geohumoral in fantasies of Englishness, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘‘English Mettle,’’ in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 130–46. 69 It is worth underlining the ambiguity of the French king’s language here: to be ‘‘bred out of that bloody strain’’ may mean both to be a product of that strain and a symptom of its exhaustion. Indeed, later in the play when the Dauphin laments that ‘‘Our madams mock at us and plainly say j Our mettle is bred out’’ (3.5.28–9), he will invoke precisely this notion of a worn-out ‘‘stock’’ of valor.

132

Biopower in the English Pale

insists upon such diVerence as written on, or rather in, the body. As this trope of ‘‘copying’’ underlines, much of Henry V centers on a narrative of reproduction— of this endless work of making and breeding men—that pointedly occludes the bodies and labor of women. As is suggested by the French king’s speech cited earlier, it is not wombs but rather the ‘‘bloody strain’’ of war that enables Englishmen to be ‘‘Xeshed’’—that is, to be born (made Xesh) as distinctively English soldiers, men whose appetites are imagined as like those of predators with a taste for newly killed Xesh. In the play’s visions of England as a pure, warrior nation, in other words, the act of reproduction is invoked in a way that insists upon a disavowal of female sites of generation and, with that, a disavowal of the maternal line authorizing Henry’s claim to France. Henry V ’s staging of a racialized English body is complicated, however, by a recurrent rhetoric of racial mixture and of pure English ‘‘breeding’’ gone awry that recalls the racialized language on view in the scenes between the King and the Countess in Edward III. This rhetoric is especially emphatic when the play contemplates the oVspring of French and English bodies—for example, when Bourbon, denying the Englishness of the English, describes them instead as ‘‘bastard Normans, Norman bastards’’ (3.5.10), or when the Dauphin fearfully imagines that French women will repudiate Frenchmen and ‘‘give j Their bodies to the lust of English youth, j To new-store France with bastard warriors’’ (3.5.29–31). Nowhere in Henry V is the possibility of embodied racial mixture developed more fully, perhaps, than in the play’s last act, in which the French queen’s description of the future marriage of Henry and Catherine of Valois as an ‘‘incorporate league’’ that will ensure ‘‘[t]hat English may as French, French Englishmen, j Receive each other’’ (5.2.361–3) itself enacts the subsumption of the two identities into one. Crucially, this scene’s engagement with race stages a full-blown return of Act 1’s repressed narrative of maternal generation, which takes the form of a materialization of the ghostly French mother who haunts the royal genealogy: she appears not only in the Wgure of the French Queen Isabel (whose name recalls that of Edward III’s mother) but also in the Wgure of Catherine whom many in the audience might recognize as the future mother not only of Henry VI but also of another diVerently hybrid son, Edmund Tudor. As in the scenes depicting Edward’s attempted seduction of the Countess in Edward III, so, too, in Henry V ’s so-called ‘‘wooing scene,’’ the complex interlocutions of race and reproduction on view have much to do with Anglo-Irish relations in the 1590s. More precisely, as a number of scholars have suggested, the King’s ‘‘wooing’’ of Catherine must be read in the context of Elizabethan eVorts to enforce the incorporation of Ireland into the would-be English empire.70 In 70 See, for example, Altman, ‘‘ ‘Vile Participation’ ’’; Baker, Between Nations; Burnett and Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland; Cairns and Richards, Writing Ireland; Dollimore and SinWeld, ‘‘History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation’’; Edwards, Threshold of a Nation; Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland; Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 196–215; and Neill, ‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish.’’

Biopower in the English Pale

133

this vein, some critics have suggested that because the royal marriage promised in the last act consummates the English martial victory, it must be understood as a kind of rape, while others have questioned the extent of Catherine’s docility.71 But perhaps more important for our purposes is the widespread recognition that the scenes between Henry and Catherine uneasily negotiate the English polemic against English/Irish intermarriage, so that, for example, Henry’s elated vision of his future with Catherine—‘‘Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’’ (5.2.204–7)—can be understood in the context of cultural anxieties about miscegenation and the consequences of ‘‘mixed’’ marriages. Indeed, Christopher Highley has persuasively argued that the play’s ending pointedly reverses a fantasy set out earlier in the play—namely the Dauphin’s vision of the coupling of the French and English, which assumes that such mixture will generate a race of warriors. By contrast, the play’s ending indicates a less sanguine outcome for the English: as those familiar with Shakespeare’s Wrst tetralogy would know, Henry VI, the child of the English king and the French princess, would be derided as a weak ruler who ventured no crusades and who lost nearly all his father’s conquests. As Highley has observed, ‘‘Henry’s French campaign began as a national crusade to highlight and diVerentiate an essential Englishness from its Others, but it ends in the blurring of identities . . . and with the prospect of the mongrel and the weak Henry VI ascending the throne.’’72 Whereas Edward III underwrites what it holds out as a pure English marriage, Henry V concludes with a mixed marriage that raises the specter of racial degeneration. Given Henry V’s preoccupation with race and reproduction, it is striking to note that in the play’s last act, Henry’s repeatedly conjures up images of bodily decline as he seeks to persuade her to unite with him: A good leg will fall, a straight back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a curled pate will grow bald, a fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow, but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon—or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly. (5.2.159–62)

Imagining himself as the sun who ‘‘shines bright and never changes’’ and as the producer of a son who similarly ‘‘keeps his course,’’ Henry optimistically absents 71 See, for example, the contrast between Neill who emphasizes her powerlessness—her ‘‘mouth . . . is conclusively ‘stopped’ by the kiss of possession which signals the end of her speaking part . . . and she is conspicuously denied any part in the political maneuvering that establishes the conditions of her marriage’’ (‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish,’’ 23) and Dollimore and SinWeld who underscore her resistance to marriage and her ‘‘recalcitrance’’ in the face of Henry’s domineering kisses (‘‘History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation,’’ 139). See also the sophisticated analysis of Henry V, rape, and marriage in Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation; the account of the French princess as the ‘‘gendered sign of the territory to be conquered and occupied,’’ in Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 13; and the discussion of the French princess and aVective labor in Donald Hendrick, ‘‘Advantage, AVect, History, Henry V,’’ PMLA, 118 (2003), 470–87. 72 Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, 144.

134

Biopower in the English Pale

himself from the possibility of corporeal deterioration he describes and, in doing so, would seem to be disavowing the possibility of Englishness as a potentially depleted, or even mutable, ‘‘stock.’’ Before the scene ends, however, the notion of racial decline will return as the French king presents his daughter to Henry: Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up Issue to me; that the contending kingdoms Of France and England, whose very shores look pale With envy of each other’s happiness, May cease their hatred (5.2.343–6)

The king’s speech, which conjures up Henry as his ‘‘son’’ and which envisions the oVspring of the royal marriage as a product of this male exchange who is destined to be ‘‘raise[d] up’’ by Henry alone, oVers yet another fantasy of generation without women. But, of course, that is not all it oVers, for the king’s identiWcation of the child as the ‘‘[i]ssue’’ of ‘‘her blood’’ betrays the play’s investment in the notion that the very matter of racial diVerence depends, at least in part, on women. Through this double narrative, Henry V oVers an ambivalent response to the question of reproduction generated by English campaigns in Ireland. Indeed, it is surely no accident that the play dwells on the matter of oVspring most explicitly in a royal meeting that takes place outside of England, outside of the locale that, as we have seen, was routinely Wgured as the ‘‘pasture’’ where English mettle was best produced and preserved. By ‘‘planting’’ the encounter between Catherine and Henry precisely in this foreign space, the play not only looks toward 1590s Ireland; it also encrypts the specter of racial degeneration at the heart of their mixed union. A recent historian of the Munster plantation has pointed out that ‘‘in government memoranda the plantation invariably was referred to as the reinhabiting or repeopling of Munster’’—that is, in a biopolitical language which, as I have suggested, often carried racial meanings in this period.73 And in fact racial thinking is implicit in English writings on the question of the proper sort of people to inhabit the new plantation, ‘‘whether it should be totally inhabited with natural Englishmen, or with a mixture of mere English and those of English here born in the Pale, or whether part of the natural inhabitants not rebels might not . . . repossess their own.’’74 The racialized rhetoric of ‘‘purity’’ and, its opposite, the intermixture of ‘‘peoples’’ is also unmistakable in contemporary documents about the Ulster plantation established under James I. For example, when in 1609, Lord Deputy Arthur Chichester set forth a plan to secure the position of 73 MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation. As it turned out, the Wrst plantation rules, which were promulgated in the mid-1580s, declared that all of the Wrst settlers had to be born in England and reiterated the prohibitions against English–Irish marriage. By the early seventeenth century, however, the prohibition against intermarriage had been lifted and intermarriage became common on the plantation. 74 See ibid.

Biopower in the English Pale

135

the Ulster undertakers—men who came both from England and the Scottish Lowlands (i.e., the non-Gaelic regions of Scotland) and who lived in castles far apart from the original inhabitants—he made his concerns with racial diVerence quite clear: It is worthy of consideration how the English language and customs may be preserved, pure and neat, unto posterity, without which he accounts it no good plantation nor any great honour and security to them to induce people thither. The way to perform that is to separate the Irish by themselves, to forbear marrying and fostering, and if possible to exceed them in multitude.75

Chichester’s recommendation that practices of segregation be enforced in the colony carries with it the suggestion that the wombs of the female participants in the plantation be Wlled with multitudes of English subjects. Interestingly, Chichester’s proposal was countered by other proposals, thus indicating that ‘‘oYcial’’ views of intermarriage were more Xexible than one might otherwise assume. In 1623 an English commentator reXecting on the Ulster plantation declared that, since the Irish had ‘‘multiplied to an incredible number,’’ intermarriage—the act that earlier had been seen as sounding the death knell to conquest—was clearly an ideal solution. The Irish, he suggested, must be compelled to ‘‘match their children . . . especially their male issue’’ with the English ‘‘because we observe that the child follows more the mother than any in his language and manners.’’76 As these opposed proposals suggest, even as the oYcial view of intermarriage Xuctuated, the discourse of biopolitics remained constant. In 1606, Francis Bacon singled out Irish men for special attention in his Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland, remarking that: [t]his Ireland being another Britain, as Britain was said to be another world, is endowed with so many dowries of nature, considering the fruitfulness of the soil, the ports, the rivers, the Wshings, the quarries, the woods, and other materials: and especially the race and generation of men, valiant, hard, and active, as it is not easy, no not upon the continent, to Wnd such conXuence of commodities77

For Bacon, Irishmen—like Irish quarries and woods—are a ‘‘commodity’’ of great value to the polity, a commodity whose value inheres in physical strength and whose racial diVerence may, when necessary, be overlooked. What Bacon’s remarks on the English appropriation of the bodies of Irishmen cover over, of 75 ‘‘Certain considerations concerning the Plantation,’’ in Calendar of State Papers, Relating to Ireland, of the Reign of James I (London: Longman, 1872–80), iii.358–9. Emphasis added. 76 Advertisements for Ireland: Being a Description of the State of Ireland in the Reign of James I Contained in a Manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin 1923 (Dublin: Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1923), 49–50. 77 Francis Bacon, ‘‘Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland Presented to His Majesty 1606,’’ in The Works, vol. XI, ed. James Spedding et al. (New York: Garret, 1968), 116. Emphasis added.

136

Biopower in the English Pale

course, is the ‘‘problem’’ of the Irish women who bring forth this ‘‘race and generation of men.’’ The textual elision on view in Bacon’s remarks—the removal of the Irish woman from the colonial landscape—mimes the larger elision on view in Edward III, in which the putatively foreign woman turns out to be a true English one. And the racial logic that may be read in the interstices of Bacon’s text—the notion that Irish conquest depends not only upon the seizure of land and labor, but also upon the control of a population brought forth by women— is, precisely, the logic at work in Edward III. Producing a martial narrative about the limitations of warfare, Edward III imagines that the war eVort must be supplemented by a politics of procreation, if Englishness is to be preserved, ‘‘pure and neat unto posterity,’’ outside of England. As the next chapter suggests, women are also at the center of a very diVerent kind of Elizabethan war plot about the limitations of warfare—one in which the limitations deWne not what warfare can do, but rather what a culture can withstand. Above all, the limitations have to do with the theater’s staging of the inassimilable truth of warfare in its continual and haunting return as traumatic wound.

4 Atrocity in Arcadia Wounds, Women, and the Face of Trauma in The Trial of Chivalry In order to show how the Elizabethan martial repertory helped establish new regimes of abstraction and classiWcation and to explore the biopolitical questions these new regimes brought into view, I have in the previous chapters risked leaving the impression that the London playhouse was a preeminently cerebral, if not exactly a bloodless, domain. That is, while I have noted some of the many unsettling moments in the plays under consideration—such as Tamburlaine’s evocation of the ‘‘Thousands of men drowned in Asphaltis lake [who] j Have made the water swell above the banks’’ (T2, 5.1.202–3); 1 Henry IV’s evocation of the ‘‘ragamuYns’’ whom FalstaV has led so poorly that ‘‘there’s not three of [his] hundred and Wfty left alive’’ (5.3.36–8); and Edward III’s evocation of the ‘‘far oV ’’ view from a French mountaintop of ‘‘Wve cities all on Wre’’ (3.2.55–6)— I have focused on how the plays’ rendering of violence in terms of what can be measured, counted, or otherwise appraised, bespeaks the culture’s new calculus of killing. In the rest of this book, I turn from this ‘‘intellectual’’ dimension of the martial repertory and explore its visceral one. I consider the theatrical performance of a wide range of frightening sights and sounds, but what I Wnd most striking—and most unexpected—is the degree to which Elizabethan dramas exhibit a sense of bewilderment in their portrayal of warfare. What I aim to show, in other words, is that even as London’s new playhouses enabled Elizabethan audiences to encounter, and master, the rationalities of the new militarism as earlier generations had not encountered earlier forms of warfare, the playhouses—and the dramas they showcased—also gave rise to complex new ways of witnessing to the devastating impact of war. Above all, they made possible the performance of war as trauma.1 1 See Deborah Willis, ‘‘The Gnawing Vulture: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 53 (2002), 21–52; Heather Anne Hirschfeld, ‘‘Hamlet’s ‘First Corse’: Repetition, Trauma, and the Displacement of Redemptive Typology,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 54 (2003), 424–48; David Foley McCandless, ‘‘A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 53 (2002), 487–511; and, most recently, Thomas P. Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), a study that oVers powerful insights into literary texts as it draws on the insights of psychoanalytically inXected trauma theory.

138

Atrocity in Arcadia

While ‘‘trauma’’ derives from an ancient Greek word for ‘‘wound,’’2 the phenomenon it describes is, of course, conventionally imagined as recent in origin. War trauma is, after all, most commonly associated with military campaigns of the twentieth century and after—with the ‘‘shell-shock’’ and ‘‘war neurosis’’ of the First World War or the ‘‘combat fatigue’’ and ‘‘post-traumatic stress disorder’’ (PTSD) that have come to prominence in the years since the Vietnam War.3 My objective in the pages that follow is not to conXate the traumas of one period with those of another; just as shell-shock is not the same as PTSD, so, too, the kinds of trauma generated by Elizabethan militarism must be recognized as sui generis. I do not propose that we search the annals of Renaissance drama for characters suVering from intrusive recollections, recurrent nightmares, unwitting reenactments, and the other symptoms that modern clinicians have identiWed with PTSD.4 But I do ask why the absence of characters exhibiting such symptoms should be read as an indication of the absence of war trauma on the Renaissance stage, especially in an era when the stage showed very little interest in character in the novelistic sense.5 Rather than look in Elizabethan war plays for Wgures marked by a certain pathology, I explore how such texts inscribe trauma in other ways. As I noted in the Introduction, my reading of these dramas is, quite often, a reading of textual elements suggestive of what contemporary trauma theorists, drawing on psychoanalysis, have identiWed as a narrative structure characteristic of traumatic representation—namely, one marked by tropes of repetition and return as well as by ‘‘latency’’ or ‘‘belatedness.’’6 While such narratives are not, of course, unique to the early modern period, traumatic representation in Elizabethan culture nevertheless remains distinctive in both its content and form. As I suggest in this chapter, theatrical performances of wounding make it clear that the populace did not smoothly absorb the transformations in the nature and scale of Elizabethan military 2 On this etymology, see (among many others) the comments of Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3. 3 On the history of war trauma and PTSD, see, for example, Michael R. Trimble’s Post-Traumatic Neurosis: From Railway Spine to the Whiplash (New York: Wiley, 1981), and Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (eds), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4 For a provocative discussion of Shakespeare’s Pistol as a traumatized subject, see Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 170–2. 5 For arguments against character-based criticism of Renaissance drama, see, for example, Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985); Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Premodern Stage (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990); Jonathan Holmes, Merely Players? Actors’ Accounts of Performing Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2004), 15–61; Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Comedian as the Character C,’’ in Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan (eds), English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36–54; and Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 For inXuential discussions of such traumatic structures and the Freudian texts from which they derive, see, for example, Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), works to which this study is greatly indebted.

Atrocity in Arcadia

139

violence it witnessed. Above all, it seems that the culture did not easily come to terms with the high incidence of war-related injury and disease, something clearly visible in the large numbers of wounded soldiers to be seen wandering about Elizabethan London; nor did it easily accept the appalling numbers of war casualties, many of which resulted from illness rather than from military action.7 What makes traumatic representation in this period distinctive, however, is not simply the speciWc historical conditions in which the theater is immersed and to which it responded; it is also that the very emergence of the commercial theater oVered Elizabethans something unavailable to earlier generations—namely, a public space for the collective reenacting of the incomprehensible and, with that, the possibility of a cultural ‘‘working through’’ of what might otherwise resist psychic assimilation. This chapter focuses on the little-known play entitled The History of the Trial of Chivalry, in part to show that traumatic representation on the Elizabethan stage was not conWned to dramas depicting the large-scale catastrophes of English history (e.g., Shakespeare’s depiction of the civil wars in the Henry VI plays). The Trial of Chivalry exempliWes ‘‘history’’ as story: it scripts a past of indeterminate date and makes no claim to be a chronicle of ‘‘real’’ events. An anonymously authored work, which may have been a collaborative eVort of Henry Chettle and Thomas Heywood, it was likely Wrst staged by the Earl of Derby’s Men, possibly at the Boar’s Head playhouse, circa 1600.8 It appears to have been popular enough to have inspired a response in the form of John Marston’s boy’s company satire, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), as well as a Wrst printing some Wve years after its initial printing.9 Indebted to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia rather than, say, the chronicles of Holinshed or Froissart, The Trial of Chivalry is marked by spiraling plotlines and hugely improbable turns of event. What makes it a compelling text for historicist analysis, however, is that even as it traYcs in nostalgia for an Arcadian age of courtly romance and knightly display, it subjects audiences to recurring 7 See, for example, Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), who notes that in Ireland in the winter of 1601, 40 men died each day from exposure (226). On Elizabethan war casualties, see also de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 1–53, and John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 240–61. While reliable casualty Wgures for the Elizabethan campaigns do not exist, McGurk oVers estimates of numbers of the dead and wounded in a variety of engagements in Ireland and provides archival evidence to suggest that wounded soldiers must have been a common sight in late Elizabethan London. He also observes that the preamble to the 1593 Poor Law, which for the Wrst time provided speciWcally for the relief of poor soldiers, noted ‘‘the Queen is troubled whenever she takes the air with these miserable creatures’’ (251). 8 Critics have speculated dates ranging from 1597 to 1603 for the play’s Wrst performance. For a discussion of the dating of this play as well as a persuasive argument for circa 1600, see Michael C. Andrews, ‘‘Jack Drum’s Entertainment as Burlesque,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 24.2 (1971), 226–31. On the theatrical history of the Boar’s Head, with which the Earl of Derby’s Men were associated, see Herbert Berry, The Boar’s Head Playhouse (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986). 9 On Marston’s play, see Andrews, ‘‘Jack Drum’s Entertainment as Burlesque.’’ On Chettle’s authorship, see Fred L. Jones, ‘‘The Trial of Chivalry, a Chettle Play,’’ PMLA, 4 (1926), 304–24.

140

Atrocity in Arcadia

visions of damaged and aZicted bodies, as though attesting, symptomatically, to the ways in which English culture became increasingly ‘‘possessed’’ by the wounds of war. Unlike the martial dramas examined in previous chapters, this play does not conjure up images of innocents being tortured or of men being levied against their will or of whole villages being destroyed. Instead, as I show in what follows, trauma is inscribed in the play obliquely through three ‘‘wound narratives’’—one about noblemen, another about an English soldier, and the last about a princess of Navarre. Moreover, as the play assembles audiences around these intertwined narratives, the stage world of popular romance subtly mutates to a recognizably Elizabethan world coping with the consequences of gunpowder warfare. Even more strikingly, while the play is preoccupied with showing—and, equally important, refraining from showing—the bodies of wounded men, it ultimately, unlike many dramas of the period, stages the face of war trauma as a female one. OVering neither a repudiation—or even an explicit critique—of modern gunpowder warfare, The Trial of Chivalry instead dwells upon the fragility of life during wartime. Staging a continual return to damaged and dying bodies, it draws theatergoers into disturbing encounters with injury and intimates that the wounding visions it depicts remain profoundly ungraspable. I At Wrst glance, The Trial of Chivalry may seem to be uninterested in war (let alone wounds and war trauma), for while the play opens with Tamburlaine-like images of spectacular martial array—a soldier announces, for example, that ‘‘Ten thousand men of Orleance . . . are bravely marshald on the playn’’—much of the drama resolves around the vicissitudes of faithful love and the valor of individual knights rather than the actions of modern warfare.10 Certainly, the play’s opening evocation of a conXict between King Lewis of France and an unnamed king of Navarre over the political autonomy of the latter’s kingdom may suggest an interest in contemporary French politics, for in 1589 Elizabeth had hastily levied forces for the Protestant leader Henri of Navarre, who had become king of France, and, as noted in Chapter 3, she continued to send her subjects to serve in northern France and Brittany for most of the 1590s.11 Whatever one makes of these opening allusions to conXicts on the Continent, it is clear that the play’s martial narrative is quickly eclipsed by a marital one: thus, within the play’s Wrst hundred lines, the two sons of the warring kings announce their love for the two 10 All quotations from the play are from The Trial of Chivalry, ed. John S. Farmer (Edinburgh and London: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1970), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11 On the Elizabethan response to the accession of Henri IV as well as on the French campaigns, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 175–82. As de Somogyi notes in his valuable discussion of this play in Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, Elizabethan audiences might well have found echoes of the French civil wars in the play’s staging of conXict.

Atrocity in Arcadia

141

daughters of these kings, with the result that the monarchs declare a truce of three months length, a period during which it will be decided whether marriage will join the contending kingdoms. Set largely in this time of uncertainty in which the two sides are poised on the brink of combat, The Trial of Chivalry does not, in fact, oVer a world apart from war. On the contrary, it imagines a domain so thoroughly militarized that even courtship, which is carried out by princes who march into enemy camps with drummers and other attendants, looks like war by other means. The most prominent of the three wound narratives in The Trial of Chivalry is that to which the play’s title presumably refers—namely, a narrative that shows nobles and royalty engaging in formal duels of honor. In most of these scenes of swordplay, the English earl of Pembrooke, who has come to France with an army in support of the claims of the King of Navarre, wields his sword against, and triumphs over, virtually all the drama’s male characters. OVering the audience the pleasure of witnessing performances of English superiority, these scenes of Pembrooke as duelist also represent the compelling spectacle of combat without consequences, for remarkably enough, everyone vanquished in these duels either emerges unscathed or is ‘‘resurrected’’ after acquiring seemingly deadly wounds. Through the repeated performance of these ritualized duels, the play not only oVers a benign substitute for the threat of bloody warfare that hovers over much of the action—a threat imaged in an opening speech as a ‘‘purple cloud’’; it also seems to deny the very possibility that the bodies of men of high birth—especially that of an English nobleman—might be vulnerable to sudden injury or death.12 That the play’s relationship to injury is not one of simple denial becomes evident, however, when one looks more closely at the strand of this wound narrative pertaining to the chivalric combat between Pembrooke and Prince Ferdinand of Navarre, the only such combat that leads to actual wounding. This plot, as C. R. Baskervill has noted, derives in part from one of Sidney’s erotic triangles in the Arcadia—namely, that which shows Amphialus wooing Helen of Corinth on behalf of Philoxenus.13 In the play, what happens, brieXy, is as follows: Ferdinand, the counterpart to Sidney’s Philoxenus, asks his dear friend Pembrooke to woo the unresponsive Princess Katharina of France on his behalf. Pembrooke’s suit—like that of Sidney’s Amphialus—succeeds too well, with the result that Katharina falls in love with the surrogate suitor, and Ferdinand, wrongly convinced of Pembrooke’s duplicity, challenges his erstwhile friend to a duel. Although Pembrooke initially refuses to Wght, the two eventually meet secretly and duel until both collapse onstage from seemingly fatal wounds. In 12 For a related discussion of the cultural work of dueling in early modern England, see Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 13 On the play’s debts to Sidney, see C. R. Baskervill, ‘‘Sidney’s Arcadia and The Tryall of Chevalry,’’ Modern Philology, 10 (1912), 197–201, and Frederic L. Jones, ‘‘Another Source for The Trial of Chivalry,’’ PMLA, 47 (1932), 668–70.

142

Atrocity in Arcadia

subsequent scenes, a forester and a Wsherman separately discover the bodies, and each man is carried oVstage by his rescuer who ministers to his injuries and provides him with new armor. Disguised in this new armor and convinced that he is the sole survivor of the duel, the contrite Pembrooke resides by a monument he has had erected in Ferdinand’s honor and compels all those who cross his path to pay homage to ‘‘The faythfulst Lover, and most valyant Knight, j That in this time drew sword, or manag’d horse’’ (G2v). It is here that the play stages the apparently bloodless duels between Pembrooke and the aristocratic (and royal) passers-by who challenge his claims. More importantly, however, it is here that Pembrooke and the now remorseful Ferdinand meet up again. Like Pembrooke, Ferdinand is ‘‘recovered of . . . mortall wounds’’ (G4v) and certain that he alone has survived the duel. Having been rendered strangers by their newly acquired armor, the two men unknowingly face oV again in the titular trial, or test, of chivalry, as each Wghts to vouch for the preeminence of the other. Shortly thereafter, the play, having clearly delighted in the deferrals of the romance genre, oVers a combat scene in which each accidentally reveals his identity to the other and a scene of joyous reunion ensues.14 While the Pembrooke/Ferdinand narrative shows the return to vibrant life of two seemingly dead men, this narrative cannot be described as about the denial of injury, for the play repeatedly represents the death and dying of noblemen as wrenching spectacle. Consider, for example, how in the dueling scene the play ‘‘fakes’’ the death of both Pembrooke and Ferdinand, inviting the audience to identify as corpses the collapsed bodies that might otherwise remain ambiguous objects. While the stage directions for the Wrst duel, which read, ‘‘Fight, and hurt eche other, both fall downe as dead’’ (E3r), underline the inherent ambiguity in staging death (i.e., they remind us that onstage to be dead can only mean to be ‘‘as dead’’), the play’s language before the men fall—in which each declares that he is dying—invites audience members to interpret ‘‘as dead’’ as ‘‘dead.’’ Indeed, the language lingers over what it represents as the bodily processes of dying: Thus the scene depicts Pembrooke announcing that he is ‘‘markt for death, j [and] feele[s] a generall fayntnesse through [his] lymmes’’ such that ‘‘Expence of bloud will soone expend [his] life’’; then it shows Ferdinand declaring that he is subject to ‘‘the like debility’’; and Wnally it represents Pembrooke avowing, with what would seem to be his dying breath, that ‘‘death hath layd his num-cold hand upon [him]’’ (E3r). Indeed, it is not until the play shows the arrival of the good-hearted rustics that audiences learn retrospectively that what they saw was not dying and that the bodies that lay on the stage were not corpses. Even more remarkable than this arresting scene of counterfeit death is the way that The Trial of Chivalry, long after it has shown that Pembrooke has been restored to health, withholds showing that Ferdinand, too, has been cured, 14 On the characteristic features of the romance genre, see Patricia A. Parker’s important account, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Atrocity in Arcadia

143

instead dwelling on the possibility that Ferdinand has not survived his wounds— a possibility, it is worth noting, that is realized in the play’s ‘‘source text’’ through the death of Philoxenus, Ferdinand’s Arcadian counterpart. The play’s death fantasy is partly fueled by its staging of scenes in which Pembrooke, while disguised in armor, Wrst reports to passers-by that the valiant prince has been slain and then challenges them all to a duel in Ferdinand’s honor. But it is also fueled by scenes in which Pembrooke reports Ferdinand’s death to Katharina, the woman who scorned him: [H]ad you seene him as I did, Begirt with wounds, that like so many mouthes, Seem’d to complayne his timelesse overthrow: And had before bin inward with his vertues, To thinke that nature should indure such wracke, And at one time so many precious gifts Perish by death, would have dissolv’d your heart. (F4r)

SigniWcantly, as Pembrooke returns to the bloody scene witnessed by the audience, he not only envisions Ferdinand’s wounds as ‘‘mouthes’’ lamenting the untimeliness of his death; he also represents the event of Ferdinand’s death as powerful enough to engender the death of others—though, strikingly, the play imagines the English earl as somehow exempt from this fate. Pembrooke’s rhetoric of death by dissolution and heartbreak summons up metaphors whose literality, as Cynthia Marshall has recently shown, had real purchase in this period.15 Conjuring up this spectacle of a singularly painful death at a moment before the audience has seen Ferdinand and ascertained that his wounds have not been fatal, the play seems to invite audience members not only to revisit the scene of Ferdinand’s body in its death throes but also to imagine—through a kind of imaginary reenactment of the scene—their own physical vulnerability to a condition that Marshall has described as a kind of slow undoing of the bounds of the self. This return at the level of fantasy to the spectacle of Ferdinand’s death is powerfully rendered through the play’s stage properties as well as its language. The most visible stage property is, of course, the monument to Ferdinand, purportedly made of marble, on which is displayed all the shields amassed by the English knight in his duels with passers-by. Pointing to Wssures in the play’s larger narrative of an invulnerable aristocracy, these shields evoke the fate of the vanquished nobles, suggesting the loss not only of their means of protection but also of the chivalric identity for which each shield once stood.16 Located at the site of Pembrooke and Ferdinand’s Wrst duel—which becomes the site of all the later 15 Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 16 See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 256–60.

144

Atrocity in Arcadia

duels—the monument is envisaged as marking a wounded space as well a space of wounding. Thus Katharina, happening upon the spot, sees the ‘‘blood’’ of the combatants, which she describes as ‘‘still Xow[ing]’’ (E4r), and Pembrooke returning still later to the site with his rescuer, describes the grass as a ‘‘purple register,’’ which still bears the bloody traces of their combat (F2v). An extravagant emblem of loss, the monument adorned with shields remains on stage through several scenes, becoming especially signiWcant in the scenes in which the play traverses the fantasy that Ferdinand really is dead. Indeed, in most of these scenes, the monument is re-imagined as the prince’s tomb, as the disguised Pembrooke, standing by the monument, tells all whom he encounters—including Katharina, the two kings, several nobles, some soldiers, and even the suitably puzzled (and disguised) Navarrese prince himself—that Ferdinand is buried within. The play’s repeated return to Ferdinand’s death is also accomplished through another stage property—namely, a portrait of Ferdinand, which hangs from the monument alongside the shields. The play calls attention to this portrait when it shows Pembrooke instructing the princess to study the image: Looke on his picture, in the armes of death, When he was ready to give up the ghost, I causde it to be drawne: if at that time, In that extremity of bitter pangs, He lookt so louely, had so fresh a colour, So quick a moving eye, so red a lip, What was his beauty when he was in health?

(F4r)

As audience members would likely realize, Pembrooke’s claim that he arranged for a drawing of the dying prince is false, fabricated apparently as part of his avowed scheme to punish Katharina by making her ‘‘hopelesse doate on Ferdinand’’ (F4v)—a scheme whose cruelty is exacerbated by the fact that Katharina, in the throes of unrequited love, had earlier enlisted a painter to draw her an accurate portrait of Pembrooke. Even as the play reveals that Pembrooke’s plan to instill remorse in Katharina works magniWcently, it leaves the question of the portrait’s origins unanswered, instead showcasing the eYcacy of visual spectacle as punishment. Moreover, by staging Pembrooke’s false representation of the death portrait, the play also draws attention to its earlier scene of counterfeit death, as though compelled to re-visit that scene once more. Indeed, one might say that through this false representation, the play not only returns to the earlier scene of false death, but it also, as it were, re-creates the death as spectacle anew. That is, as it invites the audience to linger over the erotic attractions of a ‘‘lovely’’ body in ‘‘extremity,’’ it uncannily reanimates the supposedly dead body, oVering an image of the Navarrese prince perpetually on the verge of passing away once more. The play’s most striking return to Ferdinand’s death as spectacle occurs in a scene after Ferdinand and Pembrooke’s reunion in which Pembrooke instructs Ferdinand to kneel in his armor on the monument as though he were an artfully

Atrocity in Arcadia

145

designed funerary sculpture of himself. The point, as Pembrooke makes clear, is to ensure that the newly contrite Katharina will, upon her arrival, misread the living body as, in Katharina’s words, ‘‘sencelesse stone’’ so that Ferdinand will have the satisfaction of ‘‘hear[ing] her pitious mone’’ for himself (H1v). Clearly, by staging Ferdinand as a statue, the play is here preparing for the kind of recognition scene that Shakespeare later made famous in The Winter’s Tale. Nevertheless, when one considers that this scene represents yet another instance of the play’s preoccupation with the seductive appeal of the dead body and, more particularly, with the narrative that Ferdinand’s wounds have indeed led to his death, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that something more complex than recognition is at work: on the subject of Ferdinand’s survival of the duel, the play, it seems, protests entirely too much. The play’s persistent return to Ferdinand’s death—its rendering of him interred in a tomb, Wxed in a death portrait, and monumentalized in stone eYgy—would seem to be antithetical to its dominant narratives of noblemen whose bodies are immune from injury. But there is, in fact, a key similarity between the scenes featuring the death-Wlled stage properties and the scenes of dueling knights. Like the scenes with the funereal stage properties, the scenes of dueling knights—of men who, in the words of the play’s clown, ‘‘walk in pewter vessayle[s]’’ (G2r)— point toward the fantasy of an aristocratic body beyond the reach of injury, an armored body that cannot feel the impact of anything. What is evident from the play’s staging of armored nobility as well as its preoccupation with forms and Wgures of death, in other words, is that, despite its many bloodless duels, The Trial of Chivalry cannot be said to turn away from the traumatic. Rather, as it returns repeatedly to the stylized representation of near death and death itself, it enacts a complex dynamic of disavowal, fending oV what it knows of death by insistently conjuring up such enclosed and protected bodies. The play’s structures of disavowal become more evident when one juxtaposes the duels between Pembrooke and Ferdinand with an episode from Tasso’s romance Gerusaleme Liberata, which, as it happens, has become a seminal text for contemporary trauma theory. In Tasso’s tale, the knight Tancred unwittingly slays his beloved Clorinda twice: Wrst, when he encounters her in combat and she is disguised as a warrior and, later, when he strikes with his sword at a tree in which her soul has been imprisoned and to his horror hears her voice cry out in pain. In an inXuential discussion of this tale, Cathy Caruth has noted that for Freud, the story of Tancred and Clorinda exempliWes the workings of traumatic repetition: Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the Wrst instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.17 17 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

146

Atrocity in Arcadia

Supplementing Freud’s remarks, Caruth reads the tale of Tancred and Clorinda as a ‘‘parable’’ that deWnes trauma not only in terms of the unknowing reenactment of past events but also as ‘‘the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’’ (4). With its depiction of the two duels between Pembrooke and Ferdinand, The Trial of Chivalry, like Tasso’s text, clearly suggests the experience of an unwitting repetition. But while Tasso narrates a scene in which Tancred belatedly comes to ‘‘know’’ the mortal wound that he inXicted on Clorinda in their Wrst encounter, the play depicts both men belatedly coming to know the lack of mortal wounds that they inXicted on each other in their Wrst duel. Moreover, while Tasso’s text features a ‘‘speaking wound’’ to whose traumatic truth Tancred must, with great pain, bear witness, the play conjures up Ferdinand’s speaking wounds as unreliable witnesses: there is no truth to the traumatic reality to which Pembrooke painfully bears witness when he tells Katharina that Ferdinand’s wounds, ‘‘like so many mouthes, j Seem’d to complayne his timelesse overthrow’’ (F4r). In a sense, then, the play’s staging of Ferdinand and Pembrooke’s double encounter may be said to evoke not the absence of trauma per se but rather the presence of a traumatic structure that has been stunningly emptied of content. Rather than deny trauma altogether, in other words, this narrative, which brings the two friends so close to death not once but twice, seems only to disavow it. If Tasso’s tale, as Caruth indicates, points to the demand placed upon one who hears the traumatic address of another, The Trial of Chivalry is much more enigmatic: while it shows Pembrooke recollecting the pain of ‘‘listening’’ to Ferdinand’s wounds—and while it invites the audience to imagine this traumatic address—it simultaneously suggests that what has been attended to is a trauma which both does and does not exist. II Disavowal of trauma is key as well to the play’s second—and indisputably martial—wound narrative, which centers on the antics of Dick Bowyer, an English captain who serves in the army of Navarre under Pembrooke. The centrality accorded to this witty and irreverent character is suggested on the title page of the play’s Wrst edition, which identiWes the work as The History of the Tryall of Chevalry, with the Life and Death of Cavaliero Dicke Bowyer, as well as by the fact that some copies of this edition appear to have been issued under the shorter title This Gallant Cavaliero Dicke Bowyer.18 Like Pembrooke, Bowyer is depicted as a paragon of Englishness: although he Wghts on the side of the Navarrese, for example, he declares that that he Wghts ‘‘for the honor of England, & our brave Generall, the Earle of Pembrooke’’ (C2r) and he calls upon ‘‘S[aint] 18 The Huntington Library copy oVers an instance of this title page variant.

Atrocity in Arcadia

147

George [and] the honour of England’’ (I1r) when the alarum is sounded. As a ‘‘cavaliero’’—a word that suggests both a gentleman who Wghts on horseback and a swaggerer—the English captain might thus be interpreted as a double of Pembrooke, albeit a non-noble and more boisterous version of the English earl. It must be noted, however, that the play makes a fundamental distinction between its two main English characters: while (as we have seen) the play links Pembrooke with a nostalgic, Arcadian world—a world without painful consequences19—it emphatically locates Bowyer and his troop of English soldiers in what audience members would recognize as a familiar Elizabethan world in which medieval weaponry has given way to gunpowder warfare. SpeciWcally, while Bowyer’s name, which designates a maker or seller of bows, looks back in time and conjures up the longbow weapon associated with English victories in the Hundred Years War—and, less famously perhaps, with the armies that Henry VIII sent to France in the 1540s—it also evokes a popular polemic of the 1590s. SpeciWcally, as English armies widely adopted the calivers and other Wrearms in use on the Continent, the notoriously quarrelsome writer Sir John Smythe, who had long served as a volunteer in Continental armies, published a treatise in 1590 that called for an English revival of the traditional archery weapons that had fallen into disuse. Evoking the legendary victories of the English at Cre´cy, Poitiers, and Agincourt—victories that Shakespeare and other dramatists reenacted in Edward III, Henry V, and the like—Smythe roundly castigated both the new military science and all those who had been schooled in the Low Countries, men whom he dismissed as the ‘‘new disciplinated men of war.’’20 Although Smythe’s book was suppressed almost as soon as it was published and Smythe spent much of his later life in prison for sedition, his polemic seems to have reached a wide audience. Responding to this attack on the new militarism a few years later, the militarist Humfrey Barwicke published a strong defense of gunpowder weapons in the course of which he singled out for (gentle) criticism the armies led by the eminent commander William Herbert (1506/7–70), the Wrst earl of Pembroke. According to Barwicke, while Pembroke was justly famed for his martial ‘‘valour and wisdome’’—and here Barwicke reminds his readers of the earl’s part in the Spanish capture of the French town of St Quentin in 1557—he was ‘‘not greatly trained in the knowledge of Martiall Discipline’’ 19 By describing the play’s Arcadian world as nostalgic, I do not mean to invoke the notion of nostalgia as always already politically conservative. For a discussion of the political value of nostalgia, see Leo Spitzer, ‘‘Back Through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from Nazism,’’ in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999). Spitzer’s reference to Suzanne Vromen’s discussion of a nostalgic world as ‘‘a world from which the pain has been removed’’ (92) is an especially apt description of the play’s Arcadia. 20 As cited by J. R. Hale in his ‘‘Introduction’’ to John Smythe’s Certaine Discourses Military, ed. J. R. Hale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), xxx. For an excellent summary of these controversies, see Smythe, xli–lvi. See also de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, who suggests that the staging of war in The Trial of Chivalry gestures toward the English victory at Agincourt, which, famously, was credited to the English use of the longbow.

148

Atrocity in Arcadia

and is thus representative of many Englishmen who, by virtue of their elite status, do not ‘‘understand the force and eVect of weapons . . . as other meaner persons do, who are brought up with the use therof.’’21 Whether The Trial of Chivalry’s Pembrooke is meant to evoke this (dead) Elizabethan earl is unknowable; however, striking parallels do exist between the Wctional Pembrooke who is clearly represented in terms of a chivalric world of yore and the historical Pembroke, whose funeral monument celebrated his martial valor and whose armies at St Quentin, as the historian Paul Hammer has noted, represented ‘‘the last time that an English army was sent abroad entirely based upon the ‘quasi-feudal’ system.’’22 By contrast, the play emphatically associates Bowyer and his troop of English soldiers with the new military science, conjuring up a patently Elizabethan world in which soldiers are said to ‘‘follow discipline’’ and ‘‘know the discipline of war.’’ With its references to ‘‘double-charged cannon’’ as well as to such new martial practices as giving the ‘‘word,’’ standing sentinel, and setting the watch, the Bowyer scenes depict the English captain not as a double of Pembrooke but rather as his ‘‘disciplinated’’ opposite.23 By focusing on the comic exploits of Bowyer, the proto-modern soldier, the second ‘‘wound narrative’’ of The Trial of Chivalry brings bodily injury into the foreground of the play. SigniWcantly, this narrative repeatedly evokes the perils faced by soldiers without ever evoking the possibility of cure. Such perils include the injuries and deaths resulting both from what Barwicke called the ‘‘force and eVect of weapons’’ and from disease, which in every Elizabethan military expedition caused more deaths than battle wounds.24 In this context, the play’s evocation of Navarrese royalty and a French setting are suggestive, for the play’s early audiences may well have remembered the grim fate of the 4,000 English troops sent to France in support of Henri of Navarre in late 1589.25 Within a few months of their deployment under the charge of Lord Willoughby only about 800 men were well enough to Wght.26 By January 1590, the situation was so dire that Willoughby, a man whom modern historians recognize as one of the century’s leading commanders, returned to England with 1,000 fewer men 21 Humfrey Barwicke, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and EVect of all manuall weapons of Wre (London, [1594]), C1v–C2r. On Pembroke’s role at St Quentin, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 48–9. 22 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 49. 23 It is worth noting that when Bowyer, for example, asks a soldier, ‘‘Who stands Sentronell to night, sir?’’ (20), he uses a term novel enough to be included in the glossary of foreign military terms appended by Robert Barret to his 1598 military treatise: ‘‘Centinell, a Spanish word, and signiWeth the souldier which is set to watch at a station or post, a certaine distance from the Corps de guard, or in a certaine litle garret or watch house upon the walles, or at certaine places in the Weld without the ring of the Campe.’’ See de Somogyi for further discussion of the play’s use of this vocabulary (Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 25). 24 On this point, see McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland. 25 On the Willoughby expedition, see Wallace T. MacCaVrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588– 1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 137–49, and Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 176–7. 26 David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Taurus, 1995), 104.

Atrocity in Arcadia

149

than he had when he departed. Moreover, as one gathers from a letter written by the mayor of one French town to Sir Francis Walsingham, many of those English troops who remained in France were barely alive: The diseased soldiers rested upon the town’s charge eight days in most miserable sort, full of inWrmities in their bodies, wonderfully sick and weak, some wounded, some their toes and feet rotting oV and lame, the skin and Xesh of the feet torn away with continual marching, all of them without money, without apparel to cover their nakedness, all of them full of vermin, which (no doubt) would have devoured them in very short time if we had not given them most speedy supply. Then we appointed surgeons to cover their wounds and rottenness.27

Historians note that the situation got still worse as the wounded were returned to England, for it was reported that ‘‘the persons in whose houses they were lodged and dieted, and the women that did attend and watch them, are for the most part fallen very sick and every day there dieth four or Wve of them with the infection they had from these soldiers.’’28 In sharp contrast to the ‘‘wonderfully sick and weak’’ English soldiers described in this historical account, Bowyer and his men certainly appear to be a robust lot. However, as will become evident, the play’s staging of its sturdy English soldiers in France betrays awareness that bodies at war are bodies that may face inWrmities and transmit infections not unlike those described in this letter to Walsingham. The Bowyer narrative, in other words, shares with the Pembrooke/Ferdinand plot a deep ambivalence toward woundedness: if it evokes injury, illness, and death, it also works quite hard to cover the exposed ‘‘wounds and rottenness’’ with the veneer of humor. In the Bowyer plot, the body most closely associated with woundedness is the body of the English cavaliero himself, a fact that is apparent as early as the play’s Wrst reference to him. Thus one Peter de Lions, a French soldier who serves under the Duke of Burbon on the side of Navarre, oVers a scornful description of Bowyer’s body as he bemoans the fact that he and the English captain are rivals in love for the waiting-woman Thomasin: I am crost with a Sutor, that wants a piece of his toung, and that makes him come lisping home: they call him Cavaliero Bowyer, he will have no nay, but the wench. By these hilts, such another swash-Buckler lives not in the nyne quarters of the world: why, he came over with the Earle of Pembrooke; and he limps, and he limps, & he devoures more French ground at two paces, then will serve Thomasin at nineteene . . . Ile provide for him, theres but small choice, either he shall renounce the wench, or forsake his lame legs, his lisping toung, and his life to. (A4r–v)

27 Letter from the Mayor and Jurats of Rye to Sir Francis Walsingham, 5 Feb. 1590. As cited by David Stewart, ‘‘Disposal of the Sick and Wounded during the Sixteenth Century,’’ Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 90 (1948), 34. See also Hammer, who cites excerpts of this letter in the course of his full account of the English campaigns in France, in Elizabeth’s Wars, 176–7. 28 Ibid.

150

Atrocity in Arcadia

Through Peter’s insistence on the anomalousness of the body he disparages—that is, his claim that there is no one like the English soldier who ‘‘limps and . . . limps’’ and who ‘‘wants a piece of his toung . . . that makes him come lisping home’’—the speech raises the possibility that the ‘‘extraordinary body’’ of its English soldier has already been breached by the force of weapons, a possibility that (as we will see) the play later reveals to be true.29 Peter’s comments on Bowyer’s limp might to an Elizabethan audience easily suggest that the soldier had been injured by Wrearms, for the subject of gunshot wounds to the leg was certainly topical. Most famously, perhaps, the author of this play’s source-text, Philip Sidney, had been wounded in his thigh in 1586 while Wghting against the Spanish at Zutphen; his death from gangrene a month later was followed by extraordinary public outpourings of grief, including a funeral procession that brought some 700 mourners to London. Gunshot wounds also entered the cultural imaginary through the works of the prominent English surgeon William Clowes, who, having served alongside the earl of Leicester in the Low Countries in 1586, subsequently published some of the earliest English works on gunpowder injuries.30 To read the case histories Clowes published a decade later is to gain a sense of the almost mind-boggling range of leg wounds to which Elizabethans were vulnerable: he describes, for example, a ‘‘certaine soldier that was shot through the leg, and fractured the great bone’’ (28); a soldier who ‘‘was shot through the secret parts, and so into his thigh’’; a man who is wounded in his heel by a stray arrow shot by a would-be soldier during ‘‘a great mustering and training up of soldiers at Mile end greene, neer London’’ (52); a man who ‘‘unfortunately received a shot through the thigh, with a bullet of lead’’ (63); and a man who had ‘‘both his legs fractured and broken into many peeces, with an iron bullet’’ (75). In such company, the limping Bowyer would surely be right at home. Through Peter’s description of Bowyer as ‘‘want[ing] a piece of his toung . . . that makes him come lisping home,’’ the play may evoke another form of war injury— albeit one that no one else in the play explicitly acknowledges. One of the more famous early modern victims of war, the Italian mathematician Niccolo` Tartaglia (1499–1557), whose pioneering work on the science of gunnery was issued in an English edition in 1588, acquired his surname—Italian for stammerer—after he was 29 I borrow the term ‘‘extraordinary body’’ from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who uses it to denote ‘‘the related perceptions of corporeal otherness we think of variously as ‘monstrosity,’ ‘mutilation,’ deformation, ‘crippledness,’ or ‘physical disability’.’’ Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5. For a wide-ranging discussion of this play as participating in a vogue for ‘‘lame soldier plays,’’ see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, whose account also includes A Larum for London, the play that is the subject of my next chapter. 30 See, for example, William Clowes, A ProWtable and Necessarie Book of Observations, for All Those That Are Burned with the Flame of Gunpowder (1596), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Earlier versions of this text were published in 1588 and 1591 under the title A Prooved Practise for All Young Chirurgians. It is worth noting that Clowes repudiates views set forth by Thomas Gale, who in 1563 wrote the Wrst English treatise on the subject of gunshot wounds.

Atrocity in Arcadia

151

shot in the face during the French sack of Brescia.31 Closer to home, Clowes’s text describes the treatment for an Englishman whose gunshot injury ‘‘made a great wound upon his chin, and carried away a good part of the Manduble and the teeth withal’’ (20). Similarly in a discussion of ‘‘how to supply the defect of the speech when the tongue is cut oV,’’ the celebrated French military surgeon Ambroise Pare´ indicates that speech impediments were a common eVect of fractured palates, ‘‘which make the patients to whom this happeneth, that they cannot pronounce their words distinctly, but obscurely and snuZing.’’32 While Pare´ explains how a carefully designed silver or gold palate might be used to Wll the hole and enable clearer speech, such a solution was not, of course, widely available. At a moment when the science of plastic surgery was in its infancy, soldiers with wounds to the face or mouth were commonly left with impaired speech like that which the play connects with Bowyer’s not-quite-whole tongue.33 As the play stages the rivalry between Peter and Bowyer, it focuses again on Bowyer’s imperfect speech and unsteady gait. Thus Peter derides Bowyer as, among other things, ‘‘a lame haberdine’’ [i.e., codWsh], ‘‘Stumps,’’ and ‘‘a very Jackdaw [i.e., a crow, the emblem of loquaciousness] with his toung slit’’ (C2v). Such language obviously keeps an image of Bowyer’s corporeal diVerence before the eyes of the audience, an image that the actor impersonating Bowyer presumably endorsed through his manner of walking and talking. But equally important, the play refrains from suggesting that Bowyer’s wounds have rendered him weak or in any way incapable of carrying out his duties. Consider, for example, the scene that shows Bowyer bemoaning the diYculty of keeping watch in the camp: S’hart, I have beene stumbling up and downe all this night, like a Brewers horse, that has ne’re a good eye in his head: Tis as darke as Pitch, I can resemble our Campe to nothing better then hell, save that in hell they are alwayes waking, and heere the villaynes are as drowsie as swyne. (D4r)

One could hardly imagine a scene more likely to call attention to Bowyer’s leg wound than that in which he, as Captain, is ‘‘walking . . . the Round’’ and complaining of the ‘‘toyle’’ of this duty (D4r). And yet, as the play evokes Bowyer’s journey through the camp and performs his ‘‘stumbling up and downe,’’ its emphasis is on his comic mastery, the speed and ingenuity with which he can laugh at himself and account for his pratfalls. Evoking the darkness of the night as well as a succession of amusing and ever-expanding comparisons, Bowyer’s speech, in eVect, counters the charge of corporeal deWciency with a display of linguistic abundance. 31 On Tartaglia’s injury, see Jim Bennet and Steven Johnston, The Geometry of War 1500–1750 (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 1996), 20. 32 Ambroise Pare´’s, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), 873, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 33 Indeed, the Wrst known treatise on plastic surgery, Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s 1597 De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem, was not translated into English until 1687.

152

Atrocity in Arcadia

Through its staging of Bowyer’s unruly body and hyperbolic speech, The Trial of Chivalry not only ensures that its English captain appears as a FalstaYan Wgure; it goes so far as to place Bowyer in a scene not unlike the Gloucestershire mustering scene. In this quasi-Shakespearean scene, the play foregrounds Bowyer’s (presumably unsteady) movements as it shows him bombastically ordering his men to stand and march. In addition, as it shows him stopping to converse with other oYcers about his evening duties, it oVers another Shakespearean allusion—namely, an evocation of the tavern scene in 1 Henry IV in which Hal torments Francis the drawer: bow. Sergeant. ser. Anon, Sir. bow. Anon, Sir! S’hart the Rogue answers like a Drawer, but tis the tricke of most of these Sergeants, all clincum clancum . . . Where must we watch tonight? ser. In the furthest Trenches that confront the enemies Campe. bow. Thats the next way to have all our throats cut. lieu. That cannot be, you know, Captaine, there’s a peace toward. (C1r–v)

Together, the scene’s Shakespearean allusions revive the connections the Henry IV plays forge between the laborer’s submissiveness and the common soldier’s mechanized drill. Accordingly, as the scene shows a group of soldiers marching as Wart did with his caliver and as it shows the sergeant responding ‘‘like a drawer,’’ it positions all these military men, but not Bowyer, as docile Wgures whose movements—as the nonce words clincum clancum may suggest—are regulated and routinized. But what is perhaps most striking about this scene is that it highlights how much the play, in its representation of Bowyer, stands apart from what Chapter 5 will reveal to be a common representation of lame soldiers as the bearers of sinister, machine-like bodies. Here, however, the play pointedly frustrates the culture’s association of the lame man with the mechanical one. More speciWcally, the play’s staging of martial formation breaks down almost as soon as it begins, and it breaks down precisely because the play insists that Bowyer, rejecting regimentation, looks askance at such military performances. Thus as the scene ends Bowyer, comically evoking the explosive force of gunpowder weapons, abruptly dismisses his men and turns his mind to courtship, declaring, ‘‘So I have now discharg’d myself of these. Hot shot! Now to my love’’ (C2r). As is suggested by the English captain’s banter about the discharge of ‘‘shot,’’ or bullets, the Bowyer plot frequently makes light of the vulnerability of soldiers’ bodies; rather like the lieutenant quoted above who maintains that soldiers are safe near the enemy camp, it would seem to insist that peace is at hand and danger ‘‘cannot be.’’ Indeed, even when the play shows Bowyer at last providing a genealogy for the leg wound that would seem to oVer proof of such danger, it turns Bowyer’s account into no more—and no less—than a display of his wit. The explanation comes in this same camp scene in which Bowyer is shown conversing with one of his subordinates about the indolent habits of another. Bowyer comments that if the said

Atrocity in Arcadia

153

soldier ‘‘did not sleepe when he should speake his part, I am a Badger,’’ and his subordinate, drawing upon the folklore that this animal’s legs are of unequal size, responds to Bowyer’s oath by waggishly noting that he [i.e., Bowyer] has ‘‘halfe the nature of a badger, for one leg is shorter than another’’ (C1v). As it evokes the ‘‘badger,’’ the play oVers an articulation of the soldier’s lameness within a discourse of the natural rather than the normal. Moreover, as the scene continues and Bowyer gets the better of his rival in this contest of wits, the play goes even further in its refusal to read Bowyer’s lameness as deWciency. Diverting attention from the state of his legs even as it reveals that he has been shot by an arrow, the play showcases Bowyer’s impressive talent for on-the-spot improvisation as it shows him jumbling together stories from classical mythology: Zounds, you Rogue, doe not you know that? . . . Once as I was Wghting in S. Georges Welds, and blind Cupid seeing me, and taking me for some valiant Achilles, he tooke his shaft, and shot me right into the left heele, and ever since, Dick Bowyer hath beene lame: but my heart is as sound as a bell, heart of Oake, spirit, spirit. (C1v)

Accounting for Bowyer’s wound, the play links it to a site that in 1599 was used as a venue for military training and was named after the English patron saint whom Bowyer later evokes in battle.34 Poking fun at the notion of Bowyer as an English Achilles, the play here also pokes fun at London’s trained bands, hinting with some irony that the English captain’s name has less to do with the bowmen of England’s glorious past than with its inglorious present-day militia who, so it suggests, cannot be counted upon to shoot its arrows straight. In fact, as Nick de Somogyi has observed, Bowyer’s account also oVers an echo of one of Clowes’s case histories, which describes an individual who is accidentally wounded at London’s famous training ground at Mile End:35 Amongst those bands of trained men, there was appointed a certaine number of Archers: who after they had marched a longtime, in the end the bowe men were divided from the pikemen and shot, onely to trie their shooting at a marke, about size or seaven score oV, by misfortune one of their arrows did hit a gentleman’s servant . . . into the outside of his left leg, so that the shaft was Wrmly Wxed in the bone. (65)

Clearly, both Clowes and the playwright describe the same kind of military locale, the same kind of wound, and even the same heel. However, what for Clowes is a complex medical matter—he describes in detail the diYculties of removing the shaft and treating the aVected area—is, for the playwright, an occasion for laughter. Through the Wgure of the resilient English captain, the play would seem to insist that war wounds simply do not matter.

34 de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 124. 35 As de Somogyi suggests in Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, it is hard to resist the idea that this may be an ironic contribution to the longbow controversy.

154

Atrocity in Arcadia

Insofar as the Bowyer plot repeatedly produces this phenomenon of the war wound with negligible after-eVects, it adheres to the logic apparent in the Pembrooke/Ferdinand narrative, repudiating the impact of a wound to which the play nevertheless insistently directs attention. In other words, the Bowyer plot might be read as Wrst inviting the audience to interpret the English soldier’s speech and gait as a sign of his deWciency and as then disavowing the soldier’s vulnerability by re-imagining the wounded soldier as a hearty Wgure, a man who gives orders to his soldiers and decries the truce between France and Navarre. But just as the funereal stage properties of the Pembrooke/Ferdinand narrative repeatedly return the audience to scenes of death, so too does this narrative grant a powerful presence to the bodily vulnerability it repudiates. Perhaps the best instance of the Bowyer plot’s attention to what it disavows can be seen in a speech in which the English captain (in the third person) proclaims his reputation as a brave soldier: Tis well known since Dick Bowyer came to France he hath shewed himselfe a gentleman and a Cavaliero and sets feare at’s heeles. And I could scape (a pox on it) th’ other thing, I might haps return safe and sound to England. But what remedy? Al Xesh is grasse and some of us must needes be scorcht in this hote Countrey. Lieutenant Core, prithee lead my Band to their quarter, and the Rogues do not as they should, cram thy selfe, good Core, downe their throats, and choak them. (C1v)

As the play shows Bowyer waxing philosophical about the likelihood that he will ‘‘return safe and sound to England,’’ it clearly implies that Bowyer is at present safe and sound, that, in eVect, his body is not damaged. But the mechanism of disavowal in this speech extends in several directions so as to conjure up a variety of perils to which Elizabethan soldiers were in fact subject. Most notably, perhaps, Bowyer’s image of an entire company being suVocated by a lieutenant named Core casually evokes the dangers faced by men of lesser rank who could be punished severely for their failure to obey. Moreover, as it conjures up the grotesque image of soldiers forced to swallow their lieutenant, it imagines, with some mix of the comic and the horriWc, the obliteration of an entire company in one fell swoop. If Bowyer’s bombastic speech thus evokes the image of the ‘‘band’’ as, at its core, a self-destructive body, it also points to the particular kinds of injuries to which individual soldiers may fall prey. Thus, for example, in the metaphor of setting ‘‘feare at’s heeles,’’ Bowyer obliquely returns to the image of his own heel, wounded Achilles-like with an arrow. More strikingly, Bowyer’s concern about the possibility of being ‘‘scorcht in this hote Countrey’’ may evoke the enormous danger posed by gunpowder weapons in an era when gun technology was far from failsafe and soldiers routinely suVered from burns and explosions. In fact, Pare´ follows his discussion of how to treat torn tongues with a discussion of the perils of gunpowder burns and instructions for the ‘‘covering or repairing certain defects or defaults in the face’’ (874). Similarly, Clowes’s book of case histories— which is titled A ProWtable and Necessarie Book of Observations, for All Those That

Atrocity in Arcadia

155

Are Burned with the Flame of Gunpowder—opens with a horriWc description of two men whose hands and faces, have been ‘‘grievously burned’’ and ‘‘scorched’’ in such an explosion. As is evident from Clowes’s account—which describes both a local gentlewoman’s inability to treat the men, for ‘‘she had seene had seemes the experience in the curing of such great burnings with Gun powder, neither could hir stomack well digest the sight and Wlthy favors thereof,’’ and his own regime of treatment, which involved intense scrutiny of the skin, application of leeches, and frequent ‘‘anoint[ing] [of ] the parts that were scorched and blistered’’(2)—gunpowder injuries required attention and expertise of a kind that ordinary soldiers were unlikely to receive. In fact many Elizabethan companies did not have in their charge a single surgeon able to care for the diseased and injured soldiers.36 In this context, the stream of insults that Bowyer levels at Peter—he calls him ‘‘Lobster,’’ mocks his ‘‘russeting face,’’ and declares that his ‘‘face looks worse then a Tailors cushen, of old shreds & colours . . . [and] like a weavers leg, in an old ditch feeding horseleaches’’ (C2r)—takes on more signiWcance: for an Elizabethan audience, the play’s references to Peter’s patchedtogether, leach-eaten, and ruddy visage may be every bit as evocative of war wounds as are references to Bowyer’s unequal legs.37 In addition to gunpowder injuries, Bowyer’s self-aggrandizing speech, which refers to his fears of being ‘‘scorcht’’ in France and his worries about an unnamed calamity that is clearly syphilis or the ‘‘pox,’’ draws on the common Elizabethan euphemism of ‘‘burning’’ to represent venereal disease as a hazard of war.38 Indeed, in conjuring up this deadly disease—a disease, moreover, to which the English routinely assigned a foreign provenance39—Bowyer’s speech evokes a common association of syphilis with soldiers, who may in fact have served to disseminate the sexually transmitted disease when it emerged in Europe in the 36 McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 247. 37 Fears about gunpowder burns may also help to explain the play’s emphasis on the dangers of burning in France. Thus as the king of France and his men contemplate the weather with great concern, the king worries aloud that the heat ‘‘burnes in our Armour as we march’’; Burbon proclaims that ‘‘no Souldier . . . for feare of heat j Will suVer victory to Xy the Weld’’; and Roderick recommends that even if Burbon is not hot, he should go to his tents and ‘‘refresh [his] unscorcht lymmes’’ (H2v). 38 For a comprehensive overview of syphilis in Elizabethan England, see Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley, 1994), which discusses the spread of syphilis by soldiers and sailors (5–7). See also McGurk’s discussion of payments to impoverished veterans, which includes a reference to payment to ‘‘a poor soldier having a canker and a pox’’ (The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 254). Also exceedingly helpful on the subject of the social meaning of syphilis are Margaret Pelling, ‘‘Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body and Disease,’’ in A. L. Beier and R. Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis. London 1500– 1700 (1986), 82–112; Colin Milburn, ‘‘Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England,’’ Criticism, 46:4 (2004), 597–632; Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘‘ ‘The Enterprise Is Sick’: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida,’’ Renaissance Drama, 27 (2000), 3–36, and ‘‘ ‘Some Love That Drew Him Oft from Home’: Syphilis and International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors,’’ in Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (eds), Disease Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 69–92. 39 Harris, ‘‘Some Love,’’ 82.

156

Atrocity in Arcadia

Wfteenth century, and who surely were among the many who suVered and died from it in the sixteenth. Indeed, Bowyer’s worries about the French disease can be read as pointing toward a well-worn tale that syphilis Wrst appeared in 1494 among soldiers serving in the French army in Naples. This tale—which appears in Clowes’s much reprinted 1579 treatise on London’s syphilis epidemic—gives resonance to Bowyer’s fears of what he may encounter as a soldier in the ‘‘hote Countrey’’ of France. Depicting Bowyer’s fears, the play thus raises the possibility that the disease lurks not only in the suspect bodies of French soldiers like Peter, but also in Bowyer himself, a Wgure, after all, who acknowledges that he has been shot by Cupid’s arrow. Indeed, Bowyer’s evocation of syphilis calls attention to his body as displaying some of the trademark symptoms of the disease, which include an imperfect gait—caused by a kind of leg paralysis—as well as an impaired voice, which results from lesions that have eaten away the bones of the nose and palate.40 Behind the lisping and limping Bowyer, in other words, may be a soldier trying without success to cover over his symptoms, a pox-ridden man not unlike the subject of Barnaby Rich’s satirical description circa 1617, whose syphilitic condition could nevertheless be discerned ‘‘by his snuZing, in his speech, [and] by his very gate as he passeth and repasseth by you.’’41 What must be stressed is that while the Bowyer episodes link the bodies of soldiers to war injury and disease, they also, like the tests of chivalry in the Wrst wound narrative, oVer repeated performances of physical prowess. Thus Bowyer, who recounts how he dragged one of his sleeping soldiers by the heels into a muddy ditch and who spends much of the play vowing to kill Peter, sounds like Jonson’s Bobadil or Shakespeare’s Pistol, declaring, for example, ‘‘if I do not teare out his heart and eate it with mustard, let him say Dick Bowyer’s a Mackarell’’ (C2r). But unlike conventional miles gloriosus Wgures, Bowyer is not exposed as an impostor. On the contrary, in an early scene, the play shows the man with the damaged tongue and wounded leg heartily kissing Thomasin before unsheathing his sword and waving it violently at his rival. Still later, the play insists on Bowyer’s skill as a duelist when it shows him discovering that Peter has abducted his beloved and challenging his rival once again. In a scene that may have been the play’s lengthiest performance of the lame soldier’s swashbuckling agility, Bowyer is shown rescuing his beloved and killing Peter as he attempts to Xee. Having established the superiority of the wounded English soldier to the unwounded French one, the Bowyer plot, like the Pembrooke/Ferdinand plot, thus Wnds its resolution in a swordWght. Despite its happy resolution, the Bowyer narrative, like the Pembrooke/ Ferdinand narrative, cannot seem to forget about the dangers of warfare. Indeed, the title page of the play’s Wrst edition, which refers to ‘‘The Life and Death of 40 See, for example, Clowes’s description of a syphilitic patient who ‘‘had upon his head, and in divers places of his face corrosive, virulent, and malignant ulcers with corruption of the bones, especially on his head and nose, so that his voice had but a very bad sound ’’ (176–7; emphasis mine). 41 As cited by Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, 28.

Atrocity in Arcadia

157

Cavaliero Dicke Bowyer,’’ may itself be symptomatic of this grim preoccupation, for the play nowhere suggests that Bowyer dies in the course of its action. On the contrary, the play makes a space for him in its chivalric romance, suggesting that he leaves the stage happily, after he has bested his rival in combat and won the heart of the woman whom he pursued for much of the play. Like a slip of the tongue in which one inadvertently says what one means, however, the printer’s mistake about Bowyer’s fate unwittingly suggests just how deeply the Bowyer narrative—with its visions of diseased French soldiers and a limping and lisping English captain—hints at a darker vision of men at war as vulnerable to injuries, illness, and death. As is suggested by a scene in which the English captain drolly informs his troops that they ‘‘are all dead men, all dust and ashes, all wormes meat’’ (C1v), the Bowyer plot treats its audience to something more complex than amusing FalstaYan echoes: through its insistent disavowal of death, it gestures toward the traumatic matter of warfare, which emerges, ever so subtly, from the shadows of its comedy. III At Wrst glance, there might seem to be nothing subtle about the savage assault featured in the last—and to my mind the most complex—of The Trial of Chivalry’s three wound narratives: a trauma staged in full view of the audience. Nevertheless, as will become apparent, this assault is inextricably bound up with the disavowed wounds in the other two narratives. Indeed, it is in this plot— which begins just after Ferdinand and Pembrooke have agreed to meet for their Wrst duel and which concludes as the play concludes—that the trauma evoked in the other two narratives has its deferred impact. Like the Ferdinand/Pembrooke episodes, this wound narrative closely follows a tale in Sidney’s Arcadia. In Sidney’s romance, the beautiful Parthenia is attacked by Demagoras, a rejected lover, who ‘‘rubbed all over her face a most horrible poison, the eVect whereof was such that never leper looked more ugly than she did.’’42 Similarly, in The Trial of Chivalry, the beautiful Bellamira—Ferdinand’s sister and the Navarrese princess beloved by the French prince—is attacked by the Duke of Burbon who ‘‘rubd [her] face with an infectuous herbe, j Because [she] would not graunt unto his love’’ (D3r). After this assault, carried out with the assistance of Peter and a Machiavellian nobleman named Roderick, the audience is given to understand that the spurned duke has succeeded in his desire to ‘‘blot out [her] beauty with [his] juice’’ (D2r), for in the subsequent scene when she appears before her father, her brother, and Pembrooke, they declare with horror that she has been ‘‘Spotted,’’ ‘‘DisWgured,’’ and ‘‘Made a lothsome Leper’’ (D3r). 42 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), 90. Further citations will be noted parenthetically in the text.

158

Atrocity in Arcadia

Insofar as this strand of the plot focuses on an act typical of early modern revenge plays—the destruction by poison of a woman’s beauty—it might seem to be unrelated to the warfare that I suggested lies at the heart of the Trial of Chivalry.43 But, in fact, the play everywhere intimates that while the attack on Bellamira is not literally a war atrocity, she must be understood as a casualty of war. Accordingly, when the play shows Burbon rubbing Bellamira’s face with his potion, it does not evoke a domestic space like that which Sidney evokes in narrating the attack on Parthenia. Instead, Burbon takes his revenge while Bellamira is asleep in a Marlovian ‘‘stately tent of war’’ over which the treacherous Peter is supposed to stand guard. Moreover, the attack on Bellamira is represented as martial not only in its setting but also in its eVects, leading as it does directly to war. Having come to France with an army of ten thousand in support of Navarre, Burbon thus joins forces with the French after the attack and subsequently persuades the French king to end the truce. SigniWcantly, it is not just the play’s intertwining of dynastic marriage and military matters that makes Bellamira legible as a war casualty; it is also the play’s rendering of the injury itself, which I would argue, seems designed to recall the war wounds that feature so prominently in the Bowyer plot. More speciWcally, while the play identiWes Burbon’s poison as an ‘‘infectious herbe’’—as a concoction so ‘‘strong’’ that it requires Burbon to use ‘‘a preservative to save [his] hand’’—the play’s references to this substance signify gunpowder, which, like the substance that causes such ‘‘sudden alteration’’ in the princess (C4v), was popularly believed to be poisonous. Indeed, at least one of the most inXuential medical books of the day indicated that what made gunshot wounds so perilous was that they contained traces of venom.44 Accordingly, the treatment that Katharina later evokes when she describes her chance meeting in the woods with a ‘‘Hermit j Whose skill in Phisike warrants present cure, j And pure reWning of [Bellamira’s] poysoned bloud’’ (G2r) may suggest a popular view that the proper treatment of gunpowder poisoning entailed the removal of venom from the blood, a view that Pare´ famously contested.45 Of course, insofar as the language of wounding associated with Burbon’s attack evokes blotches, 43 See Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral SigniWcance of Face Painting Conventions (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), who argues that the play’s depiction of Bellamira’s disWgurement draws on a medieval tradition of ‘‘self-disWgurement as virginal defense.’’ As such, she suggests, ‘‘the man substitutes the act of facial disWguring for that of rape; the woman’s chastity is still preserved, though at the expense of her beauty.’’ Further, she suggests the necessity of reading this episode ‘‘in relation to the larger context of female virginal heroics in which a woman’s deforming her face to avoid ravishment is seen as desirable and an image of female integrity’’ (63). 44 On gunpowder as poison, see, for example, John Kirkup, ‘‘Perceptions of Amputation before and after Gunpowder,’’ Vesalius: Acta Internationales Historiae Medicinae 1.2 (1995), 51–8, and Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 148–68. The belief may have stemmed from the fact that gunshot wounds often left a black residue on the skin of victims. 45 See Kelly R. DeVries, ‘‘Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,’’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 7 (1990), 131–46.

Atrocity in Arcadia

159

rawness, and burnt Xesh—for example, Ferdinand exclaims that Bellamira is ‘‘spotted like a Panther’s skin’’ and the play’s clown brutally compares her ‘‘bald face’’ to ‘‘A broyld herring’’—the play’s discourse may also bring to mind that used by sixteenth-century military surgeons to describe the eVects of gunpowder burns. In Clowes’s descriptions of patients with gunpowder burns, for example, one comes across images of ‘‘blemish[es],’’ ‘‘blisters,’’ ‘‘unseemely cicatrice[s],’’ ‘‘corrode[d] and ulcerate[d] Xesh,’’ and ‘‘skin cleane burned oV, and the partes made thereby raw’’ (2–6). Similarly, the play’s description of Bellamira as aZicted with facial ‘‘sores [that] are perchance incureable’’ (D3v) Wnds a parallel in Pare´’s discussion of the permanence of gunpowder burn marks: Gunpowder set on Wre doth often so penetrate into the Xesh, not ulcerating or taking oV the skinne, and so insinuate and thoroughly fasten it selfe into the Xesh by its tenuity, that it cannot be taken or drawne out thence by any remedyes . . . so that the prints thereof always remaine, no otherwise than the markes which the Barbarians burne in their slaves which cannot afterwards be taken away or destroyed by any Art. (451)

And the play’s staging of the shock with which characters respond to their Wrst sight of Bellamira’s wounded face may recall Pare´’s words about how, after ‘‘the face is deformed by the sudden Xashing of Gunpowder . . . one cannot behold it without great horrour’’ (874). Whatever one makes of the intriguing parallels between the dramatic language and the medical literature, it seems clear that through Bellamira’s ‘‘broiled’’ face, the play registers in displaced form the gunpowder wounds that emerge in the interstices of the Bowyer plot—both those about which the English captain explicitly worries and those whose imprint may be suggested by the ‘‘old shreds & colours’’ of Peter’s red face. Importantly, Bellamira’s transformed face may also be understood to bear traces of the other kind of war wound to which the Bowyer plot calls attention—namely, venereal disease. This possibility is conveyed indirectly through the play’s vocabulary of contamination and ‘‘poysoned bloud’’ (G2r) with which syphilis was commonly identiWed as well as through its many references to Bellamira’s aZiction as leprosy—for example, when her father exclaims, ‘‘O, what divine power hath sent this Leprosy?’’(D2r); when her brother exclaims ‘‘A leprous creature!’’(D3v); and when Philip, not recognizing her, notes that she must ‘‘leave the presence, j Or Leprosie will cleave unto us all’’ (D3r). Many references to leprosy in early modern texts, as Johannes Fabricius has shown, do not refer to the disease itself, which was disappearing from Europe, but rather to syphilis, with which leprosy was commonly confused.46 Whereas in Sidney’s ‘‘source’’ tale of Argalus and Parthenia, leprosy may function as a straightforward signiWer of the not-beautiful (as it does in Sidney’s above-quoted comment that ‘‘never leper looked more ugly than [Parthenia] did’’), in The Trial of Chivalry,

46 On the conXation of the two diseases, see Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, 257–9.

160

Atrocity in Arcadia

references to leprosy would not fail to suggest the more usual conXation of the two diseases, both of which were construed as sexual in nature, as highly contagious, and as likely to cause lesions to erupt suddenly on one’s skin. My point here is not that The Trial of Chivalry endorses a transparent reading of Bellamira as infected with syphilis. On the contrary, it clearly identiWes her spotted face as a consequence of Burbon’s assault so as to celebrate Philip’s claims, upon learning that the disWgured woman is indeed Bellamira, that his ‘‘love extendeth further then the skin’’ (D3v). What I would stress, rather, is how this play, which as the Pembrooke plot suggests is quite captivated by the power of spectacle, insists that, despite Bellamira’s innocence, her wounds have an impact so profound that only an exceptional lover may be able to ‘‘let go’’ of what he sees. Consider, for example, how the play stages a chorus of shocked replies when that exceptional lover, Philip, following the example of Sidney’s Argalus, declares his intention to put oV his revenge until after he has wed his disWgured lover: lew. nav. ferd. pem.

Espoused her! How! marry a face deform’d! A leprous creature! An infectuous mayd! (D3v)

While the other wound plots variously disavow the impact of injury—the wounds of Pembrooke and Ferdinand are fully cured oVstage, while those evoked in the Bowyer plot are imagined as the stuV of comedy—the Bellamira narrative ampliWes the impact of her assault, suggesting that its eVects continue to be felt long after its occurrence. Indeed, as the play stages exchanges like that above, it invites the audience to be shocked anew by the atrocity. To understand the way in which, in the aftermath of the attack, the play works to heighten—rather than diminish—the blow that Bellamira has suVered, one might revisit the scene in which she stands alone on stage and considers her options in soliloquy: Now, Bellamira, thou hast time to thinke Upon these troublous matters: should I suVer So brave a Gentleman as Philip is, To wed himselfe to my unworthy selfe, It would be counted vertue in the Prince; But I were worthy of a world of blame. No, Philip, no, thou shalt not wrong thine honour, Nor be impeacht by Bellamiraes spots In some disguise ile steale away to night, And ne’re appeare more in my Philips sight. (D4r)

As she laments that her ‘‘spots’’ have the capacity to ‘‘wrong’’ and ‘‘impeach’’ Philip’s honor, the play makes it clear that the attack—which occurred during

Atrocity in Arcadia

161

‘‘the dead of night’’ (D1v) while she was in her sleeping quarters, and which has eVects identical to those purportedly meted out to the lascivious—should be read as a sexual violation that has already irrevocably stained her honor.47 What Bellamira’s soliloquy makes plain, in other words, is that, given the play’s ideological investment in female sexual purity, the eVect of her wounds is catastrophic. Not only does she suVer the physical eVects of the wounding from which everyone recoils in horror, but she also suVers the trauma of having her chastity—that which is her only source of value in the play’s social economy— brought into question, with the result that she feels compelled to Xee. Through her sorrowful cry to Philip that she is ‘‘not to be maryed but to death’’ (D3v), the play emphasizes her awareness that a woman whose face bears the wounds that her face bears has no proper place in the world of this play. Indeed, it is perhaps no accident that the chaste Navarrese princess’s most famous precursor on the Elizabethan stage is undoubtedly The Jew of Malta’s Bellamira: a poison victim who is also, as it happens, a duplicitous courtesan. Through its rendering of Bellamira’s defacement, The Trial of Chivalry gives a female face to trauma, presenting the audience with a surrogate for both the noblemen whose susceptibility to wounds the play disavows and the soldiers whose injuries the Bowyer plot covers over with humor. What Bellamira’s wounded face discloses, in other words, is an awareness of the utter vulnerability of life in wartime—precisely what the other two narratives so persistently repudiate. In returning repeatedly to the sexual meanings of Bellamira’s damaged face, the play also makes the point that what one might call the ‘‘same’’ wounds are experienced diVerently by men and women, such that the English soldier’s body, in all its wounded irregularity, might be viewed as a wonder of nature, like the badger, while Bellamira’s wounded countenance overwhelms viewers with its aVective force. What is at stake in this gendering of war trauma? Kai Erickson’s account of how trauma often divides communities—as ‘‘[t]hose not touched try to distance themselves from those touched, almost as if they are escaping something spoiled, something contaminated, something polluted’’—may be relevant here.48 More precisely, the play’s rendering of Bellamira’s abject status may suggest something of the way in which early modern gender asymmetries ensure that Bellamira (rather than, say, Bowyer or one of the wounded noblemen) takes on the role of scapegoat. Through her, the play would seem to try to contain the uncontainable danger of warfare by displacing it so visibly—literally on the woman’s face. If, in this play, the spread of syphilis, the so-called French disease, stands in for the impact on bodies of participation in the war in France, then the play may be said 47 Indeed, one might argue that in the scene of the attack in which Bellamira bids Burbon to leave her tent immediately because his presence there ‘‘brings [her] honour into question’’ the play intimates that she has been tainted even before he douses her with poison. 48 Kai Erickson, ‘‘Notes on Trauma and Community,’’ in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 189.

162

Atrocity in Arcadia

to condense that relationship by way of synecdoche in the ‘‘spotted’’ face of Bellamira. Looked at from this perspective, Bellamira’s name gains additional signiWcance: through its Italian roots, the name suggests not only that the princess is a creature of wonders (mirabilia) but also that she is a beautiful ‘‘target’’ (mira)—that is, an object at which a traumatized culture, seeking to distance itself from those touched by war, may Wnd itself taking aim. In fastening its gaze so persistently on the female face of war trauma, The Trial of Chivalry is highly unusual, for as even a cursory glance at the Elizabethan martial repertory makes clear, dramatists represent the traumatic impact of war on the bodies of women far less often than they represent its impact on men. There appears to be no female equivalent, for example, for scenes like the one in 1 Henry VI (1592) in which Salisbury is shot onstage so that ‘‘one of [his] eyes and [his] cheek’s side [is] struck oV ’’ (1.6.53), the one in 3 Henry VI (1591) in which CliVord enters ‘‘wounded with an arrow in his neck,’’ (s.d. before 2.6.1) or the one in Tamburlaine in which the Babylonian governor hangs in chains from the city walls while he is shot by Theridimas and his soldiers (T2, 5.1.156). Apart from a few notable exceptions—such as the violence meted out to the besieged female inhabitants of Antwerp in the anonymous A Larum for London, the play that is the subject of the next chapter—Elizabethan war dramas turn away from scenes detailing the visceral wounding of women. Such disavowal may be glimpsed in the martial dramas that invoke the specter of rape only to render that threat unfulWlled, as for instance in the English King’s famous threat to the Governor of HarXeur in Henry V that the ‘‘blind and bloody soldier with foul hand j [will] DeWle the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters’’ (3.3.37–8).49 In addition, this disavowal of the precariousness of female life during wartime may be suggested by the way war plays represent women whose deaths are selfinXicted, as are those of Zabina and Olympia in Tamburlaine. And Wnally this sense of disavowal may be implicit in the way that martial dramas relegate attacks against women to events that happen oVstage, as for example, in the anonymous Locrine, when the soldier Strumbo laments that his wife has been burned alive during the war, or, as I noted in Chapter 1, in Tamburlaine when the Scythian warrior variously commands that the Damascus virgins be taken away and killed and that the Turkish concubines be taken away and raped. What makes The Trial of Chivalry important for our understanding of how early modern culture registered the traumatic impact of war, however, is not simply that the Bellamira plot, by featuring the wounded body of a woman, represents the wide reach of Elizabethan warfare. It is also that, through this plot, the play oVers an allegory of the workings of war trauma. As such, it suggests that what deWnes Bellamira’s wounds as traumatic is not simply that they evoke a body that has been ‘‘scorcht’’ by gunpowder or syphilitic infection, for the bodies of 49 For a related discussion of rape and military conquest, see Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 196–200.

Atrocity in Arcadia

163

Bowyer and Peter may be said to suVer from a similar fate. What distinguishes traumatic events from other kinds of experience, as I suggested earlier with regard to the duels between Ferdinand and Pembrooke, is that, even as a trauma is experienced, it remains resistant to comprehension. And nowhere in the play is this sense of the ‘‘ungraspability’’ of trauma writ so large, I would suggest, as it is in the play’s remarkable Wnal scene when, as though in response to a cry that Philip addresses to the absent Bellamira, the Navarrese princess returns to the stage. Before considering this scene of the reunion of Bellamira and Philip, it is well to remember that by the time of the reunion, The Trial of Chivalry has already punished the villain (Philip, after stealing into Burbon’s tent, slays him in a duel) and joyfully announced the upcoming marriage between Ferdinand and Katharina, an event which—by resolving the problem of Navarrese sovereignty—has eradicated the threat of war. It is also useful to note that by the time of the Wnal scene, The Trial of Chivalry has long held out the possibility that Bellamira’s wounds would be remedied. This promise, as I noted earlier, enters the play through Katharina, who invites Bellamira to visit a hermit skilled in ‘‘Phisike’’ who ‘‘warrants present cure’’ and removal of the ‘‘leprous spots’’ (G2r). Through Katharina, the play clearly prepares the audience for the possibility of an oVstage return to vitality like the two resurrections that feature in the narrative of Ferdinand and Pembrooke. In conjuring up the skillful hermit, however, the play may also have evoked anxieties, for as Tanya Pollard has recently observed, on the Renaissance stage medicinal potions are famed for their ‘‘equivocal eVects.’’50 When The Trial of Chivalry refers to the cure to be eVected by the knowledgeable hermit, consequently, some in the audience might well have remembered the friar whose concoctions turned so deadly in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1594–6). Others, remembering Sidney’s romance, may have been more hopeful, for after Parthenia, Bellamira’s counterpart, Xees her home, she is ‘‘sent to a physician . . . the most excellent man in the world’’ whose treatment is so eVective that when she returns to Arcadia to reveal her identity to her beloved, she is said to be even more beautiful—‘‘of the more pure and dainty complexion’’—after the attack than she was before (104–6). Whatever audience members may have expected at the play’s end, they probably did not expect what The Trial of Chivalry delivers in the Wnal scene: while the play shows Bellamira’s reunion with the lover from whom she Xed and while it thus ends with the prospect of a double marriage, it never reveals whether Bellamira’s wounds have been healed. Instead, according to the stage directions, when Bellamira, attended by a clown, comes on stage to meet Philip, her face is covered with a scarf, a stage property that early modern dramas often used to denote wounded, as well as disguised, Wgures.51 In staging this veiled Wgure 50 Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 58. 51 See the entry for ‘‘scarf ’’ in Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomason, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which oVers several examples of wounded characters entering with an arm or hand in a scarf.

164

Atrocity in Arcadia

whom everyone addresses as Bellamira but who, despite Philip’s questions to her about her identity, remains completely silent, the play clearly withholds the performance of a cure that is emphatically performed—not once, but twice— in the Pembrooke/Ferdinand narrative. Indeed, the play’s ostensibly jubilant last scene appears to be haunted by the memory of Bellamira’s wounding, for just before she arrives on stage, it revisits the memory of her disWgured countenance in Philip’s apostrophe to her, a speech provoked by the news of the upcoming marriage of Katharina and Ferdinand: Oh Bellamira, had not cursed Burbon, For beauty robd thy cheeks with Leprosie: Hadst thou but stayd with me, as is their state, So had bin mine, happy and fortunate. (K1v)

In this context, it is impossible to miss the fact that when the veiled Bellamira comes on stage and refuses to speak, the play pointedly revisits another traumatic scene: the one that occurs immediately after Burbon’s attack in which, despite the pleas of her family, the wounded princess similarly refuses to speak. One might also speculate that the play’s Wnal scene performs a return to the wounding at the center of the Bowyer plot as well, for, in a transvestite theater, the veiled—and perhaps wounded—Bellamira might easily be read as a stand-in for the wounded Bowyer, who appeared to exit the play prematurely after his conquest of his rival. On the one hand, such a reading may be only metaphorical—although, it is worth recalling that, as this play has emphasized in its scenes of counterfeit death, all theater relies on the substantial power of the ‘‘only metaphorical.’’ On the other hand, given that the two characters never share the stage, it is possible that the Bowyer/Bellamira parts may actually have been doubled. Indeed, the play may hint at this doubling when, shortly after her wounding, it follows Bellamira’s declaration that she will ‘‘In some disguise . . . steale away to night, j And ne’re appeare more in my Philips sight’’ with a stage direction signaling the entrance of Bowyer onto the stage. And it may hint again at doubling when, in the would-be recognition scene, it depicts Bellamira accompanied by a clown who, as the stage directions note (and as the audience is likely to recognize), is disguised as a gentleman. If the clown is dressed as someone other than himself, so the play would seem to suggest, then might not the Wgure whom Philip addresses as Bellamira also be a (wounded) Wgure in disguise? However one understands the veiled Wgure who refuses to speak in the play’s last scene, the play’s uncanny staging reveals that, despite its many disavowals of wounding, The Trial of Chivalry remains Wxated at the site of trauma, as it turns war’s defacement into a object of fetishistic attraction. Replicating the seeing/not seeing dynamic so pronounced in the play’s other wound narratives, Bellamira’s veiled visage, like the armoured bodies of the chivalric nobles, compels attention and yet remains out of sight. As the play presents its audience with this enigmatic Wgure—and as it leaves unanswered the basic question raised by Philip, ‘‘Whom

Atrocity in Arcadia

165

see I?’’ (K1v)—it insists upon a mystery at the core of its wound narratives. In thus performing its own possession by trauma, The Trial of Chivalry invites the audience to reckon with what it means to be belatedly possessed by wounds whose impact cannot Wnally be grasped. Before concluding this chapter, it seems important to underscore that this now obscure play can provide us with insights into the role of the Elizabethan theater at a historical moment when the culture had so profoundly turned its thoughts to war. Following Tanya Pollard’s claim that Renaissance poison narratives are frequently bound up with cultural concerns about the theater as an especially potent kind of drug, I would note that the poison narrative of The Trial of Chivalry ultimately oVers its audience a kind of homeopathic vision of the theater.52 That is, just as the play’s Wrst wound narrative imagines that Bellamira’s imaginative engagement with the (false) portrait of the dying Ferdinand might alter her very being and eVect a kind of painful cure, so, too, the play would seem to suggest that the theater has the capacity to oVer its audience a space of witnessing as a traumatic cure for war’s corporeal wounding. By drawing attention to the ways in which The Trial of Chivalry returns in its narrative to the experience of wounding as well as to disavowals of such experiences, I have sought to trace the contours of a speciWcally Elizabethan discourse of war trauma. At the same time, I have also aimed to show how the early modern playhouse acknowledged that warfare—by bringing one into contact with events whose meanings remain elusive—might engender profound breaches in understanding. Concluding with a mute, veiled Wgure, The Trial of Chivalry oVers a kind of rebuV to the eyes and ears of its audience members, as though to insist upon one’s limited capacity to apprehend what happens to bodies in wartime. The play thus ends not simply with the staging of a wounded body but also with an allegory of trauma itself. That is, the play’s recurring narratives of death, disease, and injury Wnd their conclusion, paradoxically enough, in an encounter with an enigmatic Wgure whose being cannot readily be deciphered—indeed, who cannot even be seen. In the next chapter, we turn from a backward-glancing romance to a chronicle of recent events, a play that would seem to be much more interested in teaching lessons about warfare than in foregrounding its bewilderment. Here, our focus will be on the ways in which the stage performs the violence of warfare as well as the nature of the wounded survivor whom the play locates at the center of its narrative. As I consider both martial technologies and theatrical fantasies, I shall aim to show how the play’s wounded soldier may be read as a double of the London theatergoers who encounter him in the playhouse. 52 See Pollard who brieXy mentions The Trial of Chivalry as one of several plays featuring ‘‘poisonous cosmetics’’ that seem to be ‘‘exploring concerns about the seductive and contaminating force of their own medium’’ (Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, 82).

5 Wound-man Walking Visceral History and Traumatized Bodies in A Larum for London Exhorting their audiences to conceive of past events as exemplary, Elizabethan historical dramas, as many scholars have observed, frequently negotiate didactic or moralizing narratives.1 It is thus not at all unusual for history plays about warfare to instruct their audiences directly, from prologues and epilogues, as well as indirectly, from speeches within the play proper. Nevertheless, even when one takes such conventions into consideration, the play on which this chapter focuses—namely, the anonymously authored A Larum for London, or The Siedge of Antwerpe—emerges as one of the most insistently admonitory works in the early modern repertory, for, as its title underscores, it depicts the history it dramatizes as itself an ‘‘alarum’’ or call to arms. First printed in 1602 and probably Wrst staged in 1599, A Larum for London evinces a deep interest in what Ivo Kamps deWnes as ‘‘the single most crucial premise of humanist historiography: the assumption that history can teach us about the present because history repeats itself.’’2 In staging the 1576 sack (rather than siege) of Antwerp by Spanish soldiers, it implicitly warns that history will repeat itself in London: unless Londoners recognize the dangers of peace and the need for defense of the realm, they, too, will suVer Spanish invasion. Indeed, the play comes close to making this warning explicit several times, such as when it shows one of the

1 On this point, see Irving Ribner, who maintains in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) that all history plays are, by deWnition, didactic, as well as Phyllis Rackin, who suggests in Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) that while plays are ‘‘designed for polyphonic performance,’’ they nevertheless tend to register an awareness of the principle, increasingly important to the early modern historiographic enterprise, that historical texts ought to instruct readers in religious or political virtues (26). On didacticism in early modern historiography, see also Ivo Kamps, ‘‘The Writing of History in Shakespeare’s England,’’ in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II, The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 4–25 (esp. 7). On the complex status of the exemplum in early modern texts, see Timothy Hampton, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 2 Kamps, ‘‘The Writing of History in Shakespeare’s England,’’ 13.

Wound-man Walking

167

victims of the sack, having declared that Antwerp’s negligent citizens deserve their misfortunes, posing the following question: What state is there, be it nere so populare, Abounding in the height of fortunes giftes; And all felicities of worldly Pompe, That sees sad desolation sit in teares, Upon her neighbor Citties? Warres keen edge, Hath furrowed through their entrails, let them blood, In everie artier that maintaineth life, Yet will not dread her daunger to be neere?3

Evoking the (literally) visceral image of a body whose bowels have been ‘‘furrowed through’’ and whose every artery has been severed and asking who will—or will not—proWt from the bloody lessons of Antwerp’s ‘‘sad desolation,’’ the speaker clearly addresses the audience, enjoining playgoers both to comprehend the extent of their peril and to look forward with terror—to ‘‘dread’’—their future. As this speech suggests, A Larum for London takes for granted what Steven Mullaney has aptly described as the ‘‘apprehensive power of the stage’’—that is, the play assumes an audience capable of both ‘‘mentally grasping or comprehending something in its entirety’’ and feeling a modern sense of ‘‘self-reXexive shame, dread or anxiety.’’4 Indeed, it is precisely because the play is infused with such a heady brew of apprehensive rhetoric that, in contemporary criticism, A Larum for London is typically construed as little more than a heated sermon about the need to ramp up English militarization still further.5 In this chapter I aim to shed additional light on why the play’s exhortatory rhetoric may have appealed powerfully to audiences in 1599 and again in 1602. However, I also wish to show that the play, despite its obvious gestures toward didacticism, is far from a straightforward narrative, for it continually refutes the possibility that what it stages might be instructive. Certainly, it urges military readiness. And certainly it warns its audience of ‘‘daunger [that is] neere.’’ But, as 3 A Larum for London 1602, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1913), lines 664–71. All quotations from the play follow this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 4 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 113, 98. 5 For critical accounts of the play that stress its didacticism, see, for example, A. B. Feldman, ‘‘The Rape of Antwerp in a Tudor Play,’’ Notes and Queries N.S. 5 (1958), 247, who notes that the play warns against ‘‘the perils of a metropolis that neglects its professional soldiers’’; Paulina Kewes, ‘‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’’, in Dutton and Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II, The Histories, 170–93, who describes the play as ‘‘issu[ing] a forceful warning about the military threat of Spain’’ (175); Rosalyn L. Knutson, ‘‘Filling Fare: The Appetite for Current Issues and Traditional Forms in the Repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men,’’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 15(2003), 57–76, who considers the play’s topicality as well as its indebtedness to the medieval morality play; and Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 31–53, who discusses the play’s voicing of complaint about war casualties as well as its articulation of three ‘‘morals’’: ‘‘moral reform, military readiness, and the justice of a self-defensive war’’ (32).

168

Wound-Man Walking

I demonstrate, the play through its repeated representations of bodies that have felt ‘‘Warres keen edge,’’ also performs the traumatic—and, thus, by deWnition, literally ungraspable—impact of Elizabethan militarization.6 Even as it dramatizes the sack of Antwerp, in other words, the play suggests that the extremities it depicts resist intellectual mastery and thus mark a limit to what can be known about—let alone learned from—the past. More precisely, the play’s depiction of recurring scenes of bodily danger and distress, scenes that appear guaranteed to shock the senses, forces playhouse audiences into encounters with what can be termed ‘‘uncanny corporeality.’’ When viewed from the perspective of these discomforting encounters with the uncanny, A Larum for London emerges as a text that bears witness not only to the upheaval in Antwerp but also to a more general cultural trauma—namely, the psychic dislocation generated by the increasingly militarized culture of late sixteenth-century London.7 I Before looking more closely at A Larum for London, it may be helpful to review the events that inspired the play as well as some contemporary English reactions to these events. Over the course of a few days in early November 1576, in an episode that has come to be known as the ‘‘Spanish Fury,’’ some Wve or six thousand men in King Philip II’s army—men who had successfully besieged a seaport town in Zeeland—mutinied for want of money and food.8 Setting their sights on Antwerp, a city not in revolt against Spain, the Spanish soldiers scaled Antwerp’s walls, stormed the city, and, in the process, overcame the army of the States of Brabant. At the time, Antwerp was one of Europe’s wealthiest cities; it was known for its busy port; for a variety of industries from malt-brewing to cloth, silk, and tapestry production; and, above all, for the cosmopolitan Wnancial 6 On the ungraspabilty of trauma, see the Introduction as well as Cathy Caruth’s inXuential reading of trauma in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 7 On the increase in the scale of militarization in late Elizabethan England, see the Introduction as well as such works as Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); John S. Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ Journal of Military History, 58 (1994), 391–420; and David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Taurus, 1995), 99–135. 8 For more detailed accounts of the sack, see GeoVrey Parker, ‘‘Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1572–1607,’’ Past and Present, 58 (1973), 38–52; William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971), 51–2; Jervis Weg, The Decline of Antwerp under Philip of Spain (London: Methuen, 1924), 189–206; Andrew Pettegree, ‘‘Religion and the Revolt,’’ in Graham Darby (ed.), The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt (London: Routledge, 2001), 67–83; Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 47; and Fernando Gonzalez de Leon, ‘‘Soldados, Platicos and Caballeros: The Social Dimensions of Ethics in the Early Modern Spanish Army,’’ in D. J. B. Trim (ed.), The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 247.

Wound-man Walking

169

center at which many Elizabethan merchants did business and on which Thomas Gresham would model the London Exchange. But when the Spanish soldiers pillaged Antwerp, hundreds of buildings were destroyed and some eight thousand individuals were murdered. As one modern historian has noted, the sack was ‘‘a traumatic and decisive event, and one that would live in the Dutch consciousness as vividly as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in the French.’’9 Equally important, the events, which ‘‘destroyed the last vestiges of the [Spanish] King’s authority’’ in the Low Countries and which led all the provinces to unite against Spain, were closely watched by outsiders, especially the English.10 What was probably the Wrst Elizabethan response to the Antwerp violence came from George Gascoigne—the poet, soldier, and spy—who authored a 52-page eyewitness acount, The spoyle of Antwerpe, which was published anonymously upon Gascoigne’s return to London at the end of November 1576 and later became the main source for A Larum for London.11 An explicitly didactic text, the account is prefaced with an expression of its author’s hope that Antwerp will serve ‘‘for a proWtable example unto all sutche as beeyng subiect to like imperfections, might fall thereby into the like calamities’’ (A3v). OVering a chilling report of the narrator’s encounters with victims and perpetrators of atrocities, Gascoigne describes a ‘‘pitifull massacre’’ leading to the death of 17,000(!) people, and he oVers a (no longer extant) map of the city by means of which readers might trace the paths of the marauding soldiers (B7v). Strikingly, his text combines a gripping account of violence and bloodshed—including brutal attacks on Englishmen—with an homage to Spanish military discipline. Accordingly, while Gascoigne describes the ferocity of the Spaniards after winning control of Antwerp, he also writes that they ‘‘were to be honored for the good order and direction which they kepte’’ in charging and entering the city (B3r). Lambasting the ‘‘carelessness and lack of foresight’’ of the Antwerp citizens, he interprets the sack as a sign of divine wrath at their lack of vigilance (B3r). In Gascoigne’s account, the story of Antwerp is the story of a people so lacking in military expertise that they were utterly powerless when the Germans and Walloons who had been charged with the city’s defense began to Xee. In 9 Pettegree, ‘‘Religion and the Revolt,’’ 80. Gonzalez de Leon goes still further, arguing that it was ‘‘one of the most appalling events of the century, roughly equivalent to the twentieth’s Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki’’ (247). 10 Parker, ‘‘Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army of Flanders,’’ 49. On casualty rates, see Parker (49) and van Gelderen (The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 47) who estimate eight thousand, and Weg, who estimates ‘‘six or seven thousand’’ (The Decline of Antwerp, 201). According to Maltby, ‘‘The lowest contemporary estimate . . . gives the Wgure at eight thousand’’ (146 n.27). 11 George Gascoigne, The spoyle of Antwerpe (1576). All quotations from this work follow this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. For a discussion of Gascoigne’s mission to Antwerp as well as his tract, the publication date of which is unknown, see C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 234–8. For a recent discussion of Gascoigne that explores his military milieu, see Laurie Shannon, ‘‘Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s ‘Friendly Verse,’ ’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10 (2004), 453–83.

170

Wound-Man Walking

short, The spoyle of Antwerpe hints at a sentiment that by the late sixteenth century would be ubiquitous in Elizabethan martial discourse: ruin will come to Londoners unless they prepare themselves for Spanish invasion. By 1578, several other Elizabethan writers had begun to write about the sack, thereby helping to establish the events as historical matter from which Londoners should proWt.12 Among this group were not only ballad writers13 but also, and predictably, Elizabethan soldiers who rendered explicit what was implicit in Gascoigne’s text as they urged Londoners to secure the realm militarily and to see in Antwerp’s fate an emblem of their own vulnerability. In A lamentable and pitifull description of the wofull warres in Flaunders (1578), for example, Thomas Churchyard, who had seen military service on the Continent and in Ireland, interpreted the sack as an admonition, at once practical and theological, about the need to secure one’s goods and to lead a virtuous life. The attack, he said, was: a warning to all wanton Cities, hereafter to give and keepe better watche of their libertie and wealth, and to cause the inhabitants of everye Towne and Corporation, to have suche regarde of God, and the leading of their lives, that they come not into the indignation of the highest, who often doth visite the base conditions of the people, with sword, Wre and pestilence, and manye other punishementes and plagues, that oure present daies doeth present us, and the worldes wickednesse cannot shunne.14

Similarly, in Allarme to England (1578), a treatise on the need for Londoners to endorse a program of extensive military instruction, Barnaby Rich, who also served in armies on the Continent and in Ireland, held Antwerp out as an example to his compatriots: if thou thinkest the great numbers of untrained men are suYcient to defend thee, doe but remember what happened to Antwerpe, where they wanted neither men nor any other provision for the warres. But they wanted soldiers to direct them and men of understanding to encourage them.15

For Rich, as for Churchyard, the invocation of Antwerp was vital to a sermon about the dangers of peacetime, a time when men may forget about military discipline and ‘‘grow to be slothful, [pale], proude, covetous, dissolute, incontinent, vicious, following all manner of vanities, given all to delightes, to inordinate lust, gluttony, swearing and to be short, to all manner of Wlthiness’’ 12 On the Elizabethan response to the events in Antwerp, see S. M. Pratt, ‘‘Antwerp and the Elizabethan Mind,’’ Modern Language Quarterly 24 (1963), 53–60. 13 On the ballads, see Pratt, ‘‘Antwerp and the Elizabethan Mind,’’ who notes that, by 1578, the Stationers’ Register had recorded three, now apparently ‘‘lost,’’ ballads whose titles are ‘‘A warnynge songe to Cities all to beware by Andwerpes fall,’’ ‘‘Heavie newes to all Christendom from the woofull towne of Antwerp comme,’’ and ‘‘A godlie exhortacon unto Englande to repent him of the evill and sinfull waies j shewinge thexample and distruccon of Jerlm and Andwarp’’ (54). 14 Thomas Churchyard, A lamentable and pitifull description, of the wofull warres in Flaunders (1578), 60. 15 Barnaby Rich, Allarme to England foreshewing what perilles are procured, where the people live without regarde of Martiall lawe (1578), E3r.

Wound-man Walking

171

(B4v). And such warnings that London might become Antwerp were, in a sense, realized some twenty-Wve years later when A Larum for London was performed in an Elizabethan playhouse. Drawing on many of the atrocities described in Gascoigne’s eyewitness account, A Larum for London features a (Wctional) lame soldier who defends the city against the Spanish before meeting his death in the play’s Wnal scene.16 Although nothing is known about the play’s authorship, the title page of its Wrst printing in 1602, which promises a narrative about ‘‘the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame Soldier,’’ advertises that the drama ‘‘hath been played by the right Honorable the Lord Charberlaine [sic] his Servants.’’ W. W. Greg has convincingly established that the play, which calls for a (large) cast of some twenty actors, was Wrst performed by the Chamberlain’s Men sometime between the autumn of 1594 when the company ceased to be associated with Philip Henslowe and the spring of 1600 when the play was Wrst entered into the Stationers’ Register.17 More recently, Roslyn L. Knutson has speculated that the company Wrst performed the play during the Globe’s inaugural season (from fall 1599 to spring 1600), reasoning that a new production would be likely to earn a greater proWt than a restaging of an old one in their repertory.18 Whether or not A Larum for London was performed during the Globe’s premiere season, its aYliation with Shakespeare’s playing company and its 1602 appearance in a quarto edition make it clear that this now rarely read play was far from obscure in late Elizabethan London. From the start, A Larum for London—like the treatises from the 1570s— foregrounds its didacticism and its ideological investments in warfare and military discipline. Accordingly, the play’s prologue, which is delivered by the allegorical Wgure of Time, warns playgoers that they can expect to ‘‘beholde their faults’’ in the scenes that ensue (13). Moments later, a moralizing scene emphasizes the vulnerability of undisciplined bodies as it shows Van End, a treacherous captain in charge of Antwerp’s ‘‘Almaines,’’ or German mercenary forces, conversing with a Spanish captain, Danila (a stand-in, apparently, for the historical personage Sancho D’Avila), about the surprise attack. During this conversation, Van End speculates that the plot may not work—the would-be attackers may be too few and the citizens ‘‘[m]ight at an houres warning, Wll their streetes, j With fortie thousand well appointed Soldiers’’ (45–6)—only to be dismissed by Danila, who castigates the citizens of Antwerp in language that echoes Rich’s fulminations against Londoners who are ‘‘given all to delightes’’: 16 On the casting requirements, see Laurie Maguire, ‘‘A Stage Property in A Larum for London,’’ Notes and Queries 231st ser. 3 (1986), 371–3, who suggests that the play may have called for ‘‘seventeen men and three boys’’ (373). 17 W. W. Greg, introduction to A Larum for London, v. 18 Knutson, ‘‘Filling Fare,’’ 59–60. But see Maguire, ‘‘A Stage Property in A Larum for London,’’ for the suggestion that the play may be the same as the lost play ‘‘the Sege of London’’ listed in Henslowe’s diary as having received eleven performances between 1594 and 1596.

172

Wound-Man Walking Ay, but they are remisse and negligent, Their bodies us’d to soft eVeminate silkes, And their nice mindes set all on dalliance, Which makes them fat for slaughter, Wt for spoil. (47–50)

Through these remarks, the play clearly draws on the anti-Flemish stereotypes rampant in London in the 1590s, deWning the Antwerp inhabitants in terms of laxity, eVeminacy, and corpulence.19 As the play continues, it reinforces this view, conjuring up a semiotics of the grotesque body: the citizens are said to ‘‘sit swilling in the pride of their excesse’’ (181) and to ‘‘fall a sleepe upon full stomackes’’ (188); they are ‘‘Bouzing Bacchanalian centures’’ (205), ‘‘froathy Renish fats’’ given to ‘‘foule Bestiall Gurmandize’’ (226, 229), ‘‘Bouzing Be[l]gians’’ (315), and ‘‘great swolne bellyed Burgers’’ (1422). Conceptualized as open mouths and fat bellies, they are what must be sacriWced, the play implies, on the Spanish altar of martial discipline. Indeed, the play shows one of the citizens belatedly embracing this ideal as he exclaims in the midst of the attack, ‘‘We are undone for want of discipline’’ (630). Staging the brutal punishments to which the Spanish soldiers and their accomplices subject the bodies of the citizens, the play clearly would seem to oVer a cautionary tale. At the center of this tale is the Antwerp-born lame soldier who (in some unknown fashion) wears a wooden leg, and whose ‘‘ventrous actes and valorous deeds’’ are showcased on the play’s title page.20 For most of the play, this character is not addressed or referred to by name; only at the very end of the play—in scenes to which I shall return—does he acquire a name. In his Wrst speech, this soldier rebukes the terriWed citizens, reminding them that they ‘‘rated,’’ ‘‘revil’d,’’ and ‘‘baXed’’ him when he predicted that they would be made to suVer for their negligence (595–6). When the citizens beg him to defend the city, he again reproaches them for refusing to recognize the worth of soldiers: An object base mechanicke set aworke; A swettie Cobler, whose best industrie Is but to cloute a Shoe, shall have his fee; But let a Soldier, that hath spent his bloud, Is lame’d, diseas’d, or any way distrest, 19 I refer to this rhetoric as ‘‘anti-Flemish’’ rather than ‘‘anti-Dutch’’ because, as a reader for the press has pointed out, the terms in use here refer speciWcally to individuals from Flanders and Brabant, who by the time of the play’s performance, were widely regarded as loyal to Spain. On the anti-Dutch tradition, see Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), which discusses Londoners’ responses to the inXux of immigrants from the Low Countries and cites the 1593 London tracts addressed to ‘‘you beastly brutes the Belgians, or rather drunken drones and fainthearted Flemings’’ (41). 20 As is evident from Henslowe’s inventory, the use of such a stage property is not unique to this play. See Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 320.

Wound-man Walking

173

Appeale for succour, then you looke a sconce As if you knew him not; respecting more An Ostler, or some drudge that rakes your kennels, Than one that Wghteth for the common wealth. (608–16)

Characterizing soldiers as ‘‘mechanickes’’—that is, manual laborers not unlike cobblers and ostlers—this speech nevertheless insists (like many an Elizabethan militarist) upon the exceptional worth of the military profession to the ‘‘common wealth.’’ Moreover, the play as a whole makes it clear that this lame soldier is Wercely industrious when he is ‘‘aworke.’’ As the scenes that follow emphasize, nothing can stop the lame soldier from venturing forth to spend his blood and defend the city against the fearsome Spanish mutineers. Indeed, the play is devoted to distinguishing this resolute worker from all the other inhabitants of Antwerp—from citizens who take to their houses; from soldiers who plot their escape; and even from an Antwerp captain who, near the play’s end, reveals that he has been hiding in a friary. As the antithesis of Antwerp’s swollen-bellied burghers, this lame soldier is so well disciplined, the play suggests, that he is willing to Wght even in an obscenely unequal contest in which virtually everyone on his side has either given up or been slain. The staging of this play about bloodthirsty Spanish troops, falsely secure Dutch citizens, and a truly disciplined lame soldier in 1599 was, as William S. Maltby has noted, an obvious English contribution to the period’s anti-Spanish discourse—the so-called ‘‘Black Legend.’’21 As such, its early performances must be situated in terms of a culture consumed by intense fears at the prospect of a Spanish invasion and marked by lively disagreement about the proper way to manage the war eVort in the Low Countries. Insofar as many Elizabethans assumed that an invasion of England would come via Ireland, England’s Irish crisis is surely also relevant to an understanding of the appeal of A Larum for London. Indeed, the staging of the play in 1599 may well have capitalized on those fears about Ireland, for, as I suggested in Chapter 3, the late 1590s were years of real crisis for the English forces. It is easy to imagine the play’s martial fervor as bound up with the initial excitement in England about the earl of Essex’s 1599 expedition against Tyrone—that is, about the expedition in which Essex led the largest army ever raised by Elizabeth only to return a few months later in disgrace and with Tyrone more powerful than ever. By the time that A Larum for London saw print in 1602, readers attentive to the Nine Years War in Ireland may well have viewed the play’s portrayal of the Spanish with considerably less trepidation than did its original audiences, for in 1601, English forces, responding to a national mobilization, faced oV against an expeditionary force of 3,400 Spanish soldiers

21 On the sack of Antwerp and the ‘‘black legend’’ tradition, see William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England, 51–3.

174

Wound-Man Walking

who landed at Kinsale: after both a siege and a pitched battle, the English won what proved to be the decisive victory in the war.22 The English victory in Ireland could not, of course, wipe out the grim fact of the realm’s ongoing military engagements in the Low Countries, where volunteers had been serving in Dutch pay since the 1570s and where an army of more than 5,000 English soldiers was regularly maintained—and often exposed to great hardship—between 1585 and 1602.23 Indeed, for many audience members, the play’s subtitle—The Siedge of Antwerpe—may well have summoned up bitter memories of the victory of the Spanish forces in their year-long siege of Antwerp in 1585. By the time of the play’s publication in 1602, this subtitle would surely have summoned up one of the longest and bloodiest sieges of all— namely, the Spanish siege of the Anglo-Dutch garrison at Ostend, which began in June 1601 and which once again resulted in Spanish victory in 1604.24 Contributing to the cultural fantasy of an all-powerful Spain, English presses printed at least Wve pamphlets on the siege of Ostend between 1601 and 1604, some of which were issued in multiple editions.25 Given these historical contexts, it seems clear that the portrayal of the Spanish and the Dutch in A Larum for London is the product of a moment when, to many in England, the Spanish threat was all-too-real and an English truce seemed 22 Among the many accounts of English forces in Ireland in the 1590s, see in addition to the works cited in n. 7, Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London: Methuen, 1950); Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993); and John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). On the Spanish landing at Kinsale, see J. J. Silke, Kinsale: The Spanish Intervention in Ireland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1970), and Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 225–35. 23 In fact, in some Wve of the years between 1585 and 1602, the army troop levels were between 12,000 and 15,000. On the number of forces and the diYcult living conditions in the Low Countries, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 169–74 and 246–9. See also Nolan, ‘‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’’ 404–5, whose calculations of troop levels have been emended by D. J. B. Trim, ‘‘Fighting ‘Jacob’s Wars’: The Employment of English and Welsh Mercenaries in the European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands, 1562–1610,’’ PhD thesis, University of London, 2002, appendix 2. 24 On the play’s relationship to the events in Ostend, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 32. For a concise summary of the events in Ostend, see Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 223–4, 228–30. 25 A breefe declaration of that which is happened aswell within as without Oastend sithence the vij. of Ianuarie 1602 (1602); A dialogue and complaint made vpon the siedge of Oastend, made by the King of Spaine, the Archduke, the Infanta, the Pope, the Prince Morrice, and the eldest sonne of Sauoye (1602); Newes from Ostend of, the oppugnation, and Werce siege made, by the Archeduke Albertus his forces (1601); Extremities vrging the Lord Generall Sir Fra: Veare to the anti-parle with the Archduke Albertus. Written by an English gentleman of verie good account from Ostend, to a worshipfull gentleman his friend heere in England, imprinted verbatı`m according to the originall. VVith a declaration of the desperate attempt made since, by the sayde Arch-dukes forces, for the winning of the ould towne (1602); and Edward Grimeston, A true historie of the memorable siege of Ostend, trans. from French to English (1604). There were at least three editions of both Newes from Ostend and Extremities. For an invaluable discussion of published accounts of the siege, see Anna E. C. Simoni, The Ostend Story: Early Tales of the Great Siege and the Mediating Role of Henrick van Haestens (’t Goy-Houten: HES and DeGraaf, 2003).

Wound-man Walking

175

profoundly unwise. Given that there was widespread interest in (and opposition to) the English/Spanish peace negotiations that took place in Boulogne in the summer of 1600, the fact that the play was registered for print in May 1600 may well suggest an eVort on the part of the publisher to exploit a hot topic.26 In this regard, the play’s representation of the Antwerp citizens as ‘‘remisse and negligent,’’ and as concerned with ‘‘soft eVeminate silkes’’ rather than with martial values may be seen as resonating with the views set forth in English works that advocated against peace with Spain. More speciWcally, the play’s representation of Antwerp indolence before the sack may resonate with contemporaneous predictions of what London would be like if England were prematurely to end the war with Spain: thus, for example in An Apologie of the earl of Essex, which was likely circulating in manuscript in 1598 before its 1603 publication, Essex Wrst professes his great love and esteem for English soldiery and then sets out a nightmare vision in which ‘‘our nation,’’ having made peace with Spain and abandoned martial pursuits, ‘‘generally grow[s] unwarlicke; in love with the name, and bewitched with the delight of peace’’ until it is forced to yield to Spanish enemies who have meanwhile recovered their courage and its strength.27 With its vivid reminder of past atrocities by the Spanish, A Larum for London clearly seems to be taking Essex’s side in the debate about ending the war. As such, the lame soldier whose ‘‘ventrous actes and valorous deeds’’ are advertised on the play’s title page might be read not only as a reminder of the plight of impoverished English and Welsh veterans, many of whose bodies, like that of the play’s main character, bore visible signs of their military service. He might also be understood as a metaphor for the bitter and maimed realm that—in the view of those who sought to continue the war—would necessarily come into existence should England come to terms with Spain. This admittedly brief sketch of some military contexts can help to explain the topical appeal in 1599, and again in 1602, of A Larum for London, but, it would be a mistake, I think, to read the play as though it were simply a sermon or position paper on warfare and to ignore its status as theatrical performance. Accordingly, in the rest of this chapter, my analysis focuses on how the play, through its very form, ensures that Elizabethan playgoers encounter a sensationalized, indeed visceral, staging of history. My exploration of the drama’s aesthetic elements—especially, its repetitive structure of sounds and images—shows that even as A Larum for London oVers messages about the dangers of peace and the need for military readiness, it registers late Elizabethan militarization as a disturbing phenomenon, suggesting through symptomatic Xashbacks that the full impact of England’s turn 26 For a clear analysis of the English negotiations with the Archduke Albert, the captain-general of Spanish Flanders, see R. B. Wernham, The Return of the Armadas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 319–34. I owe this insight into the relevance of the peace talks to a reader for the press who also inspired my discussion of the play’s aYliation with Elizabethan writings against the peace and directed me to the work by Essex that I cite in this paragraph. 27 An Apologie of the earl of Essex, F1v.

176

Wound-Man Walking

toward war may well resist comprehension. By reading the inscription of trauma in this play, I aim to trouble the idea that the theater, in staging this topical—even preachy—play about war, functioned in the clear-cut way that critics have hitherto suggested. Much more than a platform for presenting particular ideas—whether they be polemics against a peace with Spain or sermons about the need for military preparedness or debates about the nature of just wars or critiques of the treatment of veterans—A Larum for London enacts unsettling encounters with a past that ‘‘haunts’’ the present. By focusing on these encounters, rather than on the play’s prescriptive elements, then, I aim to suggest something of the complexity of the play’s address to its Elizabethan audiences, especially how A Larum for London through its scenes of excess calls upon playgoers to be what Robert Jay Lifton has described as ‘‘survivors by proxy’’—those who, in encountering survivors of trauma, experience something of the event.28 II Long before A Larum for London appeared on stage, Elizabethan writers had ensured that the sack of Antwerp would become legible in the cultural imaginary as an experience of collective trauma rather than simply as an event from which attentive Elizabethans might learn a lesson. Thus, in narrating what happened to Antwerp’s inhabitants in 1576, Elizabethan writers depicted a skewed temporality that corresponds to what modern theorists of trauma describe as the ‘‘latency’’ of traumatic experience—that is, the way that trauma is not grasped as it occurs but rather comes into existence after the fact and ‘‘outside the boundaries of any single place or time.’’29 In Churchyard’s text, for example, the narrator renders the impact of the attack as follows: aboute dinner time when some have more mind of their belly, than their safetie (and fall to quaYng and bibbing, when greedie hunger and thirste shoulde be moderated with sober diet) the Spaniardes issued furiouslye into the Citie, into whiche the greate Cannon shotte came roaring before them, and with them came suche a thunder of harquebuzers [i.e., Wrearms] and trampling of horses, that the Towne thoughte, that Hel hadde beene burste open, or that the skies hadde fallen uppon them by some sodaine rattle and thunder-cracke from the Heavens. (H1r)

Portraying this assault by a ‘‘sodaine’’ sound, Churchyard’s narrator interrupts his critique of immoderate appetites with an account of the inhabitants’ experience of an intense shock that shattered ordinary notions of place and time. Rendering what ‘‘the Towne thoughte’’ in terms of a shared belief that ‘‘Hel hadde beene burste open, or that the skies hadde fallen uppon them,’’ he articulates the 28 See Cathy Caruth, ‘‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,’’ in Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 145. 29 Caruth, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Trauma, 8–9.

Wound-man Walking

177

citizens’delay in grasping what has befallen them as well as their collective sense of cataclysmic rupture. Moreover, as he describes how ‘‘about dinner time . . . the Spaniardes issued furiouslye into the Citie, into whiche the greate Cannon shotte came roaring before them,’’ the very diYculty of his syntax suggests the need to make sense of—to order—a time sequence that has, it seems, been a casualty of the event. Indeed, the narrator’s description of the ‘‘greate Cannon shotte [which] came roaring’’ at the citizens—that is, of violent explosions that came well in advance of what is revealed only afterward to be their point of origin—oVers a resonant image of traumatic shock and its bewildering temporalities. Gascoigne’s The spoyle of Antwerpe also oVers a powerful rendering of the sack as an experience of collective trauma and its belated eVects. As an eyewitness report, however, its manner of traumatic inscription is signiWcantly diVerent from that of Churchyard’s text. To begin with, Gascoigne’s account, like many modern testimonies of trauma, depicts its Wrst-person narrator as an involuntary witness to his experience.30 This sense of compulsion is especially evident in the text’s last pages, where the narrator elaborates on the harrowing scenes he has endured: I refrayne to rehearce the heapes of deade Carcases whiche laye at every Trench where they entred: the thicknesse whereof, did in many places exceede the height of a man. I forbeare also to recount the huge nombers, drowned in ye new Toune: where a man might behold as many sundry shapes and formes of mans motio[n] at time of death: as ever Mighel Angelo dyd portray in his tables of Doomes day. I list not to recken the inWnite nombers of poore Almains who lay burned in their armour: som thentrailes skorched out, & all the rest of the body free, some their head and shoulders burnt of: so that you might looke down into the bulk & brest and there take an Anatomy of the secrets of nature. Some standing uppon their waste, being burnte of by the thighes: & some no more but the very toppe of the brain taken of with fyre, whiles the rest of the body dyd abide unspeakable tormentes. I set not downe the ougly & Wlthy polluting of every streete with the gore and carcases of men and horses: neither doo I complaine, that the one lacked buryall, and the other Xeing, untyl the ayre (corrupted with theyr caryon) enfected all that yet remained alyve in the Towne: And why should I describe the particularitie of every such anoiance, as commonly happen both in campes & Castels, where martiall feates are managed? But I may not passe over with sylence, the wylfull burning and destroying of the stately Towne house, & all the monuments and records of the Citie: neither can I refraine to tel their shamful rapes & outragious forces presented unto sundry honest Dames & Virgins. (C1r–v)

In obvious ways, Gascoigne’s narrator foregrounds his special status as a survivor of an extraordinary event—one that goes beyond what ‘‘commonly happen[s] . . . where martiall feates are managed’’ and that seems to elude full understanding. Thus while his many statements about what he will not narrate (e.g., ‘‘I refrayne,’’ ‘‘I forbeare,’’ ‘‘I list not’’) may seem to lay claim to a kind of mastery of the 30 For a discussion of what it means to bear witness to trauma in modern culture, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).

178

Wound-Man Walking

experience, he elsewhere reveals a sense of being mastered by it. His evocation of non-linguistic forms of representation, such as Michelangelo’s fresco of The Last Judgment and a quantifying discourse of ‘‘huge’’ and ‘‘inWnite’’ numbers, contributes to a sense that he Wnds language unequal to the task of conveying the ‘‘unspeakable tormentes’’ he has witnessed. Moreover, his language suggests that he is under duress and does not want to give evidence—‘‘why should I describe the particularitie of every such anoiance?’’ he asks—even as it implies that, as a survivor, he has no choice but to report, for, as he puts it, there are things that he ‘‘may not passe over with silence.’’ Indeed, as he oVers his almost ritualistic litany of the ways in which he will not ‘‘rehearce’’ or ‘‘recount’’ or ‘‘reckon’’ or ‘‘set downe’’ what he has seen, the text registers a kind of repetition compulsion, as if to suggest that he is, once again, possessed by the particularities of his visions. That such traumatic images cannot be erased from his memory is clear, too, from his detailed renderings of mutilated bodies. And yet, if Gascoigne represents what it feels like to be obliged to look again at horriWc images of the past, he also, paradoxically enough, suggests an anxiety that the past is quickly becoming inaccessible. Indeed, as he notes that the obliteration of ‘‘all the monuments and records’’ of the city is part of what he ‘‘may not passe over with silence,’’ he suggests that his own movement out of ‘‘silence’’ has been impelled in part by the conviction that memory itself has somehow come under attack. In striking ways, then, Gascoigne suggests that to live through the Antwerp violence is to live in crisis: his testimony, after all, seems to suggest a continual— and continually failing—eVort to keep himself at a remove from the encounter with death that he seems compulsively to record. In this regard, his evocation of a generic ‘‘man’’—a man by whose height the ‘‘heapes of deade Carcases’’ might be measured and through whom ‘‘many sundry shapes and formes of mans motio[n] at time of death’’ might be beheld—suggests a willed eVort to keep intrusive images of mass death at bay. Accordingly, it hardly seems accidental that when this Wgure who functions to keep things at a distance disappears from the text, Gascoigne starts to speak directly to the reader, as though to conjure up another eyewitness who can mediate the impact of the event. Writing that ‘‘you might looke down into the bulk & brest and there take an Anatomy of the secrets of nature,’’ he clearly substitutes the reader for himself as he urges study of the mysterious interiors of corpses. This invitation to the reader represents what is surely one the text’s most unsettling moments, for it raises the possibility that Gascoigne has already peered into this void and found out the hidden ‘‘secrets.’’ In the terrifying world he depicts, to survive is apparently to reckon with the fact that specters of death—including eerie visions of ‘‘mans motio[n] at time of death’’—cannot be kept at a distance. Thus, by the end of the passage, when one reads that ‘‘the ayre (corrupted with theyr caryon) enfected all that yet remained alyve in the Towne,’’ one gets the sense that, in the aftermath of the attack, Gascoigne has himself become a kind of phantom, for the phrasing has the eVect

Wound-man Walking

179

of removing him from the scene—or, at the very least, ‘‘outing’’ him as one of the ‘‘enfected’’ survivors.31 Like these texts depicting Antwerp’s sack as a traumatic occurrence, A Larum for London explores experiences of collective shock and proximity to death. One might speculate that the appearance of the play some twenty-Wve years after the sack may have to do with the intensity with which Londoners initially experienced the events—that is, the trauma may have been so extreme that it, in eVect, created a silence.32 However, my point here is not that the resurfacing of the events sometime around the late 1590s is the sign of a return to a ‘‘primal scene’’ of collective catastrophe. Rather, I am arguing that the play, in revisiting the sack of Antwerp, also registers the force of the more recent, and related, collective trauma of militarization itself. It is highly signiWcant, in other words, that the play shows warfare not as waged on a battleWeld but rather as erupting within the heart of a city whose resemblance to Elizabethan London is hard to miss—a site conjured up, as Laurie Maguire has noted, with frequent allusions to ‘‘castle walls, townhouse banquets, and citizens gossiping’’ (372). In depicting the atrocities visited upon the inhabitants of Antwerp, in short, the play registers a late Elizabethan struggle to make sense of its own new intimacy with military violence. A Larum for London seems to go out of its way to ensure that audience members cannot miss the magnitude of the violence unleashed upon the city. Thus the play refers to ‘‘cannons’’ and ‘‘ball[s] of lead’’ in possession of the Spanish soldiers, artillery that English military writers discussed in their treatises and that English armies were also, of course, increasingly stockpiling (240, 254)33 (see Figure 8). Indeed, the play’s second scene oVers playgoers a guided tour of the Spaniards’ military arsenal, during which a gunner points out to Danila the formidable weapons to be used against the citizens: a ‘‘faulcon,’’ or 800-pound cannon, two ‘‘Harguebuz of Crocke’’ or large guns for use on ramparts, and a ‘‘Culvering’’ or 4,000- to 5,000-pound cannon.34 Like the play, Elizabethan newsbooks reporting on warfare in the Low Countries often focused on gunpowder weaponry, as is evidenced by the description of ‘‘shotte’’ oVered in one of the pamphlets recounting events at the siege of Ostend: 31 Such rhetoric seems especially charged when one realizes that Gascoigne’s text was published anonymously and that the author died within a year of his return to London. 32 For a discussion of the way trauma can produce a ‘‘historical gap,’’ see Dori Laub’s discussion of the belated surfacing of Holocaust testimonies in ‘‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,’’ in Caruth (ed.), Trauma, 61–75 (69). 33 On the introduction of new gunpowder weapons in Elizabethan armies, see Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 99–105; on the growth in expenditure by the Tudor OYce of Ordnance, see C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 121, and Richard W. Stewart, The English Ordnance OYce, 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Rochester: Boydell, 1996). 34 On Elizabethan artillery, see Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 124–47 and ‘‘The Science of Gunnery in Elizabethan England,’’ Isis, 45 (May 1954), 10–21, as well as Bert Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

180

Wound-Man Walking

Figure 8. ‘‘A peece’’ from Niccolo Tartaglia’s Three bookes of colloquies concerning the arte of shooting, trans. Cyprian Lucar (1588). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. There was a Mariner of Zeland in Ostend, that had his legge stricken oV with a great shot, who was taken up to be carried to the shippe, but before hee could be brought to the boat, hee was with another shotte strucke throw the body, that he presently dyed, and so was rid of his pains. The like hapned at an other time to a soldier that was likewise slayne with the enemies great shotte, and beeing carried on foure mens shoulders to the grave, the coYn and corse were shot throw with another bullet, the men presently set the coYn on the ground, and ranne as fast as they could, striving who should Wrst get [away from?] the shot.35

Clearly, the notion that the new gunpowder technology possessed an enormous and erratic power was widespread, not least because the increased ferocity of gunpowder technology seems to have ensured that weapons such as those on display in A Larum for London were becoming more rather than less frightening.36 In his authoritative account of fortiWcation, the militarist Paul Ive in fact described 35 Further Newes from Ostend (1601), B1v–B2r, as cited in D. C. Collins, A Handlist of News Pamphlets, 1590–1610 (London: South-West Essex Technical College, 1943). 36 For a classic discussion of the impact of gunpowder technology, see J. R. Hale, ‘‘Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas,’’ in Renaissance War Studies (London: Hambledon, 1983), 389–420. See also Roy S. Wolper, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Gunpowder and the Idea of Progress,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 31.4 (1970), 589–98, who cites the Elizabethan translator and promoter of colonial projects Richard Eden as noting that gunpowder possessed ‘‘suche marveylous force, that mountaynes of moste harde rockes and stones, are not able to resist their violence, but are by them broken in peeces, and throwen into the ayre with such violence, that neyther the spirite of Demigorgon, nor the thunderbolts of infernal Pluto can do the like’’ (592).

Wound-man Walking

181

the cannon as ‘‘an Engine of more force than any before invented.’’37 And many of the Wrst books on ballistics available to English readers—books which date from the 1560s and which aim to bring Wrearms under the control of mathematical principles—suggest that the explosive impact of weapons is a new phenomenon with which England must contend. Writing in 1594, the English author of one such text anxiously compares past and present warfare only to conclude that bodies are more vulnerable than ever before: ‘‘[W]as not Jack and Sallet [i.e., a cloth jacket lined with small metal plates and a helmet] within our remembrance thought to be suYcient for arming of Souldiours? . . . whereas now by reason of the force of weapons, neither horse nor man is able to beare armours suYcient to defend their bodies from death.’’38 A Larum for London begins by conjuring up the explosive impact of gunpowder on silk-clad burghers who are ‘‘so tender of their Xesh, j As they. . . scorne to beare the weight of steele’’ (61–2); as it unfolds, however, it turns to other kinds of violence, staging scene after scene in which the city’s unarmed inhabitants are easily overcome by sword-wielding soldiers. Among the brutal acts the play represents in its Wfteen scenes are the following: Champaigne, the French governor of Antwerp, is stabbed to death; the Marquis d’Hauvrye is stabbed to death; Champaigne’s wife is attacked, stripped, nearly raped, rescued, and then pursued again; one of her assailants is stabbed to death; the English governor and his friend are physically abused; an English factor is tortured on two separate occasions and eventually hanged; an Antwerp burgher is tortured; an elderly man who had been forced to retrieve his daughter from the convent where she had taken sanctuary is stabbed to death; the daughter is almost raped and then shot to death with a pistol; two little children who hide from soldiers are stabbed to death; the mother and old, blind father of the two children are stabbed to death; and the conspirator Van End is pushed into an underground vault and pelted with stones. In dramatizing such scenes of extremity, A Larum for London, makes a powerful appeal to the ears, as well as to the eyes, of playgoers.39 Its audiences, like the audiences for most Elizabethan plays on martial subjects, probably heard startling noises that originated oVstage—sounds made by chambers or small guns as well as by trumpets, drums, and bells—and that were meant to signal alarums 37 Paul Ive, The Practice of FortiWcation (London, 1598), as cited by de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 63. 38 Humfrey Barwicke, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and EVect of all manuall weapons of Wre (London, [1594]), B2r. For additional Elizabethan commentary on the power of gunpowder weapons, see Barnaby Rich, The Fruites of Long Experience (London, 1604) and William Garrard, The arte of warre (London, 1591). 39 On the sounds of war on the early modern stage, see Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), 1–34, and Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 220, as well as the entries for ‘‘alarum’’ and ‘‘chambers’’ in Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language (London: Athlone, 2000) and in Alan C. Essen and Leslie Thomas, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

182

Wound-Man Walking

and other oVstage military actions. In addition, its audiences probably heard onstage noises that marked onstage violence, such as the sounds of clashing metal as soldiers draw their swords, the sound of a cannon that apparently is ‘‘discharge[d]’’ onstage at the beginning of the play (203 s.d.) and the sound of a ‘‘Pistoll’’ with which the citizen’s daughter is suddenly murdered at close range (1078 s.d.). To judge from the play’s textual cues and stage directions, A Larum for London is keenly aware of the impact of noise, especially that of gunpowder weapons. Repeatedly, the play calls attention to the way that bursts of sound may, on their own, register a kind of traumatic knowledge of death. The play’s Wrst scene—which shows Danila predicting the shock that the citizens will feel when the alarum is sounded—thus emphasizes the capacity of unexpected noise to terrify its auditors: ‘‘When once the Alarum sounds (like silly mice) j They’ll hyde them in the crevice of their walles’’ (58–9). More strikingly, in the middle of the play, another scene dramatizes sound as terror as it shows two children run on stage, pause for a moment as they try to Wgure out where to hide, and then start running again. As the children begin to run for the second time, a stage direction calls for ‘‘A great noise’’ (1117 s.d.). As soon becomes clear, this unspeciWed sound—which may be the roar of voices or of weapons or both—registers not only the entrance of the rampaging soldiers but also the traumatic impact on the children of the soldiers’ approach, for it is precisely upon hearing this noise that the children ‘‘belatedly’’ acknowledge the truth that they have, from the start, been evading: namely that, as one tells the other, they ‘‘shall both be kil’d’’ (1119). As this sickening scene makes all too clear, the play’s attention to sound includes an emphasis on ‘‘extralinguistic sounds,’’40 such as the cry of ‘‘sa sa sa sa’’ with which sword-wielding soldiers punctuate their attack on the two children41 (1134) and the ‘‘weeping’’ of the children’s father, which is indicated in a stage direction (1165). In other scenes, to judge from textual cues, the play frequently represents the wordless sounds of suVering bodies, such as ‘‘the screeching yell of death’’ that the lame soldier summons up as he approaches the vault into which Van End has just been pushed to his death (1319) or the ‘‘cryes of Babes’’ and ‘‘Screekes of distressed women and olde men’’ that a Spanish soldier invokes as he boasts that nothing has ‘‘prevail’d to qualliWe [the soldiers’] rage’’ (1482–4). Such vocalizations suggest what, following Julia Kristeva, might be called an eruption into the play of the ‘‘semiotic’’ dimension of language, the aspect of language that most gestures toward corporeality.42 Following Kristeva, one might say that the play’s deployment of these sounds—sounds that exist in a sense ‘‘outside’’ of ordinary language—conveys experiences that are inaccessible or incommunicable through words. And such extralinguistic sounds are everywhere in A Larum for 40 I borrow this phrase from Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 11. 41 This sound may be an early usage of a term that the OED dates to 1607 and deWnes as an interjection ‘‘[f ]ormerly used by fencers when delivering a thrust’’ (‘‘sa, sa’’). 42 On the semiotic dimension of language, see Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

Wound-man Walking

183

London. They communicate the trace of traumatic excess, what Gascoigne termed the ‘‘unspeakable torments’’ of his experience. Indeed, the play’s very title, in its richly alliterative form, seems to encrypt by way of onomatopoeia a kind of linguistic alarm. Perhaps no scene better exempliWes the play’s representation through sound of this otherwise unrepresentable traumatic excess than the early scene in which the cannon explodes—a theatrical moment, which, like Churchyard’s description of the Wrst moments of the sack, suggests a traumatic shattering of both place and time. In this scene, Danila converses with a gunner who shows him that the cannons are aimed at citizens relaxing in the Antwerp statehouse. Directing the audience’s attention to the imposing military instrument known as the ‘‘Linckstocke’’ (195)—a ‘‘staV about three feet long, having a pointed foot to stick in the deck or ground, and a forked head to hold a lighted match’’ (OED, ‘‘linstock’’)—Danila orders the gunner to ignite the cannon. After this, audience members are required to wait through an interval of eight lines before, as the stage direction puts it, ‘‘The piece discharges’’ (203) and the playhouse is Wlled with the sound and smell of gunpowder. Indeed, some playgoers may well have been profoundly shaken by the impact of the discharged weapon, for as Bruce Smith has pointed out in a discussion of early modern scenes of battle, ‘‘[t]he explosion of Wrearms . . . ranks among the very loudest sounds anyone was likely to hear in an age before internal combustion engines’’ (243–4). Given the play’s dilation of this moment of explosion, one imagines that the response of the audiences members—many of whom are likely to have been alert to the eerie parallel between their position in the London playhouse and that of the Antwerp citizens in the statehouse—would be all the more acute. A mere four lines after the stage direction calling for this explosion, an unusually suggestive stage direction calls for another loud and disturbing sound: ‘‘A great screeke [is] heard within’’ (207). As audience members hear a cacophony of noises meant to represent the blasts of artillery and the cries of unseen bodies, they are assaulted by acoustic eVects signifying trauma’s excess. SigniWcantly, before this scene closes, the play’s emphasis on sound leads to its evocation of a striking image of the amorphousness of traumatic experience— that is, the refusal of this experience to remain within a single place and time. This Wgure comes in the form of Danila’s words to the gunner in response to these noises: hark how the sodaine noyse Incountring with the Cannons loude report, Stops his full mouth, with the reverberate sound, And Wls the circle of the emptie ayre (209–11)

What stands out about this account of the cannon’s ‘‘reverberate sound’’ is the way it contains in its Wgurative image the traumatic experience for which the sound is a substitute. In particular, the speech’s emphasis on circularity—its

184

Wound-Man Walking

evocation of the ‘‘circle of the emptie ayre’’ as well as of a ‘‘full mouth,’’ the latter representing the source of the cries as well as of the explosions—compellingly suggests the experience of being suspended within the latency of an atemporal loop. Crucially, as the audience members encounter what they hear about—as they hear the sound, which signiWes trauma, hover eerily in the playhouse—they become, if only momentarily, proxy survivors of the attack, condemned to endless repetitions of the same. As such, they are implicated in a question that Cathy Caruth locates at the center of many trauma narratives and that I would suggest is also at the heart of this play: ‘‘Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?’’43 III A narrative about survival, A Larum for London largely centers on the actions, in the midst of the attack, of the lame soldier who, as Nick de Somogyi notes, appears to be a surrogate for the Wrst-person narrator-survivor in Gascoigne’s text (35). What might it have meant for Elizabethans to encounter in a playhouse the body of such a ‘‘survivor’’ of war trauma—or indeed to experience secondhand, but in a visceral way, their own ‘‘survival’’ of an artillery attack? In order to provide a sense of how Elizabethan audiences may have conceived of the play’s scenes of trauma, I’d like brieXy to consider early modern wound-man illustrations, for they suggest that bodies marked by the imprint of war were often visible in Elizabethan culture as something other than fragile Xesh. Wound-man illustrations—schematic images of bodies displaying many of the injuries that a surgeon might be called upon to treat—appeared in at least a dozen European medical works dating from the late medieval period through the mid-seventeenth century, including many works widely available to Elizabethan surgeons.44 The most popular version probably made its Wrst appearance in the military surgeon Hans von GersdorV ’s text Feldtbuch der wundartzney (Strassburg, 1517; 1528), which, not unrelatedly, was the Wrst medical book to illustrate limb amputation45 (see Figure 9). In this text, the wound-man is clearly identiWable as a casualty of war: he is a man who has been bashed on the temple by a club, struck on his shin and wrist by two large cannon balls, and impaled in some Wfteen places by arrows, swords, and staV weapons of various kinds. As some commentators have noted, early modern wound-man images may bring to mind Renaissance paint-

43 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7. 44 For a history of wound-man illustrations, see Elizabeth Matthew Lewis, An Exhibition of Selected Landmark Books and Articles in the History of Military Medicine (West Point, New York: United States Military Academy, 1976). 45 Richard Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, A History of Military Medicine, vol. 2 (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 70 n. 14.

Wound-man Walking

185

Figure 9. ‘‘Wound-man’’ image from Hans von GersdorV ’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Strassburg, 1528). Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

ings of St Sebastian, paintings in which the body of the Christian martyr is depicted as naked (or almost so) and as penetrated by arrows.46 Given that the historical Sebastian was a Roman centurion who became known, after his death, as the patron saint of soldiers, the resemblance between the two is suggestive. In any case, the von GersdorV Wgure appears—at times in mirror image—in several treatises by the Frenchman Ambroise Pare´, who is celebrated as an originator of modern surgical procedures and of designs for artiWcial limbs and whose detailed accounts of his experience treating the wounded in France’s religious wars were 46 See, for example, Cynthia Marshall, ‘‘Wound-man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority,’’ in Valerie Traub, Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (eds), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which notes the indebtedness of wound-man imagery to representations of St Sebastian (103).

186

Wound-Man Walking

often cited by Elizabethan medical authorities47 (see Figure 10). This woundman appears as well on the title page of Thomas Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie (1563), an inXuential text that includes the Wrst English treatise on gunpowder injuries and that was authored by an English surgeon who also practiced surgery on battleWelds in France48 (see Figure 11). The wound-man who appears in these works—a man who stands erect, seemingly undaunted by his injuries—clearly has little to do with vulnerability, despite that word’s etymological origin in the Latin word for wound (vulnus). Certainly, this wound-man may be read as evoking the possibility of a terrifying and unstoppable wounding: the presence of the weapons ensures that his injury cannot be consigned to the past and signals to the viewer that threats—of further lacerations, of castration, of death—still hover over the injured body. At the same time, however, this wound-man seems utterly sinister: not only does he lack the blood that would signify vitality, but also, with his many war like parts, he suggests the possibility of limitless aggression turned outward. As a creature seemingly impervious to assault whose body is partly composed of weapons, the wound-man is himself a potentially threatening Wgure: a quasi-automaton who embodies a lethal force. At once a symptom of fears and an object of fear, the body of the wound-man might be classed with the inventory of uncanny phenomena that Freud singled out for consideration in his classic 1919 essay on ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ which as commentators have noted, seems itself to be haunted by the experience of war.49 The uncanny, as Freud depicts it, is a sensation of ‘‘dread and creeping horror’’ that attaches to certain things—among them, Wgures of the double, repetitions of an event, live burials, corpses, ghosts, toys with mechanical parts, and severed limbs ‘‘especially when . . . they prove capable of independent activity’’—that conjure up ‘‘primitive beliefs’’ about the dead that have previously been surmounted.50 The reappearance of such discarded beliefs, as several scholars have pointed out, may be understood not simply in terms of an individual psyche (as Freud would have it), but also in terms of the social imaginary of a community.51 47 See, for example, Pare´’s Opera chirurgical Ambrosii Paraei (Frankfort am Main: J. Feyrabend, 1594), 354; the title page of The method of curing wounds made by gun-shot (London, 1617); the title page of An explanation of the fashion and use of three and Wfty instruments of chirurgery, which was bound with Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrosmographia (London, 1631); and Pare´’s The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), 49, 440. 48 The treatise, entitled ‘‘An Excellent Treatise of wounds made with gonneshot,’’ was issued twice in 1563: once separately and once as a section of his comprehensive volume, Certaine workes of chirurgerie. Another edition was issued in 1586. 49 See, for example, Hugh Haughton, introduction, The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, trans. David McClintock (London: Penguin, 2003), li–liv. 50 Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 221. 51 For a related argument about medical texts and the emergence of the uncanny body in this period, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). On the status of the uncanny in a slightly later period, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Wound-man Walking

187

Figure 10. ‘‘Wound-man’’ image from Ambroise Pare´’s The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634). Courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine Library.

188

Wound-Man Walking

Figure 11. Title page of Thomas Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie (1563). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Wound-man Walking

189

In this case, one might say that the appearance of the uncanny Wgure of the wound-man in the very texts that proVered ‘‘scientiWc’’ cures attests to the way that early modern discourses of rationality simultaneously produced discourses of the irrational. As early modern surgeons and scientists sought to dispel superstition and bring reason to bear on their explorations of human Xesh, they generated unease as well as ediWcation. Their wound-men, in other words, turn what is well known into something menacing, evoking a realm like Freud’s uncanny in which ‘‘something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality’’ (221). Bringing together the familiar and the unfamiliar, the wound-man may disturb most because he embodies a strange— and estranging—paradox: he is the common man who can endure what no man can. As such, he may also be read as a double of the wounded soldier at the center of A Larum for London. Most of the scenes of A Larum for London that feature the lame soldier draw attention to his wooden leg, an act that (as I will show) frequently has the eVect of rendering his body uncanny—of making his body kin to the wound-man’s technologized body as well as to the era’s life-like Wgures, forerunners of the toys mentioned by Freud, that appear to have mechanical parts. The enormous signiWcance of the soldier’s wounded leg for the play’s narrative is suggested by the fact that, in all but three of the play’s some forty stage directions and speech preWxes, the lame soldier—who is not identiWed with a proper name until the last minutes of the play—is referred to as ‘‘Stump,’’ an appellation that, of course, suggests both the part remaining of an amputated limb as well as the prosthesis itself. In the scene in which the soldier Wrst appears on stage, the play underlines the ambiguity of his wounded leg as signiWer, for it shows him silently crossing paths with Van End, who is simultaneously exiting the stage. Importantly, although Van End has just aYrmed his delight in treachery—noting that ‘‘he runne[s] with the Hare [though] with the hound [he] holde[s]’’ (498)—this silent scene does not oVer the simple contrast between hero and villain that one might expect to Wnd in a didactic narrative. Rather, the play circumvents such an easy juxtaposition, for as it orchestrates a visual comparison of the movements of the two men, it draws attention to the lame soldier’s body as an aberrant one. SpeciWcally, the onstage display of the two soldiers seems designed to deWne one man by the ‘‘stumbl[ing]’’ and ‘‘halt[ing]’’ that (as he later explains) his wooden leg occasions, while demonstrating that the other is as Xeet of foot as his proverbial language would suggest (1379, 1383, 1396). Revealing itself to be structured like many modern narratives of disability, the play here introduces its putative hero by inviting a ‘‘stare’’ which subsequently generates a demand for a story.52 52 For related discussions of the disabled body in narrative, see David T. Mitchell, ‘‘Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,’’ in Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (eds), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 15–30. On staring, see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘‘The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,’’ in the same volume, 56–75.

190

Wound-Man Walking

What sort of ‘‘artiWcial’’ body might Elizabethan audiences be invited to see when they looked at the lame soldier of A Larum for London on stage? The speech preWx suggests that he might be represented as a victim of a botched amputation, someone whose wooden leg is attached to an amputated limb like that which Pare´ describes when he recalls his ministrations to a captain whose ‘‘foot was stricken oV with an iron bullet’’ and who was so ‘‘much troubled and wearied with the heavy and unproWtable burden of the rest of his Legge’’ that Pare´ caused it to be cut oV just below the knee (458). The twenty-third book of Pare´’s Oeuvres, which is devoted to a discussion of limbs that the surgeon designed with the assistance of locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans, may oVer further suggestions about the lame soldier’s appearance. While Pare´’s treatise focuses on his more expensive creations—such as iron legs complete with numerous movable parts and an elegant armor casing—he also includes an innovative design for ‘‘the forme of a wooden Leg made for poor men,’’ whose ‘‘halting’’ Pare´ envisioned as a ‘‘great deformity’’ that surgeons must try to remedy (884) (see Figure 12). Such prostheses consisted not only of the wooden ‘‘leg’’ but also of both a cushioned socket for the support of the stump and straps to hold it in place. In Elizabethan England, such a semi-mechanical apparatus could be purchased from a joiner for eighteen pence, a sum then roughly equivalent to a bit more than two days pay for a soldier—though, it must be noted, a soldier’s daily wage, when paid, was supposed to cover his food, clothing, gunpowder, and supplies, and thus could hardly have left room for much else.53 Wounded soldiers were one of the most visible consequences of England’s substantial military commitments during the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, and, thanks to the ready availability of wood and the relative ease with which a crude prosthesis might be crafted, bodies like that of the play’s lame soldier may well have been a common sight in London.54 Certainly, when the

53 On the price of a wooden leg, see ‘‘Extracts from the Aldeburgh Records,’’ Notes and Queries, 12th ser. 8 (1920), 366, which shows that that amount was paid for the prosthesis in 1582 and for three quarts of claret in 1581. On the subsistence wages of Elizabethan soldiers, see Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 114. 54 On Elizabethan war casualties, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 1–53; McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, 240–61; and Cruickshank, who notes that in 1593, English law for the Wrst time singled out ‘‘maimed and impotent soldiers’’ as a distinct class of the deserving poor, specifying payments to all those men who had ‘‘adventured their lives and lost their limbs or disabled their bodies’’ (Elizabeth’s Army, 184–5). On the prevalence of the practice of amputation after the rise of gunpowder weaponry, see John Kirkup, ‘‘Perceptions of Amputation before and after Gunpowder,’’ Vesalius: Acta Internationales Historiae Medicinae 1.2 (1995), 51–8, who notes that ‘‘Injuries severe enough to suggest major amputation, in order to forestall death, were uncommon . . . [until] gunshot injuries precipitated a total change in surgical outlook’’ and amputation became the recommended treatment (52). Other helpful discussions of early modern war injuries include Kelly R. DeVries, ‘‘Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,’’ Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 7 (1990), 131–46; and Owen H. Wangensteen, Sarah D. Wangensteen, and Charles F. Klinger, ‘‘Wound Management of Ambroise Pare and Dominique Larrey: Great French Military Surgeons of the 16th and 19th Centuries,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 46.3 (1972), 207–34.

Wound-man Walking

191

Figure 12. ‘‘The forme of a woodden Leg made for poore men’’ from Pare´’s The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634). Courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine Library.

play depicts the lame soldier responding to the taunts of a Spanish soldier, it deWnes the wounded leg as a widely recognized emblem of war experience: 1 sol. What roague art thou, darst speake unto a Spaniard? stumpe No roague Sir, but a Soldier as you are, And have had one leg more than I have now. Pointing to his leg. Sir, heer’s my Pasport, I have knowne the warres, And have had the vantage of as faire a spoile as you have here. 2 sol. Away you whorson cripple rascall. (771–8)

In an era when the usual treatment for gunshot-induced leg wounds and fractures was amputation, it is not unlikely that the play’s audiences contained individuals who were familiar with—or who were themselves—amputees, men who might be in possession of a prosthesis, if not a ‘‘passport’’ or certiWcate permitting them to

192

Wound-Man Walking

move through the country and beg for support.55 Nevertheless, as is suggested by the Spaniard’s reply to the lame soldier’s display of his leg, the prevalence of war casualties in early modern England did not guarantee that a wounded body would be recognized as a body like any other. Rather, as is evident from Samuel Rowlands’s 1612 allegorical poem, ‘‘True Valour,’’ even early modern texts that appear to praise the valor of wounded soldiers do so with considerable ambivalence: A worthy Captaine, foe to coward kinde, Most resolute in action, Wrme in minde: That by the sword was carved full of scarres, And by the Bullet lost a legge in warres, Retiring from the Weld to cure his paine, Would with a wooden legge, goe Wghte againe. His friends perswasions would his mind reclaim, Objecting he was impotent and lame, UnWt for Wght, being his state was such. But he reply’d you are deceived much: I shall be sure to stand my ground and stay, When they that have their legges may run away. My nimble heeles will never take their Xight, But beare my body, while the hands doe Wght, This wooden legge will hold me to it sound, It is a Souldiers praise to keepe his ground.56

While Rowlands’s poem celebrates the soldier’s wounds as a sign of his valor, it does not exactly celebrate his wooden leg. Suggesting that the wooden leg is what enables a soldier to ‘‘stand [his] ground,’’ the speaker clearly rates the prosthesis above ‘‘natural’’ legs, which become a signiWer for cowardice—they are, after all, what enables soldiers to ‘‘run away.’’ But just as clearly the speaker’s praise of the steadfast soldier registers an implicit anxiety that an artiWcial limb has the capacity to transform the ‘‘impotent and lame’’ body to which it is attached into someone strangely unassailable. Moreover, as the speaker records the soldier’s claim that ‘‘this wooden legge will hold me to it sound,’’ he points to the possibility that the prosthesis itself wields a kind of sinister power, ‘‘holding’’ the soldier to a fate of perpetual warfare from which soldiers who ‘‘have their [Xeshly] legges’’ choose—seemingly ‘‘naturally’’—to Xee. A Larum for London frequently raises the possibility that the lame soldier’s wooden leg possesses similarly uncanny powers. Consider, for example, a scene from the middle of the play in which the soldier remarks upon the omnipresence of death in Antwerp only to suggest that his wooden leg has somehow managed to preserve his life: 55 On the requirement that ex-soldiers carry passports, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 38–9. 56 Samuel Rowlands, The Knave of Harts. Haile Fellow, well met (London, 1612), E1v.

Wound-man Walking

193

Deathe is so proude he will not looke on me, These muddie roagues that hoorded up their coyne, Now have their throates cut for the coyne they have: They that for two pence would have seene me starve; And still my olde rotten stump and I, Trot up and downe as long as we can wag. (742–7)

While this passage about the bloody punishments to be meted out to those who mistreat soldiers may contribute to our sense of the play as a didactic text, its conjuring up of the lame soldier’s body as an unnatural and strangely double construction surely diverts attention from the play’s putative lesson. As the phrase ‘‘my olde rotten stump and I’’ focuses attention on the nexus that joins the Xesh of a man to a piece of decayed wood, moreover, the play links the uncanniness of the soldier’s body to his status as one of the few survivors of the sack. Attached to an inanimate object imagined to move of its own accord, the body of the lame soldier emerges, at least momentarily, as like that of the not-quite-human wound-man with his many extra parts. In conceptualizing the lame soldier as a Wgure who seems uncannily mechanical, A Larum for London registers the notion that a wooden leg might, as it were, function too well, that a steadfast, disciplined body might in fact be a dangerously unruly body. The play is able to register such fears partly because, as David Wills points out in a compelling discussion of Pare´’s writings, the prosthetic body has a long, historical association with monstrosity—indeed, as he notes, Pare´’s discussion of artiWcial body parts follows closely upon his discussion of prodigies and freaks of nature.57 As Wills also observes, in the sixteenth century, amputees and artiWcial limbs ‘‘brought into particular focus the competing discourses of the organicist and mechanicist conceptions of the human body, putting the machine into a close and uneasy relation with the organic’’ (246). Wills identiWes the ‘‘mechanicist conceptions of the human body’’ that gave rise to images of bodily aberrancy as medical paradigms, especially Andreas Vesalius’ challenge to Galen’s ‘‘organic model’’ with an (anatomical) model of the body as a ‘‘fabrica’’ or ‘‘factory’’ in which each piece may be imagined as having its own role to play (246). But there is every reason to believe that the sense of aberrancy which attaches to some Elizabethan bodies—such as that of the play’s lame soldier with his wooden leg—may Wnd its origin as well in the new militarism, for as I suggested in the Wrst half of this study, the new military science generated a vision of soldiers as purely instrumental bodies, Wgures who were inextricably connected to weapons. The late sixteenth century in fact witnessed a profusion of ‘‘cultural fantasies and anxieties attendant upon Renaissance automata and war machinery,’’ as Jessica Wolfe has recently suggested in an incisive reading of Spenser’s cyborglike Talus in The Faerie Queene.58 As A Larum for London makes clear, visions of 57 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 249. 58 Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17.

194

Wound-Man Walking

martial bodies that blur the lines between human and machine are not exclusive to the humanist intellectual communities on which Wolfe focuses her attention. Indeed, such fantasies abound on the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare’s Henry V (1598–9), for example, oVers a vision of such a hybrid creature when the King stands before his besieging soldiers and commands them to ‘‘lend the eye a terrible aspect’’ and ‘‘[l]et it pry through the portage of the head j Like the brass cannon.’’59 As he supervises the partial transformation of the soldiers into war machines, Henry seems to incite the men to become in part ‘‘terrible’’ basilisks— that is, cannons named after the mythical creatures that could murder merely by looking.60 From a diVerent perspective, Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (1590–1) summons up a martial body composed partly of weapons in its description of Jack Cade as a hyper-phallic Wgure who Wghts with the darts of his Irish enemies impaled in his thighs: he ‘‘fought so long till that his thighs with darts j Were almost like a sharp-quilled porcupine’’ (3.1.362–3).61 Like these Shakespearean dramas, A Larum for London explores the capacities of martial bodies to turn into engines of war, for, as it fastens its gaze on the soldier’s mechanical prosthesis, it, too, imagines a martial body as a sinisterly hybrid construction, which joins human Xesh and artiWcial part. Moreover, through its lame soldier with his wooden leg, A Larum for London conjures up a martial body that, like many Elizabethan war machines, has the capacity to go spectacularly awry. Before exploring how A Larum for London depicts the soldier’s mechanical body as a war instrument gone awry, it will be useful to consider another mode in which the play suggests the soldier’s status as an uncanny body: namely, through his leg wound, which, according to prevailing early modern understandings of the human body, would make the soldier—again, like the wound-man—a Wgure who disturbingly blurs the boundary between the living and the dead. That wounds were imagined to collapse the diVerence between death and life is not always apparent in modern scholarship on early modern bodies, which tends to presume the existence in Elizabethan culture of Wrm boundaries between life and death.62 59 William Shakespeare, Henry V, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.1.9–11. All quotations from Shakespeare hereafter follow this edition and will be cited in the text parenthetically. 60 See also two other images in Henry V of a hybrid human body whose parts include the metal or stone balls used as ammunition: the French queen’s description of Henry’s eyes as ‘‘the fatal balls of murdering basilisks’’ (5.2.17) and Henry’s enraged response to the Dauphin’s gift, ‘‘tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his j Hath turned his balls to gunstones’’ (1.2.281–2), which puns on ‘‘balls’’ to refer to testicles as well as the proVered tennis balls. 61 See also Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus, the schole of shootinge conteyned in two bookes (1545, 1571, 1589), which notes that some ancients declared that ‘‘nature gave example of shooting Wrst by the Porpentine, which doth shoot his pricks and will hit anything that Wghts with it: whereby men learned afterward to imitate the same in Wnding out both bowe and shafts.’’ 62 Susan Zimmerman’s recent study, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), oVers an important exception to this tendency, for it oVers a fascinating account of the ways in which the theater focused on the indeterminate nature of the putrefying corpse.

Wound-man Walking

195

Consider, for example, Jonathan Sawday’s important study of early modern England’s ‘‘culture of dissection,’’ which begins with the observation that in this period, the acquisition of speciWc knowledge about the interior of the human body was dependent on an anatomist’s dealings with a corpse, and thus on a ‘‘violat[ion] of that special domain which belongs to the dead.’’63 While Sawday’s study rests on an absolute distinction between the living hand of the anatomist and the inert body on the dissecting slab, early medical writers on war injury routinely conjure up bodies in which life and death converge, suggesting that wounded bodies are located in a liminal zone between the living and the lifeless. Perhaps more than any other discussion of war wounds, early discussions of gangrene—the disease, intimately associated with gunpowder, that routinely led military surgeons to amputate limbs and from which, as I noted in Chapter 4, Philip Sidney famously died—explicitly traverse this liminal zone. The English translator of Giovanni da Vigo’s Latin treatise on surgery—a work issued in English eight times over the course of the sixteenth century and that includes one of the earliest medical discussions of gunshot wounds—emphasizes, for example, that gangrene ‘‘is not taken for Xeshe deade altogether, but for [that] which beginneth to putrifye by lytle and little having yet som feling, with black colour and intolerable payne and burninge.’’64 Similarly, while Ambroise Pare´ evokes mortiWed limbs when he recalls that at the siege of Metz he saw ‘‘the Legges of many souldiers to have rotted, and presently taken with a Gangreene to have fallne away,’’ he also describes gangrene in terms that suggest dynamism as much as death, for he characterizes it as a Wery disease—one caused by things which are ‘‘either actually or potentially burning . . . as by Wre, scalding oyle or water, gunpowder Wred and the like.’’65 For Pare´, a gangrenous wound is not passive, but rather something that powerfully demands attention: not only does it ‘‘cast forth a stincking and carionlike Wlth’’ (433), but it has ‘‘so great and strong a smell . . . that the standers by cannot endure or suVer it’’ (457). From Pare´’s account, moreover, it becomes clear that just as a living body can be Wlled with death, so, too, can a dead limb be Wlled with life: thus he oVers one of the earliest known discussions of phantom pain—‘‘a thing wondrous strange and prodigious’’ by which patients feel ‘‘exceeding great paine’’ at the location of the absent limb (457). Closer to home, William Clowes, the prominent London surgeon who went with the earl of Leicester’s company to the Low Countries in 1585 and subsequently authored the inXuential books on war injuries discussed in Chapter 4, similarly attributed vitality to supposedly dead Xesh. For him, a gangrenous body was Wlled not only with ‘‘burnt bloud,’’ which is ‘‘congealed and compact in the vaines and places inXamed,’’ but also with ‘‘Wlthie venomous fumes’’ and 63 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 3. 64 Giovanni da Vigo, The most excellent workes of chirurgerie (London, 1571), E2r. 65 See Pare´, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 434; 452. All references to Pare’s works are to this edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

196

Wound-Man Walking

‘‘venomous vapours [which] commonly ascende up from the corrupt member.’’66 In contrast to present-day medical accounts, which conceptualize gangrene in terms of the death of speciWc blood-deprived organs or tissue, such early modern accounts are located largely within the paradigms of Galenic medicine and thus treat the matter of mortiWcation as something aVecting the entire body. Accordingly, even as medical treatises advised surgeons to treat gangrene by severing the aVected limb, they foregrounded the diYculty of distinguishing between the living and lifeless in a gangrenous body. Setting out the necessity of separating living from dead Xesh so as to prevent the ‘‘contagion of the dead,’’ Pare´, for example, conjures up a scenario in which the living body is thoroughly imperiled by gangrenous Xesh, whose ‘‘corruption creeps out like poison, and like Wre eates gnawes and destroyes all the neighboring parts, until it hath spred over the whole body’’ (455). He thus represents the wounded body not so much as a body that is in danger of death, but rather as a body that is partly constituted by death. Clearly, individuals who are aZicted with the Wres of gangrene—those whose blood is burnt, whose vapours are envenomed, and whose foul-smelling Xesh is putrefying little by little—demand recognition as individuals who are partly dead. That is, someone whose gangrenous Xesh is not ‘‘deade altogether’’ is something other than wholly alive. In such a scenario, where exactly is the border between life and death? Rather than recognize the existence of Sawday’s ‘‘special domain which belongs to the dead,’’ these texts suggest that bodies that bear the imprint of gunpowder warfare are bodies that, like Gascoigne’s narrator, are uncannily intimate with death. Through its fetishistic attention to what the lame soldier describes as his ‘‘olde rotten stump’’ (746)—a phrase that, as is now apparent, evokes not only the mechanical prosthesis but also of the not-quite-dead Xesh to which his amputated limb was once attached—A Larum for London conjures up the lame soldier’s body as a gangrenous one. As it persistently links the soldier’s wounded body with gunWre and actual conXagrations, it summons up the ‘‘Wres’’ of gangrenous Xesh. Thus, the lame soldier’s remarks toward the close of the play, ‘‘There was never one poore peece of Timber has been so sindg’d as it has been: zblud it has been foure times a Wre under me, and yet we scramble together trotting, trotting’’ (1382–6). Whether or not these four conXagrations were actually staged—and there is little reason to assume that a playhouse which routinely used gunpowder would shy away from a few small Xames67—the play’s evocation of this burnt ‘‘leg’’ casts the lame soldier as a Wgure who can burn and burn and keep on trotting. Indeed, the 66 William Clowes, A ProWtable and Necessarie Booke of Observations (London, 1596), 28, 30. In addition to this book of case studies of men wounded by weapons of war, Clowes recorded his observations on ‘‘Woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pyke, Launce, or such other’’ in A Prooued Practise for all young Chirurgians (1588; repr. 1591). 67 On the use of Wre in the Renaissance playhouse, see Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theater (London: Routledge, 2005), who notes that the burning of the town called for in the stage directions of Tamburlaine, Part Two was ‘‘probably done using lighted aqua-vitae’’ (39).

Wound-man Walking

197

play suggests that he is made up of the matter of the city’s destruction, of the broken and burning bodies to which the play constantly returns. As such, the lame soldier is represented as a Wgure who engenders dread, not simply by his proximity to death but also by his proximity to other (non-wounded) bodies. Given this rendering of the lame soldier and the contemporary discourse on gangrene— especially ideas about contagion and what Pare´ describes as the ‘‘creeping corruption’’ of dead Xesh—it is hard to imagine that A Larum for London functioned as social critique in the ways that some critics have suggested. While the lame soldier may well have brought to mind the wounded veterans to be seen in London, the play foregrounds the danger that such men represent. Thus it depicts the lame soldier’s bitter recollection of a woman who, when he ‘‘ha[d] past by her j In the streetes . . . [would] stop her nose with her sweete gloues for feare [his] smell should have infected her’’ (760–2). Through this comment—and perhaps through the staging of an unscripted encounter like that which the comment describes—the play may hint at the stench that was said to arise from mortiWed Xesh. Representing the lame soldier as at once machine-like and death-Wlled, the play insists that he, like the wound-man, is the embodiment of the uncanny. IV By now it should be clear that A Larum for London’s staging of its wounded soldier is so bound up with the play’s traumatic (rather than prescriptive) dimension that it is impossible to imagine this Wgure as a neutral spokesman for the play’s message of military preparedness. That the play’s prescriptive dimension will be eclipsed by its traumatic one is, in fact, encrypted in A Larum for London from the start, although the play ensures that audiences can recognize this fact only belatedly. The play’s opening seems conventional enough as the allegorical Wgure of Time, traditionally depicted as lame,68 rebukes the audience: you will scorne my wants, Laugh at my lamenes, looke basely, fume and frowne But doe so, doe so, your proude eyes shall see The punishment of Citty cruelty: And if your hearts be not of Adamant, Reforme the mischiefe of degenerate mindes, And make you weepe in pure relenting kinde. (16–22)

As Time tells playgoers that he knows that they will come to see the horrors about which he has warned them and that he hopes that such sights will ‘‘reforme’’ them 68 On lameness as a traditional attribute of Time, see de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 40. See also Thomas Dekker’s Satiro-mastix (1602) in which one character remarks that impatient bridegrooms ‘‘call Time a Cripple, j And say the houres limpe after him’’ (2027–8).

198

Wound-Man Walking

and engender their tears, the play establishes its admonitory narrative. At this moment, one might well agree with the critic who claims that ‘‘the play is an exemplum, with the Wgure of Time in the role of preacher.’’69 But shortly thereafter—possibly some 500 lines later when the lame soldier appears on stage for the Wrst time—the play makes the uncanniness of this seemingly straightforward prologue apparent. With the lame soldier’s Wrst speech, which occurs at line 570, the play conjures up a sinister Wgure, one who seems to share both Time’s halting gait and his pleasure in inXicting painful visions. Indeed, it is possible that the play here reveals that the same actor who plays the role of Time doubles in the role of the lame soldier.70 In any case, the lame soldier’s Wrst speech, which is addressed to a group of terriWed Antwerp inhabitants, echoes Time’s prologue as it menacingly promises them that they will suVer for their failure to recognize the importance of the city’s defense. SigniWcantly, this speech is accompanied by a graphic evocation of the punishing visions to which Time has only alluded: Are yet your eye-lids open, are you yet Awakt out of the slumber you were in? Or will you still lye snorting in your sloath? Be still perswaded you are safe enough? Untill the verie instant, you doe feele Their naked swoords glide through your weasond-pipes? Or doe you thinke with belching puVes, that Xye From your full paunches, you can blow them backe? (570–7)

In contrast to Time, who expresses the wish that what he shows will cause people to amend their lives and thus ensure their safety, the lame soldier oVers no hope to those whom he rebukes with this grisly image of Xesh being penetrated, wound-man-like, by Spanish swords. Rather, the lame soldier torments the burghers with reminders of how unprepared they are for what is to come. SigniWcantly, as he deWnes that future in terms of an attack on their vocal apparatus—one in which their windpipes will be perforated by swords and their very breath will reveal their powerlessness—he seems to revive the traumatic ‘‘screekes’’ the play has just staged. Insofar as the play oVers through the lame soldier a double of the allegorical Wgure whom the audience has already met, then what it stages is an alternative to that ‘‘normalizing’’ vision of time. In dramatic contrast to the allegorical Wgure, the lame soldier testiWes to experiences of shock that seem to inhabit the past, present, and future at once. Moreover, as much as the lame soldier urges wakefulness, the time that he conjures up is a time for which preparation is impossible, for to be traumatized, as the play so vividly 69 Knutson, ‘‘Filling Fare,’’ 65. 70 See de Somogyi who also speculates about the possibility of a doubling of the parts of Time and the lame soldier; in his view, both characters share an ‘‘admonitory role’’ (Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 40).

Wound-man Walking

199

conveys, is to be possessed precisely by an experience over which one has no control. As A Larum for London continues, it become ever clearer that the uncanny lame soldier is not so much a heroic purveyor of edifying lessons as he is a Wgure of traumatic temporality—one who forces the audience to return, as if in Xashback, to violent events that it has already witnessed. Consider, for example, how the play Wrst stages and then re-visits the scenes having to do with the lame soldier’s successful eVorts at thwarting the rape of Madame Champaigne, the wife of the French governor. Strikingly, the play depicts the lame soldier as inordinately slow in his response: he goes to her assistance only after he has watched and narrated her attack in a thirteen-line speech. For Alexander Leggatt, the play’s staging of the lame soldier in this scene merely illustrates the workings of the play’s didactic mode: He seems to be in a diVerent dramatic world from the woman and her attackers. While he is there, the rape is suspended for as long as he needs to comment on it; once he is Wnished he re-enters the action proper and rescues the woman. His speech has been in its own way an action: action in the sense of something that needs to be done before the story is complete. It is not enough to act out the atrocity; it must be put on display, and a moral must be drawn.71

By contrast, I would argue that the play’s staging of the speech prevents the audience from interpreting the actions of the lame soldier as those of a heroic rescue, for the soldier’s commentary on the rape of Madame Champaigne—what Leggatt describes as drawing a moral—might instead be understood as a sign of the lame soldier’s participation in the attack. Thus, when the lame soldier, before drawing his sword and killing one of her assailants, delivers his thirteen-line speech, he strikes out at the woman with misogynous invective and mockery of her name: ‘‘Now Madame Marchpaigne [i.e., marzipan], minx, your Blowes j And you are one’’ (765–6). Indeed, insofar as the speech puts the rape ‘‘on display,’’ it invites the audience into a sadistic economy of the gaze. Moreover, when the play returns to this episode a few scenes later, it shows the lame soldier recounting the assault to another soldier in equally violent and pornographic tones: so Captaine, Captaine, the world is turn’d: doe you remember the groate they oVered me, when you came to trayne Soldiers? ha, giue him a groate? ha, ha, ha, I have since that seene their Mistresses setting-sticke lug’d by a lowzy Lackey, as naked as a new shav’d Water-dog. (1411–16)

As the play through this speech revisits the attack in which Madame Champaigne is stripped and nearly raped, it emphasizes the pleasure that the lame soldier takes in witnessing the distress of someone who undervalued soldiership—indeed, it 71 Alexander Leggatt, Jacobean Public Theater (London: Routledge, 1992), 115.

200

Wound-Man Walking

underscores this sense of excess in his pleasure with the extralinguistic ‘‘ha, ha, ha.’’ SigniWcantly, the lame soldier’s retrospective description of Madame Champaigne being ‘‘lug’d,’’ or dragged violently, entails a vision of her being seized by her ‘‘setting-sticke’’—‘‘A rod used for stiVening the plaits or ‘sets’ of ruVs’’ (OED, ‘‘setting-sticke,’’ def. 2). That is, the lame soldier’s metaphor for her unclothed body—a reference that seems to comprehend both the distended limbs by which she is dragged and the genitals into which the soldiers hope to ‘‘set’’ their bodies—represents the Frenchwoman as herself an uncanny Wgure; oddly enough, in other words, she, like him, is imagined as a hybrid Wgure, a human body attached to a mechanical part. Insofar as this scene shows the lame soldier linguistically rendering Madame Champaigne’s body mechanical, it resonates with several other scenes of bodily suVering, which similarly suggest that the uncanny corporeality associated with the lame soldier increasingly inWltrates non-martial bodies. In these scenes, Spanish soldiers employ instruments appropriate to siege warfare—pulleys, cords, and posts72—so as to stretch the limbs of their victims. In the process, of course, they transform the bodies on which they inXict their torments into ‘‘artiWcial’’ constructions that, like the woman-cum-setting-stick, are amenable to mechanical manipulation. The Wrst of the three scenes depicts Danila’s cruelty to an English factor by using what a soldier refers to as the ‘‘strippado’’ (1000), a quasi-Spanish punishment in which ‘‘the victim’s hands were tied across his back and secured to a pulley [and] he was then hoisted from the ground and let down half way with a jerk’’ (OED, ‘‘strappado,’’ def. 1). In this scene, Danila draws attention to the man’s ‘‘disjointed’’—that is, separated or dislocated—limbs (1001), after which the stage directions require an actor to ‘‘Hoise him up and let him downe againe’’ (1107) and Danila issues more orders to his soldiers to ‘‘so hoise the peasant up, j Now let him downe’’ (1008–9), a scene that Gabriel Egan suggests would involve actors carrying the rope on stage and then, for the torture scene, ‘‘[t]hrowing the rope around the balustrades of the stage balcony.’’73 A few scenes later the unlucky English factor is back onstage, this time being subjected to ‘‘the torturing Corde’’ by the Duke of Alva, a Wctional version of the Spanish Duke of Alba who was notorious for authorizing massacres of the citizenry in the Low Countries in the 1570s (1227). This second scene of torture—which involves ‘‘roape and gibbet’’ (1248)—also focuses on the factor’s drawn-out limbs as it, too, entails raising him up and ‘‘let[ting] him downe’’ (1254). 72 See, for example, Robert Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres (London, 1598), which provides an account of the contents of a properly supplied garrison: though it does not specify pulleys, it lists similar tools, including ‘‘shovels, spades, mattocks, pickaxes, hatchets, axes, sawes, wedges, hammers, iron-sledges, barres of iron, nayles, ropes, &c. and other necessaries to worke in earth, or in the wals, or in stone, or in timber . . . barrels, tubbes, sacks, boordes, planckes, beames, postes, rafters, stakes, watlings, gabbions, and all other things needfull, at batteries, and besieging’’ (133; emphasis mine). 73 Gabriel Egan, ‘‘Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective,’’ Shakespeare Survey, 52, Shakespeare and the Globe, ed. Stanley Wells (2003), 1–16, esp. 7.

Wound-man Walking

201

Conjuring up a passive body that moves against the will of its owner, this scene presages a grimly mechanical scene soon to come: one which depicts the factor’s onstage hanging. The Wnal torture scene shows an Antwerp burgher led around ‘‘in a Corde’’ (1467), threatened with hanging, and then tickled mercilessly while tied by his thumbs to a post. Here again, the play imagines a dangling body attached to a stationary structure and whose movements are utterly involuntary— indeed, when one soldier terms it a ‘‘prettie tricke’’ (1491), a phrase suggesting the now-obsolete meaning of ‘‘trick’’ as a ‘‘clever contrivance or invention’’ (OED, ‘‘trick,’’ def. 6a), the play foregrounds the mechanical ingenuity of this spectacle. Rather than merely represent an unremarkable insistence on Spanish ruthlessness, these recurring scenes of bodies suspended from posts suggest the blindingly repetitive images of trauma. Like the play’s attention to the body of the lame soldier and to that of the cruelly extended body of Madame Champaigne, these scenes of Spanish torture suggest the play’s enthrallment with a ‘‘modern’’ fantasy of embodiment: one constituted by disarticulated limbs and a mechanical part. Much as the play’s (double) depiction of the lame soldier’s rescue of Madame Champaigne represents scenes of return to traumatic visions, so, too, does a later scene showing the lame soldier’s liberation of the man who hangs by his thumbs reawaken prior scenes of traumatic violence, for, like the scenes with Madame Champaigne, it focuses on the force of the lame soldier’s verbal abuse. During the scene, the lame soldier gives voice to the play’s putative moral about the inestimable value of soldiers, but he does so while deriding the still hanging man, cruelly asking him how he feels, and threatening to leave him in his desperate condition: But if I should requite thy vilde contempt, Heere should I leaue thee, that as thy treasure Has bin a pray to their deuouring lust, So in this dung-hill of thy carrion Xesh, Their ravenous swords might Wnd a dirty feast. For naught but draV are thou composed of, Nor Wt for anything but to feed worms. (1521–7)

What matters here, I want to emphasize, is not that this scene once again shows that the lame soldier can be cruel; rather, it is that, in staging this cruelty, the play once again immerses the audience in scenes of uncanny corporeality. Indeed, the lame soldier’s vocabulary of Wlth, corruption, and decay—which renders the man as ‘‘rammish,’’ or foul-smelling, ‘‘fat’’ (1513) as well as a ‘‘dung-hill of . . . carrion Xesh,’’ a ‘‘dirty feast,’’ and a creature composed of ‘‘draV’’ or refuse who is ‘‘Wt’’ only ‘‘to feed worms’’—resonates with the play’s visions of the soldier’s own gangrenous Xesh. Moreover, his parting words to the man, ‘‘Hence, tumbrell from my sight’’ (1535) draw on these associations even as they identify the man as yet another mechanical construction—namely, ‘‘A cart so constructed that the body tilts backwards to empty out the load; esp. a dung-cart.’’ (OED, ‘‘tumbrel,’’ def. 3). And Wnally, insofar as the captain’s comments on the burgher’s unstable

202

Wound-Man Walking

gait as he departs from the scene call attention to the way his ‘‘clumsie limbes j Walke not but tumble’’ (1567–8), the play represents the burgher as kin to the lame soldier as well as to the earlier victims of Spanish torture. In short, as the scene represents the uncanniness of the burgher’s aZicted body—neither alive nor dead and neither human nor machine—it bears witness to the play’s seemingly unavoidable return to the dislocations of traumatic experience itself. As these scenes suggest, the repeated performance of uncanny corporeality— and especially of the uncanny body of the lame solider—stages a certain excess that breaches the didactic dimension of A Larum for London. Much of the supposedly edifying narrative of the play is thus taken up with the performance of scenes in which apparent valor is revealed as brutality. Collapsing the distinction between victim and perpetrator, the play often shows the lame soldier who defends Antwerp’s inhabitants reveling in descriptions of punished Xesh and relishing the memory of slaughter. Thus, for example, in a series of gruesome puns about the Almaines who betrayed Antwerp by joining with the Spanish, the lame soldier conjures up still more uncanny bodies—in this case, disWgured bodies like those Gascoigne describes in his eyewitness account. Indeed, as this scene shows the lame soldier remarking that these men are no longer ‘‘High Almaines’’ because ‘‘a number of them are cut oV by the waist,’’ and that they are ‘‘blanched Almaines,’’ whose ‘‘guts are blanched about their heels,’’ the play even links the lame soldier to acts of mutilation, raising the possibility that he has slashed bodies in half and Xayed others in the same way as one would cut and remove the skin of almonds (1434–8). What delights him, as the play suggests through his speech, is the aesthetics of torture, the rightness of the match between victims and their means of death. It is hard to imagine what lessons the play might be oVering in one of its most protracted scenes of slaughter: namely, that which shows the lame soldier’s delight in inXicting a suitable punishment on the traitorous Van End. As the scene begins, the lame soldier speaks to a woman who, having tricked Van End into believing that she has hidden her riches, has trapped him in a subterranean vault: For Gods sake let me come plague the dog, Ile stone the Jew to death, and paint this Vault With the unhallowed bloud of wicked treason: Heere, weare this waightie Jewell in thy hat, The towne hath sent it for a token slave; Throw stones. I bought this with the groate you gave me sir; Another sto[ne]. Soldiers must loath despis’d ingratitude. This woman for her ransome sends you this; another Give these two unto Charon for your passing. another And with this last, present grim Belzebub. another (1325–34)

Departing from Gascoigne’s text in which Van End’s counterpart dies by drowning, the play represents the death as a scene of stoning (in the Bible, a traditional

Wound-man Walking

203

punishment for the unclean) to be followed by live burial, thereby returning the audience yet once more to the realm of the uncanny. Once again, the play seems acutely aware of the way sound transmits the impact of traumatic violence, for it appears to demand that Van End, who presumably is located in the space designated as hellmouth beneath the stage, cry out each time he is struck by a stone. Moreover, as the play shows the lame soldier throwing stone after stone down into the vault and punctuating each assault with a pithy comment, it depicts him as a murderous machine run amok. As it mixes anti-Semitic invective and gleeful punning—as it shows his pleasure that a ‘‘Jew’’ should be battered with ‘‘jewells’’—the play brings into unsettling proximity the lame soldier’s ‘‘heroic’’ deeds and his extraordinary fury. In representing its soldier-hero’s transformation into this stone-throwing automaton, the play parodies the militarists’ visions of fearsome munitions Wring cannonballs (which might be made of stone); in doing so, moreover, it also performs with a kind of horrifying literalism the injunction that a man become an ‘‘instrument of war’’—one who recognizes himself merely as an extension of his weapons and as an interchangeable part in a war machine.74 V As A Larum for London moves toward its conclusion, it powerfully evinces the conXict between the didactic narrative that would exhort the audience on martial virtue and a traumatic narrative marked by the symptomatic reappearance of uncanny bodies. This conXict is writ large in a scene in which the lame soldier encounters a group of Antwerp soldiers lamenting that all is lost and wondering aloud whether they might Wnd safety in the city. Coming onstage just as the men are contemplating various escape routes from the city, the lame soldier mockingly asks them where they imagine they might Wnd refuge: Harke you hark you, whether wil you Xye? I wold know that; ’sblood whether? whether? ha; where will you be releiv’d? there’s not a towne dare receive you: the Spaniard has all the country; you cannot stragle a foote out of the walles, but your throates are cut; what have you to carry with you, but your scurvie notch’d limes? you damn’d roagues, whether will you goe, to feede Wolves? A you whorson rascals. . . . (1359–65)

At Wrst glance, the soldier’s words may seem perfectly in keeping with the moralizing narrative of venturous acts and valorous deeds: what else should an oYcer do but prevent his soldiers from Xeeing? But on closer examination, the 74 See, for example, Barnaby Rich’s description of the soldier as ‘‘an instrument of Warre’’ who ‘‘maye rightly be compared to a sword, wherewith a man maye for want of government anoy his companions, indaunger such as bee about him, hurt his friends, yea, or maine, mischiefe, or kyll him self,’’ in A right exelent and pleasaunt dialogue, betwene Mercury and an English souldier (London, [1574]), B4v.

204

Wound-Man Walking

strangeness of the speech—indeed, its uncanniness—emerges, including its unsettling linkage between the Wgure of the foot that straggles and the throat that gets cut. Instead of issuing a call to arms and adventure, the lame soldier assaults the men with questions, spewing the same insults at the soldiers as have been spewed at him by the Spaniards. Significantly, as he insists upon their vulnerability, he raises the sinister possibility that they have but one possession ‘‘to carry with [them]’’—namely, their ‘‘scurvie notch’d limes.’’ In conjuring up this image of strangely portable, diseased, and disWgured legs, the play suggests that these men—described soon thereafter as a ‘‘companie of poore hurt Soldiers’’ (1455)—are but mirror images of himself. The conXict between the moralizing and traumatic dimensions of the play becomes still more evident as the lame soldier, having incited the men to recognize themselves as worthless creatures, once again puts forward his wounded body for conspicuous display: What will you doe then? heere is my poore stumpe and I have stumbled through a thousand shot, & yet we halt together . . . You’ll bee starv’d everie mothers Sonne of yee, and worried with dogs, and yet you’ll Xye. (1381–8)

Strikingly, the play suggests that as soon as the despairing soldiers look upon the mutilated leg attached to the prosthesis, they are transformed from mere survivors into would-be heroes. Crucially, the lame soldier, too, is changed by this interaction, as though altered by his status as the object of their gaze. More speciWcally, the play here begins to ‘‘split’’ the lame soldier from his uncanny body and provide him with a new identity: 1 sol. Why Lieuetenant Vaughan, what would yee have us doe? stum. Dye like men, what should we doe, if there were any hope of safety? but there is not, there is not. 2 sol. Leiuetenant Vaughan, leade us, and wee’ll follow you to the death. 3 sol. Wee’ll not forsake you to the last gaspe. stum. Yes, Ile halt before you, follow mee as straight as you can. (1389–97)

The play’s belated revelation here that the abject lame soldier is named Vaughan is worth pausing over, as the name ‘‘Vaughan’’ was both a family name associated with the earl of Essex and the name of a Welsh commander who served in the 1585 siege of Antwerp.75 Whether or not Elizabethan audiences perceived such allusions, the simple fact that the soldier has a name as well as a community of men who recognize him as their leader may momentarily undo the play’s more usual representation of him as sinister. However, even in this scene, the lame soldier’s reference to his ‘‘halt[ing]’’ gait and his insistence that the soldiers should 75 I owe these observations to a reader for the press, who points out that a branch of the Vaughan family in Wales had married into Essex’s circle, and the two families were closely connected. In 1598, the writer Sir William Vaughan staked a claim to this aYliation in print, dedicating to Essex Poematum libellus, a collection of poems that included an ode to Essex.

Wound-man Walking

205

follow him and ‘‘Dye like men’’ keep before the audience its earlier visions of the soldier as a Wgure all too close to death. In this context, it is worth noting that earlier, in dramatizing an argument between the lame soldier and a burgher, the play had invoked an obligation to Wght for one’s country: It is thy Countrie that doth binde thee to it, Not any imposition we exacte. stum. Bindes me my country with no greater bondes, Than for a groate to Wght? then for a groate, To be infeebled, or to loose a limme? (617–21) bur.

But here, as the lame soldier addresses the desperate men, the play makes no appeal to patriotic sentiments. Indeed, the lame soldier’s question, ‘‘What should we do, if there were any hope of safety?’’ raises the possibility that the soldiers might not be compelled to die, only to negate this possibility: his question is merely rhetorical. It is as though an alternative to this vision of men following the lame soldier to their death cannot even be imagined. What persuades the soldiers to Wght is not any notion of loyalty to their country, nor is it even the lame soldier’s claims that their condition is hopeless—they had reached this conclusion before they encountered their lieutenant. Rather, the play—having, as it were, ‘‘forgotten’’ about the didactic narrative—suggests that the soldiers’ impetus to Wght springs mysteriously from their encounter with the soldier’s uncanny leg, the part that once again seems to stand in for a martial body that, like the wound-man’s body, is inextricably linked to death. SigniWcantly, the lame soldier that emerges in this scene is a survivor who avidly seeks death. Unlike Gascoigne’s Wrst-person narrator who strives to keep death at bay, the lame soldier embraces death in the play’s closing scenes, asking the despairing soldiers to join him in a mission toward self-destruction. Seeing this creature who is Wgured as part human and part singed timber, the soldiers instantly vow to band together, ‘‘cut more throats,’’ and seek out death. And the play, in turn, embraces this carnivalesque vision: as the lame soldier calls for his ‘‘lads’’ and proclaims their solidarity—‘‘this is resolv’d like men, j If we must goe, wee’ll goe together then’’—he promises to ‘‘lay [his] wodden legge afore’’ the ‘‘Spaniards and their whoores’’ who are gambling at the Antwerp Exchange (1400–2). Remarkably, once the soldier’s leg has been ‘‘properly’’ looked at— once the other soldiers see their scurvy, notched limbs in his rotten wood—the lame soldier very nearly ceases to be the wound-man. In an extraordinary reversal, the play not only establishes his identity as the heroic Lieutenant Vaughan, it brieXy engages the fantasy that his uncanny leg can be cast aside, surrendered at the Exchange. Through this idealized vision of a community of valiant and venturous men, A Larum for London seems to foreclose the traumatic violence it has associated with the wounded soldier and to envision instead a martial body that inhabits the realm of pure spirit. The wound thus seems to lose its status as a sign of

206

Wound-Man Walking

unfettered aggression and proximity to death and becomes instead merely a metaphor for the vulnerability that links all soldiers. Accordingly, shortly before his death scene, the lame soldier addresses the Antwerp captain beside whom he will eventually die and speaks of their departure for a better world: we shall quietly injoy the peace, For which we breath; there shall we be secure, There free from thought of this worlds miserie, And there indeede Wnde true felicitie: For there our travell shall be recompenc’d, Our love requited, and our wounds repayde With double merrit. Haste then unto the place, Upon the earth is nothing but disgrace. (1559–66)

With this image of the lame soldier’s desire for an unearthly realm where men of war are no longer wretched—a secure place where wounds will be ‘‘repayde’’ and men thus made whole—the play disavows the injury, disease, and torture that it has so insistently staged. This disavowal reaches its apotheosis, paradoxically enough, as the lame soldier and his captain come out on the stage, after oVstage ‘‘excursions,’’ looking ‘‘bloody and wounded’’ (1569–70, s.d.). Shortly after they appear on stage, the captain meets his death, and the lame soldier, having embraced the corpse of his companion and renounced his own ‘‘loathed Xesh,’’ dies, too (1596). At this point, Danila enters ‘‘in triumph with Drum, Colours and Soldiers’’ (1609, s.d.) and a soldier proposes to him that the corpses be drawn ‘‘at [their] horses tayles’’ through the country (1639). Strikingly, the captain responds to his soldier by declaring that ‘‘[t]here never lived two more Heroycke spirits,’’ and vowing that he will personally oversee the burial of these ‘‘honourd foes’’ (1649, 1660). A Larum for London’s closing scene may recall scenes from other, more famous, histories in the repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men. It may bring to mind Exeter’s aVecting account in Henry V of the duke of York embracing and kissing the dead body of the earl of SuVolk before dying beside him at Agincourt (4.6.11–32). Or it may bring to mind the poignant scene in 1 Henry IV in which Hal, after he has slain Hotspur, praises his enemy’s bravery, covers his mutilated face, and carries out ‘‘fair rites of tenderness’’ on the corpse (5.4.98). But the similarities with these Shakespearean scenes only serve to highlight the strangeness of this one, for nothing that has come before has prepared the audience for its outpouring of chivalric rhetoric and high-minded sentiments. Far from being about the deeds of noble warriors in the Weld, A Larum for London is primarily about an assault on defenseless civilians. The Spanish soldier who vows to watch over the bodies of the slain soldiers has until now shown no respect for the Xesh; indeed, in this very scene he not only warns that his ‘‘swoord j [s]hall lop [the] arme oV ’’ of any one who touches the dead bodies (1642–3); he also boasts that Antwerp’s streets ‘‘lye thwackt with slaughtered carkasses’’ and that

Wound-man Walking

207

‘‘ten thousand . . . [r]eft by our swoords, [will be] left unburied’’ (1617, 1655–6). Through this concluding scene, the play suggests that what matters most is a community—of which even a Spanish captain can be a member—that promises that the man who submits his body uncompromisingly to martial exploits will in some sense be preserved, almost sacralized by the act. In its last minutes, then, the play hastily asserts the promise of redemption for the something rotten that for most of the play has been the abject marker of the martial body. Foreclosing the uncanny visions of ‘‘loathed Xesh’’ that the play elsewhere represents, the Spanish captain’s proclamation of the lame soldier’s ‘‘Heroycke spirit’’ would elide and repress the audience’s witnessing to the play’s recurring visions of machine-like and decaying bodies. Ultimately, however, the play reveals the idealization of the lame soldier’s death to be a compensatory gesture; indeed, it resorts symptomatically to an epilogue in which the allegorical Wgure of Time must reappear to oVer a heavyhanded lesson about the punishments that await those sinful and pleasure-loving Londoners who waste his ‘‘precious houres’’: But when they spurne against my discipline, Wasting the treasure of my precious houres: No marvaile then, like misery catch hold On them, did fasten on this wof[u]ll towne, Whose bleeding fortune, whose lamenting cryes, Whose streetes besmear’d with bloud, whose blubred eyes, Whose totter’d walls, whose building’s overthrowne, Whose riches lost, and poverty made known: May be a meane all Cittyes to aVright, How they in sinne and pleasure take delight. (1669–78)

As Robert Weimann has argued, Elizabethan epilogues oVered ‘‘speech-acts, which, more than anything, rehearsed the memory of what was seen and heard, pointing beyond the time and place of the theatrical occasion.’’76 But what is perhaps most striking about the epilogue ending A Larum for London is the way that its staging of Time as a disciplinary Wgure who sends the audience home with a scolding seems to deny—rather than to rehearse—the force of the historical trauma that the play otherwise acts out. In other words, even as Time invokes the scenes of violence that the play has repeatedly enacted—even as he reminds playgoers of ‘‘lamenting cryes’’ and ‘‘streetes besmear’d with bloud’’—he clearly seems to redeWne the impact of these images. Insofar as these images have force, Time suggests, they are merely instrumental, simply a ‘‘meane all Cittyes to aVright.’’ The irony, of course, is that the Wgure who insists on this notion of violence as an edifying spectacle is, as we have seen, an uncanny double of the lame soldier and thus of traumatic temporality itself. 76 See Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

208

Wound-Man Walking

While it is impossible to know who spoke this epilogue, it is certainly tempting to imagine that, in the epilogue, the play actually ‘‘revived’’ the lame soldier, who for much of the play has been a walking reminder of the way in which death haunts the living and the wounds of the past refuse to stay in the past. In any case, in the very moment in which the allegorical Wgure of Time speaks, he instantiates the time of trauma: speaking in the third-person at the start of the epilogue, Time tells the audience that he has ‘‘stay’d his course’’ and arrested forward movement so as to ‘‘rubbe the memory j Of actions long since cast behinde his backe’’ into them (1662–3). The peculiar force of this epilogue—and of the play more generally— lies thus in its ability to return audience members to the site of trauma—that is, to interpellate them as unwitting survivors who have watched horrors whose meanings they have not been able fully to grasp. What attention to traumatic representation in A Larum for London serves to demonstrate, I would argue, is that our current understanding of the cultural work of London’s martial repertory remains deeply impoverished. If even a drama as prescriptive as this one seems to register the singularly disruptive force of Elizabethan militarization—seems unable, that is, to replay past violence as simple, instructive example—then it is clear that the theatrical transactions occurring at Elizabethan martial performances must be more complex than is generally acknowledged. To attend to the visceral way that A Larum for London represents what it means to survive a sack—what it means to count oneself among the walking wounded—is, I propose, to see how the martial productions of the London playhouses might act out in order to ‘‘work through’’ the traumas generated by the late Elizabethan turn toward war. What A Larum for London suggests, then, is the possibility that such dramas did not so much expound military lessons as they enabled apprehensive audiences—audiences who might ‘‘listen from the site of trauma’’—to reckon communally with the, at times, ungraspable sounds and sights of their war-suVused culture.77 Rather than straightforwardly oVering lessons about the past (what happened in 1576 in Antwerp), injunctions for the present (what Londoners must do to prepare for imminent invasion), and warnings about the future (what may happen if they do not embrace warfare themselves), A Larum for London exempliWes a complex temporality in which past, present, and future are uncannily bound together. SigniWcantly, the mode of temporality on view in this play is not, as we might expect, conWned to topical dramas that narrate the violent events of a recent past. On the contrary, as I detail in my Epilogue, the traumatic temporality so apparent in A Larum for London is central even to Richard III, a play set in Wfteenth-century England that famously opens with a declaration that warfare is a thing of the past. 77 On the notion of ‘‘speaking and listening from the site of trauma’’ see the editor’s introduction to Caruth (ed.), Trauma, which eloquently discusses how trauma may enable new forms of community (11).

Epilogue Dreadful Marches Traumatic Time and Space in Shakespeare’s Richard III In the previous two chapters, I have made arguments about the Elizabethan staging of trauma largely by considering two plays that were once popular and are now relatively obscure. I chose these plays in part to call attention to the textual richness of two works that, like so many of the extant plays of the Elizabethan drama, remain understudied and almost never performed.1 Because this choice runs the risk of implying that the kind of traumatic representation I have discussed is a feature only of the period’s non-canonical drama or is somehow more evident in such ‘‘minor’’ works than it is in the ‘‘major’’ ones, I want to end this volume by considering, if only brieXy, the intensities of traumatic experience evoked in the last play in Shakespeare’s Wrst tetralogy—that is, Richard III (1592–3), which was probably staged at one of London’s amphitheatre playhouses such as the Theatre or the Rose. Few readers, I imagine, would quarrel with the notion that the tetralogy’s portrayal of the cataclysmic events of England’s civil wars constitutes an engagement with historical trauma. But, for all the critical commentary on the plays’ staging of this sequence of bloody battles, I would argue that we have yet to Wnd a way of articulating the powerful psychic breaches that these martial texts represent.2 My aim in this Epilogue is to oVer an approach that will not only illuminate the staging of trauma in Richard III, a play that inextricably conjoins the genres of history and tragedy, but will 1 In fact the only modern performance of either The Trial of Chivalry or A Larum for London of which I am aware is the staged reading of the latter play in late 1990s London under the auspices of the Shakespeare’s Globe Education series of staged readings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. 2 For an important exception, see Thomas P. Anderson’s recent work, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); although Anderson does not analyze the Wrst tetralogy, he oVers perceptive readings of memory and loss in two other English histories, Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, as well as in Titus Andronicus. Similarly, see Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) for a brilliant study of psychic structures in Richard III that along the way suggests possible approaches to the subject of the Elizabethan staging of war trauma. Drawing on Hayden White, Charnes indicates that she is interested in ‘‘where the playwright locates the trauma and how the play interrogates its inevitable symptomology’’ (27). Although she does not discuss the traumatic historicity of the play in depth, she acutely suggests that Richard be read as a Wgure ‘‘produced as the subject of traumatic cultural memory, the Wgure that is forced both to embody and to experience its symptomology’’ (28).

210

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

also provide a model for future inquiry into early modern traumatic representation. Above all, I want once again to emphasize that to focus exclusively on the violent incidents emplotted in these—or indeed, any—staging of trauma may be to overlook the fact that, as I have been arguing, trauma is characterized by its ‘‘belated’’ or ‘‘latent’’ structure as much as by its subject matter. Put another way, trauma, by its very nature, presents problems for both representation and analysis.3 Ideally, then, the task of analyzing how the Elizabethan stage addresses the collective traumas of English history would require that we bear in mind more than the thematization of violence—more than the scenes of violent death and attendant suVering so visible in the Wrst tetralogy. We must also consider the theatrical rendering of ‘‘unassimilated,’’ or ungraspable, events. By way of a conclusion, then, I intend to explore the question of traumatic address in the ghost scene on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field. While my discussion of this scene stems partly from my desire to bring Shakespearean texts into this discussion of trauma, it also responds to recent scholarship on Richard III. SpeciWcally, I take as my point of departure recent work that suggests, via a historicist consideration of the status of the dead in early modern England, that Richard III might be read as a work that shows not only a tragic history but also the possibility of a return to a world whose fabric is no longer rent.4 Intervening in such critical discussions, I propose to show that to read Richard III as such a reparative history—or, to borrow a phrase from Dominick LaCapra, as a ‘‘redemptive narrative’’ (156)—is to neglect the play’s extraordinary staging of a traumatic past whose haunting temporality persists despite the play’s desire to disavow it. I To judge from the vast quantity of commentary on the ghost scene, scholarship on Richard III is itself clearly ‘‘haunted’’ by the visitations that, at least on the page, constitute but a small part of the play’s last act.5 Strangely, however, even as 3 On this point, see, for example, Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), in which LaCapra contends ‘‘there is no such thing as writing trauma itself if only because trauma, while at times related to particular events, cannot be localized in terms of a discrete, dated experience’’ (86). Further references to LaCapra are cited parenthetically in the text. 4 Among the more incisive of these accounts are that of Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 164–80, which I discuss below, and Katharine Goodland, ‘‘ ‘Obsequious Laments’: Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare’s Richard III,’’ in Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (eds), Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 44–79. While I don’t agree with the conclusions drawn by these critics, I Wnd much of their (historicist) analysis of Richard III compelling. See also Stephen Marche’s ‘‘Mocking Dead Bones: Historical Memory and the Theater of the Dead in Richard III,’’ Comparative Drama, 37 (2003–4), 37–57, which provocatively discusses tragedy and history in Richard III in terms of changing attitudes toward the dead in the Reformation. 5 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Richard III are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

211

many critics note that the eleven apparitions on Bosworth Field engender terror in Richard, they seem to imply that, in some fundamental way, the ghost scene is not all that unsettling; indeed, some who call attention to the play’s Catholic sensibilities have suggested that the scene may even be reassuring to spectators insofar as it would remind them of the reciprocity between the living and the dead.6 In what follows, I examine the theatrical representation of space and time in the ghost scene in order to retrieve the traumatic aVect that, I would suggest, has been foreclosed in such historicist accounts of the play. Without attending to the formal elements of this sequence—that is, to what critics sometimes dismiss as its ‘‘strict pattern and stereotyped expression’’7—we are liable to miss the play’s rendering of the structure of traumatic experience. Through my close reading of this scene, then, I aim to show how a combination of historicist and formalist analysis can enable us to make sense of early modern traumatic representation on the stage. Rather than begin with the appearance of the ghosts in Act 5, my reading turns to some stage business that immediately precedes their appearance—namely, a sequence of entrances and exits that oVers glimpses of the opposing armies on the eve of battle and that culminates with Richmond falling asleep next to Richard, an act that, as I shall explain, represents a remarkable moment in the

Press, 2005), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. In addition to Greenblatt, Goodland, and Marche, some of the many commentators who single out the ghost scenes for discussion are Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1968); Marjorie Garber, Dreams in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987); Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 113–15; Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Janet Lull, ‘‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blooper: Some Notes on the Endless Editing of Richard III,’’ in Linda Anderson and Janet Lull (eds), A Certain Text: Close Readings and Textual Studies in Shakespeare and Others (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 118–20; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Chatto and Windus, 1944), 208; and Alice I. Perry Wood, Stage History of King Richard III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1909). 6 See, for example, Greenblatt’s suggestion that the ghosts ‘‘function as a memory of the murdered . . . [and] as the agents of a restored health and wholeness to the damaged community’’ (Hamlet in Purgatory, 180) and Goodland’s suggestion that ‘‘The placement of the women’s lamentations prior to the appearance of the ghosts suggests that they have awakened the spirits from their otherworldly slumber to ‘sit heavy on [Richard’s] soul’ (5.3.131), while bringing to Richmond the ‘sweetest sleep and fairest-boding dreams j That ever ent’red in a drowsy head’ (5.3.227–8)’’ (‘‘ ‘Obsequious Laments,’ ’’ 74). See also James Siemon, ‘‘ ‘The Power of Hope?’: An Early Modern Reader of Richard III,’’ in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volume 2, The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 361–78. With his comment that the ‘‘close of the play does present a Wnal unity. . . since even the ghosts cast votes against Richard and on behalf of the new order . . . founded upon [Richmond’s] desire,’’ Siemon, too, would seem to imply an aYrmative reading of the ghosts (375). 7 See Clemen A Commentary on Shakespeare, 211.

212

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

performance.8 The sequence of entrances and exits begins, unremarkably enough, in Act 5’s third scene as Richard enters with his men and identiWes their locale as Bosworth Field, a name that proleptically establishes the locale as a space of battle, a Weld (5.3.1); immediately thereafter, and in response to Richard’s repeated instructions, the soldiers set up a royal tent and then exit with him to survey the site. Next, Richmond comes onstage with his men and, in a short speech, indicates to the audience that the stage space is now the site of his camp and his tent. At the end of the scene, Richmond either exits the stage or retreats to yet another pitched tent, where he intends with ‘‘ink and paper’’ to ‘‘draw the form and model of [the] battle’’—that is, to arrive at a military diagram of the way in which his troops shall be ordered the next day (5.4.21–2). In the next scene, Richard reappears on stage, converses with his men, and echoing Richmond, twice demands ‘‘ink and paper’’ before dismissing everyone (5.5.3; 28). Subsequently, the play oVers a kind of dumb show in which Richard, alone on stage, ‘‘writes and later sleeps’’ (s.d. after 5.5.31). It is at this point in the sequence that what I am calling Richmond’s remarkable entrance occurs. Once Richmond is visible on stage, he converses brieXy with his followers; dismisses them; kneels down to pray; and then, so his speech implies, he goes to sleep, next to—but clearly unaware of—Richard. That Richmond’s entrance is noteworthy was pointed out by Robert James Fusillo almost Wfty years ago.9 According to Fusillo, this scene of the two enemies on stage together may be the only early modern instance of a scene in which a dramatist uses one place to represent two locales: in this case, the diVerent, and presumably distantly located, military camps of Richard and Richmond.10 Unlike, say, Henry V, in which the opposing English and French camps are represented sequentially in the separate scenes of Act 4, Richard III here oVers its audience an uncanny vision of two settings in one: ‘‘When Richmond steps through his door onto the stage on which Richard lies asleep . . . the stage suddenly becomes two places at once.’’11 Moreover, so I would add, the play’s curious doubling of space is rendered even more curious by the play’s doubling of

8 Some notes about textual issues may be in order here. First, while the Quarto text of the play is not divided into scenes, the Folio introduces a Wve-act structure in which the last scene division comes at Scene 2. Because there are implied time diVerences in this sequence of actions, modern editions add from three to six additional scenes beginning with Richard’s arrival at Bosworth Field. Secondly, there are no stage directions in either the Quarto or the Folio to indicate whether the tents referred to by Richard and later by Richmond are in fact pitched. In my summary of the action, I have followed the lead of the Oxford editors who like many modern editors assume that two tents are pitched in the course of the scene. 9 Robert James Fusillo, ‘‘Tents on Bosworth Field,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 193–4. I should note that, while I admire this insight, I Wnd unconvincing Fusillo’s related argument that the tents named in these scenes are likely to have been represented by two separate doors. 10 However, see Clemen who suggests that Histromastix might oVer another example of this form of two-in-one staging (A Commentary on Shakespeare, 204). 11 Fusillo, ‘‘Tents on Bosworth Field,’’ 194.

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

213

persons.12 What Elizabethan spectators saw was a strange spectacle indeed: a mirror image of tents and sleepers, a visual paradox in which people and things are simultaneously both near to and remote from each other. I draw attention to this unusual staging because its formal elements are pertinent in discerning the play’s complex strategies for writing trauma. SpeciWcally, I want to emphasize that even before the ghosts make their entrance, something uncanny has transpired on the stage. That is, Richmond’s appearance on the stage on which Richard sleeps shatters a basic assumption about the integrity of space, an assumption that, up until this point, has subtended the play’s narrative. Indeed, the play insists that its audience not miss the fact of its unusual staging. Thus, the strangeness of Richmond’s entrance is emphasized by the deictic language (for example, the repetition of words such as ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘in my tent’’) in the scenes that precede it. Just before the stage turns into this two-inone place, in fact, Richard and Richmond have repeatedly ‘‘grounded’’ themselves in separate locales by insisting quite emphatically upon the fact of their distinct locations.13 Even more strikingly, this spectacle of doubled representation appears in the midst of scenes that take the rational disposition of martial space as their very subject. Accordingly, when Richard and Richmond appear onstage, they evoke Elizabethan discourses of military science and practical geometry: not only do they take possession of ‘‘their’’ space through the pitching of tents, but they also talk about surveying the camp and setting their troops in array. My point, then, is a simple one: Richmond’s stage entrance seems precisely designed to elicit in spectators a sense of disorientation. Having evoked a world marked by the rationalities of the new military science—a world whose spaces, so the sequence would seem to insist, can be precisely surveyed and neatly plotted on paper—the play suddenly presents its unsuspecting audience with a conundrum: where on earth, so the audience is called upon to wonder, is this scene of the near, yet remote, enemy camps? What I am suggesting is that the sense of disorientation that Richard III engenders at this moment—this spatial breach in the otherwise rational staging of place—is symptomatic of the play’s immersion in the bewildering domain of traumatic experience. Given that the traumatic matter of this play is deeply 12 On the notion of Richard and Richmond as doppelgangers, see John Jowett, Introduction to his Oxford World Classics edition of Richard III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 66, as well as Hodgdon, The End Crowns All, 113–15. 13 Note, for example, the way that Richmond seeks to know the distance between his own tent and that of Stanley and that the answer he receives includes the image of Richard’s camp as yet another distinct space: ‘‘His regiment lies half a mile, at least, j South from the mighty power of the King’’ (5.4.13–14). Even more striking, perhaps, is the way this sequence’s opening passage repeatedly calls attention to the speciWcity of one space as opposed to another. Scene 3 thus opens with Richard’s order, ‘‘Here pitch our tent, even here in Bosworth Weld’’ (5.3.1; emphasis mine), an order which he repeats twice—Wrst, with a question about other spaces, ‘‘Up with my tent! Here will I lie tonight. j But where tomorrow?’’ (5.3.7–8; my emphasis) and second, with an evocation of practical geometry—‘‘Up with the tent! Come, noble gentlemen, j Let us survey the vantage of the ground’’ (5.3.14–15).

214

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

bound up with the warfare staged earlier in the tetralogy—so that, as Nicholas Grene has noted, the murder of Prince Edward at Tewkesbury ‘‘is remembered [in Richard III ] as the last battleWeld atrocity, summing up the whole of such crimes, going back to the savage death of Rutland’’14—it is, I think, no accident that Richard III forcefully initiates its audience into a realm of the unfathomable exactly as it arrives for the Wrst time at the battleWeld, a place from which it will not depart. Moreover, as we shall see, once the ghosts begin to arrive on the stage and to traverse this incongruous space, the play shows Bosworth Field to be marked not only by spatial but also by temporal dislocation. Let me be clear. I am not saying that with the staging of the enigmatic image of the two sleepers, the play abandons all conceptualization of geometric space and linear time. In fact, the temporal and spatial infractions may be all the more striking insofar as the play continues to be deeply attentive to such rationalities. Thus during this scene, the audience witnesses Richard’s detailed description of the battle formations he has planned (5.6.21–30); his queries about the proper time (5.5.1; 5.6.6); and his demands for an almanac to account for the position of the sun as well as for a ‘‘watch’’ (5.5.16), which one editor suggests may be ‘‘a small portable clock with a chiming mechanism.’’15 What I am arguing, rather, is that as the play shows the slumbering Richard and Richmond sharing the stage—and soon sharing a series of spectral encounters—it reveals itself to be equally interested in the category of the incommensurable and the ungraspable, which as we shall see includes not only the possibility of two men in two remote spaces in one place but also the image of two remote times in proximity. Encrypted within Act 5’s proto-rational discourse of wartime, in other words, is the rendering of a ‘‘limit’’ experience that disrupts the claims of ordered space and time. II Richard III’s ghost scene, we may recall, constitutes an apparent revision of the account oVered by the chronicles, which reports that Richard has a nightmare in which he saw ‘‘divers images like terrible devils which pulled and haled him’’ and which goes on to moralize that ‘‘this [dream] was no dream but a punction 14 Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91. 15 See note 5.4.42 in Jowett’s Oxford World Classics edition of the play. For discussion of changing perceptions of time in this period, see Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (London: Collins, 1967), which discusses the demand for timepieces in Elizabethan England, as well as Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). On Shakespeare’s relationship to time, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), esp. 3–78. On the troubled time in Richard III, see Jeremy Lopez, ‘‘Time and Talk in Richard III 1.iv,’’ SEL, 45.2 (2005), 299–314, esp. 307–8.

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

215

and prick of his sinful conscience.’’16 In transforming an account of devils who attack Richard to a performance in which the ghosts of his victims pay visits to Richard and Richmond—taking possession of them as they sleep—the play clearly seems to be staging what, in a psychoanalytic lexicon, might be called the traumatic compulsion to repeat. As such, the appearance of the ghosts bears closer examination. In the course of less than sixty lines, eleven ghosts—those of Prince Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, the two young princes, Hastings, Anne, and Buckingham—appear on stage. Subsequently, each—singly, or, as in the case of (1) Rivers, Gray, and Vaughan and (2) the two princes, in a group—addresses Richard and then Richmond. While neither the Quarto nor the Folio edition of the play speciWes how the eleven ghosts make their way onto the stage, it is probable that the ghosts did not arrive from a trapdoor below in the usual Elizabethan fashion, given the impracticalities of arranging for the movements up and down of eleven individuals as well as the conventional associations of the trapdoor with the mouth of hell.17 Much more likely, as several critics have suggested, is that each individual or group would have entered from a side door, cursed Richard, blessed Richmond, and then exited from another side door to be replaced by the next in the sequence.18 However the ghosts make their entrances and exits, it is clear that the representation of this spectral visitation is highly ritualized. Staged on a battleWeld, the procession of the ghosts in fact resembles a military procession19 and suggests a theatrical return to earlier evocations of sequence and order—indeed, it may recall the march of Richmond’s army enacted earlier in Act 5 (Scene 2) as well as the battle formations that Richard and Richmond vow to commit to paper. Moreover, because these ghosts recount a genealogy of oVspring and inheritance—suggesting that Richard has violated the proper sequence and that Richmond (improbably) is the rightful heir—the play also seems to articulate an assertion of the principle of succession.20 Given this emphasis on sequence as well 16 See GeoVrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). 17 See, for example, Wood, Stage History of King Richard III, 48. See also Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 249, which posits that the ghosts would enter from above, as ‘‘spokesmen of God and destiny,’’ a view that I Wnd unpersuasive given the play’s representation of these specters as gruesome—and not necessarily godly. 18 Wood, Stage History of King Richard III, 48. 19 See Nick de Somogyi’s fascinating discussion of battleWeld ghosts in Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), which mentions Richard III and notes that in early modern folkloric traditions, the battleWeld was often imagined as a quintessentially haunted space (206, 209). 20 For example, Prince Edward’s ghost identiWes himself as ‘‘King Henry’s issue’’; Clarence’s ghost refers to ‘‘the wronged heirs of York’’; and the ghosts of the two young princes tell Richmond to ‘‘live and beget a happy race of Kings.’’ For an acute reading of the complexities of the language of succession in this play, see Willliam C. Carroll, ‘‘ ‘The Form of Law’: Ritual and Succession in Richard III,’’ in Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (eds), True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 203–19.

216

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

as the fact that so much of the play has represented Richard as the crooked or misshapen Wgure whose very body suggests his identiWcation with the principle of ‘‘obstructing linearity,’’21 we might well wonder: is there any reason we should not read the ghost scene as a simple paean to both the linear and the lineal? Indeed, there is. One argument against such a reading is that the play presents us with beings out of time who can move across the enigmatic space that is the space of the two camps, thereby powerfully calling the very notion of linear time and geometric space into question. In staging the ghost scene in the ‘‘two-in-one’’ space, I would emphasize, the play represents a temporality unlike any of its other chronological sequences: one that is at once linear (one ghost follows another in real time) as well as simultaneous (for the implication of the stage space is that both ghostly visitations happen at the same time). Moreover, as the ghosts embody and narrate the wrongs that have been visited upon them, they recapitulate a past that clearly is not simply over and done with. In their very status as specters, they bear witness to a traumatic ‘‘implosion’’ of tenses.22 In recapitulating the atrocities that the play in its episodic, forward movements has consigned to the past, the ghost scene uncannily reviviWes otherwise latent moments of traumatic experience. SigniWcantly, the scene is marked by aural as well as visual repetition, which by virtue of the symmetrical staging is likely to stand out here more than it does elsewhere in this play famed for its scenes of choral lamentation.23 Thus, the ghosts repeatedly admonish Richard to ‘‘think’’ or ‘‘think upon’’ his past while intoning the phrase ‘‘Despair and die’’; their speech to Richmond, by contrast, repeats the phrases ‘‘good angels’’ and ‘‘live and Xourish.’’ As in the play’s earlier scenes of lamentation, the ritualistic accumulation of these serial phrases seems eVectively to divorce language from individual voices. But here the play’s repetition does not serve to create a community of mourners; instead, it powerfully emphasizes that the sleepers are belatedly possessed not only by the uncanny images of the past but by the disembodied sounds as well.24 To appreciate more fully the traumatic structure of this scene, consider the appearance of the ghost of Henry VI, whose Wrst words to Richard are ‘‘When I was mortal, my anointed body j By thee was punche`d full of deadly holes’’ (5.5.78–9). This ghostly appearance is, for audience members, a reappearance or haunting, for King Henry, of course, entered the play in the form of a corpse in Act 1’s funeral procession. In that scene, Anne uncovered his body and insisted 21 See Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 178. 22 Thus LaCapra describes post-traumatic acting out as follows: ‘‘tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene’’ (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 21). 23 Clemen makes a similar point in his careful reading of the scene (A Commentary on Shakespeare, 211). 24 On this point, see Judith Greenberg, ‘‘The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo,’’ American Imago, 55.3 (1998), 319–47, in which she observes that post-traumatic stress disorder ‘‘might be described as a condition of being possessed by echoes.’’

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

217

that Richard see in it the ‘‘pattern of [his] butcheries’’ (1.2.54) while blood poured from the body, a Xow whose disjointed temporality was explained— though not thereby rendered less eerie—as Anne evoked Richard’s stabbing of Henry and suggested that the ‘‘presence’’ of the murderer ‘‘ex-hale[d] this blood j From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells’’ (1.2.58–9). Just as Anne’s words ensured that the King’s corpse might be read as a copy of prior wounded bodies, so, too, the ghost’s words remind one that Richard’s stabbing of Henry was in itself a ‘‘pattern’’ or likeness of the slayings recalled elsewhere in this play— namely, the stabbing of Prince Edward by the Yorkists; the stabbing of Rutland by CliVord; and the stabbing of York by CliVord and Margaret. Although the play shows the ghost of Henry VI turning from Richard and announcing to Richmond that he is ‘‘Harry who prophesied thou shouldst be king’’ (5.5.83), its haunting insistence on the ‘‘latency’’ of traumatic experience belies and unsettles this desire for historical succession. Although we can’t know what the actors playing the ghosts would have looked like—whether they were outWtted with special apparel or had their faces whitened and their hands and faces smeared with blood as had other Elizabethan ghosts25—the play does make it clear that these ghosts represent uncanny Wgures, belonging neither to the living nor to the dead.26 As they recapitulate the gruesome circumstances of their death—declaring themselves to have been variously ‘‘stabbed’’ (73), ‘‘butchered’’ (76), ‘‘washed to death with fulsome wine’’ (86), and ‘‘smothered in the Tower’’ (100)—they narrate endings that, paradoxically, are not endings at all. By identifying these Wgures of life-in-death with such damaged, traumatized bodies, the play makes it diYcult to contend (as some critics do) that Elizabethan audiences would read the ghostly procession as a reassuring response either to the prayers of Richmond earlier in Act 5 or to the lamentations of the mourning women in Act 4. Surely, as is also suggested by the play’s double reference to All Souls’ Day in Act 5 (5.1.10 and 12), these hauntings evoke the menace implicit in the folkloric beliefs associated with that feast, a time when the dead might visit those who had harmed them in life.27 But I would argue that they also evoke the eeriness of history itself. In particular, they may evoke the popular versiWed text of English history, A Mirror for Magistrates (1569), in which the mutilated corpses of historical personages— such as Richard’s father, the Duke of York, whose ‘‘shrekyng voice’’ is said to emerge ‘‘out of the weasande pipe’’ of his ‘‘headless bodye’’—recount the violent 25 On the conventions associated with ghosts on the Elizabethan stage, see Wood, Stage History of King Richard III, 48. John Jowett speculates in his Oxford edition that the actors would have been doubling their roles and that therefore any ghostly special eVects would have been minimal. 26 Thus, the ghosts insist that they are not alive—‘‘When I was mortal,’’ says the ghost of Henry VI (5.3.78); ‘‘I died’’ says the ghost of Buckingham (5.5.127)—even as their speech and movement indicate that they are not dead. 27 For a valuable account of the implications of the play’s All Souls’ Day references, see Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, 228.

218

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

events of their lives.28 In fact, the words uttered by the ghost of Buckingham to Richard, ‘‘Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death’’ (5.5.125), make explicit what all of the ghosts seem to imply in their speech—namely, that, as the very matter of the dream, they are no longer who they were in life. In one way or another, they have all, it seems, been transformed into the embodiment of ‘‘bloody deeds and death.’’ For some critics, as I began by suggesting, the ghost scene would seem to represent a profoundly redemptive moment in the play. In the moving account of the play oVered by Stephen Greenblatt, for example, the ghosts are part of the play’s ‘‘moral structure’’: that the dead are still present, he argues, and, further, that they are bestowing curses on Richard and blessings on Richmond aYrms a universe in which the wrongs against the dead can be repaired.29 But this reparative reading, I would suggest, omits mention of what is perhaps most disturbing about the ghosts’ ritualistic doubling of blessings and curses: that is, the way the orchestrated movement of the ghosts suggests in its formal presentation the impossibility of simply dispelling the latent return of the traumatic past. It is as though with each apparition, the audience is Wrst transported to the domain of an unalterable, endlessly repeating past—the domain of trauma—and then transported, seconds later, not to a future beyond that trauma, but only to a disorienting present: one that depends, paradoxically enough, on the naı¨ve wish to simply relinquish the past. Thus despite this staging of the desire for Richmond’s success and succession, over and over again, as the ghosts replace one another, the play represents movement forward—literal succession—as an impossibility. Rather than oVer reassurance, then, the play would seem to require that the audience endure precisely the fate that the ghosts desire for Richard: to ‘‘think’’ on the uncanny persistence of the past. What the play shows through the procession of the ghosts, in other words, is not, as an Elizabethan audience might expect or desire, the morally edifying spectacle of a bad man haunted by his murderous crimes, but rather a sense that everyone—both the good and the bad—is vulnerable to possession by the traumatic events of the past. The ghosts may sound reassuring as they bless Richmond, but what they represent—namely, the promise of the eternal return of the past—is another matter entirely. In Richard III’s well-known opening lines, Richard articulates a linear understanding of time as he positions warfare—the battles at the center of the tetralogy’s Wrst three plays—Wrmly in the past. Insisting upon the present 28 For a discussion of how Richard, in A Mirror for Magistrates, reports that while on the battleWeld, he saw the ghosts of all his victims crying out for vengeance, see Stanley Wells, ‘‘Staging Shakespeare’s Ghosts,’’ in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 50–69, esp. 53. For a thought-provoking account of A Mirror for Magistrates as testimony to cultural trauma engendered by changing conceptions of property, see Jim Ellis, ‘‘Embodying Dislocation: A Mirror for Magistrates and Property Relations,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1032–53. 29 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 179.

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

219

moment, his speech hurtles forward, imagining a martial past has been succeeded by a world in which war no longer exists, where armor is to be wondered at rather than used, where calls to arms no longer signify battle, and, most notably, where ‘‘dreadful marches’’—a phrase that suggests not only the regular forward movement of an awe-inspiring army but also the sound that orders and regulates that forward movement—have been transformed into the sounds and steps of delight. Witnessed in the ghost scene, however, is a mode of temporality that implies recapitulation rather than progress and that may recall of the untimeliness evoked by Richard’s opening declaration that he had been ‘‘sent before [his] time j Into this breathing world’’ (1.1.20–1). The play’s procession of ghosts may signify the steady, forward march of time insofar as it presents Wgures who come from the past and who prophesy a future in which a good monarch succeeds an evil one, but the mode in which this procession is represented reveals that past traumas remain all too powerfully present in this breathing world. What the play shows, then, is a breached temporality in which unassimilated trauma takes possession of its subjects belatedly in the ‘‘deferred action’’ of warfare.30 III After the ghosts exit the stage, the play shows Richard’s awakening as a response to the dream itself. In doing so, it presents the audience with yet another paradox: that Richard has been awakened by words that in some in sense he cannot hear.31 Thus Richard ‘‘starteth up out a dream’’ (s.d. after 5.5.130) immediately after Buckingham’s ghost blesses Richmond with the words, ‘‘God and good angels Wght on Richmond’s side, j And Richard falls in height of all his pride’’ (5.5.129– 30). The Wrst words Richard cries out as he awakens, ‘‘Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!’’ (5.5.131), suggest that he is responding to the ghost, who as the audience knows, has just accurately prophesied Richard’s downfall in battle. What one sees here, we might say, is that the ghostly blessing articulated in Richmond’s dream does not dispel for the audience its experience of the trauma of Richard’s encounter with the real—the encounter that befalls him in the ghostly blessing that for him is no blessing at all. The play’s last act, then, not only stages Richard’s fall and Richmond’s triumph, but, as I have suggested, its formal disorientations of place and time resist the foreclosure of historical succession so as to aVord the audience an experience not unlike Richard’s own uncanny encounter with the traumatic past. 30 On ‘‘deferred action’’ and the retroactive production of traumatic knowledge, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 31 It bears noting that this scene suggests the Freudian dream of the burning child about which Caruth has written in Unclaimed Experience, that the father ‘‘responds, in awakening, to a call that can only be heard within sleep’’ (99).

220

Epilogue: Dreadful Marches

It is bracing to consider that for a period in the early 1590s, Elizabethan theatergoers, on a given day, may have had the opportunity to choose between a staging of these ghostly battleWeld processions and a revival of Marlowe’s decorous visions of soldiers on the march. Or to put it more simply, they may have faced a choice between Tamburlaine’s stately tents and Richard III ’s haunted tents. While the temporal structures these two plays conjure up appear radically diVerent—one is future-directed and sequential; the other suggests the cyclical returns of trauma—I would argue that the two dramas may be more alike than this description suggests. If the measured movements and martial formations that distinguish the Elizabethan staging of war suggest an embrace of modern rationalities, might they not also constitute a defense against the incommensurable realities of modern warfare? To attend to the martial dramas of the Elizabethan stage is ultimately, perhaps, to recognize the particular suitability of the English history play—with its inherent interest in both the forms of battle and the forms of temporality—for the task of encountering (if not fully grasping) traumatic modernity.

Index ‘‘average man’’ concept 19–20, 78–9, 97, 99–100 abstraction of space, abstract social body 3, 7, 18–22, 24, 27–36, 40–2, 47, 51, 55, 58–65, 68–70, 72, 79, 87, 101, 126, 137 accounting 18, 93–4, 99 Adelman, Janet 106 n. 12 Admiral’s Men 28 n. 14, 42, 55, 63, 65, 67, 104 n. 9 Agamben, Giorgio 126 Agesilaus 54 algebra, see mathematics Alleyn, Edward 65 Altman, Joel 104 n. 9, 132 n. 70 amputation, amputees 158 n. 44, 184, 189–96 Anderson, Thomas Page 23 n. 65, 137 n. 1, 209 n. 2 Andrews, Michael C. 139 n. 8 Arab, Ronda 83, n. 37 Archer, Ian 73 n. 5, 74 n. 9, 75 n. 13, 76 n. 17, 82 n. 34 Archer, John Michael 43 n. 51 arithmetic, see mathematics Armada of 1588 10–11, 13–14, 25, 122–3, 175 n. 26 armor, armorers 14–15, 33–4, 53, 57, 62, 67, 87, 113, 142, 144–5, 155 n. 37, 164, 177, 181, 219 Ascham, Roger 194 n. 61 Ash, Eric H. 7, 27 n. 10, 49 n. 66 automata 97, 186, 193, 203 Ayton, Andrew 12 n. 29 Bacon, Francis 5, 72 n. 3, 87, 135–6 Bailey, C. T. 120 n. 44 Balibar, Etienne 108 ballistics, see gunpowder weaponry Barbour, Richmond 44 n. 54, 57 n. 79 Barret, Henry 37, n. 41 Barret, Robert, 2 n. 3, 3, 5, 17 n. 57, 27 n. 9, 32 n. 27, 36, 38 n. 42, 52, 55 n. 72, 62–3, 148 n. 23, 200 n. 72 Bartels, Emily 48 n. 65, 49, 57, Barton, Anne 101 Barwicke, Humfrey 147–8, 181 n. 38 Baskerville, C. R. 141 battle array, see martial formations Beck, Brandon H. 15 n. 45 Bedwell, Thomas 25 n. 4, 26

belatedness, see trauma and temporality Belsey, Catherine 138 n. 5 Bennet, Jim 25 n. 4, 26 n. 6, 151 n. 31 Berger, Harry, Jr. 73 n. 6, Bergson, Henri 96 Berners, Lord 102 Berry, Herbert 139 n. 8 biopolitics, biopower 18, 20, 106–7, 111, 114, 119–30, 134–5, 137 Blandy, William 17 n. 57 Blount, Thomas 8 Bodin, Jean 43, 44 n. 52, Bonikowski, Wyatt 8 n. 20 Boynton, Lindsay 11, 14 n. 40, 67 n. 107, 73 n. 5 and 6, 74 n. 10, 86 n. 43, 90 n. 53, 100 n. 75 Brady, Ciaran 103 n. 5 Braunmuller, A. R. 4 n. 11, 10 n. 25 breaches 4–6, 8, 48, 52, 61, 165, 209, 213 Breight, Curtis 11, 84 n. 39 Bru¨ckner, Martin 49 n. 66, 59 n. 84, 61 n. 89 Bullough, GeoVrey 215 n. 16 Burckhardt, Jacob 27 n. 12 Burnett, Mark Thornton 47 n. 63, 104 n. 9 Burns, Edward 138 n. 5 Burton, Jonathan 44 n. 54 Caesar, Julius 15 n. 47 Cairns, David 104 n. 9, 132 n. 70 calculation, see mathematics Campion, Edmund 120 n. 45 Canguilhem, Georges 78, 92 Canny, Nicholas 13 n. 32, 103 n. 4, 108 n. 17 capitalism, transition to capitalism 33, 40 n. 44, 80, 82–4, 92–3, 98 Carroll, Claire 11 n. 26, 115 n. 41 Carroll, William C. 215 n. 20 Caruth, Cathy, 8, 21 n. 63, 138 n. 2 and 6, 145–6, 161 n. 48, 168 n. 6, 176 n. 28 and 29, 179 n. 32, 184, 208 n. 77, 219 n. 30 Castiglione, Baldassarre 41 Castle, Terry 186 n. 51 Chamberlain’s Men 167 n. 5, 171, 206 Chambers, E. K. 63 n. 96 Charnes, Linda 209 n. 2 Chettle, Henry 139 Chew, Samuel C. 44 n. 54 Chichester, Arthur 134–5

222

Index

chivalric codes, chivalry 17, 30, 40–1, 56; 73, 75, 80–2, 93, 100–1, 118, 141–5, 148, 156–7, 164, 206 Christine de Pizan 77 Churchyard, Thomas 4 n. 10, 170, 176–7, 183 Cipolla, Carlo 33 n. 33, 214 n. 15 Clare, Janet 29 n. 17 classiWcatory thinking 20, 72–3, 76–8, 85, 88, 90, 92, 99–101 108 Clayton, Gyles 18 n. 61, 37–41, 59, 64–5, 90, 94 n. 63 Clemen, Wolfgang 210 n. 5, 211 n. 7, 212 n. 10, 216 n. 23 Clowes, William 150–1, 153–6, 159, 195, 196 n. 66 Cockle, Maurice J. D. 16 n. 53, 26 n. 8, 56 n. 104 Collins, D. C. 180 n. 35 commodiWcation 33–4, 93–4, 101, 135 conscription, see impressment Cook, Ann Jennalie 9 n. 24 Crewe, Jonathan 73 n. 6, 81, 100, 147 n. 19 Crosby, Alfred W. 29 n. 18 Cruickshank, C. G. 11, 73 n. 5 and 6, 84 n. 41, 179 n. 33, 190 n. 53 and 54 Cvetkovich, Ann 9 n. 23 Daniel, Samuel 2 n. 5 Davis, Lennard 78 n. 24 Dawson, Anthony 9 n. 24, 28 n. 14, 42 n. 47 Dee, John 24–5, 28, 35, 37, 69 degeneration 44, 110–12, 114–16, 120–1, 133–4 DeGheyn, Jacob 91 Dekker, Thomas 4 n. 11, 33 n. 34, 62 n. 90, 82, 197 n. 68 Derby’s Men, 139 Derricke, John 108–13, 115–18, 125 n. 54, 129 DeSomogyi, Nick 11 n. 26, 26 n. 5, 41 n. 46, 42 n. 48, 49 n. 65, 56 n. 76, 58 n. 82, 63 n. 96, 68 n. 109, 138 n. 4, 139 n. 7, 140 n. 11, 147 n. 20, 148 n. 23, 150 n. 29, 153, 167 n. 5, 174 n. 24, 181 n. 37, 184, 190 n. 54, 192 n. 55, 197 n. 68 and 70, 215 n. 19 Dessen, Alan C. 62 n. 91, 163 n. 51 DeVries, Kelly R. 158 n. 45, 190 n. 54 Digges, Leonard and Thomas 32, 35, 64–5, 80 n. 26, 98, 122 n. 47 Dimmock, Matthew 44 n. 54 discipline, disciplinary regimes 1, 5–6, 12, 18–21, 29 n. 16, 30–47, 53–9, 67–9, 79, 88–90, 99, 106, 147–8, 169–73, 193, 207 Dollimore, Jonathan 104 n. 9, 132 n. 70, 133 n. 71

Donagan, Barbara 82 n. 31 Drayton, Michael 2 n. 5 Drew-Bear, Annette 158 n. 43 drill 12, 14, 16, 90–2, 152 Dubrow, Heather 216 n. 21 duels 30, 41, 56, 141–6, 156–7, 163 DuVy, Michael 12 n. 29 DuPlessis, Robert S. 33 n. 31, 83 n. 35 Dymmok, John 110–11, 113 Edelman, Charles 6 n. 15, 44 n. 107, 181 n. 39 Edward III 105, 113–15, 131 Edward III, see Shakespeare, Edward III Edwards, Philip 104 n. 99, 132 n. 70 Egan, Gabriel 200 Elizabeth I 10, 12, 14–17, 74–5, 86, 104, 107, 11–12, 127, 140, 173, 175, 190, 204 Ellis, Jim 218, n. 28 Ellis-Fermor, U. M. 46 n. 61, 48 n. 65, 49 Eltis, David 11 n. 26, 12 n. 29, 27 n. 9 and 10, 36 n. 39, 37 n. 41, 48 n. 64, 148 n. 26, 168 n. 7, 179 n. 33 Empson, William 73, n. 6 Erickson, Kai 161 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of 13, 16–17, 25 n. 3, 173, 175, 204 Euclid 24 extermination 107, 121, 125–9 Fabricius, Johannes 155 n. 38, 156 n. 41, 159 Falls, Cyril 13 n. 32, 103 n. 4, 174 n. 22 Famous Histories of Henry V 3, 82 Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma 122 Feingold, Mordechai 25 n. 3 and 4 Feld, M. D. 14 n. 42, 27 n. 11, 80 n. 27, 83 n. 37, 91 n. 56, 91 n. 58, 92 n. 59 Feldman, A. B. 167 n. 5 Felman, Shoshana 177 n. 30 Ferguson, W. 112 n. 30 fertility, see reproduction Wrearms, see gunpowder weaponry Fissel, Mark Charles 73 n. 5, 75 n. 11, 103 n. 4, 174 n. 22 Fletcher, Giles 45 n. 57 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 43–4, 49, 57 n. 79, 58 n. 81, 66 n. 101, 131 n. 68 Foakes, R. A. 80 n. 28, 95 n. 65, 172 n. 20 fortiWcation 26, 47–50, 60, 66, 80, 105, 180–1 Foucault, Michel 1, 18, 28 n. 13, 31–2, 36, 66 n. 102, 72 n. 3, 106–7, 129 Fourquevaux, Raimond de 45 n. 59, 50, 54 n. 70, 55 n. 72, 66, 76 n. 19, 77 n. 21 Foxe, John 17 Freud, Sigmund 8, 138 n. 6, 145–6, 186, 189, 219 n. 30

Index Froissart, Jean 102–3, 129, 139 Frontius 15 n. 47 Fusillo, Robert James 212 Gabriel, Richard 184 n. 45 Gale, Thomas 150 n. 30, 186, 188 Galen, Galenic medicine 21, 193, 196 Gallagher, Lowell 7 n. 16 gangrene 21, 150, 195–7, 201 Garber, Marjorie 210 n. 4, 211 n. 7 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 150 n. 29, 189 n. 52 Garrard, William 31–2, 41, 45, 59–60, 80 n. 26, 83 n. 38, 86, 89, 181 n. 38 Gascoigne, George 21, 169–71, 177–9, 183–4, 196, 202, 205 Gates, GeoVrey 17–18 generation, see reproduction genocide, see extermination geohumoralism 43–4, 66, 131, see also race geometry, geometric space 1, 25 n. 4, 26 n. 6, 27, 29 n. 6, 35–6, 42, 49, 60–5, 213–16 Gerard, Sir William 114–15 Gibbons, Brian 10 n. 25 Gilbert, Humphrey 17, n. 56 Gillies, John 58 n. 81 Giovanni da Vigo 195 Glimp, David 28 n. 13, 29 n. 18, 38 n. 41, 106–7 Globe theater 171 Godshalk, W. L. 42 n. 48 Goldberg, Jonathan 93, 99 Gonzalez de Leon, Fernando 168 n. 8, 169 n. 9 Goodland, Katharine 210 n. 4 and 5, 211 n. 6 Gordon, Colin 28 n. 13, 106 Grady, Hugh 2 n. 6 Greenberg, Judith 216 n. 24 Greenblatt, Stephen 27 n. 12, 28 n. 15, 42, 58, 67, 84 n. 40, 95–6, 210 n. 4, 211 n. 5 and 6, 218 Greg, W. W. 167 n. 3, 171 Grene, Nicholas 214 Gresham, Thomas 169 gunpowder burns, see wounding, wounds gunpowder weaponry 12, 15–17, 21, 24, 34–6, 38, 41, 48, 52, 62–3, 87, 90–1, 140, 147–8, 150–4, 179–86, 190 n. 54, 193–6, 203, see also wounds, wounding Gurr, Andrew 2, 9 n. 24, 22–3, 28 n. 14, 55, 63 n. 94 Hacker, Barton C. 15 n. 46 Hacking, Ian 28 n. 13 HadWeld, Andrew 109 n. 22, 125 n. 54, 128 n. 59 Hale, J. R. 17 n. 57, 37 n. 41, 141 n. 20, 147 n. 20, 180 n. 36

223

Hall, Bert S. 67 n. 107, 83 n. 37, 179 n. 34 Hall, Joseph 62 n. 90 Hall, Kim 96 n. 69, 97 n. 71 and 72 Hammer, Paul E. J. 11 n. 26, 12–13, 14 n. 40 and 41, 15 n. 46, 16 n. 48 and 51, 25 n. 3, 26 n. 8, 30 n. 22, 41 n. 46, 73 n. 5, 75 n. 12, 76 n. 17, 91 n. 57, 103 n. 4, 104 n. 7, 105 n. 10, 108 n. 17, 112 n. 31, 122 n. 47, 125, 139 n. 7, 140 n. 11, 148, 149 n. 27 and 28, 168 n. 7, 174 n. 23 and 24 Hampton, Timothy 166 n. 1 Harbage, Alfred 9 n. 24 Hardt, Michael 29 n. 16 Harland, John 31 n. 23, 86 n. 45 Harris, Jonathan Gil 63 n. 93, 155 n. 38 and 39 Harrison, William 44 n. 52, 96, 97 n. 70 Hattaway, Michael 4 n. 10, 9 n. 24, 10 n. 25, 27 n. 11, 80 n. 27, 196 n. 67 Hayes-McCoy, Gerard A. 110 n. 23, 123 n. 51 Helgerson, Richard 87 n. 50 Henderick, Donald 133 n. 71 Hendricks, Margo 107 n. 16 Henri IV, king of France 13, 104, 127, 140, 148 Henry VI 132–3 Henry VIII 12, 15, 75, 147 Henslowe, Philip 28 n. 14, 61, 63, 171–2 Heywood, Thomas 3, 4 n. 11, 118 n. 43, 139 Highley, Christopher 105 n. 9, 109 n. 20 and 22, 132 n. 70, 133 Hill, Christopher 29 Hirschfeld, Heather Ann 137 n. 1 history play 18–20, 71, 106, 166, 220 Hodgdon, Barbara 80 n. 28, 211 n. 5, 213 n. 12 Holinshed, Raphael 97 n. 70, 103, 110 n. 24, 114–15, 139 Holmes, Jonathan 138 n. 5 Holstun, James 3 n. 8 Holton, R. J. 33 n. 31, 83 n. 35 l’homme moyen, see average man Honourable Artillery Company, 15 Hood, Thomas 25–6, 52 Howard, Jean E. 23 n. 65, 80 n. 28, 84 n. 40, 106 n. 12, 132 n. 70, 133 n. 71, 162 n. 49 Hughes, Thomas 113 n. 34 Hundred Years War 102–4, 122, 147 Ichikawa, Mariko 63 n. 94 imbattailing, see martial formations impressment 13–14; 19–20, 72–6, 79, 82–90, 101 injury, see wounding, wounds iron, iron manufacture 33–4, 62–3, 113, 120 n. 44, 150, 190, 200

224

Index

Ive, Paul 45 n. 59, 48–50, 66, 76 n. 19, 180, 181 n. 37 Johnson, Francis R. 26 n. 5 Johnston, Stephen 25 n. 4, 26 n. 5, 6 and 7, 151 n. 31 Jones, Ann Rosalind 67, 11 n. 26, 143 n. 16, 211 n. 5 Jones, Emrys 211 n. 5, 217 n. 27 Jones, Frederick L. 139 n. 9, 141 n. 13 Jones, Richard 17 n. 57 Jonson, Ben 4 n. 11, 29–31, 41, 62, 69–70, 73, 156 Jorgensen, Paul 11, 63 n. 95, 73 n. 6, 78 n. 22, 181 n. 39 Jowett, John 214 n. 15 Kamps, Ivo 166 Kastan, David Scott 72 n. 4, 100 n. 77, 214 n. 15 Kewes, Paulina 167 n. 5 Kiernan, V. G. 83 n. 37 Kirkup, John 158 n. 44, 190 n. 54 Kleinschmidt, Harald 90, n. 55, 91 n. 58 Klinger, Charles F. 190 n. 54 Knoespel, Kenneth J. 24 n. 1, 59 n. 85 Knutson, Rosalyn L. 167 n. 5, 171, 198 n. 69 Knyvett, Henry 76 n. 16, 79 n. 25 Kocher, Paul 42 n. 48, 48 n. 64, 53, 54 n. 69, 55 n. 71 Korda, Natasha 63 n. 93 Kristeva, Julia 182 labor, labor power 7, 20, 32–35, 42, 46–7, 52–3, 80–4, 92, 94, 96–101, 107, 128, 132, 136, 152, 173, see also manpower LaCapra, Dominick 5 n. 13, 9, 138 n. 6, 210, 216 n. 22 Lachmann, Richard 83 Lander, Jesse 84 n. 40 Langsam, G. GeoVrey 16 n. 53, 26 n. 8, 73 n. 6 A Larum for London 21–2, 150 n. 15, 162, 166–76, 179–84, 189–94, 196–208, 209 n. 1 latency, see trauma and temporality Laub, Dori 8, 177 n. 30 LeFebvre, Henri 40 n. 44 Leggatt, Alexander 199 Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of 26, 32, 150, 195 Lerner, Paul 138 n. 3 Levin, Harry 28 n. 15, 67 n. 105 Levin, Richard 62 n. 90, Levine, Nina 84 n. 40 levies, see impressment Lewis, Elizabeth Matthew 184 n. 44

Lifton, Robert Jay 176 Lindabury, Richard Vliet 2 n. 5 Loades, David 24 n. 2 Lochrie, Karma 78–9 Locrine 82–4 Lodge, Thomas 4 n. 11 longbow 15, 36, 147, 153 Lopez, Jeremy 10 n. 23, 138 n. 5, 214 n. 15 Low, Jennifer 141 n. 12 Lull, Janet 211 n. 5 Lust’s Dominion 4 n. 11 MacCaVrey, Wallace T. 11 n. 26, 15, 148 n. 25 McCandless, David Foley 137 n. 1 MacCarthy-Murrogh, Michael 130 n. 64, 134 n. 73 McCoy, Richard 17 n. 55, 80 n. 28 McDonald, Russ 59 McGurk, John 13 n. 32, 103 n. 4, 125 n. 55, 130 n. 65, 139 n. 7, 148 n. 24, 155 n. 36 and 38, 174 n. 22, 190 n. 54 Machiavelli, Niccolo 37 n. 41, 38, 66, 68, 76 n. 19, Maguire, Laurie 171 n. 16 and 18, 179 Maley, Willy 104 n. 9, 109 n. 20 and 22, 125 n. 54, 128 n. 59 Maltby, William S. 57 n. 79, 168 n. 8, 169 n. 10, 173 Manlius Torquatus 55 Manning, Roger B. 30 n. 21, 41 n. 45 and 46, 56 n. 75 manpower 34–5, see also labor, labor power Marche, Stephen 210 n. 4, marches, see processions Marlowe, Christopher Dido, Queen of Carthage 4 n. 11 Jew of Malta 161 1 and 2 Tamburlaine 2–4, 7, 11, 19, 22, 24, 28–30, 42–70, 72, 77, 126, 137, 140, 162, 196 n. 67, 220 Marshall, Cynthia 7 n. 16 and 19, 10 n. 24, 27 n. 12, 143, 185 n. 46 Marston, John 139 martial formations 5, 7, 16–19, 25, 35–41, 46, 53–5, 57, 61–5, 69–70, 80, 140, 152, 212–15, 220 Martin, Colin 123 n 52 Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) 112 Matar, Nabil 15 n. 45, 44 n. 54 maternity, maternal bodies 105–6, 119, 128–30, 132, see also reproduction mathematics, 3 n. 5, 7, 18–19, 24–42, 45–9, 55–7, 59, 67–70, 72–3, 78–84, 94–5, 98–9, 106, 137, 150, 178, 181, 213–14, 220 Mattingly, Garret 10 n. 25, 29 n. 16 Maurice of Naussau 90

Index

225

Mazzio, Carla 29 n. 18, 69 n. 110 measurement, see mathematics Melchiori, Giorgio 102 n. 1 and 2 Meron, Theodor 11 n. 26 Metz, G. Harold 102 n. 1, 103 n. 3, 115 n. 40 Metz, Karen S. 184 n. 45 Meyer, Albrecht 43 n. 49 Micale, Mark S. 138 n. 3 Milburn, Colin 155 n. 38 military diagrams, see martial formations military revolution 12 n. 29 military science 1–5, 15–19, 26–7, 30–1, 41–2, 47, 53, 61, 64, 70, 73, 77–80, 87, 95, 99, 147–8, 213 Milton, John 107, 11 n. 26 The Mirror for Magistrates 217–18 Mitchell, David T. 189 n. 52 Morgan, Hiram 13 n. 32, 103 n. 4, 174 n. 22 Moryson, Fynes 44 n. 52, 110 n. 24, 111, 116–17 Mountjoy, Charles Blount, 8th Lord 111, 125 Mullaney, Steven 9 n. 24, 95, 167 multitudes 19, 29, 36, 41, 45–7, 55–8, 62–3, 67–9, 135, 178, see also mathematics Munday, Anthony 33–4 Murphy, Andrew 105 n. 9, 132 n. 70 Murrin, Michael 2, n. 5 muster book, muster roll 20, 86–90, 98–9, 101 mustering scene, musters 7, 14–15, 27 n. 10, 35, 73–7, 84–90, 93, 95, 98, 101, 150, 152

Painter, William 102 Pare´, Ambroise 151, 154, 158–9, 185–7, 190–1, 193–7 Parker, GeoVrey 12 n. 29, 123 n. 52, 168 n. 8 Parker, Patricia 6 n. 14, 75, 87, 93 n. 61, 107 n. 16, 133 n. 71, 142 n. 14 Parmalee, Lisa F. 16 n. 50 particularity 88–9, 92, 95, 100–1 Paster, Gail Kern 10 n. 24, 131 n. 68 Peele, George 3 n. 7 Pelling, Margaret 155 n. 38 Pembroke, William Herbert, 1st earl of 147–8 Pembroke’s Men 103 Pettegree, Andrew 168 n. 8, 169 n. Petty, Sir William 72 poison 21, 118–19, 157–8, 161, 165 n. 52, 196 Pollard, Tanya 163, 165 Ponsonby, William 17 n. 57 Poole, Kristen 49 n. 66, 59 n. 84, 61 n. 89 Poovey, Mary 7, 27 n. 12, 49 n. 66, 58, 72, 77 population, see biopolitics, biopower Pratt, S. M. 170 n. 12 and 13 pressing, see impressment Price, J. L. 12 n. 29 processions 19, 24, 27 n. 9, 30, 35, 41, 47–8, 52–3, 62–3, 67, 90, 98, 141, 149, 152–3, 215–20 Proctor, Thomas 17, 44–5, 55 n. 72, 78 Prouty, C. T. 169 n. 11 Puttenham, George 59 Pye, Christopher 6 n. 14

Nashe, Thomas 22 Nef, J. U. 33 Negri, Antonio 29 n. 16 Neill, Michael 103 n. 6, 110 n. 26, 115 n. 39, 132 n. 70, 133 n. 71 Newman, Karen 96 n. 68 Nicholls, K. W. 107 n. 14, 115 n. 38 Nicolay, Nicolas de 46–7 Nine Years War 13 n. 32, 103–4, 110 n. 24, 130, 173–4 Nolan, John S. 11 n. 26 and 28, 12–13, 14 n. 42, 15 n. 45, 68 n. 107, 74 n. 8, 83 n. 37, 86 n. 44, 87 n. 48, 103 n. 3, 168 n. 7, 174 n. 23 norm, concept of the; normative order, 7, 19, 22, 30, 36, 66, 71–2, 78–81, 84–90, 92–9, 101, 108, 153 numbers, see mathematics

quantiWcation, see mathematics Quetelet, Adolphe 79 Quinn, D. B. 109 n. 20, 112 n. 29 Quinones, Ricardo 214 n. 15

O’Dair, Sharon 84 n. 40 O’Neill, Stephen 104 n. 9, 109 n. 20 Ohlmeyer, Jane H. 108 n. 17 Onosander 15 n. 47 Orgel, Stephen 138 n. 5 Ostend, siege of 174, 179–80

race, racial purity 20, 44, 57, 96–7, 106–116–123, 130–6, see also geohumoralism Rackin, Phyllis 23 n. 65, 80 n. 28, 84 n. 40, 105 n. 11, 106 n. 12, 128 n. 60, 131 n. 67, 132 n. 70, 133 n. 71, 162 n. 49 Raikes, George 15 n. 43 Raleigh, Walter 33, 41 n. 46 Reiss, Timothy J. 29 n. 18, 37 n. 41 reproduction 18–20, 81, 103–7, 111–12, 119, 125, 128–36, see also maternity, maternal bodies Ribner, Irving 166 n. 1, 210 n. 5 Rich, Barnaby 18 n. 61, 35 n. 38, 54, 56, 65, 125 n. 54, 156, 170–1, 181 n. 38, 203 n. 74 Rich, E. E. 86 n. 43 Richards, Shaun 104 n. 9, 132 n. 70 Roberts, Michael 12 n. 29, Robinson, Benedict S. 45 n. 54

226

Index

Rogers, CliVord J. 12 n. 29 Rose Theater 42, 63, 209 Rose, Mary Beth 94 n. 62 Rowlands, Samuel 192 Rowse, A. L. 86 n. 43 Roy, Ian 11 n. 26 Sadler, John 66, 77 Sams, Eric 102 n. 1 Sawday, Jonathan 186 n. 51, 195–6 Seaton, Ethel 45 n. 58, 58 n. 81 Seltzer, Mark 68 serial killing 30–1, 68–9 Shakespeare 3, 70, 107, 171 All’s Well That Ends Well 4 n. 11 Edward III 20, 102–36, 147 1 and 2 Henry IV 1, 4 n. 11, 18 n. 62, 20, 80, 83, 88–91–101, 152, 164 Henry V 4–6, 20, 102, 104, 130–4, 147, 162, 194, 206, 212 1 Henry VI 4 n. 11, 22–3, 139, 162 2 Henry VI 139, 194 3 Henry VI 139, 162 Othello 4 n. 11, 6 n. 15 Richard III 22, 208, 209–20 Romeo and Juliet 4 n. 11, 5, 163 The Winter’s Tale 145 Shannon, Laurie 169 n. 11 Shepard, Alan 11 n. 26, 42 n. 48 Shepherd, Simon 45 n. 56 Sidney, Sir Henry 109–10, 129 Sidney, Sir Philip 2 n. 5, 17, 20, 46, 55, 139, 141, 150, 157–60, 163, 195 siegecraft, siege warfare 4, 5, 46, 48, 51–2, 59–62, 102–4, 112, 115, 122, 126, 131, 162, 166–8, 174, 179, 195, 200, 204 Siemon, James 211, n. 6 Silke, J. 103 n. 4, 123 n. 50, 174 n. 22 SinWeld, Alan 104 n. 9, 132 n. 70, 133 n. 71 Smith, Adam 72 n. 3 Smith, Bruce 181 n. 39, 182 n. 40, 183 Smith, John 87–8 Smith, Thomas 34 Smythe, Sir John 17 n. 57, 147 Sofer, Andrew 63, n. 93 Soliman and Perseda 4 n. 11 sound in the theater 3, 52, 59, 137, 156 n. 40, 175–6, 181–4, 203, 208, 216 Spenser, Edmund, 17, 107, 109 n. 22, 110 n. 23 and 24, 125 n. 54, 127, 193 Spitzer, Leo 147 n. 19 stage properties 18, 20, 61, 63, 86, 120, 143–5, 154, 163, 172 n. 20 Stallybrass, Peter 67, 111, 143 n. 16, 211 n. 5 Stanyhurst, Richard 110 n. 24, 115 statute of Kilkenny 114 Stearns, Stephen J. 73 n. 6, 82 n. 34

Stewart, David 149 n. 27 Stewart, Richard W. 179 n. 33 Stone, Lawrence 41 n. 45 Strange’s Men 103 Stukeley, Sir Thomas 3, 104 n. 9, 129 n. 62 Styward, Thomas 32 n. 27, 35, 59–61, 64 Sullivan, Garret A., Jr. 58 n. 81, 59 n. 84, 61 n. 88, 62 n. 89 SutcliVe, Matthew 17 n. 54, 32, 76 syphilis, see venereal disease Tagliacozzi, Gaspare 151 n. 33 Tartaglia, Niccolo 50, 151 n. 31, 180 Tasso, Torquato 145–6 Taunton, Nina 11 n. 26, 31 n. 24, 38 n. 41, 42 n. 48, 58 n. 42 Tawney, A. J and R. H. Tawney 84 n. 41 Taylor, E. G. R. 25 n. 4 Taylor, Gary 215 n. 17 tents 1, 59–61, 63, 212–13, 220 Thersites 2 n. 5 Thomas, Vivien 42 n. 48, 48 n. 65, 65 n. 100 Thomason, Leslie 62 n. 91 Thompson, E. P. 83 n. 37 Throckmorton plot 112 Tillyard, E. M. W. 71–2, 211 n. 5 Tragedy of Selimus 4 n. 11 trained bands 14, 16, 26, 30, 74, 153 trains, see processions trauma 2–10, 18–23, 70, 136, 137–40, 145–6, 157–165, 166–9, 176–84, 197–208, 209–20 and disavowal 145–6, 154, 157, 160, 162–5, 206, 210 and temporality 5–9, 20–3, 138, 146, 165, 176–9, 182–4, 197–9, 207–8, 209–20 and repetition 6, 8–9, 20, 138, 141–6, 154, 161, 168, 175–84, 186, 201–2, 216 and survival 8, 21, 123–7, 142–5, 165, 176–9, 184, 193, 204–5, 208 and women 2, 22–3, 161–2 The Trial of Chivalry 18 n. 62, 20, 137–65, 209 n. 1 Trim, D. J. B. 13 n. 37, 41 n. 45 and 46, 80 n. 27, 82 n. 31, 91 n. 58, 168 n. 8, 174 n. 23 Trimble, Michael R. 138 n. 3 Tromly, Fred B. 49 Turner, Gerard L’E. 25 n. 4, 26 n. 6 and 8 Turner, Henry S. 25 n. 4, 33 n. 31, 49 n. 66, 61 n. 89 Tydeman, William 42 n. 48, 48 n. 65, 65 n. 100 Tyllney, Edmond 108 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd second earl of 103–4, 123, 173

Index uncanny, concept of 19–22, 164, 168, 186, 189, 192–4, 197–205, 207, 211 n. 5, 213–19 Van Gelderen, Martin 168 n. 8 Vegetius 15 n. 47, 66, 76 n. 19, 77–8, 85 venereal disease 155–6, 159–62 Vesalius, Andreas 193 Vitkus, Daniel 44 n. 54, 45 n. 55 Von GersdorV, Hans 184–5 Wake, Joan 73 n. 5, 86 n. 43, 87 n. 46 Walker, G. Goold 15 n. 43 Wallace, David 128 n. 61, 129 n. 63, Walsingham, Sir Francis 149 Wangensteen, Owen H and Sarah D. 190 n. 54 war wounds, see wounding, wounds Warwick, John Dudley, earl of 24, 25, 27, 35, 37, 69 n. 41 Watt, J. A. 114 n. 35 weapons, see gunpowder weaponry Webb, Henry J. 15 n. 47, 16 n. 53, 26 n. 8, 27 n. 11, 122 n. 47, 158 n. 44, 179 n. 34 wedding knives 120 Weg, Jervis 168 n. 8, 169 n. 10 Weimann, Robert 207 Welles, Orson 71 Wells, Stanley 215 n. 17, 218 n. 28

227

Wentersdorf, Karl 123 n. 48 Wernham, R. B. 11 n. 26, 175 n. 26 Whigham, Frank 17 n. 57 Whitehorne, Peter 37–8, 66, 68 Whitney, Charles 73 n. 6, 98 n. 73 Williams, Penry 87 Williams, Sir Roger 5, 16, 34, 122 Willis, Deborah 137 n. 1 Willoughby, Peregrine Bertie, 13th Lord 148 Wills, David 193 Wilson, John Dover 80 n. 28, 93 Wilson, Richard 42 n. 48, 57 n. 79, 63 n. 96, Wolfe, Jessica 193–4 Wolper, Roy S. 180 n. 36 Wood, Alice Perry 211 n. 6, 217 n. 25 Wood, Edward J. 120 n. 44 wounding, wounds 3, 8, 19–22, 138–46, 148–65, 177, 184–92, 194–8, 204–6, 208, 217 wound-man illustrations 21, 184–9, 193–4, 197–8, 205 Wray, Ramona 104 n. 9 Yachnin, Paul 9 n. 24 Yungblut, Laura Hunt 172 n. 19 Zimmerman, Susan 194 n. 62